History of England 1-6

At the beginning of the fifteenth century the convocation, or general assembly, of the Church asked the parliament to announce some action against the Lollards. They were still a small sect, but they appeared to be growing. They were finding an audience among the disaffected, and the spiritual authorities were worried about any possible consequences. So in 1401 an Act was passed against ‘a certain new sect, damnably thinking of the sacraments and usurping the office of preaching’. They were spreading sedition and insurrection. The bishops were granted the power to arrest and imprison any offenders. If they did not renounce their pernicious beliefs, they could in the end be burned ‘in an high place’ before the populace. This is the first time that the stake was appointed as the ultimate penalty for heresy. In the next century the fire would become one of the notable judicial sights of England.

The first to die was a London chaplain, William Sawtré, who had declared that the bread of the Mass remained merely bread. On 26 February 1401, he was stuffed inside a wooden barrel at Smithfield and placed upon the flames.

In what sense did Wycliffe and the Lollards presage the general religious reformation of the sixteenth century? An affinity in certain doctrines, later promulgated both by the Lutherans and the Calvinists, no doubt exists. The detestation of the pope and the spiritual hierarchy, the denial of transubstantiation, the rejection of any worship of images and the increasing reliance on a vernacular Bible, are all part of the same general repudiation of the Catholic Church. Yet in the fourteenth century these attitudes were held only by a small minority. They did not spread very far, and were detested by a large proportion of the population. ‘I smell a Loller in the wind’, is the line given to one of the pilgrims in the Canterbury Tales. It needed another set of accidental circumstances, and another cast of characters, before the Christian faith of England could be reformulated.

In the fourteenth century, however, the religion of the vast majority of the English people remained utterly orthodox and familiar. There was no appetite for change, and no sense of an ending. The Church was part of the texture of life, as enveloping and as inescapable as the weather. England was in any case an island of saints, with the cult of English sainthood being encouraged from the twelfth century; seventeen Englishmen and Englishwomen of that century were beatified.

This was the land of the ecclesiastical style known as the Perpendicular, a peculiarly English form of architecture that flourished in the reign of Edward III. Just as Chaucer abandoned French for English, so the great masons of the latter half of the fourteenth century renounced the Rayonnant and Flamboyant styles of France. The greatest of all these English masons, Henry Yevele, died in the same year as Chaucer himself; his early patron, John of Gaunt, was also the poet’s patron. So there is a correspondence. Yevele worked at Windsor, Westminster, Canterbury, Durham and St Paul’s as well as superintending the building of many castles, chapels and collegiate churches throughout the country.

Perpendicular was a wholly and uniquely national style, first adumbrated in Gloucester Cathedral. The king introduced it in his rebuilding works at Windsor. It became the pattern for a myriad of parish churches, and is the dominant style for the rest of the medieval period in England. Perpendicular is plain and ordered, with soaring shafts of stone; on slender piers and high arcades there rests a vast and stately vault. The emphasis is always upon the vertical line. The effect is simultaneously one of simplicity and magnificence. It is an austere style, perhaps hastened by the more sombre mood of the country in the years succeeding the Black Death. Carving of too elaborate a nature was no longer fashionable; as the nave of Canterbury Cathedral will testify, the emphasis rested upon total effect rather than on curious detail. There was an instinct for unity.