Just before Whitsunday in the summer of 1549, a fight broke out in the playground of a school in Bodmin. When the dust had settled and questions were asked, the authorities discovered that the children had divided into two gangs, or rather “two factions, the one whereof they called the old religion, the other the new”. In this the children were remarkably acute commentators on the wider society. Not long after, on 9 June – Whitsunday itself – the government of Edward VI imposed the Book of Common Prayer on every parish church in England. The time-hallowed ritual of the Latin mass was replaced by an English text. The West Country exploded with what’s known as the Prayer Book Rebellion, one of the greatest popular risings of the century. “If there was a single point in time that separated the old world and the new,” writes Lucy Wooding in her magnificent new survey of Tudor England, this was it.
Catholics would look back on Edward’s reign as “the time that lights were put down” and when “all good order broke”. But was that Whitsunday really so pivotal? Wooding’s primary aim is to defamiliarise the Tudor century. That is, to strip away the historiographical narratives and popular assumptions that have accreted to it and reveal how English men and women of the period thought about themselves and the world they lived in. Hers is a deeply human and intimate account at every level of society. One of the key themes that emerges is the importance of reciprocity and consent, of harmony and order in both interpersonal and societal relations. The Elizabethan lawyer John Barston identified five kinds of society: the country itself; the town or village; the craft or guild fellowship; the family; and the ‘society of friends’. These overlapping bodies weren’t passive concepts but purposeful communities in which everyone participated, an expression of the desire to “live in amity and concord” and to maintain the shared ideal of the ‘common wealth’. Everything supported and reinforced everything else: “Nothing joyeth without society of other,” as one physician wrote.
The pre-Reformation church too was “above all else, a body of believers”, Wooding writes. It was “less an intellectual endeavour than a passionate sensory encounter” in which the spoken word was only one part of the experience. Ritual performance and polyphony were vital. Scent too: the censer at St Paul’s weighed 13 pounds and could swing the length of the nave. A contemporary tract defended the use of sensory catalysts: they left the churchgoer “stirred and ravished to love and desire ghostly invisible things”. The exercise of secular power was likewise embodied and performative; Wooding cites a Thomas Middleton play in which a constable asserts his authority by stating, “I am sir, the duke’s own image: at this time the duke’s tongue… lies in my mouth”. Within and without the church, audience participation – engagement, acceptance, belonging – was needed to realise the meaning.
At first sight Tudor England: A History looks to be five essays on the Tudor kings and queens interspersed with nine thematic chapters that range across everything from the English landscape to language and dissent. But that may be the wrong way round: the book is rather a rich and detailed portrait of life in England through which narratives of politics, faith and power – and the personal and dynastic histories of the Tudor monarchs – are woven. Seeing the various reigns and their crises in more holistic terms enables us to see more clearly Wooding’s argument that legitimacy and power were more reciprocal and negotiated than we tend to think – and inextricably linked to popular consent. When Mary I took back the crown after the attempt to install Lady Jane Grey on the throne, her power to do so came from the acclamation of the people. Even Henry VIII, when faced with resistance to the forced levy known rather euphemistically as the Amicable Grant in 1525, accepted that it was a mis-step, acknowledging the justice of the complaint from the Kentish poor that they “will in no wise give at other men’s appointment which knoweth not their needs”.
Wooding consistently emphasises the personal in the political – “personal connections… were more important than institutions,” she writes – and is generally dismissive of overly determined readings of history. She has little time, for instance, for the idea of Henry VII as a ‘liminal’ figure, poised between the medieval and the Renaissance and Reformation era. It is, she says, “entirely an invented problem” based on the modern habit of shaping history into eras. Nor was his reign “a move towards despotism, constitutionalism or modernity”. Where others have seen ideology or political theory at play she is typically disposed to see ad hoc reactions to the insistent now of events, played out against fears of civil war, of contested or broken successions, of societal disorder.
She is particularly excoriating about misogynist readings of the lives of Mary I and Elizabeth I which comment, for example, on the ‘barren body’ of one or the other’s supposed fear of sex. Indeed, she sees women playing active, powerful roles in every sector of society. The pre-Reformation records for St Margaret’s in Westminster, which cover 58 years, show that of the 1,288 seats bought in church, 972 of them were purchased by women. By 1600 they were responsible for perhaps half of all church court cases. Assault cases record them defending their causes with fists and knives. To paraphrase, the invisibility of women in the record is in the eye of the beholder.
Mary emerges on this account as a figure of far greater stature – in terms of personal courage, political skill and intellectual weight – than she is usually thought. Her creation of the role of regnant queen made Elizabeth’s reign possible. Her Catholic Church was far from reactionary, too; instead it was committed to humanistic reform. So much so, in fact, that her Archbishop of Canterbury, Reginald Pole, was summoned to Rome in 1557 to face charges of heresy. Echoing her father’s behaviour over his ‘Great Matter’, she refused to let Pole go and bluntly told the Pope she might now “regret our piety” towards the papacy.
What was this England like? Away from court, most – perhaps three-quarters – of the population in Tudor lived south and east of the line between the Severn and the Humber. By the end of the century there were 600 market towns and some 122 ports, but fewer than 20 towns with a population above 5,000. Poverty was endemic. Perhaps 20% lived at subsistence level. Death was familiar. John Colet, founder of St Paul’s School, came from a well-to-do family. His father was twice mayor of London. Still, Colet was the only one of 22 children to survive. “Most families were scarred by loss”, Wooding writes. It was a nation of small communities bound by the small rituals of daily life and the larger rituals of the agricultural and devotional year, a network of local and familial allegiances and loyalties.
John Leland, who traveled the country visiting the monastic libraries in the 1530s and who knew it better than perhaps any one, called England “a whole world of things very memorable”. The phrase describes Tudor England perfectly. It is a remarkable achievement.
This is a slightly extended version of a review that first appeared in the October 2022 issue of Literary Review.
Read more of Mathew’s reviews here.
Mathew Lyons 