The Nonconformist Revolution: Religious Dissent, Innovation and Rebellion

By Amanda J Thomas

A historian examines the evolution of dissenting thought and how it shaped the transformation of England from a rural to an urban, industrialized society.

The foundations for the Industrial Revolution were in place from the late Middle Ages, when the early development of manufacturing processes and changes in the structure of rural communities began to provide opportunities for economic and social advancement. Successive waves of Huguenot migrants and the influence of Northern European religious ideology also played an important role in this process. The Civil Wars would provide a catalyst for the dissemination of new ideas and help shape the emergence of a new English Protestantism and divergent dissident sects. The persecution that followed strengthened the Nonconformist cause, and for the early Quakers it intensified their unity and resilience—qualities that would prove to be invaluable for business.

The book proceeds to explore how in the years following the Restoration, Nonconformist ideas fueled enlightened thought, creating an environment for enterprise but also a desire for more radical change, how reformers seized on the plight of a working poor alienated by innovation and frustrated by false promises—and how the vision which was at first the spark for innovation would ignite revolution.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: May 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9781473875692

Amanda J Thomas

Amanda Thomas is an author, historian and linguist with a particular interest in social and medical history. To date her books include Cholera - The Victorian Plague (Pen & Sword, 2015) and The Lambeth Cholera Outbreak of 1848-1849: The Setting, Causes, Course and Aftermath of an Epidemic in London (McFarland, 2009). Broadcast work comprises London 2000 Years Revealed (Channel 5, 2019), Who Do You Think You Are? (Wall to Wall Media/BBC1, 2016-17 and 2012-13), and The Flying Archaeologist (BBC4, 2012). Amanda has previously worked in journalism, and public relations for television companies including The Walt Disney Company and Television New Zealand. Born in Chatham, Kent, Amanda is passionate about supporting the heritage of the Medway Towns, and also that of Hertfordshire, where she now lives. She edits the historical journal.  Amanda’s interest in Nonconformism stems from the discovery that her ancestor, Simon Osmotherly was a Roundhead during the English Civil War and one of the founders of Quakerism in the North West of England.

Book preview

The Nonconformist Revolution

Dedicated to

Alexander, Georgina and David

for their love and support

The Nonconformist Revolution

Amanda J. Thomas

First published in Great Britain in 2020 by

Pen & Sword History

An imprint of

Pen & Sword Books Ltd

Yorkshire – Philadelphia

Copyright © Amanda J. Thomas 2020

ISBN 978 1 47387 567 8

eISBN 978 1 47387 569 2

mobi ISBN 978 1 47387 568 5

The right of Amanda J. Thomas to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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Contents

Acknowledgements

Preface

Introduction

Chapter 1 Foundations for Change

Chapter 2 The Sowing of Seeds

Chapter 3 Rebellion

Chapter 4 Escape from the Continent

Chapter 5 The Routes of Change

Chapter 6 A Country Divided

Chapter 7 An Inward Light Emerges

Chapter 8 Our Friends in the North

Chapter 9 The Communication Web

Chapter 10 The Lewes Connection

Chapter 11 To the Moon and Back

Chapter 12 The Birth of a Radical

Chapter 13 Revolution

Chapter 14 Aux Armes, Citoyens!

Chapter 15 From Sheffield to America

Conclusion

Appendix

Notes

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Hannah Birkett, Huguenot Museum, Rochester

Doreen Buxton, volunteer, Cromford Mills

Susan Chester

Catharina Clement

Geoff Deakin

Jeremy Goring

Suzi Heslan, curator of Library and Archives, The Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust

Hull History Centre

The Huguenot Society of Great Britain and Ireland

John Kay, Lewes History Group

Celia Pyke

Sarah Roberts, archivist, The Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust

Julie Smith, volunteer, Ironbridge Gorge Museums Trust

Sussex Family History Group

Sussex Record Society

The Society of Friends

Alexander Thomas

David Thomas

Georgina Thomas

David Thompson, Tate Images

Heather Weaver

Christopher Whittick, county archivist East Sussex Record Office

Dinah Winch, Huguenot Museum, Rochester

Special thanks to Kate Bohdanowicz, editor; Laura Hirst, production coordinator; Nic Nicholas, for compiling the index; Aileen Pringle, editorial and production assistant, and Jonathan Wright, Pen and Sword publisher, for making it all possible. My thanks also to Jackie Birch for keeping me calm and sane.

Preface

My interest in Nonconformism is personal and stems from many unanswered questions about my own family. My parents had turned their backs to a large extent on their Methodist backgrounds, but ideology and a way of living are hard to erase, particularly if they have a positive effect on family life. I read from a very young age and, nurtured by my mother, was taught the value of education and learning. A love of history was passed on by my father and a museum, gallery or cathedral is still my destination of choice. Yet in my childhood, contemplation and thoughtfulness were juxtaposed with much loud discussion, often existential, always political. I swiftly discovered not all families are like this and more recently began to question why. Were we demonstrating ‘typical’ Nonconformist behaviour and had it all started with my ten times great uncle, the Roundhead and Quaker, Simon Osmotherly? Perhaps, yes.

Amanda Thomas, Harpenden, April 2020.

Introduction

The origins of Protestantism and its divergent Nonconformist sects in England are deep-rooted and complex, fomented by an inner desire for immediate spiritual experience, the assurance of eternal salvation, and for religious truth. However, in the Middle Ages any questioning – let alone modification – of the Catholic Church’s doctrine was problematic. From at least the thirteenth century, and following rulings made at the 1215 Fourth Lateran Council, not only was the creation of new religious groups outlawed, but dissent was classed as heresy: ‘We excommunicate and anathematise every heresy that raises against the holy, orthodox and Catholic faith.’ ¹

Today spiritual exploration is customary and accepted with heresy replaced by a more benign heterodoxy, a deviation which is unconventional simply because it goes against the norm.² However, in the thirteenth century such behaviour was a threat to the Orthodox Church and the 1215 ruling was aimed directly at the dissident Cathars in France’s Languedoc region.³ Of additional concern was how heretical behaviour had the ability to corrupt others. The potential spread of dissenting ideas was considered extremely dangerous, and the punishment for heretics who persistently refused to conform was burning at the stake.

In the past, just as today, the choices people made in their short lives were, more often than not, in response to the deep-rooted human instinct for survival and to external demands and constraints. Yet in determining the reasons for such choices there has been a tendency to define the labouring classes, in particular, as economic abstractions rather than human beings.⁴ Frustratingly, and as Joan Thirsk lamented, ordinary people such as rural cottagers ‘rarely recorded their own thoughts and can only be observed through the eyes of outsiders.’⁵ It is a concern echoed by Margaret Spufford, on whose brilliant work the following chapters will also draw:

‘Dependence on statistics, which are entirely necessary, by depersonalizing the subjects, is also inherently misleading, and suggests a flaw in the historian’s relation to the people who are the subjects of … [their] … study, and a lack of proper respect for the human beings involved.’⁶

The decisions people make are not always for the most obvious reasons and may be difficult to define. Statistics will not reveal the quiet dissenter who still outwardly conformed, however, in the past – unlike today – an interest in religion pervaded every level of society and will always have been a consideration for any decision taken.⁷

The heretical ideas of the Middle Ages, the foundations for Nonconformity in England and Wales were nurtured in normal, ordinary godly people. The work conducted by Spufford and her colleagues⁸ has shown that early Nonconformity by dissenting Lollards was manifested across the whole of society.⁹ Ideas were nurtured within families and most significantly by women. However, the successful business endeavours of many Nonconformist groups has given the (perhaps false) impression that dissent was more prevalent among the so-called ‘middling sort’.

Throughout the Middle Ages, Northern Europe was a crucible for the development of Protestant theology. In England, land boundaries created by Anglo-Saxon treaties in the ninth century¹⁰ established a network of overland trade routes which facilitated a flourishing of commerce into the medieval period. These routes linked inland settlements to the coast and reached out across the sea to Northern Europe creating conduits not just for trade and migration, but also new ideas. Dissemination was achieved across the country by word of mouth, a surprisingly widespread ability to read, and an appetite for devotional literature. However, it was the break with Rome in the 1530s, and the Civil War a century later, that would challenge orthodox theology and allow dissent to flourish more openly.

To challenge the orthodox order is bold and courageous, but if religion is failing to satisfy society’s fears, then the validity of the Church will come into question. Disquiet was most keenly felt in the mid-fourteenth century in the aftermath of the Black Death, by those spared by the disease, the dispossessed and a population whose lives had irrevocably changed. In such an environment the possibility for change, for a fresh start, might be felt by anyone, and for a variety of personal reasons. In the early years of the twenty-first century – and the renewed threat of pandemic disease – it is a concept which still resonates and for which there is some considerable precedence.

Chapter 1

Foundations for Change

By the fourteenth century, England was still an agrarian, hierarchical society where scientific knowledge was primitive and magic and superstition held sway. Death was a constant, frightening companion and in the 1300s, during the reigns of Kings Edward II and III and Richard II, factors such as famine, war and disease all contributed to a lower life expectancy.

In the first half of the century rural life in England suffered considerable change marking an end to the expansion of the previous 200 years. The population had risen to around five million which put pressure on land values and corn prices but a drop in real wages.¹ Poor harvests between 1310 and 1323² exacerbated the situation, paving the way for an agrarian crisis which would cause widespread poverty, distress and social disruption for the rural peasantry.³ Extreme wet weather in the summer of 1315 resulted in harvest failure, and by the following year England was in the grip of famine. Weakened by malnutrition, the population was far more susceptible to disease and in 1316 an epidemic of dysentery, perhaps typhoid fever,⁴ caused large numbers of deaths. Successive waves of disease in sheep and cattle contributed to the crisis and perhaps not surprisingly, the prayers, chanting, barefoot processions and appeals by Archbishop of Canterbury Walter Reynolds to the people to atone for their sins had no effect.⁵ Life was precarious. Moreover, a decline in wool exports, heavy taxation, campaigns against the Scots and wars against the French took additional tolls on the economy; life expectancy was necessarily lower for those involved in such conflicts.

The mobility of the agrarian peasant increased with many forced to leave their holdings causing both depopulation and an increase in vagrancy. The agrarian crisis was grave but its effects were varied in different parts of the country and also depended on the relationship between landlords and the peasantry,⁶ as explained by Ian Kershaw in his analysis of events:

‘The areas worst affected were the less densely populated and poorer regions, where there seem to have been a sharp but protracted downturn in the fortunes of rural society at the time of the crisis … in many of the wealthier and more densely populated parts of the country there is no indication that the agrarian crisis initiated a lasting decline in production and occupation of the land … there is no evidence that in the long-term the crisis was a turning point for such areas.’⁷

While the reasons for the demographic and socio-economic changes in the first decades of the fourteenth century are not straightforward and attributable to a combination of factors, what is clear is the sharp rise in rural poverty, a decline in the population and a fall in agricultural production. Yet worse was to come.

Medieval plague, otherwise known as the Black Death, arrived in England at the end of 1347 and the epidemic would have a devastating effect until about 1353. A further epidemic from around 1360 was crueller still as it targeted young people and children, and the disease would return in successive waves every twenty to thirty years until 1666.⁸ In the earliest and perhaps deadliest phase from 1347, the plague killed tens of millions of people in Europe⁹ and an estimated third to a half of England’s population. In the wake of the agrarian crisis, it also caused further economic pain. In rural areas there was a contraction in both cultivation and land reclamation. Farms and settlements were abandoned and on bigger estates those landlords who had survived either retired or leased their demesnes to tenants at lower rates.¹⁰ The epidemic marked a decline in the number of market towns with many markets abandoned, never to be revived.¹¹ The depopulation caused by the Black Death was a further catalyst for social and economic change, but the disease would also bring into question God’s part in the cataclysm and – for those who survived – their future relationship with the Church.

In England and Wales the rights of the Church had been established by Magna Carta in 1215, and in 1225 Henry III (r. 1216–1272) put his seal to the definitive version which underpins the legal system of England and Wales today.¹² The first clause of the charter addressed the role of the Church, underlining its importance, and the 1225 version contained amendments which upheld ecclesiastic rights and jurisdiction in full: ‘In the first place we have granted to God, and by this our present charter confirmed for us and our heirs for ever, that the English church shall be free and shall have all its rights undiminished and its liberties unimpaired.’¹³

One of the prerogatives of the Church was the collection of tithes, a proportion, usually a tenth, of annual individual output for agricultural workers and artisans. While tithes were a type of income tax, payment was often made in kind; the system was not necessarily objected to in principle but it was still controversial. Assessment was not always consistent and the influence of a foreign papacy, not to mention the disproportionate wealth of the Church, caused disquiet. The accumulation of assets – ‘worldly goods’ – jarred with the example of humble privation espoused by Christ and his disciples in the Scriptures.¹⁴

In addition to the spiritual and economic demands of the Church, the medieval feudal system legally obligated most agricultural workers to their landowners, committing them to a life of serfdom. The estates which made up the English countryside were owned by the Crown, the nobility, manorial lords, and ecclesiastical orders. Serfs inherited the right to live and work on their parcels of land where they could produce food and goods for themselves. Constantly indebted, serfs were obliged to work for the most part on the demesne of the landowner offsetting their ‘inheritance’ with their labour, produce and financial contributions. Landowners controlled almost every aspect of their serfs’ lives and while there existed some smallholders, freemen, who owned land of their own, some also rented it from the lord. This was a stratified, hierarchical society where landowners and the Church possessed all judicial, economic and spiritual power.

The Middle Ages saw a rise in the importance of trade and commerce; the opening up of new markets and horizons. The growth of the merchant and artisan classes in urban society, the beginnings of what would later be known as the ‘middling sort’, caused a new consciousness to take root. Numeracy and literacy were fundamental for business success but education also broadens awareness and in devout lay people there was a growing interest in all aspects of religious life, including dissenting ideas. The thirteenth century saw the foundation of various orders of mendicant friars in England, including Dominicans (1221), Franciscans (1224), Carmelites (1241), and Augustinians (1249). The friars addressed the ecclesiastical shortfall, particularly in the towns and cities, and helped satisfy the increasingly sophisticated spiritual demands of the laity. By around 1300 many friars had established themselves as teachers of theology at Oxford and Cambridge, as well as York, Norwich and London.¹⁵ A career within the secular clergy (parish clerics and priests outside of the monastic orders) became more achievable and more attractive. The secular clergy had a spiritual, intellectual and financial responsibility for their parishes which poorly educated incumbents struggled to maintain. Now young men were needed to fulfil this important role for which demand continued to grow.¹⁶

The requirement for greater access to education was most keenly felt by those wishing to join the Church, and by those who understood the benefits of literacy – particularly reading - and its promise of social mobility. The need for greater theological instruction was also addressed by the 1215 Fourth Lateran Council, and in response to this, lectures were provided by all the secular cathedral schools in England. The teaching of reading, grammar and song had long existed in religious houses. The earliest cathedral schools were established in Kent in the sixth century: King’s Canterbury, a monastic foundation, in 597¹⁷ and King’s Rochester, a choir school, in 604.¹⁸ By the middle of the twelfth century, secular and monastic schools were established in nineteen of England’s cathedral cities. Nine secular foundations had been established by non-monastic canons, nine monastic foundations by the Benedictine order, and another ‘quasi-monastic’ by Augustinian canons.¹⁹ Most cathedrals had two types of school: one to teach song for the choir, such as Rochester’s, and the other a grammar school. In the monastic foundations, in order to minimise contact with the outside world, lay people, clerks and secular priests were employed as grammar masters. Grammar schools, as the name implies, were intended to teach the Latin basis for the first of the seven liberal arts, or artes liberales.²⁰ This was the intellectual foundation for university education where students were taught the trivium, (grammar, rhetoric and logic) and the quadrivium (geometry, arithmetic, music and astronomy).²¹

The funding of schools was a constant problem as grammar masters did not receive prebends from the Church and had to charge fees. Neither the papacy nor the Crown took much interest in the organisation of the English educational system and there were few controls or checks by the local diocese regarding the quality of teachers. To some extent organisational and funding issues were overcome by the appointment of patrons, the support of benefactors and scholarships ‘in the form of money, food, and accommodation’.²² In the thirteenth century, parish churches supported the education of some young men by paying them a small wage to work as clerks, and to undertake menial church tasks such as the ringing of bells. Several thousand boys were employed in this way. From about 1380 the establishment of collegiate churches or colleges began to address the growing desire by the laity to enter the secular clergy, providing the preparation for future parish and chantry priests, and chaplains. Not all the new establishments were as academic as others and not all included feeder grammar schools, but the more elite were the genesis of the university colleges of Oxford and Cambridge.²³

The establishment of university colleges gave rise to the founding of England’s first public schools, which in the fourteenth century began to provide education for a broader social range of pupils than the day grammar schools. An example of this is the establishment of Winchester College in 1382 by the Bishop of Winchester William of Wykeham, which was to prepare and provide scholars for New College Oxford. Wykeham and others realised that there were many talented boys with the potential to become clerks or take positions in the Church who did not have the financial means to pay for their education. The school at Winchester provided board, lodging and education for seventy such young men – the poor and needy or pauperes et indigentes²⁴ – establishing a format which is by and large recognisable today.²⁵

From the mid-fourteenth century, textbooks were increasingly being written in English, not Latin, and in the early years of the fifteenth century, the first Latin-English dictionaries were published.²⁶ During this period the teaching in some schools was concerned with the mastering of administrative skills required for trade, known as the ‘arts of business’. This might include letter writing, account keeping, and the composition of legal documents such as deeds, charters and court rolls. French was also considered important given its use not just in legal matters but also in popular literature. Many strata of society felt the need to learn such skills: from the nobility (who were traditionally taught at home but then might also go on to study law in London’s Inns of Court), to the lower classes whose future lay in lucrative and socially mobile clerical positions. Instruction was also required for the growing numbers of apprentices indentured to the new urban elite of tradesmen.²⁷

By the thirteenth century, schools of one sort or another were established in at least seventy urban communities in England, and in smaller towns and rural areas.²⁸ For the poor, education was unimaginable, as sending a son to school was expensive and necessitated the loss of his labour and wage. Moreover, the children of serfs could not become apprentices or go to school without the permission of the lord of the manor. Eton College had a specific admissions policy disallowing the sons of serfs, an indication that their admission must have been permitted elsewhere.²⁹ Not only was there widespread concern about losing child agricultural labour to urban artisans or the clergy, many in the establishment feared the threat of social mobility and a change to the old order. Such restrictions were, in part, addressed by the 1406 Statute of Artificers which stated: ‘Every man or woman, of what state or condition that he be, shall be free to set their son or daughter to take learning at any school that pleaseth them within the realm.’³⁰ However, the legislation was not all that it appears, as it only applied to those who owned land worth at least twenty shillings per annum.³¹ Such constraints would only ease when serfdom itself ceased to exist and although that system began to break down by the end of the fourteenth century, serfdom did not end until the sixteenth century.

In the years following the Black Death, the sharp population decline meant resources were not as stretched as before, and there was a possibility that education might become more widely available. In the 1440s, and with the enthusiastic interest and support of Henry VI, it became fashionable to found grammar schools. Benefactors included religious guilds, confraternities and a wide range of lay and ecclesiastical people keen to perpetuate the family name and, in some cases, provide local schooling in smaller country towns where there was a dearth. Between 1450 and 1530 the foundation of these endowed schools outstripped others, including those established in the colleges.³² Some of the smaller schools were chantries run by a single priest-teacher.

By the early sixteenth century, access to some sort of education was widespread, not just because of an increase in the number of schools but also as a result of social mobility, depopulation and a general awareness of the importance of education. For many, such as agricultural workers in rural areas, grammar schools were not a consideration, but this was not a determining factor for widespread illiteracy, as the importance of reading was well understood. For the tradesmen of the middling ranks of society it was essential for business and many people relished the spiritual and intellectual enrichment reading provided. It was also key to the development and dissemination of Nonconformist ideas. The provision of some sort of education for boys meant that numbers of men in every English town and village were able to read.

Recent research reveals that the ability to read was much more common than previously thought. Records from Aldenham School in Hertfordshire for the years 1689, 1695 and 1708 show that sixty per cent of the boys who started at the school aged 5, 6 and 7 could already read.³³ Up to the age of 7, children (boys and girls) were being taught to read either at home by female members of the family or at dame schools – unlicensed elementary schools run by women. Margaret Spufford cites the work of D. M. Meads who relates the situation in Norwich ‘at the time of the Tudors’:

‘Select women in each ward of the city … were to work or learne letters at their house or houses and were to teach the most poorest children whose parents are not liable to pay for theyr learning.’³⁴

Contemporary reports from the 1690s in Staffordshire indicate that to not have any reading skills at all was considered unusual.³⁵ However, the ability to write was not such a common skill, as Spufford demonstrates:

‘The importance of the social hierarchy in determining writing skills, and the much wider diffusion of reading skills, is immediately explained [by the commencement of child labour at age six or seven], since in general only a parent of the rank of yeoman or above could afford to dispense with a child’s earnings from the family budget.’³⁶

Clearly, the inability to write, as manifested in the signing of marriage registers with a cross, is not necessarily a sign of complete illiteracy.

There was a tremendous trade in reading matter in the sixteenth century, including the sale of primers and hornbooks. In the 1580s, an inventory of the Shrewsbury shop of London bookseller Roger Ward revealed a large stock of devotional matter clearly intended for a lay audience, including copies of sermons to be sold for the affordable sums of 2½d and 3d. Ward was well known for book piracy and was brought before the Court of the Star Chamber in London for the illegal production of some 10,000 copies of The ABC with the Little Catechism, 1,500 of which were to be sold at Shrewsbury. In the words of Tessa Watt: ‘Clearly there was a large market for these basic educational tools in Shropshire.’³⁷

With the development of trade in the Middle Ages and advancements in printing in the late fifteenth century, the sale of books, pamphlets and all manner of affordable printed material took off. The increase in vagrancy facilitated its dissemination as the destitute could purchase on credit and then re-sell, one presumes, at a small profit. Pedlars and chapmen visited fairs selling hornbooks and primers for basic reading skills as well as religious ballads and tracts, including dissenting texts. The contents of a Cambridge bookshop in 1578 included ‘Twelve almanackes and prognostications in octavo … listed at only a penny each, while four copies of an account of the voyager of captayne Furbisher were also valued at 1d per copy.’³⁸

The majority of texts stocked by the shop were religious in content, and the quantities and prices reflect a lucrative trade in popular and affordable literature. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries people had an appetite for religion: it was news – ‘it was dangerous’³⁹ – it was talked about, argued over and even sung about in the inns. Spufford relays the words of an Italian visiting England in the late eighteenth century from Isaac Walton’s Lives:

‘The common people of England … the very women and shopkeepers were able to judge of predestination, and determine what laws were fit to be made concerning church-government … what were fit to be obeyed or abolished.’⁴⁰

Some booksellers in Cambridge acquired books from printers in Northern Europe to sell in England. One bookbinder and stationer named John Denys had an arrangement with publishers in Cologne who produced works by the Dutch merchant – and leader of the dissenting sect, the Family of Love – Hendrik Niclaes. In 1575, two of the most affordable and portable works printed at the German works for export were broadsides (single sheets) which included a blessing and grace, and a thanksgiving to be read before and after meals, and an ABC for children.⁴¹ Watt describes how, in 1578, a Cambridgeshire pedlar was selling ‘lytle books’ in Balsham Church yard. Not only were the pedlar’s wares inexpensive but his presence there was likely not unusual. Just four years earlier six yeomen in the village admitted to hosting private conventicles and in 1580 four of them were imprisoned, accused of being Familists, that is, members of the dissenting Family of Love. It transpired that one of the local leaders owned several of Niclaes’ books.

Religious and educational texts were therefore sold and bought together but one was not exclusive of the other, as Spufford explains:

‘One of the earliest vernacular translations of the primer, of 1539, contains an almanac, a calendar, the alphabet, and the seven petitions of the paternoster, on the same page. This is followed by the Creed, the Ten Commandments, various graces, anthems and psalms, and ends with the Litany. The pattern was followed by other surviving primers from the mid-to the late sixteenth century … those who learnt to read had also learnt basic Christian tenets, and had at least a basic familiarity with them. If you could read, you were also religiously indoctrinated.’⁴²

Religious indoctrination was not the exclusive preserve of the orthodox Church. Quite clearly dissenting groups were aware of the power of the written word, the need to get the message across, and the ease with which this could happen thanks to trade networks and the prolific band of vagrants, pedlars and chapmen who plied their wares along them. As will be discussed later, that same network would be crucial for sharing innovative ideas.

Chapter 2

The Sowing of Seeds

The growth in literacy skills and the enhanced interest in theology in the fourteenth century made orthodox religion more accessible for the devout laity, reaffirming belief and resolving doubts. ¹ However, this awakening also introduced the possibility of questioning and challenging old ideas, and for orators an opportunity to reinterpret religious texts and manipulate the beliefs of their audience. ² The oration and publication of devotional texts into English gave direct access to the language of faith. This immediacy caused many among the pious to question the legitimacy of orthodox textual interpretation and the very purpose of the Church hierarchy, particularly in its role as an intermediary with God. The rulings made at the 1215 Fourth Lateran Council did not merely address the threat of so-called heretical movements, but also the need to ‘ensure the adequate instruction of the laity in the basic truths and obligations of the Catholic faith.’