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To what extent was religion in England changed significantly during the reign of Henry VIII?
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The Tudors – Politics and Religion, 1509-1603
In this course, Professor John Morrill (University of Cambridge) explores the politics and religion of Tudor England through ten key questions: (1) To what extent was religion in England changed significantly during the reign of Henry VIII?; (2) Was Henry VIII’s lack of a male heir the main reason for reforms to the English church in the years 1529-40?; (3) How far was religious change in the years 1547–63 driven by the personal religious beliefs of successive monarchs?’; (4) How accurate is it to say that Catholicism survived in the reigns of Edward and Elizabeth because of the tolerance shown by government?; (5) Were the legacies of Mary's reign wholly negative?; (6) How accurate is it to say that the changes that took place in the role of parliament were very limited in the years 1509-58?; (7) Was Parliament a help or a hindrance to Elizabeth?; (8) How far did the role played by Cardinal Wolsey as Henry’s principal servant remain the same when Thomas Cromwell served the king?; (9) Was being Queen of Ireland the biggest of all the problems faced by Elizabeth I?; and (10) How well did Elizabeth I deal with the problem of her cousin, Mary Queen of Scots?
To what extent was religion in England changed significantly during the reign of Henry VIII?
In this module, we consider the question, ‘To what extent was religion in England changed significantly during the reign of Henry VIII?’, focusing in particular on: (i) the limited changes in ordinary parish churches; (ii) the changes experienced in larger churches and cathedrals, especially those that housed relics or shrines; (iii) the changes experienced in the countryside with the dissolution of the monasteries; (iv) the services provided by monasteries, both religious and social; (v) the importance of guilds in providing religious and charitable services; (vi) the importance of chantry chapels; and (vii) the idea of the communion of saints, i.e. the idea that the living and the dead form a single community; and (viii) the extent to which Henry holds back religious changes advocated by his less conservative advisors (e.g. Thomas Cranmer).
Hello. I'm John Moral.
00:00:05I was for many years a professor of British and Irish history at Cambridge,
00:00:07now retired for a bit.
00:00:11But all the keener to think back to
00:00:13the all the mysteries about The Tudors and Stewarts
00:00:15and in this series of lectures I'm going to be talking about The Tudors,
00:00:19and we're going to start with my reflections on this question.
00:00:23To what extent was religion in England changed
00:00:26significantly during the reign of Henry the eighth?
00:00:30So let's put ourselves in 15 47 at the time
00:00:34of Henry's death and put ourselves in a parish church
00:00:37and say What changes would we see? And the answer is an ordinary parish.
00:00:41Churches up and down England virtually no changes at all.
00:00:45And certainly when we went to Mass, it would still be in Latin.
00:00:49It would still be exactly the same form of the mass
00:00:52of the main religious services that none I
00:00:56think nothing had changed in that respect,
00:00:59the sacramental life. That's to say, the pattern
00:01:02of people going to mass regularly, receiving communion much more occasionally,
00:01:07going to confession, having their Children baptised,
00:01:12going to church to be married,
00:01:16having requiem masses that whole way of relating to God through the church and the
00:01:17way in which church brought God into their
00:01:24lives would have been almost entirely unchanged.
00:01:26And in fact, in terms of what you're expected to believe about the nature of God,
00:01:30about the nature of God's plan for the world,
00:01:35there would have been virtually no changes.
00:01:37It's important to say that under Henry the eighth,
00:01:39you cannot be a heretic by holding Catholic beliefs.
00:01:42Henry, the eighth, never condemned as heretical
00:01:47anything that the Catholic Church believed,
00:01:51it's important to say. So when Henry had opponents in the Catholic Church,
00:01:54he hang, draw and quarter them as traitors. He didn't burn them as heretics.
00:02:00He still burns some Protestants for having extreme views,
00:02:05but he never burns Catholics.
00:02:09He executes them as traitors, not as heretics.
00:02:10So in that sense,
00:02:14if you're if you're an ordinary person in
00:02:15an ordinary power issue anywhere in England,
00:02:18you wouldn't see that any change at all, really, in what happens
00:02:20in your parish church,
00:02:25Um, if you're in a big, big city with big, big or a place where there's a major shrine,
00:02:28that's to say where some great miracle was remembered
00:02:35or the body of a legendary saint was kept.
00:02:39Then you would see some simplification.
00:02:44There had been an attack on the cult of the saints and on the cult of the martyrs,
00:02:46particularly ones who were seen as closely allied to the Papacy.
00:02:52So there have been great destruction at Canterbury, for example,
00:02:57where the tomb of Thomas A.
00:03:00Becket,
00:03:02the archbishop of Canterbury loyal to Rome, who had
00:03:03stood up to Henry, the eighth predecessor, Henry the second.
00:03:07Now that tomb is broken up and destroyed.
00:03:12So in some of the big churches in some
00:03:15of the big places you would notice the difference.
00:03:18But the really big difference you'd notice,
00:03:20is if you go out into the countryside because what had vanished in
00:03:23the last 10 years of Henry the Eighth Rain with the monasteries,
00:03:27there were 800 monasteries which had been dissolved.
00:03:31That's to say, which had been shut down
00:03:35in the last 10 years of Henry the eighth rain, mainly in the period 15 36
00:03:382, 15, 40.
00:03:42And that makes a really big difference, because monasteries,
00:03:44um, we're very important for most people in their everyday lives,
00:03:48not necessarily in a straightforward religious way,
00:03:54although you might well have your family may well be invested in a monastery to pray.
00:03:58Have certain masses said,
00:04:06for the souls of yourself when you died of
00:04:08your parents or grandparents or members of your family,
00:04:10but because of all the other things, which, as a church,
00:04:14the monasteries provided they were by far the biggest hotels in the country.
00:04:17They were the banks there where people kept their money for safekeeping
00:04:22there, where the elderly would invest throughout their lives,
00:04:27but in a kind of insurance that when they got old and frail,
00:04:31they could be moved in and looked after
00:04:34a lot of social services
00:04:36were provided by the church.
00:04:38Almost all the charity that's almost all support
00:04:40for the poor came through the monasteries.
00:04:43So because people throughout the centuries
00:04:47have been giving donations to monasteries,
00:04:50they had large endowment funds intended to help those in need,
00:04:52and that is seen as part of their Christian witness.
00:04:57And it's therefore, is an important religious aspect of the life of Englishmen.
00:05:00So the disappearance of those
00:05:07and the attack on those by the minister of Henry,
00:05:09particularly by Thomas Cromwell in 15 thirties did make a great make change.
00:05:15Now there were also charity funds within.
00:05:22Parishes are much, much less than in the 800 monasteries.
00:05:25But there were within many, many parish churches,
00:05:29particularly in towns much more than the countryside.
00:05:33But particularly in the towns,
00:05:36there were parish guilds. That's to say there would be chapels.
00:05:38Or there would be alters on the side of the side of the church,
00:05:43in which prayers were said for the living and for the dead.
00:05:48And there were Chantry chapels that saying closed chapels,
00:05:53which were dedicated to the memory
00:05:56of particular families or particular individuals.
00:05:59Now those don't come under attack until after Henry the eight's death,
00:06:02and it is important that we see the really crucial
00:06:06aspect of the religious life of people in Henry C.
00:06:11In England
00:06:16is to see the living and the dead as one great community. The living pray for the dead
00:06:17that they will.
00:06:22They will spend their time more rapidly in purgatory and make their way to heaven
00:06:23and the dead in particular. Saints pray for the living and help us through our lives
00:06:29and that notion of the commune of saint So the living and the dead as one community.
00:06:34Praying for one another
00:06:38is to be a really central feature of the Protestant attack on
00:06:39the Henry she in church after Henry's death.
00:06:46But Henry won't allow that kind of attack to take place.
00:06:49He himself remains very committed to a very traditional view
00:06:54of the communion of saints of the sacramental system.
00:06:59And although he'd been manoeuvred by some of his ministers to
00:07:03move in a more evangelical direction in the 15 thirties,
00:07:07particularly over the
00:07:10the publication of an English Bible Henry himself had after the
00:07:13fall of Thomas Cromwell had returned to a more conservative style.
00:07:20And I said at the time of his death,
00:07:24if you simply went to your parish church on a Sunday,
00:07:26you wouldn't have noticed much difference.
00:07:30
Cite this Lecture
APA style
Morrill, J. (2020, May 27). The Tudors – Politics and Religion, 1509-1603 - To what extent was religion in England changed significantly during the reign of Henry VIII? [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/courses/the-tudors-politics-and-religion-1509-1603-john-morrill/how-well-did-elizabeth-i-deal-with-the-problem-of-mary-queen-of-scots
MLA style
Morrill, J. "The Tudors – Politics and Religion, 1509-1603 – To what extent was religion in England changed significantly during the reign of Henry VIII?." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 27 May 2020, https://massolit.io/courses/the-tudors-politics-and-religion-1509-1603-john-morrill/how-well-did-elizabeth-i-deal-with-the-problem-of-mary-queen-of-scots