The reformation of the landscape: religion, identity, and memory in early modern Britain and Ireland 9780199654383, 9780199243556

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THE REFORMATION OF THE LANDSCAPE

Praise for The Reformation of the Landscape “This brilliant book ...1s a major reinterpretation of Christian faith and practice in Britain and Ireland over the centuries from 1500 to 1800 and beyond... [It] draws on immense learning, wearing it lightly... Its grace and authority will commend it to theologians, anthropologists, geographers and a mass of general readers besides academic historians. Its compelling argument makes the book required reading for all concerned with early modern Britain and Ireland. The Reformation of the Landscape confirms Alexandra Walsham’s place in the very front rank of British historians.’ Anthony Fletcher, Times Literary Supplement

‘A superb work of synthesis, full of fascinating detail, animated by an astringent intelligence and abounding in original insights.’ Keith Thomas, London Review of Books

‘The overall picture is vivid, astoundingly detailed and deeply compelling in its conceptual range and its forthright analysis. This book moves with both grace and authority over a vast tract of time and space, giving a whole new dimension to the

Reformation debate, and contributing to several other related discussions as it goes...Charting the topography of religious conviction and the panorama of magic and memory, [Walsham] has reconfigured a landscape of her own, contributing an outstanding landmark to the scholarly terrain.’ Lucy Wooding, Times Higher Education

‘The interweaving of religious and local history in this book produces a most stimulating effect. Based on research as broad as it is deep, it conveys an understanding of the habits of belief and desire that drove generations of men and women

all over these islands to feats of destruction and preservation in the cause of religion.’ Graham Parry, The Guardian

‘Magisterial... [Walsham] cements her reputation as the finest Reformation historian of her generation...a landmark of Reformation studies.’ Alec Ryrie, The Tablet ‘A fascinating study of the place of landscape in English religious sentiment during the century and a half after the Reformation, a work of stunning originality.’ Jonathan Sumption, The Spectator

THE REFORMATION OF THE LANDSCAPE Religion, Identity, and Memory in Early Modern Britain and Ireland

ALEXANDRA WALSHAM

OXFORD

UNIVERSITY PRESS

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2468 10975 31

To my friends, colleagues, and all the students I taught in Exeter

Acknowledgements

The Reformation of the Landscape marks the culmination of a journey that has

lasted longer and extended in different directions from those anticipated at the beginning. Its origins lie in a smaller project on holy wells and healing

springs in post-Reformation England on which I began serious work in 2002. As I neared the end of my research on this topic in January 2004, I sat down to write what was intended to be a short article on a cognate theme. However, the essay gathered an irresistible momentum of its own. Three

weeks and 120 pages later I realized to my surprise that I had laid the foundations for a substantial book. A further period of gathering additional material followed, in the course of which I made several more discoveries. The first was that in order to understand the impact of the Protestant and

Catholic Reformations on the landscape it would be necessary both to investigate the tangled layers of religious significance that had been deposited upon it over the preceding two millennia and to stretch beyond my original end point of 1700 to encompass the later phases of these religious transformations. The second was that the richness of evidence from Scotland, Wales,

and Ireland made it desirable to extend the geographical scope of my enquiry to the British Isles in its entirety. While there have certainly been moments when I have earnestly wished that I had confined myself within less ambitious parameters, I cannot regret the shape that the book has eventually taken or the intellectual challenges that I have been compelled to confront along the way. Inevitably, I have accumulated numerous debts of gratitude in the process. I owe thanks to many scholars and friends for providing bibliographical advice and suggesting lines of enquiry. Andrew Spicer has generously passed on many references and guided my research on Scotland; Raymond Gillespie, Bernadette Cunningham, and Robert Armstrong did the same for Ireland and were immensely helpful and hospitable in Dublin. Joanna Mattingly supplied interesting leads and material on Cornwall and John Blair, Ronald Hutton, and Ute Lotz Heumann have graciously allowed me to read their work prior

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Vil to publication. Jeremy Harte stimulated my thinking in conversation and kindly sent me a copy of his excellent sourcebook on English holy wells, which enabled me to eliminate some serious mistakes. Julia Crick, Sarah Hamilton, and Catherine Rider initiated me into the relevant primary and secondary literature on the pre-Reformation period and carefully scrutinized Chapter I to ensure that it would pass muster among medievalists. Lyndal Roper cast a sharp editorial eye over the introduction and conclusion. Others have been kind enough to carve out time to read the whole text and supply constructive comments from which it has benefited greatly. Here I must thank Jonathan Barry, Patrick Collinson, John Craig, Anne Dillon, Michael Duffy, Andrew McRae, John Morrill, and Andrew Spicer, together with the reader for the press. Although I have not embraced all of the latter’s recommendations, I hope it will be apparent that I have profited from reflecting on them in preparing the final version. My former postgraduate students Tom Blaen and David Davis saved me much time by proofreading, checking footnotes and place names, correcting inconsistencies, and preparing a preliminary draft of the bibliography. Harriet Raff prepared a draft of the index of place names. More generally, | am extremely grateful to my colleagues in the Department of History at the University of Exeter for their friendship and support. I write this in the knowledge that I shall be leaving them to take up a new

post in Cambridge in September 2010 and the dedication records my appreciation for the fourteen happy and fruitful years I have spent here in Devon. I owe particular thanks to Andrew Thorpe, who stepped in at a critical point to give me a short period of relief from my heavy duties as Head in May 2009, without which this book would have taken even longer to complete. Anne Dillon, Patrick Collinson, Michael Duffy, and John Morrill deserve special mention for providing much needed encouragement

during the spasms of self-doubt to which I am periodically prone. My mother and sister have been listening ears on the end of the phone in Melbourne; my father and stepmother have provided a safe haven in Devon; and my neighbour Olive Millward has supplied boundless reserves of enthusiastic interest and kindness closer to home. I am indebted to the Leverhulme Trust, the British Academy, and the

University of Exeter for funding periods of study leave that facilitated various stages of the research and writing of this book. A term as Derek Brewer Visiting Fellow at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, in Michaelmas 2005, enabled me to gather a considerable body of the material on which it is based and I am very grateful to the Master and Fellows for welcoming me

vill ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS back into their midst. Papers derived from my research on The Reformation of

the Landscape have been presented to various audiences in Birmingham,

Bristol, Dublin, Exeter, Norwich, London, Melbourne, Sheffield, and York and I have learnt much from the comments and questions raised on these occasions. I must also thank the many libraries and archives that I have

used and visited in the course of this enquiry, notably the British Library, London; the Bodleian Library, Oxford; the Borthwick Institute of Historical Research, York; Cambridge University Library; the Devon and Exeter Institution; Exeter Cathedral Library; Exeter University Library; the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC; the Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California; the National Library of Ireland, Dublin; the Na-

tional Library of Scotland, Edinburgh; the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth; the Royal Insh Academy, Dublin; the Society of Antiquaries

of London; and the library of Trinity College Dublin. I wish to express particular gratitude to the staff of the Rare Books Room in the Cambridge University Library, who have always greeted me with a smile after long periods of absence and fetched large numbers of requests swiftly and efficiently. The cost of purchasing and reproducing the illustrations has been subsidized by a small grant from the British Academy.

Finally, I must acknowledge Oxford University Press and the various editors with whom I have worked during the prolonged period over which this book has evolved: Ruth Parr, Rupert Cousens, Seth Cayley, Stephanie Ireland, and Christopher Wheeler. I fear I have tested their patience to the limit with the multiple delays and reincarnations this project has experienced. I hope that the end product will repay the trust they have placed in me. Exeter, Christmas Eve 2009

Contents

List of Illustrations x1 Abbreviations and Conventions XV

Introduction I

1 Loca sacra: Religion and the Landscape before the Reformation 18 Shrines and Sanctuaries: The Sacred Geography of Paganism 19 Footprints of the Saints: The Christianization of the Landscape 26

Miracles and Pilgrims: The Later Middle Ages 49 The Delusion of the People: The Struggle against Superstition 66

2 Idols in the Landscape: The Impact of Protestant Reformation 80

Sacred Landscape 81

A Teacher of Lies: The Theological Assault upon the

Clandestine 94 Phases of the Long Reformation 125

Removing Stumbling Blocks: Iconoclasm, Official and

Wars against the Idols: The Civil Wars and Later

Remembrancers of the Reformation: Desecrated Places 147

and the Landscape 153 Confessional Polemic 156 and the Landscape 166

3 Britannia sancta: Catholicism, Counter-Reformation, Spiritual Medicine for Heretical Poison: Pilgrimage as

Bare Ruined Choirs and Mass Rocks: Catholic Piety

Islands of the Saints: Missionaries, Laypeople, and the

Revival of Medieval Holy Places 189 The Very Stones Would Cry Out: Martyrs and the Making of a New Geography of the Sacred 217

xX CONTENTS 4 The Religious Regeneration of the Landscape: Ritual,

Rehabilitation, and Renewal 233 Gadding to Sermons and Creeping in Corners: Lollards

and Protestants in the Landscape 234

Beating the Bounds and the Beauty of Holiness: Liturgical

Rites, Laudianism, and the Resacralization of Space 252

The Chief Blemish of the Reformation: Monastic Ruins,

Sacrilege, and the Reassessment of the Medieval Past 273 Monuments, Fountains, and Follies: Archaeology,

Architecture, and Gardening 296 5 God’s Great Book in Folio: Providence, Science, and the Natural Environment 327

and Providence 328

The Wonderful Workmanship of the World: Creation Extraordinary Preachers: Prodigious Nature

and Catastrophic Events 340 Britannia Baconica: Religion and Natural History 357

The Sacred Theory of the Earth: Physico-Theology 376 6 Therapeutic Waters: Religion, Medicine, and the Landscape 395 Reforming the Waters: From Holy Wells to Healing Springs? 397

Commercialization AI4

New Found Spaws: Chemical Testing, Cold Bathing. and The Largess of Heaven: Medicine and Piety

at the Watering Places A431 the Medical Mainstream ASS

Errours of the People in Matter of Physick: Wells beyond

7 Invented Traditions: Legend, Custom, and Memory A471

Popish Survivals? Miracles, Monks, and Saints 476 Reformed Fables? Divine Judgements and the Devil’s Exploits 497

of Purification S15

Protestant Traditions: Persecution, Patriotism, and Rites

in the Post-Reformation 531

Innocent Pastimes: Ritual, Recreation, and Pilgrimage

Conclusion 555

General Index 607 Index of Places 627 Bibliography of Primary Sources 568

List of Illustrations

1.1 Rudston monolith, Yorkshire 31 1.2 Norman church inside a Neolithic henge at Knowlton, Dorset 31 1.3 St Martin’s high cross, Iona 33 1.4 Well chapel of St Cleer, Cornwall $7 1.5 Roche Rock and chapel: John Norden, Speculi Britanniae pars.

A topographical and historical description of Cornwall (London, 1728) 58 1.6 St Patrick’s Purgatory, Lough Derg: Sir James Ware,

The Antiquities and History of Ireland (London, 1705) 74 2.1 Malmesbury Abbey: Roger Dodsworth and William Dugdale,

Monasticon Anglicanum, 3 vols. (London, 1655-73) IIS 2.2 Iconoclasm in England: Richard Verstegan, Theatrum crudelitatum

haereticorum nostri temporis (Antwerp, 1592 edn.) 118 2.3 The destruction of Cheapside Cross, 1643, and the burning of

(London, 1646) 131 2.4 Churchyard cross at Silverton, Devon 132 the Book of Sports: John Vicars, A sight of the transactions

2.5 The rocking stone of Main Amber, Cornwall: John Norden, Speculi Britanniae pars. A topographical and historical description

of Cornwall (London, 1728) 139 2.6 William Stukeley, ‘An Abury Atto da Fe, May 20 1724’:

Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Gough Map 231 143

3.1 Our Lady of Montaigu (Scherpenheuvel): Antonius Sanderus,

Chorographia sacra Brabantiae, 2 vols. (Brussels, 1659-68) 160 3.2 The Lady Chapel and well of Mount Grace Priory, Osmotherly, Yorkshire: British Library, MS Landsdowne 914 (Warburton’s

Yorkshire Collections) 168

3.3 Pilgrims circumambulating the ruined shrine of Our Lady of Runxputte near Heiloo in the Netherlands: engraving by

Frederik de Wit, first publ. Amsterdam c.1690 170

xl LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 3.4 “The Lady Well near Dundalk, round which the Catholicks do pennance 9 Sept. annually being ye Patron Day’: Thomas Wright, Louthiana: or, an introduction to the antiquities of Ireland (London, 1748) 172

3.5 Memorial cross, Balrath, Co. Meath 185 3.6 The martyrdoms of St Decuman, St Cleer, and St Juthwara:

(Rome, [1584]) 210

Giovannia Battista de Cavalleriis, Ecclesiae Anglicanae Trophaea

3.7. The image of a crucifix discovered in the trunk of an ash tree blown down in Glamorganshire, 1559: Nicholas Harpsfield, Dialogi sex contra summi pontificatus, monasticae vitae, sanctorum, sacrarum imaginum

oppugnatores, et pseudomartyres (Antwerp, 1573 edn.) 219 3.8 Memorial mass rock commemorating the death of Fr Nicholas

Mayler, 1653, Tomhaggard, Co. Wexford 229

4.1 “The Orthodox True Minister’ and “The Seducer and False Prophet’: T. C., A glasse for the times by which according to the Scriptures, you may clearly behold the true Ministers of Christ, how farre differing from false

teachers (London, 1648) 245

4.2 ‘A Protestants Meeting’: John Bunyan, The life and death of

Mr Badman (London, 1696 edn.) 248

4.3 ‘Fons Sacer’: King’s Newton well, Derbyshire, restored by Robert Harding 1660: Robert Charles Hope, The Legendary Lore of the Holy Wells of England including Rivers, Lakes,

Fountains and Springs (London, 1893) 271 4.4 The ruins of Fountains Abbey: Roger Dodsworth and William

Dugdale, Monasticon Anglicanum, 3 vols. (London, 1655-73) 280 4.5 “The prospect of Glasenbury Abbey’, Somerset: William Stukeley, Itinerarium curiosum. Or an account of the antiquitys and

remarkable curiositys in nature or art (London, 1724) 281

Antiquaries, London 299

4.6 ‘Stonhing’, print of 1575: Lemon Collection, Society of

4.7. Inigo Jones, The most notable antiquity of Great Britain, vulgarly called Stone-heng an Salisbury Plain, ed. John Webb

(London, 1655) 300

4.8 ‘An Antient Heathen Temple’: Charles Smith, The antient

2 vols. (Dublin, 1750) 303 and present state of the county and city of Cork, in four books,

4.9 ‘The tolmen in Constantine parish, Cornwall: William Borlase, Observations on the antiquities historical and monumental,

of the county of Cornwall (London, 1769 edn.) 307 4.10 The White Horse of Uffington: Francis Wise, A letter to Dr Mead concerning some antiquities in Berkshire, particularly

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS x11 shewing that the WHITE HORSE, which gives name to the vale, is a monument of the west-Saxons, made in memory

of a great victory obtained over the Danes A.D. 871 (Oxford, 1738) 310 4.11 Bird’s-eye view of the garden of Wilton House, Wiltshire,

as laid out by Isaac de Caus, depicted ¢.1645 314

4.12 Enstone waterworks, Oxfordshire: Robert Plot,

The natural history of Oxfordshire (Oxtord, 1705 edn.) 315 5.1 The miraculous earth movement at Westerham, Kent, 1596: John Chapman, A most true report of the miraculous moving and sinking of a plot of ground, about nine Acres, at Westram

in Kent (London, 1597) 342

5.2 Landscapes devastated by floods: Gods warning to his people of England. By the great overflowing of the waters or floudes lately

hapned in South-Wales, and many other places (London, 1607) 347 5.3. The groaning tree near Gainsborough, Lincolnshire: [Nathaniel Crouch], Admirable curiosities rarities and

wonders (2nd edn., London, 1684) 352 5.4 The Giant’s Causeway, Co. Antrim, Northern Ireland: Samuel Foley, ‘An Account of the Giants Caus-way in the North of Ireland’, Philosophical Transactions of the

Royal Society, 18 (1694), fold-out plate 365 5.5 The Cheese Wring, Cornwall: William Borlase, Observations on the antiquities historical and monumental,

of the county of Cornwall (London, 1769 edn.) 378 5.6 Thomas Burnet, The sacred theory of the earth (London, 1684) 382 6.1 The city of Bath, with illustrations of the King’s Bath and the Cross Bath: John Speed, The theatre of the empire

of Great Britaine (London, 1611) A0O

6.2 St Anne’s Well, Buxton: John Speed, The theatre of

the empire of Great Britaine (London, 1611) 402

6.3 The healing spring at Utkinton: G. W., Newes out of

Cheshire of the new found well (London, 1600) 404

6.4 Cold spring at Kinghorn Craig: Patrick Anderson, The colde spring of Kinghorne Craig, his admirable and new tried properties, so far foorth as yet are found true by experience

(Edinburgh, 1618) A418

6.5 A mineral spring: engraving by Wenceslaus Hollar (c.1627—77) A21 6.6 Holywell in the late seventeenth century: St Winefrids

(London, c.1675—95) AO7 Well usually called Holy Well, near Flint in North Wales

X1V LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 7.1 Burgeoning cross at Glastonbury: Here begynneth the

lyfe of Foseph of Armathia (London, 1520) AQ3

7.2 The Hurlers, Cornwall: John Norden, Speculi Britanniae pars. A topographical and historical description of Cornwall (London, 1728) $03 7.3 The Devil’s Arrowes: John Aubrey, ‘Monumenta Britannica’,

Bodleian Library, MS Top. gen. c. 24 $05

(London, 1563) 517

7.4 The burning of Wyclif’s bones: John Foxe, Actes and monuments

7.5 The Oak of Reformation: [Nathaniel Crouch], Admirable

curiosities rarities and wonders (2nd edn., London, 1684) §25 7.6 The monument to the Great Fire of London: print by

William Lodge dated c.1676 527

7.7 Early eighteenth-century ceramic plate commemorating Charles II’s escape after the battle of Worcester by hiding

in the Boscobel Oak $29

7.8 ‘A Pattern Day’: Philip Dixon Hardy, The Holy Wells

of Ireland (Dublin, 1840) 546

Abbreviations and Conventions

APC Acts of the Privy Council of England, Ns 1542-1631, ed. John Roche Dasent et al., 46 vols. (1890-1964)

BL British Library, London Bod. Bodleian Library, Oxford CRS Catholic Record Society CSP Dom — Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, of the Reigns of Edward VI, Mary, Elizabeth and James I, 1547-1625, ed. R. Lemon and M. A. E. Green, 12 vols. (1856-72); Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, of the Reign of Charles I, 1625-1649, ed. J. Bruce et al., 23 vols. (1858-97); Calendar of State Papers Domestic: Commonwealth 1649-1660, ed. Mary

Anne Everett, 13 vols. (London, 1875-86).

CUL Cambridge University Library EETS Early English Text Society EHR English Historical Review ESTC English Short Title Catalogue (http://estc.bl.uk) HEHL Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California

HF Historical Fournal HMC Historical Manuscripts Commission FBS Fournal of British Studies FEH Fournal of Ecclesiastical History FJMH Fournal of Modern History L&P Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, 1509-47, ed. J. S. Brewer et al., 21 vols. and Addenda, 2 vols. (London, 1862-1932)

NLS National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh NLW National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth

NS New Series

ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (http://www.oxforddnb.com)

OED Oxford English Dictionary (http://dictionary.oed.com)

XV1 ABBREVIATIONS AND CONVENTIONS

OS Old Series; Original Series P&P Past and Present PL Patrologia Latina, ed. Jacques-Paul Migne, 217 vols. (Paris, 1844-55)

PS Parker Society PT Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London (London, 1665— 78, 1683-1775)

RH Recusant History SAL Society of Antiquaries of London

SCH Studies in Church History SCF Sixteenth Century Fournal

SP State Papers TCD Trinity College, Dublin TNA The National Archives, London TRHS Transactions of the Royal Historical Society

VCH Victoria County History Original spelling, punctuation, and capitalization are retained in all quotations, with occasional exceptions in the interests of clarity. The use of 1 andj, u and v, however, has been modernized. In citations from manuscript sources, standard abbreviations and contractions have been silently expanded. Greek letters have been transliterated. For the sake of consistency, signature numbers are cited in arabic numerals throughout. Dates are given in Old Style, except that the year is

reckoned to begin on 1 January. The place of publication is London, unless otherwise stated. All biblical citations are from the Authorized Version of 1611. Contemporary county names have generally been employed rather than modern ones.

Introduction What a pleasing variety is here of Townes, Rivers, Hills, Dales, Woods, Medowes; each of them striving to set forth other; and all of them to delight the eye? So as this is no other then a naturall; and reall Landscip drawne by that Almightie, and skilfull hand, in this table of the Earth, for the pleasure of our view; no other creature besides Man 1s capable to apprehend this beautie; I shal doe wrong to him that brought mee hither, if I doe not feed my eyes, and praise my Maker...

o wrote Joseph Hall, bishop of Exeter, in a spiritual reflection ‘upon a

S faire Prospect’ penned during one of the ‘short ends of time’ he stole from ‘his continuall and weighty imployments’ in the ‘large & busie Diocesse’

over which he presided. Discovered amongst other muddled papers in his study, it was published by his son Robert 1n 1630, together with more than a hundred other Occasionall meditations on animals, birds, insects, plants, mundane events, and quotidian objects.’ The precise location Hall described in this short essay cannot be identified, but the scene he evokes suggests it may

well have been somewhere in the mid-Devon countryside. Then, as now, this was a patchwork of fields, hedges, and thickets of trees, dotted with villages and market towns that nestled in the dips of its rolling hills and clustered in the green valleys that ran alongside its meandering rivers and

streams. The panorama he glimpsed from his unknown vantage point inspired him to remember the power and benevolence of the God who had created the world for the benefit of the human beings He had made in His own image. This delightful vista had been sculpted by the deity at the beginning of time and then embellished and altered by the people who

occupied, cleared, cultivated, and settled it over the course of several millennia.

Hall characterized this as ‘a naturall; and reall Landscip’ drawn by the hand of the Almighty. Employing a technical term that had only recently

I. Joseph Hall, Occasionall meditations, ed. R[obert] H[all] (1630), pp. 12-13 and sig. A2"—3”.

2 INTRODUCTION entered the English language from the Dutch vernacular, he compared the prospect he beheld with a pictorial representation—with a genre of painting and engraving that was just becoming fashionable across the English Channel. The seemingly superfluous adjectives with which he qualified it alert us

to the significant shift that has taken place in the meaning of the word ‘landscape’ in the centuries since. Originally it meant not a physical tract of land with its distinguishing features and characteristics, but rather an artistic depiction of this, as seen from a particular perspective and through the lens of an individual spectator. Only gradually did it come to be used to denote actual places rather than the subjective simulacra of them that artists produced on canvas and paper.” Joseph Hall was invoking it as a metaphor for the exquisite piece of craftsmanship that was the joint creation of the Lord and the species that He had accorded sovereignty over it. The sight provoked him to wonder at the majesty and mercy of the God who had made the universe and who providentially sustained all life and human endeavour on earth. As he wrote in the preface: “Every thing that we see, reades us new lectures of Wisdome, and Pietie...I desire, and charge my Reader, whosoever hee be, to make mee, and himselfe so happie, as to take out my lesson; and to learne how to read GODs great Booke, by mine.”” Hall’s devout meditation opens just one of many possible windows onto the

subject of this book: the connection between religion and the landscape in early modern Britain and Ireland. As we shall see, his sanguine confidence that the physical world supplied an emblem of divine love coexisted with a range of alternative responses: with a tendency to see it as a reservoir of soul-destroying error, as a source of temptation to backslide to the superstition of a benighted

Catholic past, and as a lingering reminder of the dark and distant ages of heathen sacrifice. The chapters that follow examine how religious assumptions influenced contemporary perceptions of the physical environment, and how

in turn that environment shaped the profound theological, liturgical, and

2. OED (accessed 25/8/2008). In its German form landschaft or lantschaft, however, 1t was used to denote a geographical area defined by political boundaries. On the etymology of ‘landscape’, see John Brinckerhoff Jackson, Discovering the Vernacular Landscape (New Haven, 1984), 3-8.

On the emergence of the genre, see Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (1983), ch. 4; Christopher S. Wood, Albrecht Altdorfer and the Origins of Landscape (1993); Malcolm Andrews, Landscape and Western Art (Oxford, 1999), chs. 1, 2; Kim Sloan, ‘A Noble Art’: Amateur Artists and Drawing Masters c.1600—1800 (2000), ch. 3. 3. Hall, Occasionall meditations, sig. A11'—12".

INTRODUCTION 3 cultural transformations that marked the era between c.1500 and 1750. They explore how senses of place and space were implicated in the series of interlinked initiatives to reform belief and behaviour that historians call the Refor-

mation. Driven by a varying combination of popular fervour and official policy, the ongins of this movement can be found in the medieval period; its progress was uneven, protracted, and contentious, and its consequences farreaching. Stretching well beyond the tumultuous events of the mid-sixteenth century, it engendered frictions and conflicts that played no small part in precipitating the bitter civil wars that engulfed the kingdoms that comprised the Bnitish Isles in the 1640s and 1650s, and which continued to disrupt their equilibrium for decades to come. Its most lasting legacy was the creation of societies comprised of people self-consciously divided by faith—societies in which Catholics, Protestants, and the members of dissenting minorities coexisted in an uneasy mixture of harmony and tension. The dramatic impact that these movements had upon the material fabric of ecclesiastical buildings and liturgical furniture has been well documented. We possess many important and powerful studies of the public directives and private actions that reduced dissolved and abandoned monasteries to hollow shells and permanently branded cathedrals and parish churches with the visible marks of the reformers’ war against the idols. Scholars have traced the stripping of the altars and the holocaust of hallowed images and objects that marked its successive phases in revealing detail; they have also devoted considerable attention to the presence and development of contrary currents

that fostered a drive to restore the ‘beauty of holiness’ and to refurbish church interiors in an effort to befit them for reverent worship. Interest in the architectural and aesthetic dimensions of the shift in theological temperature that became conspicuous in England in the 1630s has deepened; the influence and effect of these trends in Scotland and Ireland is now beginning to be more fully delineated, alongside their resurgence and oradual entrenchment within the ecclesiastical mainstream after the Restoration. More recently, the manner in which traditional conceptions of the sanctity of space were challenged and refashioned by the religious changes of the period has become the subject of sustained research." 4. For just a sample of writings on these topics, see: J. R. Phillips, The Reformation of Images: Destruction of Art in England 1535-1660 (Berkeley, 1973); David Knowles, Bare Ruined Choirs: The Dissolution of the English Monasteries (Cambridge, 1976); Margaret Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, 1: Laws against Images (Oxford, 1988); Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional

Religion in England c. 1400-1580 (New Haven and London, 1991); Julie Spraggon, Puritan

4 INTRODUCTION Yet historians have rarely ventured beyond the doors, porches, and walls of churches or the inner precincts of abbeys, priories, and convents. There has been surprisingly little scrutiny to date of the impression that the Reformation

left upon the wider natural but also partly man-made environment within which these structures were situated. With the honourable but partial exceptions of Keith Thomas’s acclaimed Man and the Natural World (1983) and Simon Schama’s lyrical survey of Landscape and Memory (1995), few studies

have considered how it aftected attitudes and practices associated with the world of trees, woods, springs, rocky outcrops, caves, mountain peaks, and other striking topographical features of this geographically diverse cluster of North Atlantic islands.” Nor has there been systematic analysis of the ways in which it altered assumptions about prehistoric monuments and other remnants of ancient civilizations that littered the rural landscape, or about the landmarks more recent generations had erected in the cities, towns, and villages that were

extending growing tentacles into the countryside. Most scholars of early modern Britain and Ireland have tended to treat the landscape as an inert and passive backdrop to the momentous events that accompanied the advent of Protestantism and the energetic attempts of the Roman Catholic faith to resist annihilation by the Tudor and Stuart state. This book seeks to bring the places and spaces in which these struggles occurred into the foreground and to focus a spotlight on them not merely as sites and locations, but also as agents of change.

Iconoclasm in the English Civil War (Woodbridge, 2003); and for Scotland, David McRoberts, ‘Material Destruction Caused by the Scottish Reformation’, Innes Review, 9 (1958), 126-72; James Kirk, ‘Iconoclasm and Reformation’, Records of the Scottish Church History Society, 24 (1992), 366-83. For initiatives for refurbishment, see Graham Parry, The Arts of the Anglican Counter-Reformation: Glory, Laud and Honour (Woodbridge, 2006); Kenneth Fincham and Nicholas Tyacke, Altars Restored: The Changing Face of English Religious Worship, 1547-c.1700 (Oxford, 2007); Andrew Spicer, Calvinist Churches in Early Modern Europe (Manchester, 2007), ch. 2. More generally, see Martin S. Briggs, Goths and Vandals: A Study of the Destruction and Preservation of Historical Buildings in England (1952). On sacred space, see John Sommerville, The Secularization of Early Modern England: From Religious Culture to Religious Faith (New York and Oxford, 1992), ch. 2; Andrew Spicer and Sarah Hamilton (eds.), Defining the Holy: Sacred Space in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Aldershot, 2005); Will Coster and Andrew Spicer (eds.), Sacred Space in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2005); David A. Postles, Social Geographies in

England (1200-1640) (Washington, DC, 2007); Amanda Flather, Gender and Space in Early Modern England (Woodbridge, 2007), ch. 5. 5. Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500-1800 (Harmonds-

worth, 1983). Thomas’s main focus is the shift in sensibilities about man’s relationship with other species and the natural environment across the period. Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (1995).

INTRODUCTION 5 Its aim is to underline the importance of integrating an awareness of the spatial

context in which human interactions take place into our understanding of the Reformation. It investigates the role that the religious revolutions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries played in the making of the early modern landscape, and vice versa. In what follows, I shall not draw a rigid distinction between natural land-

marks and the architectural structures that were an outgrowth of them. It would be both artificial and anachronistic to do so. This was an era in which the boundaries between these categories were conceptually hazy and blurred. Contemporaries from all sections of the social spectrum chronically confused geological phenomena with edifices erected by the ancient inhabitants of the British Isles. They thought that many strange rock formations were the work of mythical creatures like giants, native druid priests, or foreign invaders such as the Saxons, Normans, and Danes. Moreover, they conceived of the physical environment they occupied as the work of the deity, as a sculpture designed by the Lord, which bore the marks of His continuing intervention, as well as the desperate efforts of the devil and his band of demons to lead men and women to spiritual damnation. Steeped in the theology of Creation and providence, they did not share our aptitude to polarize the raw matter of nature and the products

of human culture. With Joseph Hall, the people of early modern Britain and Ireland approached the landscape as a supplementary source of revelation, as a medium of heavenly instruction and admonitory warning. Like their medieval predecessors, they saw it as a moral guide and as a book of holy doctrine and divinity, albeit secondary to the canon of Scripture. In the words of Martin Bucer, later Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, ‘the whole frame of this world’ was ‘a monument and token to put us in remembrance of god’, while Sir Thomas Browne spoke of it as ‘that universall and publique Manuscript, that lies exposed to the eye of all’.°

In thinking of the landscape as a text and an artefact, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers anticipated an insight that lies at the centre of current academic discourse on this topic. An earlier generation of scholars tended to treat it as primordial: as an empirical object that had an independent existence beyond the realm of human apprehension. For the French Annalistes, notably Fernand Braudel, the environment exercised a formative and 6. Martin Bucer, A treatise declaring & shewi[n]g dyvers causes taken out of the holy scriptures, of the sentences of holy faders, & of the decrees of devout emperours, that pictures & other ymages in no wise to be

suffred in the temples or churches of Christen men, trans. William Marshall (1535), sig. B6"; Thomas Browne, Religio medici (1642), 26.

6 INTRODUCTION even deterministic influence on the evolution of the societies that occupied it. It was an immobile entity and almost irresistible force that constrained individual action and shaped historical causation.’ Now, by contrast, the landscape is conventionally understood as a cultural construction. Geographers, archaeol-

ogists, and anthropologists have taught us to regard it as the biography or autobiography of society, as a form of iconography, and as a visual ideology. The landscape 1s conceptualized not merely as a by-product of the economic and social activities and processes that unfolded upon it, but also as a dense and complex system of signs and symbols that can be decoded and deciphered. It is widely compared with a parchment and palimpsest, a porous surface upon which each generation inscribes its own values and preoccupations without ever being able to erase entirely those of the preceding one. It is a surface onto

which cultures project their deepest concerns and recurring obsessions, a medal struck in the image of their mental structures.” W. G. Hoskins described it as ‘the richest historical record we possess’, while Oliver Rackham speaks of the countryside as a historic library, the contents of which are in a constant state

of flux.” These commonplaces are closely linked with the notion that the landscape is a repository of the collective memory of its inhabitants, a 7. Especially in the work of Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip I, trans. Sian Reynolds, 2 vols. (London, 1975; first publ. 1949), pt. 1. See Samuel

Kinser’s discussion of this issue in ‘Annaliste Paradigm? The Geohistorical Structuralism of Fernand Braudel’, American Historical Review, 86 (1981), 63-105.

8. The literature is extensive. See especially Carl Sauer, “The Morphology of Landscape’, University of California Publications in Geography, 2 (1925), repr. in J. Leighley (ed.), Land and Life: A Selection from the Writings of Carl Otwin Sauer (Berkeley, 1963), 315-50; Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels (eds.), The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation,

Design and Use of Past Environments (Cambridge, 1988); Alan R. H. Baker and Gideon Biger (eds.), Ideology and Landscape in Historical Perspective: Essays on the Meanings of Some Places in the

Past (Cambridge, 1992); Barbara Bender (ed.), Landscape: Politics and Perspectives (Providence,

RI, and Oxford, 1993); Denis Cosgrove, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape (1994); Christopher Tilley, The Phenomenology of Landscape: Places, Paths and Monuments (Oxford and

Providence, RI, 1994), esp. ch. 1, and The Materiality of Stone: Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology (Oxford and New York, 2004); Eric Hirsch and Michael O’Hanlon (eds.), The Anthropology of Landscape: Perspectives on Place and Space (Oxford, 1995); Peter J. Ucko and Robert Layton (eds.), The Archaeology and Anthropology of Landscape: Shaping your Landscape

(London and New York, 1999); Richard Muir, Approaches to Landscape (Basingstoke, 1999); Barbara Bender and Margot Winer (eds.), Contested Landscapes: Movement, Exile and Place (Oxford and New York, 2001); Ian D. Whyte, Landscape and History since 1500 (2002); Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew Strathern (eds.), Landscape, Memory and History: Anthropological Perspectives (London and Sterling, Va., 2003); Alan R. H. Baker, Geography and History: Bridging the

Divide (Cambridge, 2003), ch. 4. On space more generally as a cultural construction, see the classic work of Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford, 1991; first publ. 1974). 9. W.G. Hoskins, The Making of the English Landscape (1955), 14; Oliver Rackham, The History of the Countryside (1995 edn.; first publ. 1986), 29-30.

INTRODUCTION 7 mnemonic to their knowledge of previous eras, and a source of ideas about their social identity. As Pierre Nora, Raphael Samuel, David Lowenthal, and others have emphasized, it is a ‘theatre’, ‘site’, and ‘palace’ where ‘memory crystallizes and secretes itself’.'” Such suggestions have particular resonance for

early modern Britain and Ireland. One of the most distinctive features of the perception of the past in this period was the extent to which it was shaped by the visible world. This was a society in which historical consciousness was intimately connected with topography and in which space rather than time often provided the most significant fillip to the task ofremembering.'' It was a society in which the disciplines of history and geography were much more closely allied than they have been in subsequent centuries. And yet, for all the fertility of these ideas and their potential to illuminate

other areas of enquiry, the dominant focus of post-medieval landscape studies has remained the changes associated with the transition from feudalism to capitalism: enclosure, fen drainage, deforestation, new techniques of crop rotation and other forms of agricultural innovation, as well as urbanization and industrialization. Demography and economy continue to be the chief prisms through which the transformation of the physical environment

are viewed, augmented by a growing awareness of how the alterations wrought by ploughs and spades, axes and swords intersected with processes of class and state formation, and, in Ireland, with colonization, conquest,

plantation, and settlement.'~ If there are now promising signs of a new 10. Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire’, Representations, 26 (1989), 7-24; Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory, 1: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture (London

and New York, 1994), esp. preface; David Lowenthal, ‘Past Time, Present Place: Landscape and Memory’, Geographical Review, 65 (1975), 1-36; id., The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge, 1985), quotation at 238. 11. Keith Thomas, The Perception of the Past in Early Modern England, Creighton Lecture Trust (1984), esp. 5-6; David Rollison, The Local Origins of Modern Society: Gloucestershire 1500-1800

(London and New York, 1992), 70-3; Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England 1500-1700 (Oxford, 2000), ch. 4, esp. 216-19, 238-42, 253-8; Daniel Woolf, The Social Circulation of the Past: English Historical Culture 1500-1730 (Oxford, 2003), esp. ch. 9. Medieval

and early modern theories of memory conceptualized it in spatial terms: see Francis A. Yates, The Art of Memory (Harmondsworth, 1969 edn.); Mary J. Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge, 1990), esp. 71.

12. An especially influential study of the ‘commodification’ of the early modern landscape 1s Matthew Johnson, An Archaeology of Capitalism (Oxford, 1996). Religion is mentioned only in passing 1n the relevant chapters of Michael Reed’s The Landscape of Britain: From the Beginnings

to 1914 (1990) and Whyte, Landscape and History. It is also noticeably neglected in two recent collections of essays reflecting trends in this field: Mark Gardiner and Stephen Rippon (eds.), Medieval Landscapes (Macclesfield, 2007) and P. S. Barnwell and Marilyn Palmer (eds.), PostMedieval Landscapes (Macclesfield, 2007). The theme is, however, explored in a cross-cultural context in David L. Carmichael, Jane Hubert, Brian Reeves, and Audhild Schanche (eds.),

8 INTRODUCTION sensitivity to the contribution that religion made to the reconfiguration of the landscape, notably in the guise of William Smyth’s remarkable study of early modern Ireland and Nicola Whyte’s important recent research on the

county of Norfolk, there is still considerable scope for more detailed investigation. 1s

Taking inspiration from the pioneering work of scholars in these cognate disciplines, this book uses the landscape as a laboratory in which to examine the origins, immediate consequences, and later repercussions of the ruptures

brought about by the Reformation in the countries of the British Isles. Although it sidesteps the heated debates about the speed and success with which it was embraced and implemented that have animated historians over the past several decades, it nevertheless engages with some of these questions

indirectly.'* Moving beyond recent emphasis on the reluctant compliance and pragmatic collaboration of the populace with the religious changes imposed upon it by the monarchy and state, my study highlights the extent to which this was a movement fuelled by the evangelical zeal of individuals who participated willingly in it, and emphasizes the interplay between official and clandestine action that shaped its successive phases. It underlines the lively cocktail of enthusiasm, cooperation, regret, and resistance which

it provoked in the people who witnessed and experienced it.

Sacred Sites, Sacred Places (London and New York, 1994) and Chris C. Park, Sacred Worlds: An Introduction to Geography and Religion (London and New York, 1994). 13. See William J. Smyth, Map-making, Landscapes and Memory: A Geography of Colonial and Early Modern Ireland c. 1530-1750 (Cork, 2006); Nicola Whyte, Inhabiting the Landscape: Place, Custom

and Memory, 1500-1800 (Oxford, 2009), esp. ch. 2. See also Robert J. Mayhew, Landscape, Literature and English Religious Culture, 1660-1800: Samuel Fohnson and Languages of Natural Description (Basingstoke, 2004).

14. These debates have been most heated in relation to England and the literature is vast. Key contributions include Duffy, Stripping of the Altars; Christopher Haigh, English Reformations: Religion, Politics and Society under the Tudors (Oxford, 1993); Ethan Shagan, Popular Politics and

the English Reformation (Cambridge, 2003). For recent reflections and overviews, see Eamon Dufty, “The English Reformation after Revisionism’, Renaissance Quarterly, 59 (2006), 702-31; Peter Marshall, Reformation England 1480-1642 (London, 2003); id., “(Re)-defining the English Reformation’, Journal of British Studies, 48 (2009), 564-86. For Ireland, see Brendan Bradshaw, The Dissolution of the Religious Orders in Ireland under Henry VIII (Cambridge, 1974); Alan Ford,

The Protestant Reformation in Ireland 1590-1641 (Frankfurt, 1997); and the summary of the historiography offered in Karl S. Bottigheimer and Ute Lotz-Heumann, “The Irish Reformation in European Perspective’, Archiv fiir Reformationsgeschichte, 89 (1998), 268-309. On Scotland, notable contributions are Gordon Donaldson, The Scottish Reformation (London, 1960); Ian Cowan, The Scottish Reformation: Church and Society in Sixteenth-Century Scotland (London,

1982); Margo Todd, The Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland (New Haven and London, 2002); Alec Ryrie, The Origins of the Scottish Reformation (Manchester, 2006).

INTRODUCTION 9 A further theme that underpins the discussion 1s the relationship between

the profound disjunctures that the Reformation eftected in the spheres of ideology and culture and the currents of continuity that eased and smoothed

its passage in the two centuries following the formal schism between the Church of Rome and the English and Welsh, Irish and Scottish kingdoms. In particular, we shall consider how far Protestantism undermined medieval ideas about the immanence of the holy. The reformed theology of idolatry and its practical manifestations in godly vandalism undoubtedly had corrosive power. They both entailed and facilitated a fundamental reassessment of

the nexus between the material and spiritual realms and a redefinition of how the sacred was present in the world.'” At the same time, it is hard to overlook the persistence and subtle transmutation of assumptions about the supernatural significance and sanctity of wells, trees, stones, wayside crosses, ancient chapels, monastic houses, and a host of other natural and architec-

tural landmarks. This book reflects the widespread conviction that the Reformation played a more marginal role in the ‘disenchantment’ of the universe than Max Weber and other scholars have argued. It builds upon the late Robert Scribner’s insistence that the traditional paradigm of desacralization fails to pay sufficient heed to the points of contact between

Catholic and Protestant mentalities and to the ways in which religious change was mediated through the experience and practice of ordinary believers. It responds to his call for historians to focus on the “dissonant elements’ and ‘the complex mental and cultural modifications’ that accompanied the upheavals of the era.'° These developments have much to reveal about the evolution and assimilation of the Reformation as it progressed into its second and third generations.

15. See especially Carlos Eire, War against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin (Cambridge, 1986); Edward Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1997), ch. §. 16. See especially Robert W. Scribner, “The Reformation, Popular Magic, and the “Disenchant-

ment of the World”’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 23 (1993), 475-94 at 494; id., ‘Reformation and Desacralisation: From Sacramental World to Moralised Universe’, in R. Po-Chia Hsia and R. W. Scribner (eds.), Problems in the Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Europe, Wolfenbtitteler Forschungen, 78 (Wiesbaden, 1997), 75-92, quotations at 76, 78; id., “The Impact of the Reformation on Everyday Life’, in Mensch und Objekt im Mittelalter und in der friihen Neuzeit, Osterreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philoso-

phisch-Historische Klasse, Sitzungsberichte, 568 (Vienna, 1990), 315-43. See also Ulinka Rublack, Reformation Europe (Cambridge, 2005), esp. IO-I1, 155-7. For a more extended discussion of this historiographical problem, see my “The Reformation and the Disenchantment of the World Reassessed’, H¥ 51 (2008), 497-528.

10 INTRODUCTION The landscape also proves a fruitful arena in which to examine the parallel

Reformations, radical and Catholic, which ran alongside the versions that became institutionalized. It draws our attention to strands of opinion which sought to effect a more comprehensive purification of the physical environment than those that prevailed, together with the vein of subversive funda-

mentalism that was latent within Protestantism, not merely during its infancy as a protest movement, but also in its middle age and later stages. This impassioned minority was a destabilizing presence within the religious mainstream. Running alongside it was a vigorous campaign for Catholic renewal that complicated the efforts of Protestant evangelists to grasp the hearts and minds of the people of early modern Britain and Ireland. The spaces and places to which missionary priests and laity migrated for worship,

and in which they found solace and refuge from their tribulations, illuminate the course of the Counter-Reformation in national contexts where Catholics were the targets of fierce persecution. They offer insight into the creativity with which they adapted to the fact of disestablishment, and, in Ireland, clawed themselves back to the status of a defiant majority with its own ecclesiastical hierarchy. And they provide a fresh opportunity to probe the interface between traditional and Tridentine priorities and to explore how far these embattled communities were able to carry out the revitalization of the geography of the sacred that was proceeding apace elsewhere in Catholic Europe. As will become apparent, the landscape was a crucial forum in which confessional identities were forged. It was a setting for encounters and clashes between the members of competing creeds, who fought for control over disputed locations. The rival legends and myths, rituals and customs that accumulated around these places over the course of the period became one of the ways in which men and women cemented their sense of belonging to the different churches and sects that were the end-products of the religious fracturing of the British and Irish realms. Firmly embracing the model of a ‘long Reformation’,'’ this book adopts a broad chronological framework. It sees the reform of the landscape as a lengthy and cumulative, but also as an erratic and partially reversible process. Spasms of iconoclasm and disciplinary initiative were not simply a feature of the mid-sixteenth century; they recurred throughout the following decades,

reached a new peak of intensity during the revolutionary wars, and 17. Nicholas Tyacke (ed.), England’s Long Reformation 1500-1800 (1998); Peter G. Wallace, The Long European Reformation (Basingstoke, 2004).

INTRODUCTION II continued sporadically beyond the year 1700. Nor was their trajectory linear in any simple sense. The very ferocity of official and clandestine attacks on the physical vestiges of false belief and practice that lingered on in cities, towns, and the rural countryside prompted a stubborn and spirited reaction within Protestant ranks. Aghast at the scale of the purge carried out by past generations and the excesses of present zealots, some responded by emphasizing the dangers of sacrilege and by engaging in schemes of renovation that

implicitly or explicitly reconsecrated mutilated structures and discarded spaces. Such sentiments and developments in turn stimulated further outbursts of violence, fuelling an ongoing cycle of strife that left permanent scars on the early modern environment. It will be argued here that there are merits in considering the Reforma-

tion not merely as a movement that extended forwards into the late seventeenth and even eighteenth centuries, but also as one umbilically linked with impulses rooted in the preceding period. To comprehend their full significance, the events of the 1530s, 1540s, and 1550s must be reconnected with the anxieties surrounding ‘superstitious’ beliefs and practices centred upon marginal locations in the landscape articulated by medieval bishops and humanists, and more emphatically and systematically by the later lollards. Approached from a perspective that draws attention to reli-

gious activity that took place on the edges of and outside the parish, traditional piety begins to look rather more eclectic and less settled and consensual than much recent work has suggested. It 1s equally vital to recognize the lasting shadow cast by the earlier onslaughts that Celtic and Roman Christianity launched against indigenous and imported paganism. The conversion of Britain and Ireland half a millennium before was a no less contested and prolonged process than the implanting of Protestantism. The combination of repression and accommodation that characterized these initiatives for Christianization parallels that which accompanied the Refor-

mation itself. Moreover, the struggles in which evangelists and rulers engaged against heathen reverence for nature left a legacy of doubt about the depth of popular commitment to the faith of Christ. These underground streams fed into and fused with the reformers’ fears about the imperfections

of their own drive to eradicate popery and idolatry from early modern society. My decision to tackle the British Isles in its geographical entirety reflects

the influence of historiographical trends that have emphasized the interpre-

tative value of juxtaposing the histories of its three kingdoms and four

12 INTRODUCTION nations and considering their interconnnections.'* The analysis that follows highlights important differences between the temper and dynamic of the Reformation of the landscape as it manifested itself in the countries that

comprised the Atlantic archipelago. It shows how the precise interplay between popular initiative and political impetus varied across space and time. The Tudor state largely set the agenda in mid-sixteenth-century England and Wales, and in Ireland, where religious reform was intimately linked with the Crown’s imperial pretensions; in Scotland, by contrast, the Lords of the Congregation and the crowd of supporters they swept along with them were the critical agents in its initial turbulent phases. The book emphasizes the diverging patterns of activity exhibited by the agents of civil and ecclesiastical discipline in subsequent decades and the contrasting pace, scale, and impact of the renewed crusades that accompanied the military conflicts of the 1640s and 1650s as they touched each of these territories. It endeavours to demonstrate an awareness of the problems and tensions that resulted from ethnic encounters between English, Welsh, and Gaelic speak-

ers and their religious heritages, though the picture painted here is only partial. Simultaneously, this study reveals many points of convergence and similarity between the complex transformations that affected perceptions of

the landscape between c.1500 and 1750. It casts light on cultural and intellectual trends that transcended national boundaries and united Protestant elites across these islands, as well as on the ties that bound beleaguered Catholics with their persecuted brethren elsewhere in Britain and Ireland and inspired coordinated efforts to restore the allegiance of these nations to Rome. As far as possible, it situates events and tendencies in their international and European context.'” To this extent the book may be seen as a contribution to the task of writing a comparative history of religion in the British Isles.

18. See J. G. A. Pocock, ‘British History: A Plea for a New Subject’, JMH 47 (1975), 601-28 and ‘The Limits and Divisions of British History: In Search of an Unknown Subject’, American Historical Review, 87 (1982), 311-36; Ronald G. Asch (ed.), Three Nations—A Common History?

(Bochum, 1993); Steven G. Ellis and Sarah Barber (eds.), Conquest and Union: Fashioning a British State 1485-1725 (Harlow, 1995); Brendan Bradshaw and John Morrill (eds.), The British Problem, c. 1534-1707: State Formation in the Atlantic Archipelago (Basingstoke, 1996); Brendan Bradshaw and Peter Roberts (eds.), British Consciousness and Identity: The Making of Britain, 1533-1707 (Cambridge, 1998); Felicity Heal, Reformation in Britain and Ireland (Oxford, 2003); Ian Hazlett, The Reformation in Britain and Ireland (Edinburgh, 2003); Alec Ryrie, The Age of Reformation: The Tudor and Stewart Realms 1485-1603 (Harlow, 2009). 19. See especially here Diarmaid MacCulloch, Reformation: Europe’s House Divided 1490-1700 (London, 2003).

INTRODUCTION 13 The ensuing chapters also illustrate the ways in which these Reformations intersected with other contemporary developments that are still too often studied in isolation from them. We shall consider their connections with the

srowth of antiquarianism and the spread of the artistic and architectural Renaissance; with the rise of empirical science and natural philosophy; and

with the professionalization of medicine and the evolving cultures of sickness and healing. The surge of contemporary scholarly interest in the ancient and medieval past was catalysed in complex ways by religious

sentiment, which also tinted attitudes towards the preservation and re-edification of the physical structures that previous generations had erected around hallowed sites in the rural and urban landscape. Traditional assumptions about the environment were also contested and modified in the context of impulses that fostered closer scrutiny of the secondary causes of

preternatural phenomena and extended speculation about the precise mechanisms and processes by which the visible world had come into being. These tendencies converged with shifts in the framework within which contemporaries sought relief from the illnesses and ailments that perennially afflicted them. Such shifts were in no small part a consequence of Protestantism’s rejection of older traditions of sacred therapy. In presenting religion and piety less as counter-currents than catalysts of these transformations, this book contributes towards revising the secularizing narratives that have long dominated analysis of early modern medicine and science. In tandem with a range of other movements and trends, the Protestant and Catholic Reformations involved a re-formation of the landscape on several different levels and planes. First, they fostered deliberate attempts to demolish and damage topographical features that were believed to be an obstacle to the advancement of the Gospel. Iconoclasm, together with the abandonment, dilapidation, and transfer of consecrated buildings and spaces to profane and secular use, decisively altered the appearance of the material

world within which people lived, and by which their religious outlooks were partly defined. On the other hand, the period bore witness to initiatives that served to encrust the landscape with new structures and remould its existing geography in line with emerging ecclesiastical priorities

and social and cultural fashions. It saw efforts to protect and rehabilitate prehistoric monuments and medieval churches, chapels, and crosses and to incorporate them into newly designed spaces, notably the parks and gardens of the aristocracy and gentry. Where such vestiges were no longer present, some felt compelled to reinvent them. Some of the ruins, hill figures, and

14 INTRODUCTION stone circles that embellished the eighteenth-century countryside were not

authentic antique remnants, but rather replicas, follies, and imitations. Elsewhere, in marketplaces and on urban thoroughfares Protestants were erecting memorials to commemorate the events that symbolized the liberation of their nations from Catholic ignorance and tyranny and the individuals who had made a significant contribution to their histories. Secondly, the Reformation effected the re-formation of beliefs and prac-

tices that clustered around long-hallowed places in the landscape and imbued them with meaning. Inherited stories and tales which people told about these sites were either repudiated or reshaped, and, where they were not totally suppressed, the rituals and customs performed at such locations were likewise transfigured. In this way, the physical environment served as both a mirror and a motor of religious change. It was a major focus for attempts to alter the mentality and culture of the British and Irish populace. It was also a key arena in which memory underwent a process of mutation. By paying close attention to the wisps of significance and association that

became woven around the topography of these islands, we may learn something about the intense struggle about the past that stood at the very heart of the conflicts unleashed by the Reformation. This was a movement that radically reorientated attitudes towards the medieval Church and boldly rewrote inherited historical narratives about the conversion of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland to Christianity from paganism. To that end, it engaged in censorship, selective embellishment, and fabrication. In response, Catholics strenuously upheld a rival version of events that buttressed their own claim to be the sole custodians of the truth, and which they alleged was amply documented by the material evidence still present all around them. The landscape thus became a battleground in which these wars about memory were waged. In due course, it also became a receptacle for competing myths about the Reformation itself. Even as they eradicated one set of legends, contemporaries were busy creating others to fill their place. The story told in the pages of this book is thus a complex and paradoxical one, in which the impulses towards destruction and preservation, sanctification and desacralization, remembering and forgetting, were often mutually reinforcing. The sources upon which we must rely to reconstruct the early modern landscape are themselves products of these contradictory processes. Our knowledge of it is dependent on the eyes of those contemporaries who beheld it. It is filtered through texts and representations that reflect the very developments that this study seeks to illuminate. Maps, for

INTRODUCTION 15 instance, must be recognized as instruments of political power and ideolog-

ical control. These graphic images tell us as much, if not more about the values and ambitions of those who made them than about the actual places they depict cartographically. Whether prepared at the behest of the state or for the benefit of local landowners, they provide at best only a fleeting olimpse of alternative ways of conceptualizing space. They hide associations

and modes of navigation that depended less on the technology of the ruler and pen than on oral transmission and mental recollection.~” Similar limitations afflict the extensive corpus of topographical and antiquarian literature of which I have made extensive use in researching this book. These works reflect the perspective of the learned clergy and gentlemen who prepared

them and eclipse many local traditions of which they disapproved and therefore consigned to the oblivion of silence. Nor were the sketches and

drawings, woodcuts and engravings of landmarks and prospects they incorporated in their texts objective depictions: they too were coloured by the religious and intellectual convictions of those who made them, as well as by artistic and generic convention. The evidence provided by ecclesiastical records and polemical treatises is also refracted through the lens of censure and affected by rhetorical tropes rooted in Scripture and the classical culture in which their authors were educated. The writings, correspondence, and transactions of doctors and natural philosophers suffer from comparable problems. For all their empirical pretensions, they are inflected by similar intellectual and moral assumptions. Such texts allow us only indirect and imperfect access to how the landscape was interpreted and experienced by the illiterate or taciturn majority whose voices have not been captured in manuscript or print for posterity.

20. There is scope for greater exploitation of the cartographic evidence. For a demonstration of how estate maps can illuminate local ‘religious topographies’, see Whyte, Inhabiting the Landscape, ch. 2. On maps, see Victor Morgan, “The Cartographical Image of “The Country”’, TRHS, sth ser., 29 (1979), 129-54; P. D. A. Harvey, The History of Topographical Maps: Symbols, Pictures and Surveys (1980), ch. 10; 1d., Maps in Tudor England (1993); J. B. Harley, ‘Meaning and Ambiguity in Tudor Cartography’, in Sarah Tyacke (ed.), English Map-Making 1500-1650 (1983), 22-45; Sarah A. Bendall, Maps, Land and Society: A History, with a CartoBibliography of Cambridgeshire Estate Maps, c.1600-1836 (Cambridge, 1992); J. H. Andrews, Maps and their Makers 1564-1839 (Dublin, 1997); Bernhard Klein, Maps and the Writing of Space in Early Modern England and Ireland (Basingstoke, 2001); Ian C. Cunningham (ed.), The Nation Survey’d: Essays on Late Sixteenth-Century Scotland as Depicted by Timothy Pont (East Lothian, 2001); Smyth, Map-Making, Landscapes and Memory, ch. 2.

16 INTRODUCTION Even more pitfalls surround a further set of sources which has proved a rich quarry: the collections of ‘folklore’ compiled in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by elite lay and clerical amateurs. Tainted by a mixture of condescension, nostalgia, and misguided convictions about the timeless quality and primitive provenance of the beliefs and customs they describe, these anthologies are a methodological minefield. Like the earlier threads of discourse from which they derived, they have exerted a deeply distorting influence on how historians have interpreted the opinions and practices that clustered around wells, trees, stones, and other topographical landmarks,

which have too often been seen as remnants of an archaic religion or symptoms of Catholic survivalism. Nevertheless, I hope to highlight here the potential of folklore to yield important insights into how the Reformation modified traditions and rituals linked with the physical environment. Finally, it is important to stress that the archaeological relics of the medieval and early modern past that can still be inspected in situ must be treated with no less caution. Their very survival and current appearance is a function of the multiple historic processes to which they have been subjected over succeeding centuries. With the exception of the first chapter, which sketches the prehistory of the religious landscape from antiquity to the eve of the Reformation, this

book adopts a thematic structure. Chapter 2 examines the theological underpinnings and practical manifestations of the campaign to remove popish and pagan ‘idols’ that remained eyesores on the face of the country-

side. The reaction of Roman Catholics to these initiatives and to their displacement from the church buildings erected by their predecessors is assessed in the third chapter, which also explores the imaginative ways in which missionaries exploited natural spaces and harnessed holy places in their bid to bolster the morale of the faithful and win new converts to their cause. Chapter 4 considers a range of counter-currents within Protestant culture that fostered a religious regeneration of the landscape. It investigates the ways in which it became a venue for reformed worship and liturgical

rituals and how shifting opinion led to its partial resacralization in the seventeenth century, together with various aesthetic and cultural trends that overlaid it with new sediments of association. In Chapter 5 we shall analyse how the intersecting discourses of providence and science influenced attitudes towards the natural world, while the focus of Chapter 6 is the intricate link between the demise and marginalization of medieval holy wells and the rise of medicinal springs and therapeutic spas. The last chapter

INTRODUCTION 17 assesses the persistence, transformation, and invention of legend and custom connected with the landscape over the longue durée. It traces the process by

which some such traditions withered, while others survived in modified forms or came into being for the first time. This book cannot pretend to be fully comprehensive and, despite its length, there are many dimensions of its large subject that merit further attention.~' Moreover, the synoptic and telescopic vision presented here needs to be complemented by studies that exploit the technique of microhistory. The pages that follow sketch on a broad canvas how the religious changes of the period materially altered both the landscapes of early modern

Britain and Ireland and the mental and cultural outlooks of those who inhabited these islands. They delineate the degree to which the Reformation and associated developments shaped the spectacles through which contemporaries perceived and experienced the physical world they had inherited from past generations. That physical world was itself a confection of historical processes that had left a lasting mark on their sense of individual identity

and on the collective memory of their societies. As the miniature painter Edward Norgate commented in a manuscript tract on the art of limning written c.1648—s5o0: “Lanscape is nothing but Deceptive visions, a kind of cousning or cheating your owne Eyes, by our owne consent and assistance, and by a plot of your owne contriving.”~~

21. In particular, I have not explored the relationship between parish churches and the landscape

in great depth. This theme was the subject of an AHRC project led by Andrew Spicer at Oxford Brookes University, to whom I am grateful for preliminary discussions about its findings.

22. Edward Norgate, Miniatura or The Art of Limning Edited from the Manuscript in the Bodleian Library and Collated with other Manuscripts (Oxford, 1919), 51.

I Loca sacra: Religion and the Landscape before the

Reformation

efore we can begin to investigate the Reformation of the landscape, it B is necessary to excavate the sedimentary layers of religious association

that had been deposited upon it over the course of the preceding two millennia. By 1500, the physical environment of Britain and Ireland already bore the imprint of multiple phases of religious regeneration and change. It carried with it intriguing residues of the systems of belief and practice that had prevailed prior to the arrival of Christianity in this archipelago of islands. Such remnants of the pagan past coexisted with structures and spaces that testified to the prolonged struggle of the early missionaries to convert their

inhabitants to this new faith and to the degree to which the Church they established had attained cultural and institutional dominance by the late Middle Ages. These events and developments are integral to the story told in this book because the religious conflicts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries revolved in large part around their contested memory. Protestant and Catholic reformers competed for control of the ecclesiastical histories of the three kingdoms and four nations of the British Isles, and the geographical

locations and topographical landmarks with which they were intimately connected in the eyes of the laity. This chapter therefore erects the historical backdrop against which the processes that comprised the Reformations were understood by contemporaries. It surveys the successive transformations that affected both the exterior appearance of the landscape and the ways in which people experienced religion in relation to it. In striking and significant ways, the patterns of adaptation associated with Christianization anticipated those that followed in the wake of the early modern reform movements.

LOCA SACRA 19 The task of reconstructing the pre-Reformation landscape is hampered by the nature of both the sources available and the interpretative tools scholars have adopted to unlock their meaning. The archaeological and topographical

evidence upon which we are obliged to rely, though suggestive, can be ambiguous and misleading. Our understanding of the significance of surviving

landmarks and textual artefacts is severely affected by the double filter of Christianity and Graeco-Roman classicism through which knowledge of them has been transmitted to posterity.’ The written documents of royal and ecclesiastical administration that proliferate from around aD 700 are also coloured by the mental and cultural preconceptions of those who compiled them. Bishops and churchmen viewed popular religious practice and belief through opaque and distorting spectacles: sensitized to signs of ‘superstition’, ‘heathenism’, ‘magic’, and ‘idolatry’, they edited out many other less contentious dimensions of the relationship between medieval piety and the material world. The post-Reformation antiquarians who did so much to preserve older traditions about the environment were also prisoners of particular obsessions and prejudices, including abhorrence of popery and a consuming curiosity

about ‘druidism’. The retrospective myth-making in which they were enoaged reflects the manner in which the landscape 1s remade 1n its own image by each successive generation. It too adds to the difficulty we face in distinguishing hard facts about the period extending from the shadowy margins of British and Irish pre-history to the eve of the Protestant challenge in the early sixteenth

century from pious and polemical fictions. The intellectual paradigms they helped to create, moreover, continue to exert more than a lingering influence. Ultimately we cannot disentangle the ancient and medieval landscape from the texts in which it was recorded and represented by later commentators.

Shrines and Sanctuaries: The Sacred Geography of Paganism The central place that the veneration of nature occupied in the pagan religions of the British Isles, though poorly documented, can hardly be contested. The ritual practices of its earliest residents appear to have focused 1. See Ronald Hutton, The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles: Their Nature and Legacy (Oxford, 1991), 297; and James Palmer, “Defining Paganism in the Carolingian World’, Early Medieval Europe, 15 (2007), 402-25.

20 LOCA SACRA upon sites in the environment that were perceived to be the dwelling places of the gods or apertures through which human beings could gain access to

them. Providing a staircase to a higher world above the sky, mountain peaks and hill tops were locations where people expected to experience epiphanies of the sacred. Caves, volcanic chasms, and rocky fissures were similarly regarded as entrances and gateways to an unseen spiritual realm hidden beneath the surface of the earth. Forests, woods, and groves functioned as arenas in which communication with numinous forces was beheved to be possible and individual trees of impressive stature frequently became the focus of cultic behaviour. The element of water also exerted a magnetic attraction: bogs, lakes, and estuaries were seen as liminal places and many wells, springs, streams, and rivers were approached with reverence and awe. Heavy with anthropomorphic symbolism and redolent of divine power, nature was at the same time responsive to human activity: care had to be taken to avoid angering the deities that invisibly occupied the physical spaces men and animals traversed.

Common to the prehistoric cultures of both the Western and nonWestern worlds, the beliefs and observances that underpinned these polytheistic sacred geographies have left very few palpable traces.” Despite the vast scholarly industry engendered by them, we still know very little about

the precise purpose of the stone circles, menhirs, and other megalithic structures erected during the Neolithic era between c¢.3500 and 1200 BC. Theories about the significance of Stonehenge and its many cousins scattered across these islands abound. Were these places where ancient people

made solemn sacrifices, or cemeteries in which they interred and worshipped their dead ancestors? Might they be vast calendars or astronomical devices, or could they have been sites dedicated to medical therapy and magical healing?” Their original meaning and use had been forgotten by the beginning of the Christian era, when the massive size and imposing pres2. Anne Ross, Pagan Celtic Britain: Studies in Iconography and Tradition (1967), ch. 1; Miranda Green, The Gods of the Celts (Gloucester, 1986); Ralph Merrifield, The Archaeology of Ritual and Magic (1987), ch. 1; H. R. Ellis Davidson, Myths and Symbols in Pagan Europe: Early Scandinavian and Celtic Religions (Manchester, 1988), ch. 1; Hutton, Pagan Religions; Ann Woodward, Shrines

and Sacrifice (1992); Nigel Pennick, Celtic Sacred Landscapes (1996). See also David L. Carmi-

chael, Jane Hubert, Brian Reeve, and Audhild Schanche (eds.), Sacred Sites, Sacred Places (London and New York, 1994). 3. See Aubrey Burl, Prehistoric Avebury (New Haven and London, 1979); id., Rites of the Gods (1981), ch. 5; 1d., The Stone Circles of Britain, Ireland and Brittany (New Haven and London, 2000); Gabriel Cooney, “Sacred and Secular Neolithic Landscapes in Ireland’, in Carmichael et al. (eds.), Sacred Sites, Sacred Places, 32-43. For a recent reinterpretation of Stonehenge as a

LOCA SACRA 21 ence of these monuments persuaded contemporaries that they were supernatural constructions of the gods themselves. The new legends and rituals that accumulated around them reflected their adaptation to changing social and cultural circumstances and the subtle modifications that occurred over many generations.” Bronze Age barrows and tumuli also had an afterlife: the fading memory of their first creators provided the stimulus for forging fresh traditions about their past history and for the reappropriation of these burial mounds to serve different ideological and practical objectives.” The same observations apply to the enormous chalk figures carved into the hillsides of southern England, such as the Long Man of Wilmington and the White Horse of Uffington. Gradually reshaped as they were scoured over the centuries or actively reinvented after extended periods of neglect, both their antiquity and their function remain a matter of ongoing academic

speculation.° Our knowledge of the holy places which the indigenous peoples of Britain and Ireland created and consecrated through priestly rite 1s further frustrated by the fact that they left few durable shrines and temples behind them. The discovery of votive shafts and pits suggests that some efforts were made to construct artificial points of entry to the underworld and to propitiate its occupants with offerings, including the severed heads and skulls of human victims.’ It may be that timber buildings once covered other sanctuaries set aside for worship but these have long since perished. However, it is likely that this was a religion which revolved more around topographical features and open-air enclosures than it did around man-made structures.” site dedicated to magical healing, see Timothy Darvill, Stonehenge: Biography of a Landscape (Stroud, 2006). 4. Richard Bradley, An Archaeology of Natural Places (London and New York, 2000), esp. 35, 104; id., Altering the Earth: The Origin of Monuments in Britain and Continental Europe (Edinburgh, 1993).

5. Nicola Whyte, “The After-life of Barrows: Prehistoric Monuments in the Norfolk Landscape’, Landscape History, 25 (2003), 5-16 at 6. 6. Flinders Petrie, The Hill Figures of England, Royal Anthropological Institute, Occasional Papers, 7 (1926); Morris Marples, White Horses and Other Hill Figures (Gloucester, 1981; first publ. 1949); Nigel Pennick, Ancient Hill Figures of England, Institute of Geomantic Research, Occasional Papers, 2 (Cambridge, 1976); Paul Newman, Lost Gods of Albion: The Chalk Hill-Figures of Britain (Stroud, 1987); Rodney Castleden, Ancient British Hill Figures (Seaford, East Sussex, 2000); Hutton, Pagan Religions, 160-3. 7. Anne Ross, ‘Shafts, Pits, Wells—Sanctuaries of the Belgic Britons?’, inJ. M. Coles and D. D. A. Simpson (eds.), Studies in Ancient Europe: Essays Presented to Stuart Piggott (Leicester, 1968), 255-85; ead., “Severed Heads in Wells: An Aspect of the Well Cult’, Scottish Studies, 5 (1961), 31-48; ead., Pagan Celtic Britain, 50-6. 8. Green, Gods of the Celts, 17-21; Hutton, Pagan Religions, 170.

22 LOCA SACRA What is clear is that the Roman invaders eventually assimilated many of these sacred sites and transferred them to the tutelage of their own pantheon of deities. Tacitus’ description of the landing of Suetonius Paulinus and his forces in Anglesey in AD 61 attests to a violent clash between the conquering and conquered culture: after overcoming the host of armed men, accom-

panied by druids uttering “dire curses’ who met them on the shore, the soldiers were ordered to ‘cut down the groves devoted to their cruel superstitions’, in a manner reminiscent of the efforts of Tiberius and Claudius to extirpate native religion in Gaul.” On the whole, though, the story appears to be less one of determined eradication than of creative conflation and adaptation. Celtic belief and practice were readily absorbed into the system of pantheistic ritual the Romans imported from the Mediterranean world, a system 1n which powerful gods and goddesses such as Sylvanus and Terminus likewise presided over natural places like woods and fields and in which particular tracts of landscape had their own genius loci. Attested by Ovid and Pliny, such beliefs were closely connected with the notion that strange aberrations in the physical world like earthquakes, blood-coloured pools, and plants that flowered out of season bore portentous warning and oracular witness to future events. The idea that nature could be manipulated as an instrument of divination and an aid to prophetic insight was another aspect of Greek and Latin culture which seems to have been compatible with existing pagan assumptions.'° Elements of synthesis between imperial

and indigenous religion are especially apparent in the case of the cult of fountains and springs. Coventina’s well at Carrawburgh on Hadrian’s Wall is one example of how devotion to a pre-existing divinity could be 9. The Annals of Tacitus: An English Translation, trans. and ed. George Gilbert Ramsey, 3 vols.

(1904-9), 11. 206-7. On the ambiguities of evidence of iconoclasm, see Ben Croxford, ‘Iconoclasm in Roman Britain?’, Britannia, 34 (2003), 81-05.

10. See Martin Henig, Religion in Roman Britain (1984), esp. ch. 3; Thomas Blagg, “Roman Religious Sites in the British Landscape’, Landscape History, 8 (1986), 15-25; Peter Salway, The Oxford Illustrated History of Roman Britain (Oxford, 1993), ch. 22; Hutton, Pagan Religions,

ch. 6; John Walter Taylor, “Tree Worship’, Mankind Quarterly, 20 (1979), 79-141 at 84-97. Pliny, The historie of the world. Commonly called, the naturall historie of C. Plinius Secundus, trans.

Philemon Holland (1601). For attitudes to the landscape in the ancient Mediterranean world, see Susan E. Alcock and Robin Osborne (eds.), Placing the Gods: Sanctuaries and Sacred Space in Ancient Greece (Oxford, 1994), especially the essays by Susan Guettel Cole and Darice Birge; Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (Oxford, 2000); ch. 10; Susan Guettel Cole, Landscapes, Gender and Ritual Space: The Ancient Greek Experience (Berkeley, 2004); Susan E. Alcock, Graecia Capta: The Landscapes of Roman Greece (Cambridge, 1993); ead., Archaeologies of the Greek Past: Landscape, Monuments and Memories (Cambridge, 2002).

LOCA SACRA 23 maintained and transformed in a new environment, while the architectural elaboration of the thermal healing shrine at Bath, dedicated to the hybrid deity Sulis Minerva, illustrates the possibilities for successful convergence even more clearly. The cult of Aquae Arnemetiae at Buxton appears to preserve the memory of an ancient nemeton or sacred precinct where a hallowed spring and grove were intimately linked.'' Writing in the sixth century, the cleric Gildas offered a tantalizing glimpse of the character of the compound Romano-British paganism that had evolved by this period: I shall not enumerate the devilish monstrosities of my land, numerous almost as those that plagued Egypt, some of which we can see today, stark as ever, inside or outside deserted city walls: outlines still ugly, faces still grim. I shall not name the mountains and hills and rivers, once so pernicious, now useful

for human needs, on which, in those days, a blind people heaped divine honours. ~

Rooted in the concept of a sacralized landscape, there 1s little to suggest that this religious culture withered either quickly or completely after Christianity was definitively declared the official religion of the Empire by Theodosius in the late fourth century. The financial penalties he imposed on pagan worship conducted in public temples and shrines, buildings and fields in 392 were reinforced in 435 by the threat of the death penalty.'” The limited progress that was made 1n converting England to monotheism before the retreat of the Roman legions in AD 410 was seriously impeded

and substantially reversed by the waves of Germanic immigration that ensued over the following two centuries.'* Like its predecessors, with which it may often have merged, Anglo-Saxon heathenism was also marked by the veneration of springs, stones, and trees, especially enormous single

11. See Lindsey Allason-Jones and Bruce McKay (eds.), Coventina’s Well: A Shrine on Hadrian’s Wall (Gloucester, 1985); Barry Cunliffe and Peter Davenport, The Temple of Sulis Minerva at Bath, Oxford University Committee for Archaeology Monographs, 7 (1985); Joan P. Alcock, ‘Celtic Water Cults in Roman Britain’, Archaeological Fournal, 122 (1965), I-12; Salway, Oxford Illustrated History, 474-7; Henig, Religion in Roman Britain, 43-8. 12. Gildas, The Ruin of Britain and Other Works, ed. and trans. Michael Winterbottom (London and Chichester, 1978), 17. 13. Christianity and Paganism, 350-750: The Conversion of Western Europe, ed. J. N. Hullgarth (Philadelphia, 1969), 47-9.

14. See W.H. C. Frend, “The Christianization of Roman Britain’, in M. W. Barley and R. P. C. Hanson (eds.), Christianity in Britain, 300-700 (Manchester, 1968), 37-49. But for an emphasis on continuities in the period c.400—700, see Charles Thomas, Christianity in Roman Britain to AD 500 (1981); Richard Morris, The Church in British Archaeology, Council for British Archaeology Research Report, 47 (1983), ch. 3.

24 LOCA SACRA specimens of oak. It too seems to have engendered outdoor enclosures for worship and involved the rehearsing of vows at natural features, together with artificially constructed pillars, cairns, and mounds on the edges of local settlements. Further complicated by the incursions of the Vikings and Danes in the 900s, our knowledge of pagan belief and practice in the pre-Conquest era 1s constrained by ‘the cloak of silence that early clerics cast over the whole subject of cursed rites’. Bede and his successors had no wish to revive or sustain these elements of false religion by describing them in telling detail.’ Similar omissions characterize the more limited body of literary evidence surviving from Scotland and Ireland. Nevertheless, the pronouncements of Continental churchmen such as Caesarius of Arles and St Eligius, bishop of Noyon, offer some small patches of insight. Both vehemently condemned the ‘profane’ and ‘fanatical’ rituals

conducted at cultic sites in the landscape, which they described as loci abhominati.'° Maximus of Turin admonished the landowners of northern Italy to ‘remove all pollution of idols from your properties and cast out the whole error of paganism from your fields’, and in On the Castigation of Rustics

(c.§74) Martin of Braga described how people invoked the gods which inhabited rivers, forests, and springs and burnt candles at crossroads, as well as engaging in other dubious forms of augury and divination. '’ Though

brief, allusive, and formulaic, the repeated prohibitions of the worship of stones, fountains, and trees issued by diocesan councils and synods, including those at Arles (443-52), Lyons (567), Tours (567), Auxerre (578), and

Toledo (681, 693), may also tell us something comparatively about the 15. Quotation from John D. Niles, “Pagan Survivals and Popular Belief’, in Malcolm Godden and Michael Lapidge (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Old English Literature (Cambridge, 1991), 126-41 at 128. See Audrey L. Meaney, “Bede and Anglo-Saxon Paganism’, Parergon: Bulletin of the Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, NS 3 (1985), 1-29;

ead., “Anglo-Saxon Idolators and Ecclesiasts from Theodore to Alcuin; A Source Study’, Anglo-Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History, § (1992), 103-25, esp. 25; R. I. Page, ‘Anglo-

Saxon Paganism: The Evidence of Bede’, in T. Hofstra, L. A. J. R. Howen, and A. A. MacDonald (eds.), Pagans and Christians: The Interplay between Christian Latin and Traditional Germanic Cultures in Early Medieval Europe, Germania Latina II (Groningen, 1995), 99-120,

which emphasizes the weakness and ambiguity of Bede’s evidence. 16. For Caesarius of Arles, see Sancti Caesarii Arelatensis Sermones, ed. D. G. Morin, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina, 103—4, 2 vols. (2nd edn., Turnholt, 1953), esp. sermon 13. For St Eligius, “Vita: St Eligius Episcopi Noviomensis’, in PL 87, esp. col. 528. See also Bernadette Filotas, Pagan Survivals, Superstitions and Popular Cultures in Early Medieval Pastoral Literature

(Toronto, 2005), 145-8, 151-2, and ch. 5. 17. Christianity and Paganism, ed. Hillgarth, 53-64 at $5, 59, 62. See also Stephen McKenna, Paganism and Pagan Survivals in Spain up to the Fall of the Visigoth Kingdom, Studies in Mediaeval

History, Ns 1 (Washington, DC, 1938), 83, 103-6.

LOCA SACRA 25 character of pagan religion in Britain and Ireland, as in contemporary Gaul

and Galicia. References to sacrilegious rites at similar landmarks in an eighth-century list of superstitiones et paganiae yield further evidence of their persistence, as does the Decretum of Burchard, bishop of Worms, written c.1008—12, which prescribed harsh penances for those who had carried out or consented to these illicit practices.'® James Palmer argues that the ‘paganism’ described by ecclesiastical writers of this period is best understood as ‘a general characterisation of Christianity’s perceived antitheses rather than a specific set of beliefs’. It was a fluid and heterogeneous phenomenon given artificial coherence by the patchwork of literary borrowings and classical references they employed to construct it as a category of difference and otherness. '” Despite the many etymological pitfalls that surround their interpretation, the ‘linguistic fossils’ contained in place names are also revealing. Some, like Thundersley and Tuesley, may preserve the faint memory of the locations of temples dedicated to the pagan gods Thunor and Tiw. The echoes of the word hearh or hearg in Harrow in Middlesex and Harrowden in Bedfordshire and Northamptonshire appear to point to former hill sanctuaries unconnected with any particular divinity. Others, such as Wansdyke, illuminate the way in which

ancient earthworks of unknown origin came to be attributed to the deity Woden, while the residues of his Norse nickname Grim in Grimsditch and Grimsby alert us to the cultural influence exerted by the Scandinavian invasions.~” Barrows too were overlaid with new associations: Drakenhowe and

18. Valerie I. J. Flint, The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe (Oxford, 1991), ch. 8, esp. p. 205. For the councils held at Toledo, see McKenna, Paganism and Pagan Survivals, 126-9, 149. ‘An Eighth-Century List of Superstitions’, in Medieval Handbooks of Penance: A Translation of the Principal Libri Poenitentiales and Selections from Related Documents, ed. John T. McNeill and

Helena M. Gamer (New York, 1990 edn.; first publ. 1938), 419-21; Burchard, Decretum, in Alan Charles Kors and Edward Peters (eds.), Witchcraft in Europe 400-1700: A Documentary History (2nd edn., Philadelphia, 2001), 64. For Auxerre, see Christianity and Paganism, ed. Hillgarth, 103—5 at 103. See also the Precept of King Childebert I (c.533—8), ibid. 108-9. 19. Palmer, ‘Defining Paganism’, 403, and passim. 20. See F. M. Stenton, “The Historical Bearing of Place-Name Studies: Anglo-Saxon Heathenism’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 4th ser., 23 (1941), 1-24; Eilert Ekwall, ‘Some

Notes on English Place-Names Containing Names of Heathen Deities’, Englische Studien, 70 (1924), 55-9; idem, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Place Names (4th edn., Oxford, 1960), pp. xxx-xxxi1. R. H. Reaney, The Origin of English Place-Names (1964), 116-21; G. J. Copley, English Place-Names and their Origins (Newton Abbot, 1971), esp. 148-53; Margaret Gelling, Signposts to the Past: Place Names and the History of England (1978), ch. 6; ead. and Ann Cole, The Landscape of Place-Names (Stamford, 2000); A. D. Mills, A Dictionary of English Place-

Names (2nd edn., Oxford, 1998), pp. x1 (quotation), xxi. Excavation of Wansdyke, however, has revealed it be of post-Roman origin rather than a prehistoric earthwork.

26 LOCA SACRA Drakenorth in Norfolk index the process by which prehistoric grave mounds came to be regarded as the dwelling places of dragons in the Anglo-Saxon centuries.~' In Ireland, Armagh (Ard Macha, the Height of Macha) incorporates the name of a pagan goddess, while Movilla, Co. Down, is derived from Magh Bile, meaning ‘the plain of the sacred tree’.*~ Similar vestiges of obsolescent belief can be detected in the place names of highland and lowland Scotland. Multiple occurrences of neued, a derivative of the Latin nemeton (Gaelic neimhidh) meaning sacred grove or sanctuary, on the Perthshire/ Angus border provide evidence that paganism survived stubbornly enough in this area to have left some toponymic traces.~” The persistence of these pagan appellations into modern times indicates their resilience in the face of later Christian initiatives designed to eradicate the habits of a ‘heathen’ age, even though their significance had been forgotten more than a millennium before. Afflicted by the tendency of later writers to engage in spurious back projection, place names can be both treacherous and deceptive. Even so, they offer some intriguing signposts to an obscure pagan past that is otherwise extremely hard to recover. They highlight the extent to which distinctive topographical landmarks remained notable foci for cultic veneration in early medieval Britain and Ireland.

Footprints of the Saints: The Christianization of the Landscape Notwithstanding its wholehearted rejection of paganism, the advent and entrenchment of Christianity in these islands did not spell the end of this sanctified landscape. Still swathed in myth and controversy, the chronology and geography of conversion varied in different parts of the region, as did

the point at which the Church of Rome can be said to have claimed hegemony over them. In Ireland, where the relative significance of Bishop Palladius and St Patrick continues to be disputed, Christian missionaries were active from the fifth century and a vibrant monastic tradition took root quickly. The Irish launched successful migratory movements into Scotland, 21. Whyte, “After-life of Barrows’, 6. 22. Nancy Edwards, The Archaeology of Early Medieval Ireland (1990), 105.

23. W. J. Watson, The History of the Celtic Place-Names of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1926), 244-50; G. W. S. Barrow, “The Uses of Place-Names and Scottish History—Pointers and Pitfalls’, in Simon Taylor (ed.), The Uses of Place-Names (Edinburgh, 1998), 54-74 at 56-9.

LOCA SACRA 27 Wales, and the south-western peninsula of England. Further east the arrival of the papal envoy Augustine 1n 597 appears to be the decisive juncture, though the legacy left by the earlier short-lived efforts at Christianization under imperial rule should not be discounted completely. Latin priorities oradually spread northwards beyond the Anglo-Saxon heartlands to North-

umbria, where they were embraced by King Oswald at the Synod of Whitby in 664. Their influence on the Pictish Church, whose origins are generally linked with the endeavours of Ninian, bishop of Whithorn, and the Irish abbot of Iona, Columba, became evident in the eighth century. The attitude of the early Christian evangelists to the indigenous religion and magic of the landscape is best described as ambivalent. The lives of the

saints attest to a concerted strategy of iconoclastic destruction, but they simultaneously supply evidence of a programme of ‘rescue’ and substitution

which Valerie Flint and other historians have argued was being pursued across early medieval Europe as a whole.~” The smashing and dismantling of idolatrous shrines was accompanied by the deliberate resanctification of the

same sites. Thus St Martin of Tours is said to have erected a church or monastery on the spot where he demolished an ancient temple and cut down a sacred pine. In the more dramatic episode of “evangelical tree surgery for which St Boniface is renowned, timber from the mighty oak of Jupiter he felled with divine assistance at Gaesmere in Hessia was used to

build an oratory dedicated to St Peter the Apostle. The ability of the

24. Fora brief overview of developments in Ireland and England, together with relevant documents, see Christianity and Paganism, ed. Hillgarth, 117-37, 150-68. See also M. W. Barley and R. P. C. Hanson (eds.), Christianity in Britain, 300-700 (Manchester, 1968); Charles Thomas, Britain and Ireland in Early Christian Times, AD 400-800 (1971); Henry Mayr-Harting, The Coming of Christianity to Anglo-Saxon England (1972); John Blair, The Church in Anglo-Saxon Society (Oxford, 2005), esp. ch. 1; T. M. Charles-Edwards, Early Christian Ireland (Cambridge, 2000), ch. 5; 1d., “Conversion to Christianity’, in id. (ed.), After Rome (Oxford, 2003), 103-39; W. Douglas Simpson, The Celtic Church in Scotland (Aberdeen, 1935); Barbara Yorke, The Conversion of Britain: Religion, Politics and Society in Britain c.600—800 (Harlow, 2006), esp. ch. 2.

For continuity between Roman and Anglo-Saxon Christianity in England, see the items cited in n. 14, above. For the prolonged nature of conversion, see Philip Rahtz and Lorna Watts, “The End of Roman Temples in the West of Britain’, in P. J. Casey (ed.), The End of Roman Britain: Papers Arising from a Conference, Durham 1978, B.A.R British Series, 71 (Oxford, 1979),

183-201.

25. Flint, The Rise of Magic. For the debate engendered by this book, see below p. 36. See also Geriasimos Pagoulatos, “The Destruction and Conversion of Ancient Temples to Christian Churches during the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Centuries’, Theologia, 65 (1994), 152-70; John Howe, “The Conversion of the Physical World: The Creation of a Christian Landscape’, in James K. Muldoon (ed.), Varieties of Religious Conversion in the Middle Ages (Gainesville, Fla., 1997), 63-78.

28 LOCA SACRA missionaries to carry out these acts of holy vandalism without suftering supernatural retribution convinced those who witnessed them to abandon their former beliefs and embrace the faith of Christ.*° According to the Adomnan’s seventh-century vita of St Columba, a fountain feared and venerated by the ‘insensate people’ in the land of Picts was transformed by the saint’s blessing into a healing spring: their astonishment at his willingness to wash in its noxious water turned to awe after he nullified its evil powers by raising his “holy hand’ and invoking the name of the Lord. ‘Jealous for the living God’, St Patrick likewise sought to uproot pagan reverence for the well of Findmag, where “the foolish folk believed that a certain dead prophet had made a bibliotheca [coffin] for himself under the stone in the water’. He and

his disciple broke the taboo surrounding the site by lifting the hitherto immovable slab.*’ In these cases the natural places at which the impotence of the pagan deities and inhabiting demons is so patently revealed to the heathen acquire thereby another more acceptable kind of numinous power. In others the transposition is less violent and more subtle. After his verbal fulminations against idolatry failed to put an end to pagan worship of a marshy

lake in the mountains of the Auvergne, the fifth-century bishop of Jarols constructed a church dedicated to St Hilary nearby, to which he encouraged the misguided inhabitants to divert their accustomed offerings.~* ‘Conscious manipulation’ of Celtic pagan tradition may explain why Columba chose splendid forests of oaks as the setting for the religious house he established in

26. “The Life of St Martin of Tours by Sulpicius Severus’, in The Western Fathers: Being the Lives of SS. Martin of Tours, Ambrose, Augustine of Hippo, Honoratus of Arles, and Germanus of Auxerre, ed. and trans. F. R. Hoare (1954), 26-8; “The Life of St Boniface, by Willibald’, in The Anglo-

Saxon Missionaries in Germany, ed. and trans. C. H. Talbot (London and New York, 1954), 45—6. The phrase ‘evangelical tree surgery’ is used by Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory

(1995), 217. See also C. H. Talbot, “St Boniface and the German Mission’, in G. J. Cuming (ed.), The Mission of the Church and the Propagation of the Faith, SCH 6 (Cambridge, 1970), 45-57, esp. 48-9. 27. Adomnan’s Life of Columba, ed. Alan Orr Anderson and Marjorie Ogilvie Anderson (1961), 349-51; The Tripartite Life of Patrick, with Other Documents Relating to that Saint, ed. Whitley Stokes, 2 vols. (1887), 123, and see Charles-Edwards, Early Christian Ireland, 47. 28. Gregorii Turonensis Opera, ed. W. Arndt and Br. Krusch, Pars I. Historia Franca, Monumenta

Germaniae Historica, Scriptorum Rerum Merovingicarum, vol. 1 (Hanover, 1884), 749-50. See also The History of the Franks by Gregory of Tours, ed. and trans. O. M. Dalton, 2 vols.

(Oxford, 1927), 1. 247-8. The story was known in Anglo-Saxon England: see Benjamin Thorpe, The Homilies of the Anglo-Saxon Church. The First Part, Containing the Sermones Catholici, or Homilies of A-fric, in the Original Anglo-Saxon, with an English Version, 2 vols. (1844-6), 507-11. See also C. E. Stancliffe, “From Town to Countryside: The Christianization of the Touraine 370-600’, in Derek Baker (ed.), The Church in Town and Countryside, SCH 16 (Oxford, 1979), 43-59.

LOCA SACRA 29 Ireland at Dearmach (Durrow) and why so many ancient yews inhabit English churchyards. Such trees stand as living relics of ecclesiastical attempts to colonize

previously hallowed spaces.~’ Almost certainly associated with the preChristian festival of Lughnasa, the holy mountain of Croagh Patrick, in Co. Mayo, is probably another instance of deliberate superimposition, while the cult of St Brigid at Kildare is also widely regarded as ‘a carefully managed takeover’ of

a location linked with an older female deity.°” The wooden cross St Oswald of Northumbria set up on the battlefield at Heavenfield, near Hexham, has been seen as a similar attempt to simultaneously harness and transfigure the heathen tradition of tree worship, epitomized in reverence for the great ash Yggdrassil.”!

Official endorsement of this policy of accommodation can be found in Gregory the Great’s famous letter to the abbot Mellitus in 601 containing instructions to be conveyed to Augustine. Heathen shrines were on ‘no account’ to be razed but instead purified of idols, aspersed with holy water, and then reconsecrated to the service of Christ: In this way, we hope that the people, seeing that their temples are not destroyed, may abandon their error and flocking more readily to their accustomed resorts, may come to know and adore the true god... For it is certainly impossible to eradicate all errors from obstinate minds at one stroke, and whoever wishes to climb to a mountain top climbs gradually step by step, and not in one leap.”*

In an echo of these recommendations, towards the end of the seventh century, Aldhelm, abbot of Malmesbury and bishop of Sherborne (639-709),

can be found commenting on how houses of prayer and residences for students now occupied the locations where the pagan had once worshipped the snake and the stag, ‘with coarse stupidity in profane shrines’.

29. See Taylor, “Tree Worship’, 114. 30. Maire MacNeill, The Festival of Lughnasa (Oxford, 1962; repr. Dublin, 1983), 73. See also Proinsias Mac Cana, “Placenames and Mythology in Irish Tradition: Places, Pilgrimages and Things’, in Gordon W. MacLennan (ed.), Proceedings of the First North American Congress of

Celtic Studies (Ottawa, 1988), 319-41 at 324, 328. For St Brigid and Kildare, see CharlesEdwards, Early Christian Ireland, 239. 31. Bede, A History of the English Church and People, trans. and ed. Leo Sherley-Price; rev. R. E. Latham (Harmondsworth, 1968 edn.), bk. 111, chs. 2, 4. See also C. Tolley, ‘Oswald’s Tree’, in

Hofstra et al. (eds.), Pagans and Christians, 149-73 and Catherine Cubitt, “Sites and Sanctity: Revisiting the Cult of Murdered and Martyred Anglo-Saxon Royal Saints’, Early Medieval Europe, 9 (2000), $3—83 at 60-3, who likewise discerns pagan echoes in this cult. 32. Bede, History, bk. 1, ch. 30. 33. Aldhelm: The Prose Works, ed. and trans. Michael Lapidge and Michael Herren (Cambridge, 1979), 160-1.

30 LOCA SACRA Just how systematically or effectively this tactic was put into practice remains difficult both to assess and to chart. Examples of churches being sited within or beside surviving prehistoric or later pagan monuments, though striking, are in fact relatively scattered and sparse, and caution must be exercised in interpreting them as evidence of self-conscious ecclesiastical recycling. At Rudston in East Yorkshire the parish church has been erected beside a large menhir (Fig. 1.1); at Midmar in Aberdeenshire it is built on part of a stone circle; at Knowlton in Dorset it is situated within a Neolithic henge of impressive proportions (Fig. 1.2). In Wales a standing stone is incorporated into the altar of St Tysilio at Llandysilio and elsewhere barrows are enclosed within the precincts of churchyards.** In Ireland, it

may be no coincidence that Armagh is situated just two miles from the major royal site and ritual complex of Navan.”? At Rushden on the Isle of Man a chapel dedicated to the Virgin Mary has been superimposed over a Roman temple, the foundation stone of which was discovered when a new church was constructed on the site in 1826.°°

Instances of ancient megaliths or Roman monuments being inscribed with, or refashioned as, Christian symbols are slightly more common, especially in Celtic regions. Although the precise era in which these ostensible acts of religious reclamation occurred is now hard to pinpoint, the story of the Welsh evangelist St Samson, who chiselled the sign of the cross on a standing stone on the summit of a hill on Bodmin Moor, suggests that at least some of them may date from the fifth and sixth centuries. This stood close to a ‘simulacrum abominabile’ (abominable image) which he persuad-

ed the local inhabitants to destroy.”’ The coexistence of Christian and Pictish symbols on many Scottish standing stones alerts us to the same process, as does the appearance of the cross and chi-rho monogram on ogham monuments in Ireland and Wales. Where these deface or score through an earlier inscription the struggle to transform the original mean34. See Leslie Grinsell, Folklore of Prehistoric Sites in Britain (Newton Abbot, 1976), 16-20; id., “The

Christianisation of Prehistoric and Other Pagan Sites’, Landscape History, 8 (1986), 27-37. Note the caution expressed by Richard Morris, The Church in British Archaeology, Council for

British Archaeology Research Report 47 (1983), 67. An earlier discussion can be found in Walter Johnson, Byways in British Archaeology (Cambridge, 1912), ch. 1 (‘Churches on Pagan Sites’), though some of the suggested correlations now seem questionable. 35. Edwards, Archaeology of Early Medieval Ireland, 10s.

36. See John Stuart, Sculptured Stones of Scotland (Aberdeen, 1856), p. i. 37. The Life of St Samson of Dol, ed. Thomas Taylor (1925), 49. See Flint, Rise of Magic, 265; Gareth

Longden, ‘Iconoclasm, Belief and Memory in Early Medieval Wales’, in Howard Williams (ed.), Archaeologies of Remembrance: Death and Memory in Past Societies (New York, 2003), 172-02.

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LOCA SACRA 31

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32 LOCA SACRA ings of the memorials is especially transparent.” Ty Iltud (the House or Hermitage of St Hltud) a chambered tomb with multiple crucifixes incised

on one of its inner walls, may also testify to the ongoing attempt to counteract the heathen associations of such sites by connecting them with the new cult of Christ.°” Itis much harder to substantiate the thesis that the practice of erecting freestanding sculpted crosses in Scotland and Ireland derives from the tradition of building menhirs and reflects deliberate Christian efforts to cancel out their

influence (Fig. 1.3). However, this finds a sliver of textual support in Jocelinus’s life of Kentigern, which records how the saint set up ‘this lifesiving, holy, and terrible sign’ wherever he preached, in order to banish the powers of darkness.*” Could the function of such monuments have been not merely commemorative but also apotropaic: were they designed to keep evil forces at bay? The towering Anglo-Saxon roods at Bewcastle in Cumbria and Ruthwell in Dumfries and Galloway, each over five metres in height, provide

a compelling illustration of the manner in which the landscape became a theatre in which to proclaim the triumph of the Gospel over this frontier region of the Bernician kingdom.*' Suggestions that the arcane letters that 38. For examples of the apparent Christianization of earlier monuments, see V. I. Nash Williams, The Early Christian Monuments of Wales (Cardiff, 1950), 17-27, esp. 18, 104, 111; plate IX, no. 128 and fig. 113; Kenneth Jackson, Language and History in Early Britain: A Chronological Survey of the Britonnic Languages 1st to 12th c. AD (Edinburgh, 1953), 165 n. 3, and see ch. § passim. See also P. M. C. Kermode, Manx Crosses: Or the Inscribed and Sculptured Monuments of the Isle of Man from about the End of the Fifth to the Beginning of the Thirteenth Century (1907); J. Romilly Allen, The Early Christian Monuments of Scotland: A Classified, Illustrated, Descriptive List of the Monuments, with an Analysis of their Symbolism and Ornamentation (Edinburgh, 1903); Stuart,

Sculptured Stones; Simpson, Celtic Church, ch. 8; Anthony Jackson, The Symbol Stones of Scotland: A Social Anthropological Resolution of the Problem of the Picts (Stromness, 1984), esp.

ch. 4; Malcolm Seaborne, Celtic Crosses of Britain and Ireland (Aylesbury, 1989); Harold Mytum, The Origins of Early Christian Ireland (London and New York, 1992), 66-73; Daibhi O Croinin, Early Medieval Ireland 400-1200 (Harlow, 1995), 33-6. 39. Grinsell, Folklore, 263 and pls. 3 and 4, facing p. 35; Glyn E. Daniel, The Prehistoric Chamber Tombs of England and Wales (Cambridge, 1950), 118-20; G. H. Doble, Lives of the Welsh Saints,

ed. D. Simon Evans (Cardiff; 1971), 139. The date at which these inscriptions were made remains difficult to ascertain, but may be quite late. The site was noted by Edward Lhwyd in

his additions to William Camden, Britannia, ed. and expanded by Edmund Gibson (1695 edn.), $94. 40. For suggestions of this link, see, for instance, Woodward, Shrines and Sacrifice, 129. Two Celtic Saints: The Life of St Ninian by Ailred and the Life of St Kentigern by Foceline (Lampeter, facs. edn., 1989), 109.

41. See Rosemary Cramp, County Durham and Northumberland, 2 vols., Corpus of Anglo-Saxon

Stone Sculpture, 1 (Oxford, 1984), 1. 112-13; u, pl. 95, fig. 518, and pl. 96, figs. 519-20; Eamonn O Carragain, ‘At Once Elitist and Popular: The Audiences of the Bewcastle and Ruthwell Crosses’, in Kate Cooper and Jeremy Gregory (eds.), Elite and Popular Religion, SCH 42 (Woodbridge, 2006), 18-40; id. Ritual and the Rood: Liturgical Images and the Old English

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Figure 2.2. Protestant iconoclasm in England as perceived by its Catholic opponents: the destruction of a free-standing cross: Richard Verstegan, Theatruim crude-

litatum haereticorum nostri temporis (Antwerp, 1592 edn.), 23. (Reproduced by permission of Cambridge University Library. Shelfmark U*. 4. 41)

: (35 bse: ee sas

others ‘standyng in oppen ways’ near Doncaster during Edward’s reign (Fig. 2.2). ~~ Such initiatives continued to test the stability of the Protestant Church in subsequent years. Archbishop Matthew Parker’s visitation articles for Canterbury in 1569 asked whether anyone had destroyed churches, chancels, and chapels, ‘plucked downe the bells’, or felled or spoiled wood on ecclesiastical land. A Scottish statute passed in 1573 similarly condemned the ‘cassin doun’ of parish kirks by private persons who appropriated the stones, timber, and other material to ‘their awin particular use and profite’. But neither had only greedy opportunists in mind. ~’ Often, the ideological

, , , Tor

135. See 21 Henry VIII. c. 1, $7; Stanford E. Lehmberg, The Reformation Parliament 1529-1536 (Cambridge, 1970), 91. Foxe, Actes and monuments (1563 edn.), 496. A. G. Dickens (ed.), ‘Robert Parkyn’s Narrative of the Reformation’, English Historical Review, 62 (1947), 58-83 at 07;

136. Documentary Annals, ed. Cardwell, 1. 356-7, and repeated in Grindal’s articles for Canterbury, 1576, 1. 411; Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, ed. Thompson and Innes, 111. 76-7.

IDOLS IN THE LANDSCAPE 11g motives that inspired such actions can only be inferred, as in the case of Rowland Chambers and Mabel Wilson, who demolished a cross in the cemetery of Springthorpe, Lincolnshire, under cover of darkness in 1563.1’ A similar structure in Shrewsbury was pulled down in 1581 and the body of an executed criminal buried where this sacrilegious symbol had stood, in a

further attempt to counteract its lingering charisma. In Durham, a stone cross erected in the fourteenth century to commemorate a famous victory over the Scots was taken down illegally ‘by some lewde & contemptuous wicked persons...utterly & spitefullie dispising all auncyent ceremonies and monuments’ in 1589, once again in a nocturnal attack. A wooden crucifix which had long stood nearby on the Maid’s Bower, at which the medieval prior and monks had prayed to God and St Cuthbert, seems to have been ‘soddenly defaced & throwne downe’ in an earlier spasm of unofficial iconoclastic fury.'°* Built to the memory of Queen Eleanor, consort of Edward I, Cheapside Cross in London was subjected to repeated unauthorized assaults by puritan zealots enraged by the tendency of some citizens to pay reverence to it: in Elizabeth’s reign the image of Christ which adorned it was wrenched from his mother’s lap and statues of the Virgin and other saints defaced by knocking off their limbs.'”” The Catholic polemicist William Bishop was scandalized by these actions of Calvin’s most “fervent disciples’, who ‘cannot abide a Crosse standing by the High-waie, or in any, never so profaine a place, but either they beate and hale them downe, or most despitefullie deface them’. Although they ‘caste over it the mantle of zeale, saying that the Papists make them their Gods, and that therefore they are to be abolished’, to Bishop this was merely a cover for heretical ‘malice’. It betrayed a blasphemous contempt for the Saviour himself and revealed to ‘all moderate men, their cankered stomaks

137. English Church Furniture, Ornaments and Decorations, at the Period of the Reformation. As Exhibited in a List of the Goods Destroyed in Certain Lincolnshire Churches, AD 1566, ed. Edward

Peacock (1866), 142.

138. Patrick Collinson, “The Shearman’s Tree and the Preacher: The Strange Death of Merry England in Shrewsbury and Beyond’, in id. and John Craig (eds.), The Reformation in English Towns, 1500-1640 (Basingstoke, 1998), 205-20 at 211; Rites of Durham Being a Description or Brief Declaration of all the Ancient Monuments, Rites and Customs Belonging or Being within the

Monastical Church of Durham before the Suppression Written 1593, ed. J. T. Fowler, Surtees Society, 107 (1903), 28-9. 139. See David Cressy, “The Downfall of Cheapside Cross: Vandalism, Ridicule and Iconoclasm’, in his Travesties and Transgressions in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford, 2000), 234-50; Joel

Budd, “Rethinking Iconoclasm in Early Modern England: The Case of Cheapside Cross’, Fournal of Early Modern History, 4 (2000), 379-404.

120 IDOLS IN THE LANDSCAPE against him that dyed on the Cross’.'*° Bishop’s uncomprehending outrage

contrasts with the sympathetic and sophisticated reading of these ‘nites of violence’ offered by recent historians. With Natalie Zemon Davis, we need to recognize that the actions of iconoclasts were didactic in character: they had ‘a goal akin to preaching’. As Lee Palmer Wandel has argued, they

need to be understood as a medium of communication and a form of ‘speaking’, a mode through which ordinary Christians entered into the dynamic of the Reformation. They offer us oblique insight into the religious outlook of anonymous individuals who have otherwise left no mark on the historical record. '*"

The iconoclasm of the populace mimicked that of the authorities in ways that make the line between sanctioned and unsanctioned activity sometimes hard to discern. In Banbury, for example, the destruction of two market crosses in broad daylight in July 1600 appears to have been condoned if not actively sponsored by several godly aldermen disturbed by reports that a certain John Traford took oft his hat whenever he passed it. On witnessing a spire topple from its perch, one of these worthies ‘cried out with a loude voyce and in a reloycinge manner... god be thancked theire god dagon 1s fallen downe to the ground’ and proceeded to smash the pictures on it into small pieces with a stone axe. Those who sought to prevent the workmen from carrying out this iconoclastic act were restrained by the town constables, but the matter was not allowed to rest by members of the opposing faction, who took their grievance all the way to the Star Chamber.'*~ The Cheshire gentleman John Bruen who purged his parish church of Tarvin of ‘lying vanities’ in ‘a flame of holy zeale’ seems to have believed that his

actions were justified not merely by the example of Kings Josiah and Hezekiah but also the Injunctions of 1559. In turn, they seem to have 140. D. B. P. [William Bishop], A reformation of a Catholike deformed... wherein the chiefe controversies in religion, are methodically and learnedly handled ({Douai], 1604), 2nd pagination, 42. I owe this reference to David Davis. 141. Natalie Zemon Davis, “The Rites of Violence’, in her Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, Calif., 1975), 152-87 at 156; Lee Palmer Wandel, Voracious Idols and Violent Hands: Iconoclasm in Reformation Zurich, Strasbourg, and Basel (Cambridge, 1994), 3-4, 23-4, 196, and passim. See also David Cressy, “Different Kinds of Speaking: Symbolic Violence and

Secular Iconoclasm in Early Modern England’, in Muriel McClendon, Joseph Ward, and Michael MacDonald (eds.), Protestant Identities: Religion, Society, and Self-fashioning in PostReformation England (Standford, 1999), 19-42.

142. TNA, STAC 8/82/23 (‘The Deposition of Matthew Knight, 1604’), printed in P. D. A. Harvey, ‘Where was Banbury Cross?’, Oxoniensia, 31 (1966), 83-106 at 105-6. See also Kenneth Fincham and Nicholas Tyacke, Altars Restored: The Changing Face of English Religious Worship 1547-c.1700 (Oxford, 2007), 91.

IDOLS IN THE LANDSCAPE [21 encouraged some of his servants to carry out further attacks in the vicinity:

in 1614 several were prosecuted for demolishing seven churchyard and wayside crosses, which they threw down with staves.'*” Renowned for his zeal against popish survivals, in 1613 the Scottish minister Richard Murchiston destroyed a statute of St Fergus which had long stood in the burgh of Wick, to the fury of his parishioners, who drowned him in the river in retaliation.'** The visceral hatred of idolatry that animated his actions was unintelligible to those who still regarded material objects and places as conduits of the sacred, and even those for whom they were merely reminders and representations of local heroes of old. The ‘burdened consciences’ of puritans also propelled them to dismantle

maypoles on the grounds that these ‘painted puppets’ were latter-day ‘dagons’. In 1550, a preacher described one set up annually at St Andrew Undershaft in London as an idol, and twenty-two years later a zealous

Protestant carpenter who helped chop down another at Warbleton in Sussex became a martyr to the cause when he was shot dead in the ensuing aftray.'*° The following century Adam Martindale publicly denounced a maypole which had been set “upon a little banke called Bow-hillock’ in his parish as ‘a relique of the shamefull worship of the Strumpet Flora in Rome’ and ‘a randezvous of rake-hells’, soon after which his wife, assisted by three young maids, ‘whipt it downe in the night with a framing-saw’.'*° Holy trees were other casualties of the godly crusade against idols in the post-

Reformation period, including one that overhung a spring dedicated to 143. William Hinde, A faithfull remonstrance of the holy life and happy death, of Ffohn Bruen of Bruen-

Stapleford, in the county of Chester, esquire (1641), 78-80; Aston, “Puritans and Iconoclasm’, 103; Fincham and Tyacke, Altars Restored, 115. Cf. the initiatives of the recorder of Salisbury,

on whom see Paul Slack, ‘Religious Protest and Urban Authority: The Case of Henry Sherfield, Iconoclast’, in Derek Baker (ed.), Schism, Heresy and Religious Protest, SCH 9 (Cambridge, 1972), 295-302; 1d., “The Public Conscience of Henry Sherfield’, in John Morrill, Paul Slack and Daniel Woolf (eds.), Public Duty and Private Conscience in SeventeenthCentury England (Oxford, 1993), 151-71. 144. Mackinlay, Ancient Church Dedications: Non-scriptural Dedications, 210. 145. Stow, Survey of London, ed. Kingsford, 1. 143-4. For the Warbleton incident, see Calendar of

Assize Records: Sussex Indictments, Elizabeth I, ed. J. S. Cockburn (1975), no. 411; Jeremy Goring, Godly Exercises or the Devil’s Dance? Puritanism and Popular Culture in Pre-Civil War

England, Friends of Dr Williams’s Library 37th Lecture (1983), 1; Patrick Collinson, The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth

Centuries (New York, 1988), 141-2. 146. Adam Martindale, The Life of Adam Martindale, Written by Himself, and Now First Printed from

the Original Manuscript in the British Museum, ed. Richard Parkinson, Chetham Society, 4 (Manchester, 1845), 156-7. They cut it “‘brest high, so as the bottome would serve well for a diall-post’.

122 IDOLS IN THE LANDSCAPE St Endellion in the Cornish hundred of Trigg, which local people superstitiously refrained from cutting for fear of supernatural punishment. Details of

the episode are fragmentary but perhaps the perpetrator was intent on eradicating a remnant of heathenism.'*’ More famously, the Christmasflowering thorn on Wearyall Hill near Glastonbury was severely mutilated by a sectarian attack with an axe, along with the prodigious walnut tree in

the grounds of the dissolved monastery which reputedly burst into leaf annually on St Barnabas’s Day.'*® These too were temptations to worship the saints in ways that replicated the pagan errors of the ancients. Removing them was ‘a necessary rite of exorcism’, to employ Eamon Dufty’s evocative phrase. '*” It purged society of a source of spiritual pollution that the hottest sort of Protestants were convinced was a lightning rod to the consuming rage of their implacable God. Wells also seem to have been the subject of extra-legislative oftensives. Sometimes the ardent outrage of those who attacked these topographical landmarks is unmistakable. Robert Palmer, parson of Eltisley in Cambridgeshire, broke up the stonework surrounding a spring located in the churchyard, next to which the relics of the martyred medieval prioress Pandionia (or Pendwynn) had once been buried, in 1575. Charged the following year

before the consistory court for this offence, along with a range of other misdemeanours, he declared that it was used for ‘superstitious purposes, therefore he brake it down’.'°” Often, however, it is not very easy to distinguish ‘the sniping of freelance purifying iconoclasts’ from acts of destruction underpinned by more mundane and mercenary motives. ~ In 1639 Alderman Sayre of Oxford is said to have ‘plucked downe’ the

147. Nicholas Roscarrock’s Lives of the Saints: Cornwall and Devon, ed. Nicholas Orme, Devon and

Cornwall Record Society, Ns 35 (1992), 78-9. The stalwart Catholic Roscarrock noted that the sacrilegious vandal had died shortly afterwards. 148. Richard Broughton, The ecclesiastical historie of Great Britaine (Douai, 1633), 138. Again the perpetrator was alleged to have been supernaturally punished. See Ch. 3 below for further discussion of Catholic responses to Protestant iconoclasm. 149. Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c. 1400-1580 (New Haven and London, 1992), 495. 150. VCH Cambridgeshire, ed. C. R. Elrington (Oxford, 1973), v. 57; fohn Layer (1586-1640): A Seventeenth-Century Local Historian, ed. W. M. Palmer, Cambridge Antiquarian Society, $3 (1935), 84 n. 1. Palmer was probably also responsible for defacing funeral monuments in the

church, ‘for avoyding of adoration’. He does not easily fit the mould of the archetypal puritan, though, and was charged with having turned the vicarage into an alehouse and playing cards while he should have been at divine service. On St Pandionia’s well, see Leland, Itinerary, ed. Toulmin Smith, v. 218. 151. Aston, ‘Puritans and Iconoclasm’, 95.

IDOLS IN THE LANDSCAPE 123 surviving well house of St Frideswide at Binsey, which bore a picture of the

Virgin on the front: already in a state of decay, by the later seventeenth century it was ‘overgrowne with nettles and other weeds, and harbouring frogs snails and vermin’, and had long since lost the reputation for thaumaturgy that had once drawn so many pilgrims.'°~ The timing of the incident, at a moment when anxiety about popery was soon to reach fever pitch, is certainly suggestive. A report of ‘ryotous behaviour’ which reached the ears of the Privy Council in 1598 1s harder to assess: “certaine leude and disordered persons of base sorte and condicion’ had invaded a private bath fed by the famous spa at Bath and ‘in tumultious sort... did dig up the springe and heade...and have either destroyed yt or at least so drawne yt awaye as that

yt may not serve for soche good use and purpose as heretofore yt hathe done’. Carried out on Shrove Tuesday, a favoured date in the festive calendar for anti-Catholic crowd action, it 1s striking that the attack centred on a site that had formerly been part of a priory.'”” Whatever their underlying incentives, collectively such acts contributed to the progressive desacralization of the landscape. They helped to undermine the potent memories it served to sustain and to defuse the numinous power that many late medieval people believed it to hold. In his study of the destruction of Hailes Abbey in Gloucestershire, Ethan Shagan has argued persuasively that those who participated in stripping the lead from the roofs of dissolved monasteries and plundering their fabric for building material in the 1530s and 1540s thereby made themselves accomplices in the process of

Protestant reform. Regardless of their original intentions, they became implicated in a form of sacrilege that encouraged them to internalize the new theology that vindicated this as a legitimate and indeed pious act. Their actions helped to discredit the Church’s claim to be able to sanctify space and to demonstrate that shrines were not hallowed oracles but mere sticks and stones. '°* We catch a glimpse of this process in a conversation that took

place between a Yorkshireman and his son some sixty years after the Dissolution. The father was asked why he had purchased timber and a bell frame from a nearby monastic church despite his respect for its beleaguered inhabitants: 152. Anthony Wood, Survey of the Antiquities of the City of Oxford, Composed in 1661—6, ed. Andrew Clark, 3 vols., Oxford Historical Society, 15, 17, 37 (1889-95), 1. 324, 329, 577. He rented some lands there. 153. APC, 1597-8, 373-S. 154. Shagan, Popular Politics, ch. s.

124 IDOLS IN THE LANDSCAPE how then came it to pass you was so ready to destroy and spoil the thing that you thought well of? What should I do, said He: might I not as well as others have some Profit of the Spoil of the Abbey? For I did see all would away; and therefore I did as others did.'”°

Involvement in such incidents must have compelled many to forge “new consciences to navigate the unprecedented circumstances in which they found themselves’, consciences compatible with the novel precepts of reformed theology.'°° Those who defaced, demolished, and looted chantry and wayside chapels and dismantled the architectural structures over sacred

springs similarly helped, wittingly or unwittingly, to remodel the local environment in line with evangelical and later Calvinist priorities. So too did the ongoing dilapidation of Scottish cathedrals: William Lord Ruthven received a grant to carry off the lead which covered the roof of Fortrose Cathedral in 1572, its expropriation being sanctioned because this was “na paroch kirk, bot ane monasterie to sustene ydill belleis’.'°” The collaboration of ordinary people in the redeployment of ecclesias-

tical artefacts for secular purposes had the same far-reaching effects. A remarkable inventory from Lincolnshire dating from 1566 reveals how ‘monuments of superstition’ such as altar stones, fonts, and holy water vats had been converted into bridges, pavements and stepping stones, cisterns and kitchen sinks. At East Newlyn in Cornwall, a stone that had previously served to display relics in St Neghton’s parish was ignominiously transformed into a cheese press, while at the manor house at Easton Pierce in Wiltshire part of a highway cross was turned into a trough for cattle and

swine.'>® Simply to walk on a path or highway or climb over a stile constructed of such ‘trifelinge trompery’ and ‘popishe peltrie’ was to cooperate in redefining, both intellectually and literally, the boundaries between sacred and profane. It was to cooperate in iconoclastic acts which 155. Michael Sherbrooke, “The Falle of Religiouse Howses, Colleges, Chantreys, Hospitalls & c,’ in A. G. Dickens (ed.), Tudor Treatises, Yorkshire Archaeological Society, 125 (Leeds, 1959), 125.

156. Shagan, Popular Politics, 309. For a similar argument, see Alec Ryrie, “Counting Sheep,

Counting Shepherds: The Problem of Allegiance in the English Reformation’, in Peter Marshall and Alec Ryrie (eds.), The Beginnings of English Protestantism (Cambridge, 2002), 84-110. 157. Innes, Origines Parochiales Scotiae, 11. 572. 158. English Church Furniture, ed. Peacock, esp. 39, 41, 48, 54, 55, 62, 65, 67, 73, 74, 84, 86, 93, 94, 107, I10, III, 112, 120, 132, 147, 150; Nicholas Roscarrock’s Lives of the Saints, ed. Orme, 94; John Aubrey, Wiltshire: The Topographical Collections of fohn Aubrey, F.R.S., A.D.1659-70, with

Illustrations, ed. John Edward Jackson, Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Society (Devizes, 1862), 235.

IDOLS IN THE LANDSCAPE 125 were not only a mirror but also a key motor and agent of doctrinal change, acts that have been aptly described as the ‘central sacrament’ of Protestant reform.'”” By this means, the populace aligned itself with an ideology that

perhaps the majority, given a choice at the outset, would not have embraced enthusiastically.

For some, though, the Reformation of the landscape had not gone far enough. The determination of a small extreme minority to erase all remaining traces of the text of the Golden Legend inscribed upon its surface must not

be underestimated. To these zealots, too many mnemonics to the hagiosraphical tales which Protestant polemicists from Bale and Foxe onwards scathingly dismissed as ridiculous fables and damnable lies remained. Only by smashing the physical objects and structures that sustained them could

the written and unwritten traditions linked with wells, trees, caves, and stones be consigned to permanent oblivion. For many such acts smacked of

unnecessary fanaticism. Yet there is much to suggest that the godly in general were growing increasingly sensitive to the presence of both danger-

ous residues of the Catholic past and new manifestations of the human propensity to fabricate idols. Fear of popery had always been a ‘moveable

goalpost’,'°” but in the context of ecclesiastical policies that seemed to presage a kind of Counter-Reformation by stealth it served to foster renewed efforts to remove the stumbling blocks that stood in the way of a pure Reformation. Such efforts played no insignificant part in precipitating the conflicts that culminated in the Wars of the Three Kingdoms.

Wars against the Idols: The Civil Wars and Later Phases of the Long Reformation The outbreak of fighting in the Stuart realms in the mid-seventeenth century was preceded by fresh fits of religious violence against images and other symbols of idolatry. In Scotland, the popular iconoclasm sparked oft

by the attempt to introduce the revised Laudian prayer book in 1637 provided a prelude not just to the signing of the Covenant and the abolition of episcopacy the following year, but also to new measures by the General Assembly to eradicate pre-Reformation survivals. In July 1640 the reascen159. English Church Furniture, ed. Peacock, 69, 77; Dufty, Stripping of the Altars, 480. 160. Aston, ‘Puritans and Iconoclasm’, 95.

126 IDOLS IN THE LANDSCAPE dant Kirk convened at Aberdeen ordered the destruction of all idolatrous monuments that remained extant in churches, colleges, chapels, and ‘wther publict places’, noting that this was a particular problem in the “North parts’ of the kingdom. Endorsed by Parliament the following year, this made the work incumbent upon presbyteries and provincial synods and required their commissioners ‘to report their diligence herein’ to the next session. If they neglected to accomplish this within the space of three months, then sheriffs, stewards, bailiffs, and magistrates were to be charged with the task of razing,

‘casting downe’, and defacing them.'®’ The subject of a special edict, the magnificent Anglo-Saxon rood at Ruthwell was a particular target of presbyterian ire. It was broken in two in 1642, the lower part of the shaft having already been severely defaced.'°” As the Glaswegian divine Robert Baillie

noted, all of this was closely linked with intensified anxiety about the ‘enormous sinnes in the land’ and an earnest desire to prevent heavy divine punishments. '°” The records of local kirk sessions over the following decade bear witness to their efforts to implement these orders, as well as to suppress pilgrimages

to hallowed springs and chapels. In both they encountered trouble and resistance and manifested a degree of inefficiency. In October 1640, for instance, the presbytery of Perth and Stirling expressed concern that two stones engraved with a portrait of Christ and the twelve apostles were still standing outside the west door of the kirk of Dunkeld; when these ‘reliques of superstition’ were still intact three years later, the sheriff of Perth was asked to intervene. In 1649 the same body endeavoured to stop visits to a holy spring at Struthill by requesting the assistance of the earl of Perth in demolishing the chapel, cutting down the tree that overhung it, and defacing the fountain. This had not yet been carried out the following decade, despite several efforts to “deale earnestlie’ with the nobleman in question, who excused himself by saying that ‘he could gett none that wold undertake’

161. Records of the Kirk of Scotland, Containing the Acts and Proceedings of the General Assemblies, from

the Year 1638 Downwards, ed. Alexander Peterkin (Edinburgh, 1838), 279; Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, v. 395. See also Spicer, Calvinist Churches, 88-90.

162. Only the title of the ‘Act anent Idolatrous monuments in Ruthwell’ now survives. See R. I. Page, “An Early Drawing of the Ruthwell Cross’, Medieval Archaeology, 3 (1959), 285—8. The

two broken sections were kept in the church in the mid-18th c.: Richard Pococke, Tours in Scotland 1747, 1750, 1760 by Richard Pococke, Bishop of Meath, ed. Daniel William Kemp, Scottish History Society (Edinburgh, 1887), 32. 163. Robert Baillie, The Letters and Fournals of Robert Baillie, A.M., Principal of the University of Glasgow M.DC. XXX VII—MDC.LXI, ed. David Laing, 3 vols. (Edinburgh, 1841-2), 1. 366.

IDOLS IN THE LANDSCAPE 127 the work.'°* The synod of Argyll gave notice of its intention to enforce the measure against idolatrous monuments ‘to which the vulgar superstitiously

resorts to worship’ in 1642; the following year it told the presbytery of Dunbarton ‘to ditt up and demolish’ a well at Lochlongshead to the end that ‘it be no more a stumbleing block’ to the local populace. The rituals associated with such sites, together with traditional customs performed on holy days, were recognized as ‘a meane to retaine in the peoples minds memorialls of the inbred superstitiouse conceit of the holines’ of particular times and places.

Another long-running saga, in this instance the destruction of the spring had been frustrated by the death of the man to whom the task was entrusted. '°°

No less indicative of the popular intransigence with which the Kirk met is the struggle of the Synod of Aberdeen to stop pilgrimage to St Mary’s Well at Seggatt: twice ordered to be ‘stopt up by stones’ in the middle years of

the seventeenth century, on both occasions it was cleared out by the local inhabitants, after which it was decided not ‘to waire any more paines on it’.'° Sometimes ministers and magistrates were obliged to admit defeat. Other beliefs associated with the sacred landscape were also proving hard

to eradicate. In 1646 two offenders were accused of ‘sorcery’ by the presbytery of Strathbogie ‘in allotting and giving over some land to the old goodman’, which remained untilled. They denied this crime and earnestly promised to manure it. Five years later an elder of the kirk of Rynie was commended for his ‘ingenuitie’ after he declared his intention (‘be the assistance of God’) to labour a plot in the parish which people were afraid to cultivate out of mingled fear and respect for the capricious fairies to whom it was dedicated.'®’ In 1656 the presbytery of Inverness and Dingwall

instituted a special commission into the ‘heathinishe practizes’ of people who circumambulated ruined chapels and travelled to wells, stones, and a 164. National Archives of Scotland, CH 2/449/1 (Minutes of the Presbytery of Perth and Stirling 1639-51), fos. 15, 35, $2, 103, 111, 151. In 1642 they had claimed not to have seen the act. See also Spicer, Calvinist Churches, 90. 165. Minutes of the Synod of Argyll 1639-1651, ed. Duncan C. MacTavish, Scottish History Society (Edinburgh, 1943), 36, 45, $9, 67. 166. Morris, Scottish Healing Wells, 190; Janet and Colin Bord, Sacred Waters: Holy Wells and Water Lore in Britain and Ireland (1985), 33. For this well, see also Selections... Aberdeen, ed. Stuart,

221. Similar difficulties were experienced elsewhere in Europe: Donald A. McColl, ‘Fribourg’s Public Fountains and the Coming of the Reformation’, in James van Horn Melton (ed.), Cultures of Communication from Reformation to Enlightenment (Aldershot, 2002), 158-97 at

180, observes that the council of Bern had to reseal the entrance to the cave of the Swiss patron St Beatus on Lake Thun several times after initially blocking it up in 1530, after worshippers repeatedly broke through the mortar work. 167. Extracts... Strathbogie, ed. Stuart, 208-9, 71 respectively. See also pp. xxiv—xxv.

128 IDOLS IN THE LANDSCAPE loch associated with the seventh-century Irish missionary St Mourie. They were also horrified to find that people were divining the future by thrusting their heads through a hole in a round stone: if they could they believed they

would live to return to the place; if not then they conceived this to be ‘ominous’. The minister was instructed to labour to convince them of their

error by catechizing and ‘by evidenceing the hand of God against such abhomina|tio]nes’.'°® So sensitized was the session of Elgin to the sin of idolatry that in November 1649 it summoned Andrew Man for allegedly “wsing some superstitious ceremonies’ to a stone ‘as taking of]f] his bonat to

it’. He insisted he had set it up merely as a boundary marker and denied having worshipped it, but the elders and four honest men were nevertheless ordered to go the following morning to ‘break it all in peaces’.'©” However innocent its origins, this was too reminiscent of Old Testament paganism to be tolerated by a nation that had cemented its sacred alliance with the Lord in a binding covenant. In England and Wales too, official and clandestine assaults upon images and idols accompanied the descent into war between 1640 and 1642. The

spontaneous outbreaks of religious vandalism against images, altar rails, surplices, prayer books, and other items of church furniture that marked this period were stirred up by a hatred of the innovations introduced by the Caroline ecclesiastical hierarchy which readily spilled over into concern about eradicating what had been overlooked in the initial phases of what the godly saw as an imperfect and partial Reformation.'’” The mood was summed up by Cornelius Burgess in the sermon he delivered to the House of Commons on the occasion of its public fast on 17 November 1640, the anniversary of Queen Elizabeth’s accession in 1558. Recalling the glorious exploits of the great Hebrew king Asa, he urged his auditors to enter into a solemn bond with God to cast away, “as a Menstrous cloth’, the idols that 168. Records of the Presbyteries of Inverness and Dingwall 1643-1688, ed. William Mackay, Scottish

History Society (Edinburgh, 1896), 279-81. 169. Extracts from the Records of the Kirk-Session of Elgin, 1584-1779, ed. William Cramond (Elgin,

1867), 266. Note that the 1641 act had also prohibited the erection of superstitious monuments. 170. For the context, see David Cressy, England on Edge: Crisis and Revolution (Oxford, 2006), esp. ch. 9, but especially John Walter, Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution: The

Colchester Plunderers (Cambridge, 1999); id., ‘““Abolishing Superstition with Sedition”? The

Politics of Popular Iconoclasm in England, 1640-1642’, P&P 183 (2004), 79-123; 1d., ‘Popular Iconoclasm and the Politics of the Parish in Eastern England, 1640-1642’, HF 47 (2004), 261-90; 1d., ‘““Affronts and Insolencies”: The Voices of Radwinter and Popular Opposition to Laudianism’, EHR 122 (2007), 35—60.

IDOLS IN THE LANDSCAPE 129 continued to threaten the country with devastating plagues. If they neglected to ‘throughly cleanse the Land of these spirituall whoredomes’, he warned, ‘in stead of a blessing upon your Consultations and proceedings, you will draw downe a Curse that will cleave to you...and scatter like poyson over all parts and Corners... till all be consumed and become a desolation.’ He could not countenance the ‘tumultuous or seditious spirits’ who had lately taken up this task without commission, but exhorted MPs to put their hand to the wheel.'’' In September of the following year the first phase of the revolution began, with an edict that transferred responsibility for iconoclasm from the Church to lay representatives of the state.'’~ Eighteen months later, William Greenhill took up the text of Matthew 3: 10 (Now also the Axe is laid unto the root of the trees...’) to remind the Commons that idolatry was ‘a Kingdome destroying sinne’ and to urge them

to do yet more to cut away the ‘bryars and thornes [that] do grow in the Sanctuarie’ and to pulverize to dust the ‘cockatrice eggs’ which ‘breed Serpents’ that would consume it from within.'’” Duly admonished, the Long Parliament’s Committee for the Demolition of Monuments of Superstition and Idolatry, chaired by the redoubtable Sir Robert Harley, extended the process of purifying ecclesiastical buildings and the wider environment in which they resided another stage further. Retrospectively sanctioning the actions of several generations of illicit puritan iconoclasts, ordinances passed in 1643 and 1644 took the momentous step of insisting upon the destruction of offensive artefacts not just inside churches, but also outside in churchyards and ‘in any other open place’.'’* As Margaret Aston writes: ‘Idolatry was to be erased from every quarter, the pollution of the image wiped out of every street or square. The purification of the precise was not bounded by church walls or ground deemed holy; it imposed itself on universal space.’'”°

171. Cornelius Burgess, The first sermon, preached to the honourable House of Commons now assembled in Parliament at their publique fast. Novemb. 17. 1640 (1641), quotations at 67, 70.

172. See Aston, ‘Puritans and Iconoclasm’, 114. 173. William Greenhill, The axe at the root, a sermon preached before the honourable House of Commons,

at their publicke fast, April 26, 1643 (1643), quotations at 22, 42, 43. 174. Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, ed. Firth and Rait, 1. 265—6, 425-6. See also Spraggon,

Puritan Iconoclasm, ch. 3 for a full discussion of the evolution of Parliamentary policy. In Cambridgeshire, William Dowsing oversaw the removal of many crucifixes from church steeples and gables: these offensive symbols could no longer to be tolerated on ecclesiastical exteriors. See William Dowsing, The Fournal of William Dowsing: Iconoclasm in East Anglia

during the English Civil War, ed. Trevor Cooper (Woodbridge, 2001), 127-8, 240-1, 297, 369, 370, 372. 175. Aston, ‘Puritans and Iconoclasm’, 117.

130 IDOLS IN THE LANDSCAPE In anticipation of these edicts or as a direct consequence, many freestanding crosses now received their death sentence. In a parliamentary recess

in 1641, Harley himself, soon to be heralded ‘that most worthy Nehemiah of our dayes’, set about destroying images in the vicinity of his estate at Brampton Bryan in Herefordshire. At Wigmore, he took advantage of his status as patron of the living, personally pulling down the churchyard cross and causing it to be ‘beaten in pieces, even to dust’ with a sledgehammer, and then laid ‘in the footpath to be trodden on’. This and other incidents suggest that he modelled himself on King Josiah, who had burnt the idols

and groves in the fields of Kidron and stamped them into powder.'’® Cheapside Cross had suftered a further bout of defacement at the hands of nocturnal iconoclasts in January 1642, and a few months before the passing of the first Commons ordinance it was hauled down amidst much rejoicing on 2 May 1643, the mayor and aldermen having petitioned Parliament for special permission. Many assembled to see ‘the fatall fall of that whore’ and ‘Babylonish-Baud of Rome’: as the small crucifix on the top was dragged from its perch drums were beaten, trumpets sounded, and a mass of caps hurled in the air in celebration of ‘the happie downfall of Antichrist in England’. All this occurred, noted approving observers like John Vicars, on

the very day on which the cross itself had been invented by St Helena (Fig. 2.3).'’” In Doncaster the gilt crucifixes adorning the Hall Cross were shot down around the same time, along with statues of the disciples inside

the niches on the entrance to a bridge.'’® Abingdon Cross was another impressive medieval monument to suffer in 1644, at the hands of Sir William Waller and his forces, who levelled it with the intent of leaving no trace of popery to stimulate the imagination. They struck down other 176. Jacqueline Eales, Puritans and Roundheads: The Harleys of Brampton Bryan and the Outbreak of

the English Civil War (Cambridge, 1990), 115 and see 182-4 for his activities. When he destroyed a painting of God the father found in a stable in 1639, his daughter Brilliana threw ‘the dust of it upon the water’ (ibid. 47). Harley later visited Christ’s Hospital and caused ‘a monstrous great Crucifix’ to be destroyed and broken into a thousand pieces, in much the same fashion: John Vicars, Magnalia dei Anglicana. Or, England’s Parliamentary-Chronicle (1646), 290. The relevant scriptural citations are 2 Kings 22; 2 Chron. 34. As early as 1649, some of the shafts of the decapitated crosses were being fitted with sundials: Alfred Watkins, The Old Standing Crosses of Herefordshire (Hereford and London, 1930), 32. 177. Quotations from Vicars, Magnalia, 326—7. See also The downe-fall of Dagon, or the taking downe of Cheap-side crosse this second of May, 1643 (1643); Cressy, “Downfall of Cheapside Cross’;

Budd, “Rethinking Iconoclasm’. 178. Abraham de la Pryme, The Diary of Abraham de la Pryme, the Yorkshire Antiquary, ed. Charles

Jackson, Surtees Society, 54 (1870), 294, 296. The dating of this is vague: Pryme says it occurred ‘in Cromwell’s days’.

IDOLS IN THE LANDSCAPE 131

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132 IDOLS IN THE LANDSCAPE

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IDOLS IN THE LANDSCAPE 133 such ‘Antichristian Monsters’ as they marched through the Oxfordshire countryside, including one at Burford, as if these had been “placed there of purpose to defie them’.'’” Sir William Purefoy had led the attack on the ancient monuments of Warwick the previous summer, animating his men in their ‘so barbarous work’ and standing by as they destroyed the market cross, ‘not leaving one Stone upon another’.'*’ Sometimes the process of purgation could have seditious overtones: the governor of Southampton pulled down a picture of Queen Elizabeth from the north gate of the town, blaming her for the current troubles and saying that ‘if shee had made a thorow Reformation all this fighting would have been spared’.'®' The urban and rural landscape was closely implicated in the political struggle between Parliament and monarchy to monopolize the memory of England’s Protestant past.

Official initiatives carried out in obedience to the legislation cannot always be neatly differentiated from more disorderly acts of profanation and destruction perpetrated by Parliamentary soldiers which overstepped the letter of the law. The “blessed Reformation’ that these ‘military saints’, together with radical sectarians, set out to accomplish stretched far beyond the list of items sanctioned by Harley and his colleagues. It encompassed the physical shells of churches and cathedrals, which extremists believed to be

irredeemably polluted by Catholic (and indeed Anglican) worship. In Hampshire, when Waller and his regiment assaulted a former monastery that had been converted into a church, they were commended by a local preacher for this ‘religious Act’ and urged ‘to goe on as they had begun’. '** Some felt Harley himself had been too lenient in allowing St James’ Chapel in Whitehall to stand after its altars, images, and rails were torn down and

demolished, seeing that ‘it was as full of Adultery and Idolatry as ever Oratory was in this Kingdome...and the iniquity cannot but sinke deeply into the wals’. Ironically such activists implied that depravity could be

179. Mercurius aulicus, communicating the intelligence and affaires of the court, to the rest of the kingdome . . . the

22 weeke (1644), 1003;... The 25 weeke, 1043-4.

180. According to the hostile account in [Bruno Ryves], Angliae ruina: or, Englands ruine ([London], 1647), 59. For other accounts, see Mercurius aulicus. The foure and twentieth weeke ([1647]), 320; Mercurius rusticus... VI week. Fune 24, 1643 (1643), 46-7. See also Philip Tennant, Edgehill and Beyond: The People’s War in the South Midlands 1642-1645 (Stroud, 1992), 110-11. On Purefoy, see Ann Hughes, Politics, Society and Civil War in Warwickshire, 1620-1660 (Cambridge, 1987), 174-5. 181. Mercurius aulicus... The seventh and thirtieth weeke (1643), S11. 182. Mercurius aulicus... The eleventh weeke (1643), 130.

134 IDOLS IN THE LANDSCAPE physically localized in precisely the manner they denied to sanctity. Petitioners at Winchester who sought to save their cathedral protested that they did not do so out of any ‘superstitious conceite’ of the material fabric itself but out of a desire to propagate the Gospel.'®’ The whole concept of sacred space was once more under serious assault. Declaring that ‘he conceived no Holiness to be in any place, or Burial; and that all Earth was fit for that use’ (this being a ‘Hethenish Principle’), one lieutenant general interred the bodies of the slain in a mass grave in unconsecrated ground. Ditches and dunghills, barns and stables were no less fit for the purpose of liturgical and funeral services than dedicated oratories, sepulchres, and churches.'** By inversion, the latter were incapable of being desecrated by being used to house troops or to store ammunition or provisions.

The soldiers of the New Model Army also set their sights on other eyesores that blighted the face of the countryside. The Holy Thorn at Glastonbury was subjected to further disfigurement by Roundhead forces, who cut it down in an act of ‘pure devotion’, as John Taylor the water poet commented sarcastically in an account of his travels in the West Country during that decade. Grubbed up by the roots and burnt to ashes, the winterflowering hawthorn had become tainted by association with another target of puritan ire—the celebration of Christmas, which was formally abolished as a pagan remnant by an ordinance of 1647. The Anglican minister Edward Symmonds was quite clear about the malicious motives of the “Militia men’ who had cut this ‘teaching Tree’ in pieces: their aim was ‘that it might no longer Preach unto men, the Birth day of their Saviour’.'°? Another victim of what John Aubrey later called ‘the fanatique rage of the late times’ was

183. Mercurius Britannicus communicating the affaires of great Britaine: For the better information of the

people, no. 35, 6 May—13 May 1644 (1644), 272. For the Winchester petition, see Spraggon, Puritan Iconoclasm, 216.

184. [William Dugdale], A short view of the late troubles in England (Oxford, 1681), 561-2. 185. John Taylor, fohn Taylor’s Wandering, to see the wonders of the west (1649), 6; Edward Symmonds, A vindication of King Charles: or, a loyal subjects duty (n.p., 1648 [7]), 76. Iconoclastic attacks on the Thorn are also documented in The Weekly Post (26 Dec. 1654-2 Fan. 1655) (1655), 4045-6; Joshua Childrey, Britannia Baconica: or, the natural rarities of England, Scotland, & Wales (1661), 36; William Annand, Mysterium pietatis or the mysterie of godlinesse (1671), 25—6; John Aubrey, The

Natural History of Wiltshire, ed. John Britton, Wiltshire Topographical Society (1847), 57. For the crusade against Christmas, see Christopher Durston, “Lords of Misrule: The Puritan War on

Christmas 1642-60’, History Today, 35/12 (1985), 7-14; Ronald Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year 1400-1700 (Oxford, 1994), 206-8, 209-11, 215-17. For a more extensive discussion, see my “The Holy Thorn of Glastonbury: The Evolution of a Legend in Post-Reformation England’, Parergon, 21 (2004), I-25.

IDOLS IN THE LANDSCAPE 135 that graphic symbol of fertility, the maypole, itself banned by Parliament in 1657 as a ‘Heathenist vanity’.'°° The shrine of St Winefride at Holywell was also defaced during the civil wars, probably by Sir William Brereton and his men, whose tour of North Wales in 1643 was accompanied by much godly vandalism.'®’ In Scotland, an elaborately carved fountain over the Cross Well in Linlithgow was demolished by occupying Cromwellian soldiers during the Commonwealth. Despite the fact that it was the usual venue for the expression of contrition by delinquents disciplined by the kirk session,

so was the market cross at Perth, the stone being appropriated for constructing a citadel. St Catherine’s spring at Liberton was also filled in and mutilated in the 1650s, while a marble image erected near a well at Barton in Lincolnshire with the same dedication was later remembered as having been ‘all broke in pieces in Cromwell’s time’.'®° In the Welsh parish of Llanwe-

nog, golden-ringed trout that swam in a hallowed fountain were also ‘destroyed in ye Oliverian Revoluc’on’. The scandal of popular reverence for the spring and its fishy familiar spirits was insupportable to those intent upon purging the realm of lingering traces of pagan animism. '*” Many other medieval well houses which had hitherto evaded ruination were now reduced to rubble. According to the eighteenth-century Cornish antiquary William Borlase, in the 1640s and 1650s ‘it was reckon’d very 200d religion to raze all such Chapels’ to the ground. The destruction of Madron Well seems to have been a relatively orderly aftair carried out by the parish constable in accordance with a warrant issued by Major Ceely, but elsewhere such acts were evidently more frenzied. Not satisfied with correcting the errors of the common people, remarked Borlase, ‘the weak enthusiasts in the great rebellion’ had felt it their duty to ‘destroy the very place too, as if the very stones had been defil’d’. At St Wen, one Lieutenant Best did not stop short at dismantling a well house consecrated to Mary 186. Bodl., Aubrey MS 3, fo. 81°. See Spraggon, Puritan Iconoclasm, 83, 232. For the ordinances, see Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, ed. Firth and Rait, 1. 421 and 1. 1163. 187. David Thomas, ‘Saint Winifred’s Well and Chapel, Holywell’, Fournal of the Historical Society

of the Church in Wales, 8 (1958), 15-31 at 28-9. See BL, Harley MS 2125, fo. 135” for Brereton’s iconoclastic activities in Flintshire in 1643. John Taylor noted that the chapel was ‘now much defaced by the injury of these late Wars’: A short relation of a long journey... encompassing the principalitie of Wales (1653), 11.

188. Por Linlithgow and Liberton, see Morris, Scottish Healing Wells, 144, 95. For Perth, see Spottiswoode Miscellany, ed. Maidment, 317. For Barton, see Pryme, Diary of Abraham de la Pryme, ed. Jackson, 142. 189. Edward Lhwyd, Parochialia. Being a Summary of Answers to ‘Parochial Queries’ in Order to a Geographical Dictionary, etc, of Wales, 3 vols., Archaeologia Cambrensis Supplements (1909-11), 1. 89.

136 IDOLS IN THE LANDSCAPE Magdalen and lodging his horses and parodically baptizing a broom in the chapel. Apparently inspired by the example of King Hezekiah in 2 Kings 18: 4, he proceeded to cut down the grove of large oak trees that surrounded it.'”? Singing psalms and stirred up by the preaching of Obadiah Sedgwick, Nehemiah Wharton and fellow soldiers in the Earl of Essex’s army committed various similar outrages on their way to fight the royalists at Worces-

ter (a city he described as the ‘very embleme of Gomorrah’) in 1642. Interestingly, though, they spared Sir Guy’s rocky hermitage near Warwick and the springs from which he had allegedly drunk, seemingly because they

were ‘antiquities’. Only the most radical of puritans equated these with idols.'”' The rock houses once occupied by anchorites in the Duke of Newcastle’s park outside Nottingham, however, were less fortunate, being demolished by the Roundheads, as an unsympathetic observer later

¢ » 192

commented, “under pretence of abhorrence of popery’. That most famous place of Irish pilgrimage, St Patrick’s Purgatory, was a more obvious target of Protestant ire. Partly reconstructed after the devastating raid in 1632, during the British Wars of Religion it was once more crushed and closed up. As the papal nuncio Giovanni Rinuccini reported to Rome in

1649: “At present, the fury of the Calvinists has levelled everything to the sround, and filled up the cave; and as thus they destroyed every vestige of the spot, so do they seek to cancel every trace of its memory.’ Two years later a Jesuit told how a company of Parliamentary cavalry and foot soldiers, assisted by an ‘irreligious mob’, had arrived on the island and in ‘an infuriated attempt’

expelled the Franciscan friars who cared for it, profaned the crypt with filth, and crammed it full of soil and stones, ‘So that no insult might be wanting’.'”° In the Barony of Forth in Co. Wexford Cromwellian soldiers also took a heavy toll of medieval monuments, breaking up and burning many wayside chapels and crosses and confiscating and destroying surviving 190. BL, Egerton MS 2657, fos. 28°, 179°. For other biblical exhortations to cut down groves, see Exod. 34: 13; Deut. 7: 5; 12: 13. 191. Henry Ellis (ed.), “Letters from a Subaltern Officer of the Earl of Essex’s Army, Written in the Summer and Autumn of 1642’, Archaeologia, 35 (1853), 310-34 at 326-7, 330, 325. Guy

of Warwick’s cave is described and illustrated in William Dugdale’s The Antiquities of Warwickshire (1656), 183—5 and facing plate. 192. Charles Deering, Nottinghamia vetus et nova. Or an historical account of the ancient and present state

of the town of Nottingham (Nottingham, 1751), 189. 193. Moran, History of the Catholic Archbishops, 336; a slightly different translation is given in The Embassy in Ireland of Monsignor G. B. Rinuccini, Archbishop of Fermo, in the Years 1645-1649, ed.

Annie Hutton (Dublin, 1873), §15. Benignus Millett, The Irish Franciscans, 1651-1665 (Rome, 1964), 303-4.

IDOLS IN THE LANDSCAPE 137 relics.'”* At Kilkenny they assembled in the market square and fired their muskets at the fourteenth-century cross, especially intent on destroying the sculptured figure of the crucifixion that atopped it to crown their ‘irreligious triumph’.'”” The visible effects of these military campaigns on the landscape of Ireland were sufficiently striking to prompt a German writer to comment two centuries later on the paucity of memorials to Catholic piety in the Irish countryside by contrast with that of the Continent.'”° The iconoclastic

atrocities committed by the English forces in the 1640s and 1650s left lacerating scars on the environment, as well as upon the Irish mind. Hostile Royalist and Romanist commentators typically condemned such acts of religious vandalism as the work of ‘a barbarous crew of Brownists’ and/or a vulgar, irrational, and drunken ‘rabble’. Yet it would be a mistake to swallow their claims that this was nothing more than lower-class hooliganism or the ‘Anabaptisticall fury’ of a lunatic fringe.'”’ Rather we need to see them as forms of ‘lay theology in action’, as evidence of the agency of ordinary people in cleansing their land of abominable idols. To quote John

Walter, these initiatives reveal ‘the corrosive power of conscience called into being by the (incomplete) Reformations of the sixteenth century’.'”” The soldiers and civilians who carried out attacks of this kind sincerely believed that every single Christian had a responsibility to eliminate remain-

ing traces of the reign of Antichrist. In a context in which the monarchy itself had come to be regarded as a horn of the Beast, this was no longer the sole prerogative of rulers and governors. Individual subjects were not only

empowered by the biblical injunction in Deuteronomy 12: 3 (‘ye shall overthrow their altars, and break their pillars, and burn their groves with fire; and ye shall hew down the graven images of their gods, and destroy the 194. TCD, MS 883/1, p. 49, printed as J. Synnott, ‘An Account of the Barony of Forth, in the County of Wexford, Written at the Close of the Seventeenth Century’, ed. Herbert F. Hore, Fournal of the Kilkenny and South-East of Ireland Archaeological Society, NS 4 (1862), 53-84

at 69. 195. William Carrigan, The History and Antiquities of the Diocese of Ossory, 4 vols. (Dublin, 1905), ll. §9—60.

196. J. G. Kohl, Ireland: Dublin, the Shannon, Limerick, Cork and the Kilkenny Races, the Round Towers, the Lakes of Killarney, the County of Wicklow, O’Connell and the Repeal Association; Belfast, and the Giant’s Causeway (1844), 106-7. 197. Quoted from a Royalist newsbook in Mercurius Britannicus. 30 Sept.—7 Oct. 1644 (1644), 410. [Bruno Ryves], Or, the countries complaint, of the sacrileges, prophanations, and plundrings, committed by the schismatiques, on the cathedral churches of this kingdome (Oxford, 1646) [part of Angliae ruina], preface.

198. Walter, ““Abolishing Superstition with Sedition”’, 112 and passim. See also Wandel, Voracious Idols and Violent Hands, introduction, p. 198, and passim.

138 IDOLS IN THE LANDSCAPE names of them out of that place’), but also by the Solemn League and Covenant by which Parliament had bound itself to labour for the purity of the true religion in the three kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland and to turn away the ‘wrath and heavy indignation’ of the Lord.'”” Animated by sermons and tracts which informed them that He sometimes chose humble instruments to effect great things and admonished them ‘to fear not to venture their lives, limbes or estates in the quarrell of Christ’,“°” the New Model Army’s self-appointed iconoclasts found further warrant for their conduct in Robert Ram’s Soldiers’ Catechism (1644). ‘God hath put the Sword of Reformation into the Souldiers hand...that they should cancell and demolish those Monuments of Superstition and Idolatry’, it declared, ‘especially seeing the Magistrate and the Minister that should have done it

formerly, neglected it.’ Convinced that past governors were guilty of criminal negligence, they felt compelled to take action themselves to eliminate these hazards to the spiritual health of their fellow brethren. While this was not to be done in ‘a tumultuous manner’, Protestants who failed to stand up to the challenge would find themselves under the curse of Meroz (Judges §: 23) and in danger of being spewed out of the mouth of the Almighty like the lukewarm Church of Laodicea (Revelation 3: 16).°”' Another biblical text that acquired acute importance to those who engaged themselves in the Cromwellian cause was the story of the sin of Achan: without the elimination of accursed things the new Israel they were build-

ing would find itself consumed from within.~°* The providential and millenarian zeal that had been a major engine of military conflict from the beginning was critical in inspiring the saints to carry out—sometimes quite literally—a root-and-branch reform of the landscape.~”°

199. The Stuart Constitution 1603-1688: Documents and Commentary, ed. J. P. Kenyon (2nd edn., Cambridge, 1986), 239-42. 200. William Whitfield, Idolaters ruin and Englands triumph, or the meditations of a maimed soldier (1645), 35. See also J. P.’s A spirituall snapsacke for the Parliament souldiers (1643). 201. Cromwell’s Soldiers Catechism: Written for the Encouragement and Instruction of All that Have Taken up Arms, Especially the Common Soldiers, ed. Walter Begley (1900), 21 and 7.

202. For the importance of this passage in Cromwell’s outlook, see Blair Worden, ‘Oliver Cromwell and the Sin of Achan’, in Derek Beales and Geoffrey Best (eds.), History, Society and the Churches: Essays in Honour of Owen Chadwick (Cambridge, 1985), 125-45.

203. The degree of sectarian radicalism in the army and the role of chaplains in promoting it has been disputed by Mark A. Kishlansky, The Rise of the New Model Army (Cambridge, 1979),

ch. 3, esp. pp. 70-5, but see Anne Laurence, Parliamentary Army Chaplains 1642-1651 (Woodbridge, 1990), ch. 6 and Ian Gentles, The New Model Army in England, Ireland and Scotland, 1645-1653 (Oxford, 1992), ch. 4, though the latter stresses the limits of military

IDOLS IN THE LANDSCAPE 139

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186 BRITANNIA SANCTA fulfil their earnest wish to rebuild the chapel of Ffynnon Fair near St Asaph when he came to the throne, but in Derbyshire the Eyres bravely anticipated his accession by erecting one next to Trinity Well in 1683.'°° A stone slab erected above a sacred spring at Oran in Co. Roscommon reads ‘Pray for the soule of Pa. William Hanley who caused this monument to be made

in honour of God and St Patrick of Ireland Anno Domini I.H.S. 1684’, while Edmund Dowling erected a church in the monastic precincts of Clonmacnoise ‘to the greater glory of God & use of his posterity’ in 1689. Commemorated by a plaque, the restoration of the ancient cathedral itself

had been overseen by Charles Coghlan, vicar general of the diocese, in 1647, following Catholic reappropriation of the building in the aftermath of the Irish rebellion six years earlier.'°” Overt architectural statements of this kind were obviously perilous for much of the period, but some dared to make them, especially in areas where numerical majority made Catholics audacious and at moments when hopes

for the restoration of Rome to political dominance were high. The door of the chapel at Duxendean in Lancashire bore the date 1611 and the letters I.H.S. R.LE.I, and, according to Popish Plot informers in 1679, the house of the recusant Thomas Gunter at Abergavenny likewise carried ‘the marks

of the Jesuites on the outside’-—the monogram of the Lord that was a distinctive badge of the Society, which was conducting a successful mission in this mountainous region.''” In the Scottish Highlands, Catholic chapels of the same era seem to have been more primitive: St Ninian’s Tynet near Fochabers was a long low structure that had been converted from a sheep-

cote.''' However, even fully functioning barns could assume symbolic shapes: one at Ince Blundell, which could accommodate up to 300 people, 108. NLW, MS 12646C, fo. 26°; James Rattue, The Living Stream: Holy Wells in Historical Context

(Woodbridge, 1995), 110. On the refurbishment of crosses and wells, see also Rachel Moss, ‘Appropriating the Past: Romanesque Spoila in Seventeenth-Century Ireland’, Architectural History, 51 (2008), 63-86, esp. 70-80. 109. C. F. Tebbutt, “St Patrick’s Well, Oran, Eire’, Folklore, 73 (1962), 55-6; James Lyttleton, ‘Faith of our Fathers: The Gaelic Aristocracy in Co. Offaly and the Counter-Reformation’, in James Lyttleton and Colin Rynne (eds.), Plantation Ireland: Settlement and Material Culture c.1550-c.1700 (Dublin, 2009), 182—206 at 189-92.

110. Lancashire Registers, ed. Smith, 166. Joseph Herbert Canning (ed.), “Catholic Registers of Abergavenny, Mon., 1740-1838’, in CRS Miscellanea, CRS 27 (1927), 98-235 at 98; Bryan Little, Catholic Churches since 1623: A Study of Roman Catholic Churches in England and Wales

from Penal Times to the Present Decade (1966), 23-4; W. Haines, [Abergavenny Catholic Chapel], Archaeologia Cambrensis, 6th ser. 8 (1908), 291-2.

111. Peter F. Anson, “Catholic Church Building in Scotland from the Reformation until the Outbreak of the First World War, 1560-1914’, Innes Review, 5 (1954), 125—40.

BRITANNIA SANCTA 187 was built in the form of a cross.''* The gradual transition from houses, stables, and farmyards to dedicated buildings made possible by the policies of

the later Stuarts and the de facto toleration of Catholics in the eighteenth century facilitated the erection of more substantial and permanent chapels, though these remained vulnerable to attack at times of intense crisis such as the Glorious Revolution and the Jacobite rebellions of 1715 and 1745. At

Hathersage in Derbyshire, for instance, Catholics felt secure enough to move from worshipping in the ruins of an old chapel at North Lees to a purpose-built stone mass house in the late 1680s, but their confidence was short-lived: during the tumults of 1688 it was unroofed and sacked by a Protestant mob.''” At Fernyhalgh, a new chapel was likewise erected on the old site near the ancient Lady well when James II ascended the throne and Bishop Layburne confirmed no fewer than 1,069 people there in September 1687. But the Williamite coup and later anti-Catholic spasms forced the

incumbent to flee.''* The various commissions instituted to investigate lands bestowed for “superstitious uses’ during this decade are also indicative

of a new determination on the part of the wealthy Catholic laity to reendow the church with property: one such bequest in Monmouthshire was designed to sustain a Franciscan priest and the Jesuit college of St Xavier in Hereford.''? At moments of emergency, congregations found it necessary to revert to outdoor locations: the holy spring at Marsden, near Blackburn,

was probably used as a venue for communion and baptism only when conditions precluded the use of the chapel at Samlesbury.'"® The pattern of development in Ireland was chronologically different and dependent on the varying distribution and density of Protestant settlement. In some parts of the country the erection of mass houses was possible in the earlier part of the seventeenth century; elsewhere the hostility of heretics precluded the construction of oratories.''’ In 1672 Bishop John Brenan of 112. Blundell, Old Catholic Lancashire, 111. 69.

113. Little, Catholic Churches, 25-6. 114. Lancashire Registers, ed. Smith, 1-2; Blundell, Old Catholic Lancashire, 1. 169-74. T15. ‘Enquiry as to Lands Given for Catholic Purposes (1689)’, in John Hobson Matthews (ed.), ‘Records Relating to Catholicism in the South Wales Marches, 17th and 18th Centuries’, in CRS Miscellanea I, CRS 2 (1906), 299-303. See also George Elphage Hind (ed.), ‘Official

Enquiry as to the Estate of Robert Charnock of Leyland, Lancashire, Priest, Left for “Superstitious Purposes”, 1687’, in CRS Miscellanea X, CRS 17 (1915), 327-62. 116. Margaret Pannikar, “A Restored Holy Well: Marsden Well’, North West Catholic History, 18

(1991), 33-6. I owe this reference to Anne Dillon. 117. For the geography of mass houses, see Smyth, Map-Making, Landscapes and Memory, 371 and fig. 10.10.

188 BRITANNIA SANCTA Waterford reported to the Congregatio de Propaganda Fide that many priests in his diocese were forced to celebrate the Eucharist on the hills and in the open country, spreading a tent over the altar to protect it from the elements, but that in other districts where Catholics or charitable Protestants oranted land for the purpose “commodious and decorous’ chapels had been

built. Here too the ebb and flow of persecution affected the visibility of Catholic activity. Sometimes Bishop Brenan was able to move about his diocese with relative freedom, administering confirmation to large numbers ‘under the mid-day sun’; on other occasions he was reduced to hiding in a

miserable cottage in the Fews mountains. In August 1675 his colleague Dominic Burke wrote to an official in Rome from the cave in which he had been obliged to take refuge.''® The natural contours of the Irish landscape provided the illicit Catholic episcopate with places of asylum. This was even more true of England during the Elizabethan and early Stuart period, when priests were regularly forced to evade pursuivants by hiding in caverns, forests, and other isolated locations. In 1593 a Protestant informant described how the Catholic clergy fled into the Peak District,

where they found ‘harbors in the Stony Rockes, and ther ar releved by shippards, so that that Country is a Sanctuary ffor all wycked men’.''” The

farmer Richard Jebbe constructed a rudimentary safehouse enclosed by bushes in a secluded spot on land that he cultivated.'*? Writing in 1581, Robert Persons referred to similar stratagems for protecting missionaries from the violence of officials, adding that recusants themselves often took to ‘the woods and thickets, to ditches and holes even, for concealment’ when their houses were raided: such conditions were strongly reminiscent of ‘the

custom in the primitive church’.'*' When rumours that Catholics were shortly to be massacred were rife, his fellow Jesuit William Weston remembered, people spent the night under the stars rather than risk being killed in their beds. '~* In Scotland too priests like Father Abercromby retreated from

118. John Brenan, A Bishop of the Penal Time: Being Letters and Reports of Fohn Brenan Bishop of Waterford (1671-93) and Archbishop of Cashel (1677-93), ed. P. Canon Power, Irish Historical Documents, 3 (Dublin and Cork, 1932), 13, 21-2; Benignus Millett, ‘Calendar of volume 3 (1672-5) of the Scritture Riferite nei Congressi, Irlanda, in Propaganda Archives: Part 2, ff. 201-518’, Collectanea Hibernica, 21-2 (1979-80), 7—81 at 67. 119. Unpublished Documents, ed. Pollen, 221-2. 120. “An Ancient Editor’s Note Book’, in The Troubles of Our Catholic Forefathers, Related by Themselves, ed. John Morris, 3 vols. (1872-7), i. 18. 121. Letters and Memorials, ed. Hicks, 86. 122. Weston, Autobiography, 32.

BRITANNIA SANCTA 189 the high roads to the beaten tracks and moved perpetually from place to place to escape scrutiny; another said his hours in the fields and lurked all day in the hills dressed as a peasant. The military conflicts of the 1640s and 1650s compelled many to take shelter once again in rocks and caves, valleys and precipices, renewing their sense of affinity with the ancient Christians

who had inhabited the catacombs.'*” The Counter-Reformation priesthood thus forged an intimate link with the varied terrain which they traversed in order to succour the faithful. The landscape became a sanctuary

in both senses of the world: a haven from repression and an enclave for worship.

Islands of the Saints: Missionaries, Laypeople, and the Revival of Medieval Holy Places Much evidence can be assembled to demonstrate that the clergy collaborated with their flocks in reclaiming old hallowed spaces, promoting them as places of pilgrimage and turning them into mission stations. Unlike their colleagues in Italy, Bavaria, and the Spanish Netherlands, those labouring in territories under the yoke of heresy lacked the backing of the state and a fully-fledged ecclesiastical hierarchy, but this did not stop them from endeavouring to transform sacred sites scarred by the religious conflicts of the long Reformation into symbols of confessional bellicosity no less compelling

than Loreto, Alt6tting, or Scherpenheuvel. Nor did it prevent them from creatively exploiting them as instruments to reform popular piety. Friction and tension were inevitable by-products of this process, but the dominant motif of the story told in the following pages is the successful convergence of Tridentine confessionalism with devotional strands at the heart of medieval Catholicism. In the course of the period, the clergy harnessed many numinous sites and turned them to pastoral and evangelical advantage. In 1650, Lady Walmsley presented a house at Osmotherly to the Franciscans in return for taking care of the crumbling ruins of the Marian chapel above Mount Grace Priory and supplying the spiritual and physical needs of pilgrims. The friars soon made it a base for their wider ministry on the moorland and one of their number, 123. Narratives, ed. Forbes-Leith, 226-7; Memoirs, ed. Forbes-Leith, i. 76 and see also i. 49, 212, 245, 275, 293; ll. $5, 146-7, 195.

190 BRITANNIA SANCTA Hugh Goodyear, was buried in the vicinity of the shrine in 1677.'~* The same was true of the chantry chapel of St Francis at Goosnargh, which dated from 1281: situated on a wooded hilltop, this too became a focal point for a formidable community of local recusants, which engendered several priests and martyrs.'~” The late seventeenth-century rejuvenation of nearby Fernyhalgh and its use as a quasi-episcopal centre for mass confirmations has already been mentioned. One of Northumberland’s chief centres of Catholic worship and proselytizing activity was Biddleston Hall, in the vicinity of which was Holystone and a spring where St Paulinus was said to have

baptized 3,000 converts in the seventh century. Launched in 1693, the Benedictine mission in Knaresborough evidently commandeered the craggy caves which hermits like St Robert had occupied for similar purposes. '~° In Ireland, the early seventeenth-century Cistercian revival focused on Holy Cross Abbey in Tipperary, which still retained a relic of the famous crucifix. '~’ In Scotland and Wales, the Jesuits actively encouraged veneration of ‘localities consecrated by old tradition to the Blessed Virgin’ and saints including wayside oratories and fountains, celebrating the wonders wrought at springs like St Hilary’s well in Anglesey in their annual letters and in manuscript miracle collections.'~* The Irish Franciscan missionaries in the Hebrides eagerly sought faculties to reconsecrate ancient chapels and cemeteries linked with the Celtic saints who had originally brought the light of Christianity to these outlying islands.'~’ Like the Jesuits who conducted rural missions in Brittany in imitation of the first evangelists of Armorica,'”” they modelled themselves on St Columba and his disciples. It was only fitting, they argued ina letter of 1626, that ‘the faith which was first brought to the Scots from Ireland should be revived by men from the same country’. They were not unwilling to

124. Storey, Mount Grace Lady Chapel, ch. 6; The English Franciscan Nuns 1619-1821 and the Friars Minor of the Same Province 1618-1761, ed. Richard Trappes-Lomax, CRS 24 (1922), 272.

125. St Francis, Hill Chapel, in CRS 31. 126. Joseph S. Hansom (ed.), “The Catholic Registers of Biddleston Hall, Alwinton, Northumberland, the Seat of the Selby Family, 1767-1840’, in CRS Miscellanea IX, CRS 14 (1914), 249-50; T. G. Cummins, G. F. Englebach, and J. S. Hansom (eds.), “The Catholic Registers of Knaresborough, 1765-1840’, in CRS Miscellanea, CRS 22 (1921), 220-1.

127. Raymond Gillespie and Bernadette Cunningham, ‘Holy Cross Abbey and the Counter Reformation in Tipperary’, Tipperary Historical Fournal (1991), 171-80. 128. Memoirs, ed. Forbes-Leith, 11. 100-1 and see also 11. 74. St Hilary’s well is mentioned in a story

included in a manuscript register of miracles performed at Holywell: C. de Smedt (ed.), ‘Documenta de S. Wenefreda’, Analecta Bollandiana, 6 (1887), 348. 129. Irish Franciscan Mission, ed. Giblin, 57-8, 93. 130. Tingle, ‘Sacred Space of Julien Maunoir’, 248-51.

BRITANNIA SANCTA 191 accede to requests to bless wells to ensure that islanders had a regular supply of holy water.'”' Members of the order of St Vincent de Paul, who were sent to this region in 1651, were no less quick to cater for the local thirst for sources of

supernatural power that would improve the fertility of the barren landscape from which they eked out a living. On Barra Dermit Duggan sprinkled holy water on the beach where the islanders collected seaweed to manure their fields, with the result that the sea threw up such a quantity that it ended the dearth and lasted over a year; near Knoydart in the Highlands, his Lazarist colleague Francis White blessed Loch Hourn, restoring the plentiful catches of herring it had previously yielded.'’~ Elsewhere priests seemed to have used holy water to dispel the curse thought to lie on pieces of land known as the

Goodman’s Croft, making them suitable for the cultivation of crops.'”” Cultivating a reputation as thaumaturges and presenting themselves as modern reincarnations of the religious heroes of old, they consciously reactivated the memory of medieval saints, who were still deeply revered by the inhabitants of the rugged regions which they evangelized. Similar patterns are apparent further south. When the Jesuits of the English Province began to organize themselves formally into districts towards the end of the seventeenth century, the dedications they chose not only reflected CounterReformation figures and doctrines like St Francis Xavier and the Immaculate Conception, but also a determination to renew their historic links with holy men and women from an earlier era. In Staffordshire, they adopted St Chad as their patron; in Lincolnshire, St Hugh, the child martyr reputedly killed by the Jews; in Hampshire, St Thomas of Canterbury; in Worcestershire, the slayer of the dragon and England’s saviour, St George.'”* A comparable patriotric revival of native and founding saints was taking place elsewhere in Europe. In Bavaria, the eleventh-century bishop St Benno was elevated into a symbol of national unity and pride and his shrine in Munich splendidly re-edified.'”° In the Netherlands, the Apostolic Vicar Sasbout Vosmeer and other priests encouraged veneration of

131. Irish Franciscan Mission, ed. Giblin, 48-50 (‘Congruebat igitur ne alio quam in Hyberniae filios Scotiae divideretur obligatio, ut unde prius genita est, inde denuo renasceretur’); 24—5 (‘Conforment actus, incessum, et mores, ut vere Apostolorum imitatores agnoscantur’), and see p. 68. For holy water and sacramentals, see pp. 86-7. See my “Miracles and the CounterReformation Mission’ for the wider context for this strategy. 132. Odo Blundell, The Catholic Highlands of Scotland, 2 vols. (Edinburgh and London, 1909-17),

133. Anderson (ed.), “Prefect Ballantyne’s Report’, 103. 134. The districts and their dedications are listed in Records of the English Province, ed. Foley. 135. Soergel, Wondrous in his Saints, 62-3, 181-91. See also Louthan, Converting Bohemia, ch. 4.

192 BRITANNIA SANCTA the early Anglo-Saxon evangelists of the region, St Willibrord and St Boniface, in a manner that simultaneously endorsed devotion to topographical landmarks attributed to them.'”°

In Britain and Ireland, as on the Continent, this impulse manifested itself in a surge of hagiographical activity. From the 1580s onwards, the CounterReformation clergy devoted much effort to reanimating the reputation of these islands as the nursery of a unique crop of illustrious saints. Steering a course between a Tridentine determination to sift out dubious accretions and popular fascination with traditional lore about their miraculous exploits, they energetically collected and disseminated accounts of their triumphs and

tribulations. International celebrities such as St Patrick, St Columba, St Brigid, St David, St Winefride, and St Thomas Becket naturally received much attention, but less renowned holy persons whose cults were more localized in character were by no means neglected. Some of these antholosies brought British and Insh saints under a single umbrella, but others gave expression to ethnic rivalries between different parts of the realm. Notable here were the heated controversies about the national identity of figures from ancient Scotia precipitated by Thomas Dempster’s largely unwarrantable claims that many Irish worthies were in fact Scots.'”’ Such collections of vitae helped to preserve legends about the making of the medieval sacred landscape that Protestantism was hell-bent on effacing. Emu-

lating the high standards set by humanist hagiographers in Italy and the Bollandist authors of the Acta Sanctorum in Antwerp,'~® learned Latin tracts

like those prepared by the Louvain-trained priests Hugh Ward, Stephen White, and John Colgan edited out matter that might expose the Church of

136. For the Dutch Republic, see Frijhoft, Embodied Belief, 130.

137. For England, see J. T. Rhodes, ‘English Books of Martyrs and Saints of the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries’, RH 22 (1994), 7-25; on Becket, see Victor Houliston, ‘St Thomas Becket in the Propaganda of the English Counter-Reformation’, Renaissance Studies, 7 (1993), 43-70. For Ireland, see Richard Sharpe, Medieval Irish Saints’ Lives: An Introduction to

Vitae Sanctorum Hiberniae (Oxford, 1991), esp. ch. 2; Ryan, “Popular Religion in Gaelic

Ireland’, ch. 6, pp. 164-98; on St Patrick, see Bernadette Cunningham and Raymond Gillespie, “““The Most Adaptable of Saints”: The Cult of St Patrick in the Seventeenth Century’, Archivium Hibernicum, 49 (1995), 82-104. Much Irish hagiographical activity was

stimulated by a desire to respond to the scholarly endeavours of Archbishop Ussher and to discredit the claims made by Thomas Dempster in his Historia ecclesiastica gentis Scotorum (Bologna, 1627) and other works, and echoed by some other Scottish writers. For Wales and St Winefride, see below p. 196. 138. On which see Simon Ditchfield, Liturgy, Sanctity and History in Tridentine Italy: Pietro Maria Campi and the Preservation of the Particular (Cambridge, 1995), ch. 4. For a brief overview of Bollandist enterprise see Hsia, World of Catholic Renewal, 131-2.

BRITANNIA SANCTA 193 Rome to scholarly ridicule. Intent upon refashioning saints as models of virtue rather than spectacular wonder-workers, they played down their thaumaturgic

credentials.'”’ Vernacular tracts prepared for devotional consumption and scribal circulation were, by contrast, less discriminating. More concerned to rally and console the faithful than to repel the accusations of heretics, the latter

were particularly rich in stories about prodigious happenings that had left a permanent mark on the physical environment, though these distinctions should not be exaggerated.'*? Like Manus O’Donnell’s 1532 life of St Columba in Gaelic, the post-Reformation Catholic lives of St Patrick and St Brigid by the Franciscan friar Robert Rochford and Philip O’Sullivan Beare did

not exclude the tales they found in their sources about trees and wells that sprung up where the saints had planted their staves.'*’ When the Jesuit John Falconer published a new edition of Robert of Shrewsbury’s twelfth-century life of St Winefride in 1635, he chose to retain traditional stories about the hoofprint deposited by a cow stolen out of a pasture on the saint’s land and the

providential punishment of a labouring man who cut a bough from an oak which sheltered pilgrims.'** Although it ejected some ‘Apocryphall Legends and other fabulous Historyes’, John Wilson’s English Martyrologe of 1608 still incorporated references to miraculous events that linked the saints of the three kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland with their natural surroundings. His intention, as he declared in the preface, was to gather together “that which the injury of tymes had violently taken from yow, and sought to abolish all » 143 memory therof’.

139. For example, Thomas Messingham, Florilegium insulae sanctorum (Paris, 1624); Henry Fitzsimon, Catalogus praecipuorum Sanctorum Hiberniae (Antwerp, 1611); John Colgan, Acta Sanctorum veteris et maioris Scotiae, seu Hiberniae sanctorum insulae (Louvain, 1645) and Triadis Thaumaturgae (Louvain, 1647). See Sharpe, Medieval Irish Saints’ Lives, 60, for concerns about

editing out ‘improbable fables’ expressed in a letter from Stephen White (who compiled a MS ‘Vindiciae Scotorum Veterum’) to Colgan dated 1640.

140. See the remarks of Anne Dillon, The Construction of Martyrdom in the English Catholic Community, 1535-1603 (Aldershot, 2002), ch. 2, about this tendency in the lives of martyrs. 141. Manus O’Donnell, The Life of Colum Cille, ed. and trans. Brian Lacey (Dublin, 1998), ch. 5; B. B. [Robert Rochford], The life of the glorious bishop S. Patricke apostle and primate of Ireland, together with the lives of the holy virgin S. Bridgit and of the glorious abbot Saint Columbe patrons of

Ireland (St Omer, 1625), 40, 69, 82-3, 136-8, 173-4; Philip O’Sullivan Beare, Patritiana Decas

(Madrid, 1629). This is noted by Ryan, ‘Popular Religion in Gaelic Ireland’, 182-91, who qualifies Gillespie and Cunningham, ‘Most Adaptable of Saints’, esp. 90-1. 142. J[ohn] F[alconer], The admirable life of saint Wenefride virgin, martyr, abbesse ({St-Omer], 1635),

193-6, 244-5. 143. John Wilson, The English martyrologe conteyning a summary of the liues of the glorious and renowned

saintes of the three kingdomes, England, Scotland, and Ireland ({[St-Omer], 1608), sig.*7°, *2” respectively.

194 BRITANNIA SANCTA The physical traces of ancient Christian devotion are also repeatedly mapped onto the rural environment in a manuscript collection of the lives of women saints compiled c.1610—-15: from the footprint cast by St Mildreth as she stepped from a ship onto the coast of Kent and the spring which burst

forth where St Juthwara was decapitated in Cornwall to the miracles associated with the church where the virgin martyr St Maxentia had carried her head after it was cut off by a lustful pagan prince.'** Probably prepared in the same decade, Nicholas Roscarrock’s ‘Alphebitt of Saints’ set aside the task of discrediting the ‘pevishe pseudomarters’ who filled the pages of John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments in favour of commemorating more obscure

saints of the British Isles, not all of whom were officially canonized or recognized in the Church’s revised calendar. Drawing on the works of leading Catholic hagiographers including Caesar Baronius, Laurentius Surius, and Pedro de Ribadeneira, it also recorded many oral traditions about places in the landscape, not least those associated with his native county Cornwall. Roscarrock lovingly preserved the memory of Red Lane in St Columb Major where the saint was martyred, the green path between St Endellion and St Illick where this saintly pair had once walked, the holy

chairs of St Mawes and St Michael’s Mount, and the sacred tree at St Breward. He also recorded the stone on which the Irish virgin and abbess St Began had knelt near Cockermouth and the fertile tract of ground in the Malvern Hills linked with St Catherine of Ledbury which grew corn of the finest quality.'*° Declaring them ‘helps and encouragements to Faith and Piety’, Richard Challoner’s Britannia Sancta, published more than a century later in 1745,

was replete with similar stories, albeit only those ‘attested by the best monuments of Church-History’ which prejudiced Protestants would find 144. BL, Stowe MS 949, printed in The Lives of Women Saints of our Contrie of England, Also Some

other Lives of Holie Women Written by Some of the Auncient Fathers (c.1610-1615), ed. C. Horstmann, EETS, os 86 (1886), 63, 79-80, 99-100. It 1s possible that this is a translation of the Latin ‘Manuscript of the women Saintes of England’ by Robert [sic, Ralph?] Buckland to which Nicholas Roscarrock refers on several occasions: CUL, Additional MS 3041, e.g. fos. 111” and 275°. See also Catherine Sanok, “The Lives of Women Saints of our Contrie of

England: Gender and Nationalism in Recusant Hagiography’, in Corthell et al. (eds.), Catholic Culture in Early Modern England, 261-80.

145. CUL, Additional MS 3041, fos. 262", 308", 314° “, 109°, 87°, and 116” respectively. On fo. 5”, he defended his inclusiveness by saying ‘that Bellarmyne de sainctis and others doe think,

that many such may be reverenced privatelie, thoughe not publicklye...’. The entries for Cornish and Devonian saints have been edited by Nicholas Orme: Nicholas Roscarrock’s Lives

of the Saints: Cornwall and Devon, Devon and Cornwall Record Society, 35 (1992), see pp. 78-9, 87, 92, 61 for the passages cited.

BRITANNIA SANCTA 195 difficult to discredit as invented fables. To this end, he did not disdain to

mention the hillock in Cardiganshire that rose up under St David to vindicate his preaching against the Pelagians, the spring St Cuthbert had obtained by his prayers on the Isle of Farne, or the curative fountain that flowed from the tomb of St Ivo in Huntingdonshire. Nor did he exclude the legend that St Gudwall had miraculously enlarged the bounds of the Isle of Plet by commanding the tide or the tale that the snakes that had swarmed

in the woody abode in which St Keyna lived on the banks of the River Avon had been turned at her request into harmless stones with serpentine markings.'*° The urge to preserve such traditions was somewhat at odds with the universalism which the Tridentine Church aspired to assert. In an echo of the dialogue between centre and periphery that had shaped the medieval cult of saints, it reflected the tensions associated with the celebration of local manifestations of the sacred in an age of bold claims of Catholic internationalism.

This is not to say that the eftorts of the post-Reformation clergy to resuscitate the memory of hallowed places linked with native British and Irish saints were necessarily frowned upon by the Vatican. A number, in fact, received formal endorsement from the papacy in the guise of plenary indulgences. A bull issued by Pope Paul V in 1607 reinstated the spiritual benefits associated with pilgrimage to several medieval sites, including

Skellig Michael, Croagh Patrick, and Lady’s Island, Co. Wexford, in order to boost the morale of afflicted Catholics and encourage them ‘to prove themselves worthy sons of those forefathers’ who had earned for their country the title of ‘Sanctorum Insula’ (Island of Saints).'*” His predecessor

Clement VIII had endorsed ritual journeys to the remains of a nunnery founded by the fifth-century virgin at St Gobnet in Ballyvourney in 1601 by renewing its indulgence and in 1674 the priest Peter Creagh petitioned the cardinals of the Congregatio Propaganda de Fide to give official approval to

146. Richard Challoner, Britannia Sancta: or, the lives of the most celebrated British, English, Scottish, and Irish saints, 2 vols. (1745), 1. pp. V, 143, 192, 266-7, 3453 11. 165—7. The hill that was raised

up to form a natural pulpit for St David was also mentioned in Serenus Cressy’s Church history, prompting the Protestant writer John Patrick to mock it as a fable and ‘pleasant absurdity’ in his Reflexions upon the Devotions of the Roman Church (1674), 109.

147. J. Hagan, ‘Miscellanea Vaticano-Hibernica, 1580-1631’, Archivium Hibernicum, 3 (1914), 260-4: “Vos, quemadmodum accepimus, gloriamini, Maiores vestri tanta in Deum pietate

fuisse, ut Hibernia meruerit hac de causa appellari Sanctorum Insula: igitur exhibete vos dignam eorum progeniem.’

196 BRITANNIA SANCTA a Marian well in the diocese of Clonfert which was working wonders.'*® Two years later Pope Clement X granted complete remission of sin to those who travelled to the evocatively situated chapel of St Michael the Archangel on Skirrid-Fawr, a mountain near Abergavenny said to have been cleft by the earthquake that occurred at the precise moment that Christ died on the cross, and prayed there for ‘the extirpation of heresies and the exaltation of Holy Mother Church’. This seems to have increased resort to the site and ten years later the order of St Francis contemplated establishing a hospice for the steady stream of pilgrims to it. Gatherings for mass and sermons were still

being noted there in the 1750s. As Michael Lewis has remarked, far from ‘simply some superstitious flotsam from the shipwreck of a vanquished Catholic past’, devotion to the hilltop chapel converged closely with the goals of a Tridentine Church still confident of its ability to reconquer lands lost to Protestantism more than a century before.'*” In this enterprise, two sites with medieval traditions of pilgrimage stand out from the rest. The first is Holywell, which became the jewel in the crown of the Welsh Catholic revival.'”° Even in the sixteenth century the spring and chapel had been the headquarters of the Catholic mission to this region, and by the mid-seventeenth, served by the Jesuits and seculars from two inns in the town (the Old Star and Cross Keys respectively), it had wholly reclaimed its reputation as a destination of pious pilgrims from much further afield. Its popularity was fostered by Falconer’s new edition of the life of St Winefride, which lauded her shrine as ‘a bright morning-star’ that had not ceased to emit light when others had been ‘lamentably defaced’ and ‘quite vanished out of living mens sights’. The very fact that the monument

over her spring remained standing despite the ‘generall vastation of Monasteries, and Saintes memories’, he declared, was a testament to the

148. Millett, “Calendar of volume 3’, 57; David Hugh Farmer, The Oxford Dictionary of Saints (Oxford, 1992 edn.), 207. 149. Canning (ed.), “Catholic Registers of Abergavenny’, 102, 108-9; Michael R. Lewis, “The Pilgrimage to St Michael’s Mount: Catholic Continuity in Wales’, Journal of Welsh Ecclesiastical History, 8 (1991), 51-4. Cf. the emphasis on the un- or anti-Tridentine character of the pilgrimage in Mullett, Catholics in Britain and Ireland, 98. 150. See my ‘Holywell: Contesting Sacred Space in Early Modern Wales’; also Robert E. Scully,

‘St Winefride’s Well: The Significance and Survival of a Welsh Catholic Shrine from the Early Middle Ages to the Present Day’, in Margaret Cormack (ed.), Saints and their Cults in

the Atlantic World (Columbia, SC, 2007), 202-28. Extensive materials on the history of Holywell can be found in Foley, Records of the English Province, ed. Foley, iv. 491-537.

BRITANNIA SANCTA 197 intervention of the Lord.'?' The well was further endorsed by a plenary indulgence awarded around 1657 and by the compilation of a register of carefully authenticated miracles, copies of which circulated in both English and Welsh.'°* Many of these functioned as confessional propaganda. They described the conversions of stalwart Protestants and contemptuous Qua-

kers who had resorted to the famous spring when all other sources of medical help had failed. Others were framed to teach theological lessons or, like the rumour that the Dutch holy well at Heiloo would cure even better if its water was mixed with the blood of the Beggars, invested with an

abrasive anti-Calvinist edge.'°” Protestant patients were shown to be unworthy of receiving its heavenly benefits, dying of their diseases because they lacked faith “which is alwayes necessary for the obtaining of supernaturall favours’. One cure followed a young girl’s earnest prayer that relief

be granted sooner than later, ‘least heretiques should laugh at them for having taken so long a journey to no eftect’. The same account noted that such wonders flummoxed them, since ‘it aggreeth not with that doctrine of

theires that miracles ceased long agoe, and that we cannot desire the intercession of the blessed saincts without injurie unto God’.'°* The uninterrupted stream of cures wrought by St Winefride at her Flintshire shrine buttressed Catholicism’s claim to be the sole possessor of Christian truth. The increasingly high profile of the site was reflected in the recusant George Petre’s plan to transform a mansion in the town into a spacious hostel for pilgrims, which he quite openly set in motion in 1640. Some Catholics regarded this scheme as highly dangerous at a time of intense antipopish feeling and, in an effort to thwart it, informed the government that it

1s1. Falconer, Admirable life of saint Wenefride, sigs *3°—4', *5", *8". Versions of her life also circulated in Welsh, included the Bucchedd Gwenfrewy: for which see S. Baring-Gould and John Fisher, The Lives of the British Saints, 4 vols. (1907-13), Iv. 397-423.

152. This is revealed by an incidental reference in one of the miracle stories: Smedt (ed.), ‘Documenta de S. Wenefreda’, 340. During Mary’s reign, the indulgence had been briefly restored through the efforts of Bishop Thomas Goldwell: C. de Smedt (ed.), ‘De Sancta Wenefreda’, Acta Sanctorum, 1 (Paris, 1887), 736. By 1664, the clergy who served the shrine

had built up a substantial lending library, which included fifty-four copies of the life of St Winefride bound in leather and another forty-seven in vellum: Archives of the Archdiocese of Westminster, MS XX XII/99, fo. 477°. lam indebted to Tom McCoog for drawing this to my attention. 153. See Frihoft, Embodied Belief, 129. 154. Smedt (ed.), ‘Documenta de S. Wenefreda’, 335, 336-7. See Colleen M. Seguin, “Cures and Controversy in Early Modern Wales: The Struggle to Control St Winefride’s Well’, North American Fournal of Welsh Studies, 3 (2003), I-17, esp. 3-8, for further discussion of the confessional dimension of stories of miraculous cures.

198 BRITANNIA SANCTA was intended to house a College of Jesuits. It went ahead nonetheless, with

the tacit permission of Charles I himself.'°? The king’s willingness to condone it probably did little to settle the nerves of his puritan subjects, who were beginning to suspect that he was implicated in a conspiracy to reintroduce the Catholic faith. Half a century later, it received more overt royal endorsement when James II travelled to the well in 1687 to pray that his wife might bear a son and heir, leaving behind a lock of his hair and using

the occasion to touch for the king’s evil. Mary of Modena herself sent a thank-offering after the birth of James Francis Edward and paid for a priest to say mass there to celebrate his conception. She had earlier persuaded her husband to bestow the chapel upon her as a personal gift and expressed her intention of repairing and embellishing it.'°° Had the Stuart dynasty retained its hereditary right to the throne, Holywell might well have become a

shining symbol of Catholic confessionalization comparable to famous shrines on the European mainland. Its sufferings during the Revolution did not stop it from flourishing anew in the eighteenth century or from becoming a ‘Jacobite totem’, a focus for loyalty to the Pretender as well as

the Old Religion.'°’ Nor did it cease to vouchsafe miraculous cures. Nicholas Blundell’s diurnal reveals that he and his household made regular visits to the spring during the summer months between the years 1702 and I719.°>° Philip Metcalf issued a new edition of the life of St Winefride vigorously defending certifiable accounts of the posthumous wonders she had performed against the charge that they were mere ‘Monkish Legends’ in 1712; ‘stupendious’ recoveries of ‘incredulous wicked persons’ as well as the devoted faithful were still being recorded in 1731; and in 1805 Bishop John

Milner published a celebrated account of the recovery of a debilitated servant called Winifred White which stimulated a fresh wave of pilgrimage. In subsequent decades Holywell benefited from the Victorians’ fascination

155. CSPDom 1640, 455; CSPDom 1640-41, 10, 52; Records of the English Province, ed. Foley, tv.

$30, 536. Apparently this information was brought to the attention of the Privy Council by enemies of the Jesuits. See Seguin, ‘Cures and Controversy’, 13-15, for a fuller discussion. 156. Thomas Pennant, The History of the Parishes of Whiteford, and Holywell (1796), 230; Maurice Ashley, James IT (1977), 208, 218; Lord Mostyn and T. A. Glenn, History of the Family of Mostyn of Mostyn (1925), 148-9.

157. See Colin Haydon, ‘St Winifred, Bishop Fleetwood, and Jacobitism’, in Peter Clarke and Tony Claydon (eds.), Saints and Sanctity, SCH 47 (Woodbridge, forthcoming). 158. Nicholas Blundell, The Great Diurnal of Nicholas Blundell of Little Crosby, Lancashire, ed. J. J. Bagley, 2 vols., Record Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 110, 112 (1968-70), 1. 32, 40, 60, 87, 142-3, 257; ll. 23, 65, 105—6, 233, 234.

BRITANNIA SANCTA 199 with the medieval past and from the fervour surrounding the foundation and efflorescence of Lourdes in southern France.'”” The post-Reformation history of St Patrick’s Purgatory provides many striking parallels. Devotional visits by Catholics to Lough Derg continued in the years following Henry VIII’s break with Rome, despite the fact

that it was situated in the midst of the Scottish Protestant plantation. From the later Elizabethan period, Counter-Reformation polemicists vociferously defended it in both Latin and Gaelic. Philip O’Sullivan Beare included an account of it in his reply to the sneers and slanders of Giraldus Cambrensis and Richard Stanihurst, Historiae Catholicae Iberniae Compendium

(Lisbon, 1621), which he dedicated to that ‘barrier to the pestilence of hellish heresy’, Philip III, king of Spain, who he hoped would intervene to relieve Ireland of ‘the most tremendous load of calamities’ that overhelmed her. Anti-Protestant resonances were even more apparent in book 9

of his Patritiana Decas (1629), where he argued that even the heretical English Council acknowledged the importance of the shrine by prohibiting the Irish from frequenting it.'°” The wealthy, foreign Catholics who had been prominent visitors in the medieval period were by now outnumbered by native Irish, as the circulation of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-

century vernacular poetry on the subject of the Lough Derg pilgrimage reveals. Celebrating the Purgatory as ‘the bright Rome of the western world’, this bardic literature reflected a potent fusion between Gaelic culture and Catholicism.'®’ In a similar vein to O’Sullivan Beare, in 1632 the titular Primate of Ireland, Peter Lombard, bragged that the concourse of 159. Philip Metcalf, The Life of Saint Winefride (1917 edn.; first publ. 1712); London, Achives of

the Archdiocese of Westminster, MS A XXXIX, 1o1 (‘Some account of Wales’, 22 July 1731); J[ohn] Mfilner], Authentic Documents Relative to the Miraculous Cure of Winefrid White

(1805). For the later history of Holywell, see Judith Champ, ‘Bishop Milner, Holywell, and the Cure Tradition’, in W. J. Sheils (ed.), The Church and Healing, SCH 19 (Oxford, 1982), 153-64. 160. O’Sullivan Beare, Ireland under Elizabeth: Chapters towards A History of Ireland in the Reign of Elizabeth. Being a Portion of the History of Catholic Ireland by Dom Philip O’ Sullivan Bear, ed.

Matthew J. Byrne (Port Washington, NJ, and London, 1903), pp. xxili-xxiv; O’Sullivan Beare, Patritiana Decas, bk. 9. It was also vindicated from the criticisms of medieval and postReformation writers in John Lynch’s Cambrensis Eversus ([St-Omer], 1662).

161. See Proinséas ni Chathain, “The Later Pilgrimage: Irish Poetry on Loch Derg’, in M. J. Haren and Yolande de Pontfarcy (eds.). The Medieval Pilgrimage to St Patrick’s Purgatory: Lough

Derg and the European Tradition (Enniskillen, 1988), 202-11; Marc Caball, ‘Religion, Culture and the Bardic Elite in Early Modern Ireland’, in Alan Ford and John McCafferty (eds.), The Origins of Sectarianism in Early Modern Ireland (Cambridge, 2005), 158-82 at 167-70. Caball qualifies the pivotal role Meigs attributes to the Gaelic literati in resisting Protestantism in her Reformations in Ireland.

200 BRITANNIA SANCTA pilgrims was so great that the government was neither capable of preventing it, nor dared to violate the sanctity of the place.'®

The destruction of the site in May of the same year was partly a retort to these boasts, but its timing also reflects the fact that the Franciscans of the province of Armagh had recently taken up residence as keepers of the shrine. ‘°° Six years later, Sir Thomas Wentworth, earl of Strafford, had to exercise his greatest powers of tact to persuade Queen Henrietta Maria that reviving and sanctioning resort to the site would be ill-advised. Not only would the demolished Purgatory be very difficult to restore, but, he said, ‘I fear, at this Time, where some men’s zeal hath run them already not only beyond their wits, but almost forth of their allegiance too, it might furnish them of something to say in prejudice and in scandal at his Majesty’s Government’. He professed his hope that there would be “a fitter opportu-

nity’ to effect the queen’s satisfaction in the matter in due course.'”* Conscious of the anxieties about the popish inclinations of the Crown of which he himself would later become a collateral casualty, Wentworth recognized that any public attempt to tolerate the pilgrimage would stoke rumours of a royal scheme to bring the realm back into communion with Rome. That its subsequent renaissance after the outbreak of the Civil Wars was actively promoted by the Catholics who rose up in rebellion against Charles I is a measure of the complexity of the conflicts that engulfed his three kingdoms.'®°

The papal nuncio Rinuccini saw it as a chief part of his holy mission to Ireland in the late 1640s to free the site from the hands of the heretics who occupied Ulster, and he had proposed that O’Neill and his army proceed from Connaught and Sligo to secure the nearby Enniskillen castle. As he wrote forlornly to Innocent X on his return to Italy: It appeared to me that this equalled any of the most glorious of Apostolic missions, and that I should have in some measure fulfilled my career, if in this

place covered as much by the insults as by the earth thrown on it by the Puritans, it had been granted to me again to plant there the Cross. But I was

162. Peter Lombard, De regno Hiberniae sanctorum insulae commentarius (Louvain, 1632), ch. 20, at

pp. 277-8. 163. Wadding Papers 1614-38, ed. Brendan Jennings (Dublin, 1953), 485—6; Saint Patrick’s Purgatory, ed. Shane Leslie (1932), 75-6; Millett, Irish Franciscans, 303. 164. Saint Patrick’s Purgatory, ed. Leslie, 80-1.

165. William Pinkerton, ‘Saint Patrick’s Purgatory: Part IV. Modern History’, Ulster Fournal of Archaeology, 5 (1857), 60-81 at 75.

BRITANNIA SANCTA 201 not worthy of seeing this hope carried into execution, the want and tardy supply of money entirely ruined the design. '®°

Rinuccini’s crusade may have failed, but by 1660 St Patrick’s Purgatory had nevertheless resurrected itself from the dust and secured a new indulgence from Clement XI.'° Its battering at the hands of the heretics made it an ever more potent emblem of confessional militancy. Writing in 1668, the authors of the Acta Sanctorum ascribed the resurgence of miracles at the shrine after the Reformation to the hand of God: this was a providential intervention to confirm the faithful and confound the Church’s enemies.'°° Writing in 1714, Bishop McMahon reported that thousands of men and women went there each year and thought it ‘an extraordinary feature... that none of the Protestants in the locality ever interfere with the pilgrims’, despite the fact that they were forbidden by an act of Parliament: ‘[W]hile in the rest of the country the practice of religion has practically ceased as a result of persecution, here, as in another world, Religion 1s practised freely and openly. This, people attribute to the mercy of God and the prayers of St Patrick.’'®” As at Holywell, the authorities had apparently more or less abandoned the attempt to suppress Catholic practice, in a display of tolerance that was at root an admission of defeat. St Patrick’s Purgatory was an oasis in a desert occupied by rabid heretics. These and other sites were the breeding ground for a combative brand of Catholicism that was not merely unfazed by the threat of Protestant persecution, but also brazenly outfaced it. By the early seventeenth century the audacity of the annual gatherings of pilgrims at Holywell on St Winefride’s feast day was palpable. In November 1620, when Bishop Lewis Bayly of Bangor went to the spring in person to arrest papists congregated there, the local populace rose up against him, ‘handled him roughly and then threw him into a ditch’.'’° Four years later John Gee alleged in his scurrilous Foot out of the snare that the midsummer festival of the virgin martyr was the occasion for a

yearly “Synod or Convention’ of the missionary clergy. Catholics boldly ignored the prohibitions issued by the Church and state: in 1629 it was said 166. Embassy in Ireland, ed. Hutton, 515-16. See Tadhg O hAnnrachdin, Catholic Reformation in Ireland: The Mission of Rinuccini, 1645-1649 (Oxford, 2002), 182-3. 167. Millett, Irish Franciscans, 304 n. 17. 168. Jean Bolland et al., Acta Sanctorum Martii IT 9-19 (Antwerp, 1668), 587-92 at 590. Cited in Pinkerton, “Saint Patrick’s Purgatory’, 63-4. 169. Flanagan (ed.), “Diocese of Clogher’, 129. 170. Albert J. Loomie (ed.), Spain and the Facobean Catholics, 11: 1613-1624, CRS 68 (1978), 139-40.

202 BRITANNIA SANCTA that between 1,400 and 1,500 laypeople had congregated there, together with 150 Jesuit and secular priests. The assembly included Lord William Howard of Naworth and the prominent convert Elizabeth Cary, Viscountess Falkland, accompanied by her chaplain Mr Everard. Seven years later the same lady and her company came thither on foot, dissembling ‘neither their quality nor their

errand’.'’' The government had long suspected that the well was a rallying point for individuals engaged in anti-Stuart intrigue and took the precaution of imposing the oaths of supremacy and allegiance upon visitors who could not

demonstrate they were conformable to the Church of England.'’” This suspicion was strongly cemented by the retrospective revelation that an alarm-

ing number of the Gunpowder Plotters, apparently led by the Jesuit Henry Garnet, had undertaken a pilgrimage to the shrine in the summer of 1605. On its way through the West Midlands the party, which included Fathers Tesimond and Gerard and eventually numbered thirty, paused at the houses of Sir Everard Digby, John Grant, and Robert Winter. Rumours circulated that “the

company went in such hostile manner for the Catholic cause’. Catholic historians have strenuously denied the official propaganda which presented this journey as integrally linked with the frustrated terrorist act. Encrusted in

myth, the motives behind the pilgrimage may indeed have been purely spiritual, but we cannot dismiss the alternative possibility that it was designed to invoke the aid of St Winefride in support of this desperate crusade to save the nation from Protestant thraldom.'’” After all, medieval kings had often prayed at major shrines for victory in war and in 1620 Maximilian of Bavaria, patron

and devotee of the Marian image at Altétting, made the Blessed Virgin Generalissima of his armies at the decisive Battle of the White Mountain. '”* The parallels are at the very least suggestive.

Decaying chapels and monastic buildings could likewise become a focus

for Catholic belligerence. In north Wales, truculent Jacobean recusants

171. John Gee, The foot out of the snare (1624), 33-4; TNA, SP 16/151/13; The Stuart Constitution:

Documents and Commentary, ed. J. P. Kenyon (2nd edn., Cambridge, 1986), 146 (Laud’s return to the king’s instructions for 1636). 172. For example in 1617: BL, Royal MS 18 B. VII, fo. 1° “. For the apprehension of two suspected Catholics who came ‘to seeke for ease of some infirmytie’, see TNA, SP 12/193/14.

173. TNA, SP 14/216, II, 121 and 153, transcribed in Michael Hodgetts, ‘Shropshire Priests in 1605’, Worcestershire Recusant, 47 (1986), 24-36, quotation at p. 31; CSP Dom 1603-1610, 270, 299; John Morris, The Condition of Catholics under James I: Father Gerard’s Narrative of the

Gunpowder Plot (1872), 78, 240, 258; Philip Caraman, Henry Garnet 1555-1606 and the Gunpowder Plot (1964), 324-5. See my ‘Holywell’, 229 for other relevant references. 174. Bireley, Refashioning of Catholicism, 109.

BRITANNIA SANCTA 203 demonstrated their contempt for the Protestant establishment on the Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin 1606 by repossessing the chapel at Pfynnon Fair, in which Anglican services were held in order to provide a counterattraction to popish worship: they turned an altar stone upon which the curate now knelt to recite the liturgy to the wall and inserted into the prayer book ‘the likenes or similitude of a gallows with a halter thereunto bounde made of rushes’. Later that day they disrupted evensong with dancing, singing, and drinking. The apparent jollity of the episode cannot disguise the veiled threat it contained.'’° Scottish Protestant bishops complained of the ‘insolent assemblage of large bands of pilgrims with guns and cannon in different parts of the country’ at ruinous shrines dedicated to the Virgin Mary in 1628.'’° The Irish authorities were no less troubled by the ‘infinite

number of people and greate store of friers and prists’ who went to Glendalough on St Kevin’s Day in the early seventeenth century. In 1617 the Council of Munster suspected that open-air meetings and ‘parlies’ at wells, wayside crosses, and on hillsides and plains were the seedbeds of rebellion, gatherings that led his Majesty’s subjects into ‘dangerous disloyalties’, as well as a cause of the ‘great offence of almightie god’.'’’ It should come as no surprise that in 1641, the medieval High Cross at Belturbet was chosen as the setting for a symbolic act of Catholic iconoclasm: Protestant books and bibles were ‘burned in great heaps’ at the foot of this ancient monument.'’” Assemblies of papists in Wales in the reign of Elizabeth also had an anglophobic dimension. According to a memorandum written to Lord Burghley, ‘harpers and Crowthers’ sung ‘songes of the doeinges of theire Auncestors namelie of theire warrs againste the kinges of this realme

and the English nacion’, together with the lives of the ‘Prophettes and Saintes of that cuntrie’. Some of these bardic poems recalling the memory of the victories of the ancient Britons over the tyrannous Saxons as part of a clarion call for the country’s liberation still survive in Welsh archives.'’” Here religious conservatism and patriotism fused to produce an intoxicating mixture.

175. G. Dyfnallt Owen, Wales in the Reign of fames I (Woodbridge, 1988), 95. 176. Memoirs, ed. Forbes-Leith, i. 34, 36. 177. M. V. Ronan (ed.), ‘Archbishop Bulkeley’s Visitation of Dublin, 1630’, Archivium Hibernicum, NS 8 (1941), 56-98 at 91; BL, Harley MS 697, fo. 198”, cited in Ch. 2 above at n. 108. 178. Cited in Smyth, Map-Making, Landscapes and Memory, 130. 179. BL Lansdowne 111, fo. 10° “. See also G. Dyfnallt Owen, Elizabethan Wales: The Social Scene (Cardiff, 1964), 218-19.

204 BRITANNIA SANCTA Even in the early years of the Reformation in the 1530s, hallowed shrines whose raison d’étre was in the process of being undermined by Protestant

legislation were a venue for Catholic protest: rumours circulated about a dream in which an angel had commanded Henry VII to go on pilgrimage to St Michael’s Mount and it was in the Mount Grace Lady Chapel that George Lazenby, a monk of Jervaise, had visions of the Virgin Mary which encouraged him to uphold papal supremacy and be ready ‘to die in so good

a quarrel as the defence of the Church’ on the eve of the Dissolution.'*” Defiant resistance found natural expression at the sites which symbolized the embattled Old Religion.

Nor were Catholics simply passive witnesses to the bouts of Protestant iconoclasm that periodically afflicted them. The laity attending mass in a

Franscican house in Dublin that was violently ransacked in 1630 did not just stand back: ‘not forbering any Longer the spirit of zele and indignation, which mounted up in her hart... Like an other Matthathias’, Widow Nugent raised the cry to other ‘Viragos’ in the congregation, who scratched and thumped the soldiers so hard that, together with the mayor and bishop, they ‘were gladd to hasten out of doores’. As they fled through the streets, they were pelted with a shower of stones cast by women, boys, apprentices, and “Countrie-clownes’ who had come to the city to visit St Stephen’s Well on pilgrimage. “It seemeth the Saint would be revenged on them.’!®!

Such sentiments were also enshrined in the stories about divine judgements visited upon the perpetrators of sacrilege that freely circulated within post-Reformation Catholic communities across the British Isles. Anecdotes about the supernatural punishment of the scoffing Elizabethan Protestant William Shone, who maliciously profaned the water of Holywell with his muddy boots, had a long life in accounts of the shrine. A similar lesson was enshrined in the tale of Lowry Davies, who went to the well ‘rather out of pastime then devotion’ and spoke out irreligiously against its healing waters, only to find herself struck suddenly ‘stark blind’.'°* The officials who 180. For St Michael’s Mount, see LGP, xii, pt 2, p. 23; Diana Webb, Pilgrimage in Medieval England (London and New York, 2000), 260. For Lazenby, see Letters and Papers of Henry VII, vii. 420-1 and L. E. Whatmore, “George Lazenby, Monk of Jervaux: A Forgotten Martyr?’, Downside Review, 60 (NS 41) (1942), 325-8. 181. BL, Harley MS 3888, fos. tog’—110’. 182. Loomie (ed.), Spain and the Facobean Catholics, 140; John Gerard, The Autobiography of an

Elizabethan, ed. and trans. Philip Caraman (1951), 47; Smedt (ed.), ‘Documenta de S. Wenedfreda’, 311, 319.

BRITANNIA SANCTA 205 implemented the 1637 order of the Flint Assizes to disfigure the image of St Winefride and remove the iron rails round the bath were also alleged to have suffered miserable deaths, while a fire consumed the house of a

spectator who had urged on the work. Philip Metcalf alluded to other such precedents “to caution Protestants from being too forward in their Contempts’ of the saint and her spring.'®’ Catholics in Northern Ireland had expected comparable misfortunes to befall those who had destroyed St Patrick’s Purgatory in 1632 and Scottish Jesuits made frequent mention of the fates that had befallen people responsible for gratuitous acts of destruction. Father James Macbreck wrote to the General of the Order in Rome in

1642 about a man who had hacked to pieces an image of Christ on the market cross at Inverkeithing: “He had scarcely come down from his ladder, when he was seized with paralysis in all his limbs, and remains to this day a

prisoner to his bed, quite unable to move—a visible evidence of Divine power.’ Other iconoclasts were tormented with demons and punished with terrible illnesses: a ‘worthless fellow’ hired by local Calvinist ministers to profane the healing fountain of St Gruon suffered from a “stercorous vomit’,

which induced him to return to the well and beg forgiveness by way of penance, while a tempest stopped the efforts of elders to demolish the famous Chapel of Grace on Speyside.'** Legends of providential vengeance were also engendered by the attacks on the Holy Thorn and prodigious walnut tree at Glastonbury in Somerset

launched by puritan zealots. Roscarrock told how a man ‘moved with spleene’ who had cut down the walnut had been injured with his own axe and reduced to penury, while a work of 1633 recalled how the attacker of the hawthorn had been ‘miraculously prevented’ from completing his ‘wicked designement’ to hew down the main trunk by a severe wound to his leg and a chip of wood that flew up and put out one of his eyes. The Thorn’s defiant refusal to quail in the face of Protestant violence and its propensity to fight back against vicious assailants transformed it into an

emblem of the intrepid Church of Rome.’ A Franciscan tract written in 183. Metcalf, Life of Saint Winefride, 73; Margaret and Agnes Blundell, St Winifride and her Holy Well (1954), 48-9. 184. Saint Patrick’s Purgatory, ed. Leslie, 79-80; Memoirs, ed. Forbes-Leith, 1. 217-18; uu. 75—6 and 11 IOI—2 respectively. See also 11. 74.

185. CUL, Additional MS 3041, fo. 271’; Richard Broughton, The ecclesiastical historie of Great Britaine (Douai, 1633), 138. Other judgement stories clustered around the man who chopped down the sacred tree associated with St Illick at St Endellion in Cornwall: CUL, Additional MS 3041, fo. 262’.

206 BRITANNIA SANCTA the early seventeenth century no less triumphantly registered the deaths of several workmen suffocated by a filthy damp emanating from a well on the site of a former convent in Dublin, which had been broken up and converted to a secular purpose. “What do wee wonder such an accident to have happened in so holy a place? now profaned [and] violated [?].’ This too was a plague upon the ‘hypocritical Hereticks’.'°° Tales about the ‘purificatory disinterment’ of the bodies of Protestants buried in consecrated ground were another common genre in Ireland, the expulsion of their corpses a measure of divine outrage at their usurpation of Catholic graveyards.'°’ The recycling of altar stones for municipal and agricultural purposes also stimulated polemical exempla: the recusant Thomas Meynell recorded the story

of a man whose horses refused to draw a cart containing a font he had confiscated from the chapel at Thornton le Beans and ‘for many yeares sacriligiously profained it, even to the very use of serving Hogs therein’.'”® In 1666, it was said that a ship loaded with bells and lead from the roof of

Elgin Cathedral had sunk with all hands, in clear weather, in Aberdeen harbour. 189 Abundant in other cultures where Catholicism was a hunted minority like the Dutch Republic, such ‘punitive miracles’ attested to the presence of

a God who hated heretics.'”” They were close cousins of the stories of judgements meted out to the persecutors of executed priests and laypeople, which themselves sometimes engendered new landscape legends. In return for leaving ‘no stone underturned to harass and extirpate’ local Catholics, Baron Hempisfield of Dumfriesshire drowned in a shallow stream near his castle: in 1657-8 his spirit was said to haunt it by night, ‘with great noise and tumult, in the midst of ghosts and spectres, calling upon his friends to help him with lamentable voice, but all in vain’.'”’ Reports of the divine punishment of those who vandalized numinous sites in the natural environment embodied a conviction that the sacred landscape itself was the victim of a

186. BL, Harley MS 3888, fo. 285" ”. 187. Tait, Death, Burial and Commemoration, 92-3. For examples, see O’Sullivan Beare, Ireland under Elizabeth, ed. Byrne, 47-8; [Malachy Hartry], Triumphalia Chronologica Monasterii Sanctae Crucis in Hibernica, ed. Denis Murphy (Dublin, 1891), 53-s. 188. Aveling (ed.), “Recusancy Papers of the Meynell Family’, 40-1. 189. Anderson (ed.), ‘Prefect Ballantyne’s Report’, 109. 190. See Fryhoft, Embodied Belief, 122-4. Note also the legends of the punishment of Swedish

soldiers who attacked sacred images which circulated in south-west Germany: Forster, Catholic Revival, 90-1.

191. Memoirs, ed. Forbes-Leith, ii. 72-3.

BRITANNIA SANCTA 207 form of martyrdom. Purged churches like St Giles’s Cathedral in Edinburgh, which Protestants celebrated as symbols of the reformers’ defeat of idolatry, were to the Benedictine monk Alexander Baillie a spectacle of ‘abominable desolation’ that would surely bring down ‘sodaine reveange’ from heaven.'”” Richard Verstegan explicitly linked attacks on bodies, buildings, and monuments in the graphic images that made up his Theatrum Crudelitatum of 1587. All displayed the scars of the bloody sacrifices that were at once Catholicism’s undoing and its greatest source of glory and triumph.'”” Battered chapels and pilgrimage shrines bore visual witness to theological doctrines vehemently condemned by the Protestant establishment: purga-

tory, the cult of saints, the perpetuity of miracles, and the value of the cloistered life of celibacy and vicarious prayer led by the inhabitants of convents and monasteries. They were also physical reminders of a version of church history which Reformation propagandists were urgently rewriting

to support Protestantism’s own rather spurious claims to antiquity. In pursuit of proof that a pure apostolic version of Christianity had existed in Britain prior to the arrival of St Augustine in the late sixth century, English writers like Bale and Foxe created a patriotic historiographical myth that depicted the Gregorian mission as the beginning of centuries of corruption

by the anti-Christian papacy. The venerable pedigree for the new faith which they forged so successfully made much of the early conversion of the British nation, either by Joseph of Arimathea and his disciples, purported to have settled near Glastonbury in Ab 63, or through the eftorts of King Lucius in the second century, and then traced its steady declension and degeneration through the Middle Ages. The backsliding of the people to paganism

was regarded as a divine punishment for their descent into sin and the advent of Augustine as having opened the floodgates to a tide of popish superstition under which the true religion all but suffocated.'”* Welsh 192. Alexander Baillie, A true information of the unhallowed offspring, progresse and impoisoned fruits of our Scottish-Calvinian gospel, and gospellers (Wiirzburg, 1628), repr. in Catholic Tractates, ed.

Law, 274-6. 193. Richard Verstegan, Theatrum crudelitatum haereticorum nostri temporis (Antwerp, 1592 edn.), 23,

and see Fig. 2.2 above. 194. On this tradition of Protestant historiography, see Glanmor Williams, “Some Protestant Views of Early British Church History’, in his Welsh Reformation Essays (Cardiff, 1967), 207-19; Colin Kidd, British Identities before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic

World 1600-1800 (Cambridge, 1999), ch. 5; Felicity Heal, Reformation in Britain and Ireland (Oxford, 2003), 386-94. For Lucius and Joseph of Arimathea, see Felicity Heal, “What can King Lucius do for you? The Reformation and the Early British Church’, EHR 120 (2005),

§93-614; Sarah Scutts, ‘Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Perceptions of Joseph of

208 BRITANNIA SANCTA proponents of this thesis like Bishop Richard Davies proudly stressed the vigorous resistance to Roman subordination displayed by the ancient Celts compared with the swift subjugation of the Anglo-Saxons. Succumbing only at the point of the sword, Wales was superior to England in the tenacity of its adherence to the proto-Protestant faith.'”? Post-Reformation Scottish

church history was a more tangled variation on these themes, which reflected the contested political relationship between the kingdom and its

southern neighbour in previous ages, but it too was predicated on the chauvinistic assumption that popery had submerged an earlier independent tradition of Christianity—a tradition that was either presbyterian or episco-

palian depending on the ecclesiological orientation of the scholars concerned.'”° In Ireland, Archbishop James Ussher was especially critical in weaving a narrative which reinterpreted the religion planted by St Patrick as free of the taint of papistry and repositioned the Protestant Church of which he was primate as its true heir.'”’ Catholics responded to this body of polemical scholarship by seeking to demonstrate the unbroken continuity of their religion in the British Isles Arimathea’ (MA diss., University of Exeter, 2006). On Foxe and Bale, see K. R. Firth, The Apocalyptic Tradition in Reformation Britain, 1530-1695 (Oxford, 1979), chs. 2-3; Benedict

Scott Robinson, ‘John Foxe and the Anglo-Saxons’, in Christopher Highley and John N. King (eds.), John Foxe and his World (Aldershot, 2002), 54-72.

195. See Davies’s ‘Address to the Welsh People’ prefacing the Welsh New Testament of 1567: Albert Owen Evans, A Memorandum on the Legality of the Welsh Bible and the Welsh Version of

the Book of Common Prayer (Cardiff, 1925), Appendix III, pp. 83-124. 196. A. H. Williamson, Scottish National Consciousness in the Age of fames VI (Edinburgh, 1979),

117-33; Kidd, British Identities, 119-20, 128-31; Roger A. Mason, ‘“Scotching the Brut”: The Early History of Britain’, in Jenny Wormald (ed.), Scotland Revisited (1991), 49—59; 1id.,

‘Usable Pasts: History and Identity in Reformation Scotland’, Scottish Historical Review, 76 (1997), 54-68. 197. See James Ussher, Gravissimae quaestionis de Christianarum ecclesiarum . . . explicatio (1613) and A discourse of the religion anciently professed by the Irish and Brittish (1631), repr. in The Whole

Works of the Most. Rev. ames Ussher, D.D., ed. Charles Richard Elrington, 16 vols. (Dublin,

1847-64), ll. I-413 and iv. 235-381 esp. 238-9 respectively. Meredith Hanmer’s earlier A chronicle of Ireland had also presented St Patrick as a proto-Protestant: James Ware, Ancient Irish Histories: The Works of Spencer, Campion, Hanmer and Marleburrough, 2 vols. (Dublin, 1809), i1.

77-89. See Alan Ford, ‘“Standing One’s Ground: Religion, Polemic and Irish History since the Reformation’, in id., James McGuire, and Kenneth Milne (eds.), As by Law Established:

The Church of Ireland since the Reformation (Dublin, 1995), I-14 at 2-3; id., “The Irish Historical Renaissance and the Shaping of Protestant History’, in id. and McCafferty (eds.), Origins of Sectarianism, 127-57; id., James Ussher: Theology, History and Politics in Early Modern Ireland and England (Oxford, 2007), ch. 6; Kidd, British Identities, 162-8; Ute

Lotz-Heumann, “The Protestant Interpretation of History in Ireland: The Case of James Ussher’s Discourse’, in Bruce Gordon (ed.), Protestant History and Identity in Sixteenth-Century Europe, 2 vols. (Aldershot, 1996), 11. 107-120, esp. 116-20; John McCafferty, “St Patrick for the Church of England: James Ussher’s Discourse’, Bullan, 3 (1998), 87-102.

BRITANNIA SANCTA 209 since the earliest times. The English strand of the Protestant origin myth was

countered by Nicholas Harpsfield, Thomas Stapleton, and especially by Robert Persons in his Treatise of Three Conversions (1603—4), which described

the successive waves of evangelism that had brought the Roman Catholic faith into England and Wales: the first linked with St Peter and the Apostles, the second associated with Pope Eleutherius, and the third launched by Gregory the Great and Augustine of Canterbury.'*° Such works embodied in text the message that took pictorial form in the spectacular murals painted on the walls of the chapel of the English College in Rome by Pomerancio Circignani, and circulated in a folio volume of engravings entitled Ecclesiae Anglicanae Trophaea published by the Jesuits in 1584 (Fig. 3.6).'”” The torch

was taken up by the secular priest Richard Broughton in his Ecclesiastical Historie of the period up to AD 700 dated 1633 and, dismissing ‘the fancie of a

Church invisible and hidden in some unknown desart presently after the Apostles times’, the Benedictine monk Serenus Cressy carried this narrative forward to the Norman Conquest in his Church history (1668).~°° Catholic Scots did not allow Protestant historiography to go unrefuted either and the Counter-Reformation in Ireland was closely associated with a bold reasser-

. oo, 4. 201

tion of the cherished precept that the primitive Celtic faith planted by St Patrick was indistinguishable from that now upheld by Rome. Exiled priests

in Louvain replied to Ussher in Latin, but this historiographical tradition was given even more potent expression in a Gaelic literature.” Repossessing 198. Nicholas Harpsfield, Historia anglicana ecclesiastica (Douai, 1622); Thomas Stapleton, A _fortresse

of the faith. First planted amonge us Englishmen (Antwerp, 1565) and his translation of Bede, History of the Church of Englande (1565). Robert Persons, A treatise of three conversions of England

from paganism to Christian religion ([St-Omer], 1603-4), on which see Dillon, Construction of Martyrdom, esp. ch. 7. Persons’s stress on the specifically Saxon ancestry of English Catholi-

cism found an echo in the Antwerp-based printer and intelligencer Richard Verstegan’s A restitution of decayed intelligence (Antwerp, 1605). On the Catholic attempt to reclaim the past, see also Christopher Highley, Catholics Writing the Nation in Early Modern Britain and Ireland

(Oxford, 2008), ch. 4. 199. Giovanni Battista de Cavalleris, Ecclesiae Anglicanae Trophaea (Rome, [1584]). See Dillon, Construction of Martyrdom, ch. 4.

200. Broughton, Ecclesiastical Historie; Serenus Cressy, The church history of Brittany, from the beginning of Christianity to the Norman Conquest ([Rouen], 1668), sig. e3', which takes several

sideswipes against Foxe and Dempster. See also Alfordus [Michael Griffith], Fides regia Britannica sive annales ecclesiae Britannicae (Liege, 1663) and Charles Dodd [Hugh Tootel], The church history of England, from the year 1500 to the year 1688... To which is prefixed, a general

history of ecclesiastical affairs under the British, Saxon, and Norman periods, vol. 1 (Brussels [Sherborne], 1737).

201. See Brendan Bradshaw, “The English Reformation and Identity Formation in Wales and Ireland’, in id. and Peter Roberts (eds.), British Consciousness and Identity: The Making of Britain, 1533-1707 (Cambridge, 1998), 43-110, esp. 105. See also John McCafferty, “The

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Figure 4.7. Stonehenge as a Roman temple: Inigo Jones, The most notable antiquity of Great Britain, vulgarly called Stone-heng an Salisbury Plain, ed. John Webb (London, 1655), fold-out plate facing p. 64. (© British Library Board. All Rights Reserved. Shelfmark 454 f.1)

This hypothesis was challenged by Dr Walter Charleton, personal physi-

cian to Charles Il], who argued, admittedly on the basis of conjecture, that this “Gigantick Pile’ had been constructed by the Danes as a royal court, and in particular as an arena for the election and coronation of their kings, during the time when ‘that warlike Nation usurped the soveraignty of this our fertil Island’. Comparison with the pictures and descriptions in Olaus Wormuius’s Danica Monumenta (1643) persuaded Charleton that Stonehenge had Danish prototypes and he did his best to explain away

‘the points of Dissimilitude or Inconformity’ between monuments in the two countries and the claim that its appearance suggested a much earlier date of construction. The decayed state of the sarsens was due to the ‘sacrilegious violence’ of those who had overthrown them in search of building material. He wasted even fewer words refuting ‘what the vulgar

RELIGIOUS REGENERATION OF THE LANDSCAPE 301 idlely feign of the Stones’ regarding their enchantment and translocation.'””

Webb soon leapt to the defence of his mentor, insisting that the Vikings were ‘utterly incapable’ of erecting a structure of such magnificence and elegance: all they had brought to Britain was desolation, destruction, and heathenism. Charleton’s ‘spungy Conceits’ about Scandinavian influence were no more credible than the tales manufactured by the ‘idle brain’ of ‘monkish fablers’ and still swallowed by the ignorant and unlearned.'”* But

the ‘rude and impolished’ character of the structure troubled many who were otherwise drawn to the theory that it had Roman provenance: as John Ray commented, there was nothing of this kind anywhere in Italy.'”” The comic tone of Robert Gay’s A fool’s bolt soon shott at Stonage, written in the same decade, suggests it may be a scholarly spoof on the controversy: it is difficult to know how seriously to take his suggestion that this was an open-

topped British construction erected for heathen worship by a tribe of Somerset giants.'”° In 1676 Aylett Sammes put forward the even more fantastic theory that it was the work of the Phoenician settlers of Britain

and had probably been a temple to Hercules, whom they adored as a tutelary deity.'”’ Aubrey’s Monumenta Britannica, compiled around the same time but neither completed nor published during his lifetime, discussed Stonehenge in the context of a much wider, comparative study of prehistoric antiquities throughout the British Isles and advanced the theory that these were pagan temples, probably constructed by the ancient druids. He fancied that the

mortice-and-tenon joints of the Wiltshire monument were the nesting places of the holy birds kept by these priests, but his approach was more empirical than most of his predecessors. Adopting ‘a kind of Algebraical method’, he approached it as an archaeological artefact that spoke volumes in the absence of written records. He saw it as the poor cousin of Avebury, which, he declared, “did as much excel Stonehenge, as a cathedral does a

193. Walter Charleton, Chorea gigantum, or, the most famous antiquity of Great-Britan, vulgarly calld Stone-heng, standing on Salisbury plain, restored to the Danes (1663), dedication to Charles II, 7, 194. John Webb, A vindication of Stone-Heng restored (1655), 133, 112, 232.

195. Bodl., MS Eng. Hist. c. 11 (Letters to Edward Lhwyd, 1671-1705), fo. 48’. 196. Robert Gay, ‘A Fool’s Bolt soon shott at Stonag: A Discourse concerning Stone-henge’, first publ. in Peter Langtoft’s Chronicle (1725), repr. 1n facsimile in Stonehenge Antiquaries, ed. Legg, 197. Aylett Sammes, Britannia antique illustrated: or, the antiquities of ancient Britain, derived from the Phoenicians (1676), 395—402.

302 RELIGIOUS REGENERATION OF THE LANDSCAPE

parish church’. But his research extended much further and encompassed many monuments in Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. This brought him into contact with scholars from these countries, whose ideas fed into and were cross-fertilized by his own in turn.'”® These included James Garden, professor of theology at Aberdeen, with whom he corresponded on the topic in the 1690s. Garden explained that it was the ‘generall Tradition throughout this Kingdome’ that stone circles like that at Auchincorthie (now Aquorthies), just five miles from the city, had been places of worship and sacrifice in heathen times. From this and other circumstances, he averred, “we may rationally collect’ that they were druid monuments. He went on to engage in speculation about the groves that had once enclosed them, partly on the basis of what appeared to be a surviving example near Strathspey in Inverness-shire, where a copse of trees was still held in sacred veneration by the local inhabitants and visited by

women to give thanks after the safe delivery of their infants. Another question he addressed was how a number of them had come to acquire the name ‘chapels’ over time. He suspected that this was because many had

been converted into churches after the first planting of Christianity.'”” James Wallace found that ideas about the pagan origin of stone circles such as the Ring of Brodgar and the Stones of Stenness were common in Orkney at the end of the seventeenth century, and Martin Martin also encountered them in the Hebrides, where people even identified the altars on which the druidical priests had made propitiary offerings.~°” These notions appear to have been well entrenched by as early as the 1520s. Hector Boece had discussed stone circles in these terms in his Scotorum

198. Bodl., MS Top. gen. c. 24, printed as John Aubrey, Monumenta Britannica or A Miscellany of British Antiquities illustrated with the Notes of Thomas Gale D.D. and John Evelyn Esquier. Compiled between the Years 1665 and 1693, ed. John Fowles and Rodney Legg (Sherborne,

Dorset, 1980), quotations at pp. 21, 32. For Stonehenge, see pp. 74-102, and p. 93 for the holes for the druids’ holy birds. For another late 17th-c. description of Stonehenge by a Scottish traveller, see NLS, Wodrow MS Folio XXVI, fo. 284°. On Avebury, see Aubrey Burl, Prehistoric Avebury (New Haven and London, 1979), and Peter J. Ucko, Michael Hunter, Alan J. Clark, and Andrew Davids (eds.), Avebury Reconsidered: From the 1660s to the 1990s (1991), chs. 1-2.

199. See Bodl., Aubrey MS 12, fos. 122'-127°. This is printed in Cosmo A. Gordon (ed.), ‘Professor James Garden’s Letters to John Aubrey 1692-1695’, Miscellany of the Third Spalding

Club, vol. 3 (Aberdeen, 1960), I-56 at 11-15, 23-38; as well as in Aubrey, Monumenta Britannica, 170-218. 200. James Wallace, A description of the Isles of Orkney (Edinburgh, 1693), 23; Martin, Description of the western islands, 9. See also Macfarlane, Geographical Collections, ed. Mitchell, 1. 33, 330; ll. 137.

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RELIGIOUS REGENERATION OF THE LANDSCAPE 303

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. C To ‘ Zptecne C Heather v Senegpele Sy he GYrounoS Veo? Figure 4.8. Prehistoric monuments and druidism: ‘An Antient Heathen ‘Vemple’, in Charles Snuth, The antient and present state of the county and city of Cork, in four books,

p> 201 ;

2 vols. (Dublin, 1750), fold-out plate facing p. 412. (Reproduced by permission of Cambridge University Library. Shelfmark VIII. 8.10)

Historiae, commenting that they were called ‘ald temples] of goddis be ye

vulgare pepill’.~ In this regard the English lagged considerably behind their northern neighbours. The suggestion that such structures had been constructed for druidical purposes was also relatively early to emerge in Ireland. The Catholic priest and Gaelic scholar Geoftrey Keating described them as ‘relics of the Pagan times’ in his history of the island, which circulated in manuscript from around 1634, and pointed to the many ‘idol altars’ that had survived. ‘Ignorant of the reason of their construction’, the general populace here called them the ‘beds of the Pian’ (see Fig. 4.8).~ ~ The visits of the Welsh antiquary and keeper of

, , .. 202 a ,

201. Hector Boece, Scotorum historiae (Paris, 1526). Quotation from The Mar Lodge Translation of

the History of Scotland, ed. George Watson, Scottish Text Series, 3rd ser., 17 (Edinburgh, 1946), 83-4. 202. Geoftrey Keating, The History of Ireland by Geoffrey Keating, D.D., 1: Containing the First Book of the History from Sect XV to the End, ed. Patrick S. Dinneen, Irish Texts Society, 8 (1908), 349-51. For the Irish antiquarian context, see John Waddell, Foundation Myths: The Beginnings

304 RELIGIOUS REGENERATION OF THE LANDSCAPE the Ashmolean Museum, Edward Lhwyd, to various sites in 1699 and 1700 cemented the view that they had been constructed by the ancient pre-Roman Irish as places of sacrifice or burial. The account of Newgrange near Drogheda he contributed to the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society described the

cave found under the mound as a “‘Barbarous Monument’ and pondered whether the shallow basins filled with rainwater found inside might have once contained blood.*”’ Lhwyd’s investigations of various kinds of prehistoric megaliths—cairns, cromlechs, and kistvaens—in his native Wales led him to

conclude that they were likewise of indigenous and heathen origin. These included Ty Illtud in Brecknockshire and the chambered tomb of Pentre Ifan in Pembrokeshire, which the Ehzabethan gentleman George Owen had described and illustrated in 1603, inferring from biblical precedents that it was an ancient funeral monument. Incorporated into Gibson’s 1695 edition of Camden, Lhwyd’s findings helped to lay the foundations for the intellectual

preoccupation with druidism that reached its peak in the eighteenth century." Henry Rowlands’s Mona Antiqua Restaurata (1723) was a patriotic but somewhat uncritical attempt to argue that the monuments on Anglesey were relics of the pure monotheistic religion practised by its early inhabitants (themselves descendants of Noah and Japhet), which had only later been corrupted into idolatry.~”’ Published in Dublin, this exerted considerable influence on archaeological scholarship in Ireland. The view that they were ‘appurtenances of the Religion of the Patriarchal Age’ which had presaged the introduction of Christianity contrasted with the significance they were of Irish Archaeology (Bray, 2005), chs. 1-3; Clare O’Halloran, Golden Ages and Barbarous Nations: Antiquarian Debate and Cultural Politics in Ireland c. 1750-1800 (Cork, 2004), 73-82.

203. Edward Lhwyd, ‘Several Observations Relating to the Antiquities and Natural History of Ireland’ (Letter to Tancred Robinson, 15 Dec. 1699), Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 27 (1710-12), §03—6. See also Trinity College, Dublin, MS 883/2, p. 285. On Lhwyd and Celtic archaeology, see David McGuinness, ‘Edward Lhuyd’s Contribution to the Study of Irish Megalithic Tombs’, Fournal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, 126 (1996),

62-85, and Nancy Edwards, ‘Edward Lhuyd and the Origins of Early Medieval Celtic Archaeology’, Antiquaries Fournal, 87 (2007), 165-96. Collectanea de Rebus Hibernicis, ed. Charles Vallencey, 6 vols. (Dublin, 1770-1804), vol. 1, pp. 1x—x1 adhered to the view that such monuments were Phoenician and that the Insh druids had been immune from idolatry.

204. Camden’s Britannia, ed. Gibson (1695), 588, 593-4, 627-9, 636-8, 677-8, 683-4. George Owen, The Description of Pembrokeshire: George Owen of Henllys, ed. Dillwyn Miles (Llandysul,

1994), 194-5. See also NLW, MS 13215E, pp. 577-8. See Philip Jenkins, The Making of a Ruling Class: The Glamorgan Gentry 1640-1790 (Cambridge, 1983), 234-8. 205. Henry Rowlands, Mona antiqua restaurata: An archaeological discourse on the antiquities natural and historical, of the Isle of Anglesey, the antient seat of the British druids (Dublin, 1723). For a later

work betraying its influence, see Thomas Wright, Louthiana: or, an introduction to the antiquities of Ireland (2nd edn., 1758), pt. III.

RELIGIOUS REGENERATION OF THE LANDSCAPE 305 accorded in the Anglo-Inish deist John Toland’s polemical History of the Druids published three years later, as symbols of the oppressive system of priestcraft whose pillars he was intent upon breaking.*”°

This mode of interpreting the prehistoric landscape of the British Isles scaled new heights and acquired even more eccentric elements in the work of William Stukeley. His books on Stonehenge (1740) and Avebury (1743) elaborated the thesis that these stone circles were products of the protoChristian faith of the druids, who were the true heirs of Abraham—‘a family God almighty had separated from the gross of mankind to stifle the seeds of idolatry’. The only difference between their religion and that now professed was that ‘they believed in a Messiah who was to come into the world, as we believe in him that is come’.~’’ The pattern for such monuments could be found in the books of the Pentateuch: in the pillars erected by Moses and the patriarchs before temples and tabernacles were built. The groves they had planted were their ‘verdant cathedrals’. Carried to Britain and preserved in a pure form by the aboriginal druids, only later did this faith become contaminated as a result of heathen incursion from the Continent. Constructed using the biblical measure of the cubit, Stonehenge was nothing less than the ‘metropolitical church of the chief Druid’, while Avebury was a complex emblem or hieroglyph of the Trinity. The serpentine shape of its avenues was another mystical symbol of the patriarchal religion, just as the

cross was of the Christian one. The circular and winged character of a further prehistoric site at Barrow on the banks of the Humber was a third. The ancients had deliberately imprinted “the form of the divine being’ on the landscape which surrounded them, this being ‘a most effectual prophylact, as they thought, which could not fail of drawing down the blessings of divine providence upon that place and country, as it were, by sympathy and similitude’. Although this unlettered race had left nothing about their beliefs on record, they had ‘stamp’d a whole country with the impress of this sacred

206. Mason, Statistical Account, 1. 386; 11. 180, 240, 323; Charles Smith, The antient and present state

of the county of Down (Dublin, 1744), 201; id., Antient and present state of... Cork, 11. 410; Thomas Wright, Louthiana: or, an introduction to the antiquities of Ireland (1758 edn.), bk. III. John Toland, A Critical History of the Celtic Religion and Learning: Containing an Account of the

Druids (1814 edn.; first publ. 1726). See Justin Champion, ‘John Toland, the Druids and the Politics of Celtic Scholarship’, Irish Historical Studies, 32 (2001), 337-41. On the 18th-c. Irish antiquarian scene, see Waddell, Foundation Myths, ch. 4. For a broader overview, covering the whole British Isles, Sweet, Antiquaries, ch. 4. 207. William Stukeley, Stonehenge. A temple restor’d to the British druids (1740), quotation at p. 2; id., Abury. A temple of the British druids, with some others, described (1743).

306 RELIGIOUS REGENERATION OF THE LANDSCAPE

character, and that of the most permanent nature’. The face of the earth bore witness to the druids’ commitment to the true religion—a religion which Stukeley sought to defend against the scepticism of the deists. Indeed

he saw his antiquarian and archaeological endeavours to decipher the meaning of these ancient landmarks as a form of apologetic for the Church of England, which, he declared emphatically, had ‘made the best reformation from the universall pollution of Christianity’ by popery.~’> Whether the deist threat against which he marshalled his energies was that represented by Toland, or, as David Haycock has more recently argued, the Arianism of

William Whiston and his colleagues in Cambridge, including Sir Isaac Newton, 1s less relevant to this enquiry than the implications Stukeley’s writings had for contemporary perceptions of the environment. Animated by anger and anxiety about the destruction of stone circles by an alliance of avaricious farmers and religious zealots, his efforts to map this ritual landscape reflected a determination to protect it from further devastation. This may in fact have enjoyed some success. Captivating the imagination of a whole generation of learned gentleman amateurs, they too helped to reinvest the countryside of Britain and Ireland with religious resonances.~”” William Borlase’s detailed field studies of the antiquities of Cornwall in the 1750s were greatly influenced by the publications of Stukeley, but they departed significantly from him in interpreting a range of prehistoric monuments as evidence that the druids had been guilty of idolatry. His inspections of such structures were predicated on the assumption that the early Britons

had been addicted to the pagan superstition of worshipping rocks. The

‘naturall Crage’ of the Cheese Wring was one which had been thus venerated (see below, Fig. 5.5), while the narrow passages under a tolmen in the parish of Constantine had probably been used in rites of initiation, ‘for

208. Quotations from Stukeley, Abury, pp. iv, 5, 9-10, 101; 1d., Stonehenge, 10. For Avebury as a Roman monument, see T. Twining, Avebury in Wiltshire, the remains of a Roman Work, erected by Vespatian, and Fulius Agricola, during their several commands in Britanny (1723). 209. There is a considerable body of scholarship on Stukeley: Stuart Piggott, William Stukeley: An Eighteenth-Century Antiquarian (Oxford, 1950) and Ancient Britons and the Antiquarian Imagi-

nation (1989), ch. 5, presents his career in terms of intellectual declension, from an objective field archaeologist to a religious eccentric. David Haycock’s recent study emphasizes the fundamental continuity of Stukeley’s thought across his career, and situates it within its broader intellectual, scientific, and religious context: William Stukeley: Science, Religion and Archaeology in Eighteenth-Century England (Woodbridge, 2002), esp. chs. 7-8. Ronald Hutton, ‘The Religion of William Stukeley’, Antiquaries Fournal, 85 (2005), 381-94, argues that the

shift in Stukeley’s thinking and elaboration of his theories reflected a reaction against and repudiation of his own flirtation with deism.

RELIGIOUS REGENERATION OF THE LANDSCAPE 307

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introducing Proselytes or Novices, people under Vows, or going to sacrifice, into their more sublime Mysteries’ (see Fig. 4.9). The holed stone of the Men an Tol near Madron had in all likelihood ‘serv’d several delusive purposes’,

together with the many rock basins he had come across on his travels around the county. These, he suspected, were vessels ‘most ingeniously contrived’ to collect the holy water that druidical priests used for lustration.

Borlase also gave qualified support to Toland’s suggestion that rocking stones had been used by these evil magicians as a form of ‘Piae fraudes, to increase their private gain, and establish an ill-grounded Authority, by deluding the common people’. Irregular furrows on a large boulder on a promontory on one of the Isles of Scilly were ‘the work of art’ and may

ee 210 ¢

have been a means of collecting sacred embers. Similar corrugations in others,

he speculated, had been ‘designed as chanels for the blood of the victim to run into, for, to divine by such shocking meanders was one of the Druid

abominations’. Stukeley could not but ‘shake his sententious head’ at

210. William Borlase, Observations on the antiquities historical and monumental, of the county of Cormwall (Oxtord, 1754), 165-9, 170-2; id., Observations on the ancient and present state of the islands of Scilly (Oxford, 1756), 34—S.

308 RELIGIOUS REGENERATION OF THE LANDSCAPE

these subversive suggestions, which transformed the West Country landscape into the venue for gruesome acts of human sacrifice.*'' Borlase’s analysis certainly sat somewhat uncomfortably with the patriotic Protestant foundation myth that had become woven around the ancient Britons. But it left its imprint upon English and Irish elite outlooks: until well into the twentieth century his theories about rock basins supplied an alternative

explanation for the bullauns at Glendalough and elsewhere that were more conventionally seen as saintly contact relics.“'~ Perhaps the most sionificant legacy of Borlase’s work was the tendency to subject topograph-

ical features we would now recognize as the result of natural geological processes to scrutiny through the lens of druidism. Another class of conspicuous landmarks was simultaneously being reassessed by contemporary antiquarians and surrounded by ‘a sea of conjecture, some of it very frothy conjecture’: chalk figures on hillsides.*'’ Chief among these was

the famous White Horse of Uffington on the Berkshire downs, which extensive excavation and rigorous scientific testing has definitively dated to the late Bronze Age.” '* Considered a ‘wonder’ by medieval authors, it was noted by Camden only in passing, who implied that it was simply a figment of the

imagination of those who looked at the slope from a certain mental and physical perspective—rather like the random patterns people discern in clouds as they float across the sky. Aubrey set the tone for subsequent controversy by sitting on the fence: in one section of his Monumenta Britannica he attributed the figure to the Saxon chieftains Hengist and Horsa, in another to the pre-Roman Britons on the basis of its resemblance to symbols on coins of that era.7'” In 1738 the first thesis was filled out by the Oxford don Francis Wise, who argued that it was a monument created to commemorate the victory of the Christian

King Alfred over the heathen Danes at the battle of Ashdown in 871. The equine symbol confirmed the link with the Saxons, since they were well 211. As Jeremiah Milles wrote to Borlase in Apr. 1754. See P. A. S. Pool’s introduction ‘The Man and his Work’ to the 1973 facs. edn. of Borlase, Observations on the antiquities... of Cornwall (1769 edn.), p. x1. 212. See Liam Price, ‘Rock-Basins, or “Bullauns”’, at Glendalough and Elsewhere’, Fournal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, 89 (1959), 161-88.

213. Quotation from Morris Marples, White Horses and Other Hill Figures (Gloucester, 1981 edn.; first publ. 1949), 201.

214. For the archaeology of the site, see David Miles, Simon Palmer, Gary Lock, Chris Gosden, and Anne Marie Cromarty, Uffington White Horse and its Landscape: Investigations at White Horse Hill, Uffington, 1989-95, and Tower Hill, Ashbury, 1993-4, Oxtord Archaeology Thames

Valley Landscapes Monograph, 18 (Oxford, 2003). 215. Camden, Britain (1610), 279; Aubrey, Monumenta Britannica, 338.

RELIGIOUS REGENERATION OF THE LANDSCAPE 309 known to have adopted this as their standard. Wise explicitly compared such prehistoric landscape features with written texts. He saw them as the natural medium of a preliterate culture: “The most ancient people, before the invention of books, and before the use of sculpture upon stones, and other smaller fragments were wont to represent things great and noble, upon entire rocks and mountains...’ On his reading, the White Horse was not only an emblem of the valour of the Anglo-Saxons in defence of native liberty, but also of the salient role they had played in the nation’s Christianization. He could not

approve ‘the byass in them to superstition’ and their preoccupation with miracles, but lauded their part in delivering the English people from ignorance and sloth into politeness and civility and in laying down their much admired constitution and religion. His essay must be seen as much against the backdrop of early Reformation eftorts to harness the Anglo-Saxon past in order to buttress the Protestant Church of England’s claims to antiquity as a forerunner and catalyst of the Victorian cult of Alfred (see Fig. 4.10). Ina supplement published four years later, he interpreted Whiteleaf Cross near Monks-Risborough in

Buckinghamshire in the same fashion: the fold-out engraving depicting it was labelled Crux Saxonica.“'® Wise’s imaginative exposition of the Uffington landmark aroused the ire of one ‘Philalethes Rusticus’ (his nval William Asplin), who weighed in with a tract entitled The impertinence and imposture of modern antiquaries display’d, condemning it as ‘an idle and infamous Fiction’, “void of all Foundation in Truth or Probability’, and a ‘most insolent Attempt upon the

Understanding of the Curious’. Wise might tax the Saxons with venerating white horses, declared Rusticus, but was he not at fault for adoring this chalk figure ‘to an equal Degree of Superstition?’*!’

216. Francis Wise, A letter to Dr Mead concerning some antiquities in Berkshire, particularly shewing that the WHITE HORSE, which gives name to the vale, is a monument of the west-Saxons, made in memory of a great victory obtained over the Danes A.D. 871 (Oxford, 1738), quotations at 23 and

10; id., Further Observations upon the White Horse and other antiquities in Berkshire (Oxford, 1742). See the excellent discussions of this topic in Philip Schwyzer, “The Scouring of the

White Horse: Archaeology, Identity and “Heritage”’, Representations, 65 (1999), 42-62; Brian Edwards, “The Scouring of the White Horse Country’, Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Magazine, 98 (2005), 90-127. Iam very grateful to Henry French for drawing

the Edwards essay to my attention. On the cult of Alfred, see Simon Keynes, “The Cult of King Alfred the Great’, Anglo-Saxon England, 28 (1999), 225-356. 217. Rusticus, Impertinence and imposture, quotations at pp. xill, xvi-xv, 4. Asplin refrained from attempting to erect another theory in its place but veered towards the idea that it was either British in origin or ‘no more than a Lusus Pastorum; a Fancy of the Neighbouring Shepherds, to direct themselves at their Leisure Hours’ (pp. 22—3). For a defence of Wise against the efforts of this ‘bombast scribler’, see An answer to a scandalous libel, entitled, the impertinence and imposture of modern antiquaries display’d (1741).

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316 RELIGIOUS REGENERATION OF THE LANDSCAPE

Castle incorporated many of its characteristic features. Anglo-Irish noble-

men of an older vintage also embraced them, though they tended to translate them into practice less ostentatiously, but they were largely resisted by Gaelic landowners, in another manifestation of the ethnic and cultural differences that divided the elite in this region.*~” The process of architectural regeneration that was transforming country

estates also extended to the urban landscape and had a civic as well as aristocratic dimension. In towns and cities, conduits became a vehicle for symbolic messages and a focal point for pageantry such as mayoral inaugurations, coronation processions, and royal entries. Their embellishment visibly celebrated the wealth of their benefactors and communal pride and identity and, in the case of London, sought to cement the links between the crown and the metropolis.*~° Carfax conduit in Oxford was edified in 1617 with the assistance and initiative of the rich lawyer Otho Nicholson, and an ornate structure was erected over the cisterns. Bearing the arms of the city, university, and founder and the allegorical figures of Justice, Temperance,

Fortitude, and Wisdom, together with statutes of eight worthies (King David, Alexander the Great, Godfrey of Bouillon, Ardaticus, Charlemagne, Hector of Troy, Julius Caesar, and James I), this was a deliberate attempt to link Nicholson’s name with the king’s. Imitating triumphal arches that were circulating in contemporary pattern books, it must be seen in the context of

other attempts to flatter and pay homage to him.**’ Whereas the public fountains of Fribourg in Switzerland and the more flamboyant examples created by Bernini in Rome gave expression to militant Catholic confes-

225. See Terence Reeves-Smyth, Irish Gardens and Gardening before Cromwell, The Barryscourt Lectures IV ([Cork], 1999), 121-4; Patrick Bowe, “The Renaissance Garden in Ireland’, Irish

Arts Review Yearbook, 11 (1995), 74-81. For Youghal, see Evelyn Philip Shirley (ed.), ‘Extracts from the Journal of Thomas Dineley, Esquire, Giving Some Account of his Visit to Ireland in the Reign of Charles IP’, Journal of the Kilkenny and South-East of Ireland Archaeological Society, 4 (1862-3), 103-6.

226. For some of these conduits, see Stow, Survey of London, ed. Kingsford, 34, 40, 41. On conduits, see Mark S. R. Jenner, ‘From Conduit Community to Commercial Network? Water in London, 1500-1725’, in Paul Griffiths and Mark S. R. Jenner (eds.), Londinopolis: Essays in the Cultural and Social History of Early Modern London (Manchester, 2000), 250-72. For civic ceremonial involving conduits, see Lawrence Manley, Literature and Culture in Early

Modern London (Cambridge, 1995), ch. 5, esp. p. 225; Andrew Gordon, ‘Performing London: The Map and the City in Ceremony’, in Andrew Gordon and Bernard Klein (eds.), Literature, Mapping and the Politics of Space in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge, 2001),

69-88. 227. Catherine Cole, ‘Carfax Conduit’, Oxoniensia, 29-30 (1964-5), 142-66 and pls. I-V.

RELIGIOUS REGENERATION OF THE LANDSCAPE 317 sionalism and papal imperialism, their counterparts in England harnessed the

Renaissance to buttress the reputation of its Protestant magistracy and monarchy.~~* Market crosses like Cheapside, which underwent neo-classical rehabilitation in this period, frequently performed the same function.

It is hard to ignore the way in which such spaces and structures were implicated in the conflicts that culminated in the civil wars of the 1640s, though we must be careful to avoid seeing this in terms of any simple opposition between court and country.~” At a time when royal patronage was politicizing the arts in general, elaborate Renaissance gardens came to be seen by some as symptoms of the crypto-Catholic decadence and prodigality

of the Caroline court and its entourage. Just as masterpieces shipped over from Europe to install in the palaces of the king and the mansions of the aristocracy were perceived by the godly as ‘hieroglyphic[s] of the causes and

intents of our present troubles’, so too did the parks that surrounded them become symbols of the discontents that were embroiling the British Isles in bitter internecine struggle.” Roy Strong has spoken of ‘the association of the new gardening with the principles of Divine Right’.~”’ The tendency to see them as emblems of absolutism should not be overstated: classicism was never the monopoly of any particular religious group or political party.

Both republicans and royalists, puritans and Anglicans, embraced and adapted it for their own needs.~* Nevertheless, like the ‘antique idols’ Charles I was criticized for accepting as gifts from the papal envoy, the Mannerist gardens that housed them did acquire contentious resonances in the middle decades of the seventeenth century. It is surely no coincidence that so many became the targets of Parliamentary violence after the outbreak of fighting. Statuary and fountains were destroyed and stands of trees ruthlessly felled on the royalist estates plundered

228. Donald A. McColl, “Standing by the Ancient Faith: Fribourg’s Public Fountains and the Coming of the Reformation’, in James van Horn Melton (ed.), Cultures of Communication from Reformation to Enlightenment (Aldershot, 2002), 158-97. On Bernini, see Schama, Landscape and Memory, 289-306.

229. The earl of Pembroke, for instance, sided with Parliament in the Civil War. See Perez Zagorin, The Court and the Country: The Beginning of the English Revolution (1969).

230. Quoted in Margaret Aston, ‘Puritans and Iconoclasm, 1560-1660’, in Christopher Durston and Jacqueline Eales (eds.), The Culture of English Puritanism, 1560-1700 (Basingstoke, 1996),

231. Strong, Renaissance Garden, 200; Hart, Art and Magic, 103.

232. Keith Thomas, ‘English Protestantism and Classical Art’, in Lucy Gent (ed.), Albion’s Classicism: The Visual Arts in Britain, 1550-1660 (New Haven and London, 1995), 221-38, esp. 231.

318 RELIGIOUS REGENERATION OF THE LANDSCAPE

during these decades, and the plans to cut down a royal walk of elms in St James’s Park may have sprung from more than the pressing need of Parliament to convert any asset into cash.’ The destruction of a grove near St Bartholomew’s Hospital in Oxford (which was ‘a great pleasure and ornament to this place and which afforded much recreation to the defatigated student’) by Oriel College on the orders of the city governors and officers was probably driven by more pragmatic motives. But it too was lamented by Anthony Wood as a casualty of the Civil War.~** Renaissance gardens, orchards, and fishponds were similarly devastated by the military campaigns

in Scotland and Ireland, which inevitably brought an abrupt halt to their creation. The wanton destruction of the landscapes created by English Protestant settlers has been seen as part of a drive of the Catholic Irish ‘to wipe out the cultural capital of the colonizer’ and to erase the icons and symbols of imperial subjugation. The Dutchman Gerard Boate commented on their determination ‘to extinguish the memory of them, and all their civility and good things by them introduced into that Wild Nation’.~”° Gardens also became a source of tension within the ranks of the Cromwellian regime. When a dozen classical statues of Venus, Adonis, Apollo, and other Greek gods from the dead king’s collections were retained ‘for

their antiquity and rarity’ in 1651 and erected in the Privy Garden at Whitehall, an army officer declared that such “‘Romish and Heathenish

images make not a good shew in a...Commonwealth’s garden’. Two years later a sectary by the name of Mary Netheway wrote to the Lord Protector urging him to order their destruction because these ‘monstres’ were an intolerable affront to the Almighty, “for wils they stand, though you

se noe evel in them,...thar is much evel in it, for wils the grofes and altars of the idels remayn’d untaken away in Jerusalem, the routh of God continued agaynst Israel’. In 1659, evidently animated by the same convictions, a Quaker cook crept into the garden with a blacksmith’s hammer and tried to reduce them to dust. He escaped serious punishment, apparently through the intervention of ‘som rich men that ware of his

233. Thomas, “English Protestantism and Classical Art’, 224; Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500-1800 (Harmondsworth, 1983), 218-19. For the destruction of Lord Cholmondley’s garden, see Mercurius Aulicus: The sixth weeke, ending Feb. 10, 1643/4] (1644), 822. See also Ch. 2, p. 142, above. 234. Wood, Survey of the Antiquities of Oxford, ed. Clark, u. 517. 235. William J. Smyth, Map-Making, Landscapes and Memory: A Geography of Colonial and Early Modern Ireland c.1530-1750 (Cork, 2006), 142-3.

RELIGIOUS REGENERATION OF THE LANDSCAPE 319

judgment’.~°° The sculptures in the grounds of the late earl of Arundel’s residence in south London may have been deliberately mutilated in the same period: when John Aubrey saw them after their later relocation to Cupid’s Gardens in Lambeth, they were ‘mangled’ and ‘very much injured by Time’ and by the ‘ill Usage’ they had received ‘from the Ignorance and Stupidity of those who knew not their Value’.~°’ As Keith Thomas has remarked, ‘the introduction of the styles and artefacts of ancient paganism into a Christian world could never be a matter of religious indifference... Only when the prospect of a return to paganism had receded, could they be admitted on aesthetic grounds and cherished as what we call “art”.’*°* In the heady and highly charged atmosphere of the Revolutionary era, when

Protestant zealots believed they had to re-enact the iconoclast zeal of the Hebrew kings and patriarchs to save the nation from catastrophe, the degree of detachment this required was anathema to extreme iconophobes. Like tracts of the countryside polluted by holy wells and wayside crosses, these cultivated and manicured pockets of landscape were the receptacles of idols. The gardening preferred by the godly was a spiritual husbandry, which sought to reverse the curse and re-create the earthly paradise of the Garden of Eden by perfecting nature. It brought the gardener closer to God, who it sought to emulate by bringing order out of chaos and by privileging

agricultural and botanical production above ornate decoration. To plant orchards on patches of wasteland was to mimic the aesthetic engineering of

the Creator. The idea that cultivation and improvement represented the fulfilment of the Lord’s purposes for the earth was especially associated with

the Hartlib circle.”

236. Original Letters and Papers of State, Addressed to Oliver Cromwell, Concerning the Affairs of Great Britain, ed. John Nickolls (1743), 115; Thomas Rugg, The Diurnal of Thomas Rugg, 1659-1661,

ed. William L. Sachse, Camden Society, 3rd ser. (1961), 10-11. 237. Aubrey, Natural history and antiquities of... Surrey, v. 282-3.

238. Thomas, “English Protestantism and Classical Art’, 221. On the problems of pagan and Catholic art in the post-Reformation world, see id., “Art and Iconoclasm in Early Modern England’, in Kenneth Fincham and Peter Lake (eds.), Religious Politics in Post-Reformation England (Woodbridge, 2006), 16—40; and for the later period, Clare Haynes, Pictures and Popery: Art and Religion in England, 1660-1760 (Aldershot, 2006). 239. See Michael Leslie, “The Spiritual Husbandry of John Beale’, in id., Culture and Cultivation in Early Modern England: Writing and the Land (Leicester and London, 1992), 151-72; John Prest, The Garden of Eden: The Botanic Garden and the Re-creation of Paradise (New Haven and

London, 1981); Luke Morgan, ‘Early Modern Edens: The Landscape and Language of Paradise’, Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes: An International Quarterly,

27 (2007), 142-8.

320 RELIGIOUS REGENERATION OF THE LANDSCAPE

The Restoration permitted a major resurgence of ornamental gardening and saw the increasing influence of the Baroque styles that were becoming dominant in France.~*” By the 1720s there were also signs of a turning away from formal patterns towards the elegant irregularity and studied asymmetry

that would mark the picturesque garden. Synonymous with the work of Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown, this mode of design idealized nature and blurred the boundaries between enclosed parks and the wider prospects that were visible from them.~*! The effort to contrive ‘natural’ landscapes not only spurred the creation of serpentine lakes, streams, and waterfalls on an unprecedented scale; it also converged with the romanticization of the

ruin. This resulted not merely in the active incorporation of crumbling ecclesiastical structures and prehistoric monuments into the estates of the nobility and gentry but also the construction of fake ones. Dilapidated monasteries, chapels, castles, megalithic tombs, and stone circles were made into focal points of the private pleasure grounds of the wealthy. Where they were not already present they were artistically created.**” In Ireland, for instance, the remnants of Grey Abbey in Co. Down were made into an important visual feature when Rosemount House was built in the mid-eighteenth century and those of the Fransciscan friary of Armagh

were incorporated into the archbishop’s demesne.“ Purchased from a Roman Catholic landowner, the ruins of Fountains Abbey became part of the landscaped gardens of Studley Royal around the same time, while the

duke of Queensberry, owner of Amesbury House near Stonehenge, incorporated views of it into his park, as well as remodelling the land around 240. See Thacker, Genius of Gardening, ch. 9; Quest-Riston, English Garden, 79-90. 241. There is a considerable literature on the 18th-c. and picturesque garden: see, among others, S. Lang, “The Genesis of the Landscape Garden’, in Nikolaus Pevsner (ed.), The Picturesque Garden and its Influence outside the British Isles, Dumbarton Oaks Colloquium on the History of Landscape Architecture II (Dumbarton Oaks, 1974), 3-29; David Watkin, The English Vision: The Picturesque in Architecture, Landscape and Garden Design (1982); John Dixon Hunt, Gardens and the Picturesque: Studies in the History of Landscape Architecture (Cambridge, Mass.

and London, 1992); Pat Gardner, ‘Landscapes, Follies and Villages’, in Christopher Christie (ed.), The British Country House in the Eighteenth Century (Manchester and New York, 2000), 129-53; P. M. Harman, The Culture of Nature in Britain 1680-1860 (New Haven and London,

2009), ch. 4, esp. 113-47. 242. See David Coffin, The English Garden: Meditation and Memorial (Princeton, 1994), ch. 3; Watkin, English Vision, ch. 3; Michael Charlesworth, ‘Sacred Landscape: Signs of Religion 1n the Eighteenth-Century Garden’, Fournal of Garden History, 13 (1993), $6—-68. On prehistoric monuments, see Hayman, Riddles in Stone, ch. 9. 243. Ann Hamlin and Nick Brannon, ‘Northern Ireland: The Afterlife of Monastic Buildings’, in David Gaimster and Roberta Gilchrist (eds.), The Archaeology of the Reformation 1480-1580 (Leeds, 2003), 252-66 at 254.

RELIGIOUS REGENERATION OF THE LANDSCAPE 321

an Iron Age camp and constructing a druidical grotto.*** Henry, earl of Pembroke, paid for an expensive and accurate model of the monument to be installed at Wilton, as William Stukeley noted with approval in the dedication to his book on Avebury. Stukeley’s own antiquarianism cannot be readily separated from his interest in landscape gardening. Nor can that of Francis Wise, who filled the garden of his house at Elsfield outside Oxford

with fantastic devices such as cascades and triumphal arches, as well as replicas of the tower of Babel, an Egyptian pyramid, and a druid temple.~” Richard Pococke saw many examples in his tours around England and Scotland in the 1750s, including the ruins at Inverary Castle constructed by the duke of Argyll and a mock prehistoric avenue at Dogmansfield.**° For some, cromlechs and standing stones became ‘a luxury item of garden furniture’.~*’ Nor did these intellectual preoccupations fail to leave a mark on the architecture of burgeoning cities. John Wood’s Grand Circus in Bath appears to have been a symbolic recreation of Stonehenge, a fitting orna-

ment for a town he believed to have been the headquarters of the druids.

The giant acorns that top the parapets are the most overt hint of the mythology that informed and shaped his vision.**” Ancient hallowed springs were also transformed into ornaments. At St Albans, John Churchill, future duke of Marlborough, designed a series of

terraces around the holy well linked with England’s protomartyr; Sir Edward Bealknap incorporated another at Burton Dasset into his park; and at Gokewell in Lincolnshire a third was diverted to supply the ingenious

244. On Fountains, see the description by Philip Yorke, 2nd earl of Hardwicke, dated 1744 in John Dixon Hunt and Peter Willis (eds.), The Genius of the Place: The English Landscape Garden 1620-1820 (1975), 237-9; Mavis Batey and David Lambert, The English Garden Tour:

A View into the Past (1990), 162-7. On Stonehenge, see Bender, ‘Stonehenge—Contested Landscapes’, 262.

245. Stukeley, Abury, dedication to Henry, earl of Pembroke. See David Haycock, ‘“A Small Journey into the Country”: William Stukeley and the Formal Landscapes of Stonehenge and Avebury’, in Martin Myrone and Lucy Peltz (eds.), Producing the Past: Aspects of Antiquarian Culture and Practice 1700-1850 (Aldershot, 1999), 67-82. For Wise, see Margaret Clunies Ross and Amanda J. Collins, ‘Francis Wise’, in ODNB. 246. Richard Pococke, Tours in Scotland 1747, 1750, 1760 by Richard Pococke, Bishop of Meath, from

the Original MS and Drawings in the British Museum, ed. Daniel William Kemp, Scottish History Society (Edinburgh, 1887), 66; Pococke, Travels through England of Dr Richard Pococke, ed. Cartwright, 11. 161-2. 247. Hayman, Riddles in Stone, 94. See also Sam Smiles, The Image of Antiquity: Ancient Britons and the Romantic Imagination (New Haven and London, 1994), ch. 9.

248. Hayman, Riddles in Stone, 83-5; Haycock, “Small Journey’, 77.

322 RELIGIOUS REGENERATION OF THE LANDSCAPE

waterworks and fountains in the garden.~*” Relatively recent structures were also subject to the same treatment: in the 1780s the ‘no less sacred than venerable’ monument that was Carfax conduit was removed from the Oxford High Street and re-erected in Lord Harcourt’s park of Nuneham.~”” Trees too began to be incorporated into picturesque landscapes and seen

through the prism of ancient mythology. The tendency to regard them as objects of beauty and sources of inspiration which ought to be actively cherished was already implicit in John Evelyn’s Sylva (1664). Evelyn declared that there were no more ‘delightful’ or ‘goodly adornments to a magnificent estate and lamented the felling of venerable oaks in tones that bespoke a new near-idolatry of the natural world: ‘I do not at any time

remember to have heard the groans of those nymphs (grieving to be dispossessed of their ancient habitations) without some emotion or pity.’~’ A new reverence for groves and woods as primitive churches and sanctuaries accompanied the revival of Gothic architecture, which was itself seen as an attempt to reproduce the overarching branches of a forest arbour

in stone.” The evolving passion of the eighteenth-century elite for the medieval past also encouraged a vogue for installing hermits in cottages and cells on their estates. Obtained by advertisement and paid a pension, such recluses helped to transform the gardens of the nobility and gentry into fantasy theme parks. A hermitage in the garden of Caledon in Co. Tyrone, the seat of Lord and Lady Orrery, was equipped with a range of props, including

old manuscripts, a pair of spectacles, a leather bottle, an hour glass, and various mathematical instruments. One newspaper notice called for applications from individuals prepared to live underground invisible, silent, unshaven, and unclipped for seven years, albeit in a comfortable room with books, an organ, and delicious cuisine.~?” The manufacturing of follies that would enhance a vista or hillside also extended to enormous chalk figures. Antiquarian interest in ancient white

249. Tony Hanes, “‘Well-Wishing in St Albans’, Source, 6 (1987), 20-4 at 21; Rattue, Living Stream, 118. On Gokewell, see Pryme, Diary of Abraham de la Pryme, ed. Jackson, 79.

250. Cole, ‘Carfax Conduit’, 151. 251. Evelyn, Silva, 11. 349-50.

252. Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 209, 216, 218-19; Schama, Landscape and Memory, 253. Soe Jannes Howley, Follies and Garden Buildings of Ireland (New Haven and London, 1993), 39 and ch. 3 passim; Barbara Jones, Follies and Grottoes (1974 edn.; first publ. in 1953), 177-92 at 184.

RELIGIOUS REGENERATION OF THE LANDSCAPE 323 horses like that at Uffington spawned a veritable stable full of Georgian and

Victorian imitations, which may have been further encouraged by the fashion for equestrian paintings in the style of George Stubbs. Francis Wise believed that the White Horse of Westbury had been wrought within living memory when he wrote in 1742, and many others were carved in subsequent decades at sites as far apart as Aberdeen, Yorkshire, Hampshire, and Sussex. The fad for ‘leucippotomy’ was accompanied by a proliferation of white crosses like that at Whiteleaf. As Brian Edwards writes, ‘Contrived landscapes were not just places to be seen, but places in which to be seen.’*”* Some figures of the legendary giants Gog and Magog are of proven medieval or older origin, including those which adorned Plymouth Hoe. This is probably also true of those in the vicinity of a Roman camp at Wandlebury in Cambridgeshire first recorded in 1605: scholars renewed the cut turf each year by custom until shortly before 1640, after which it was discontinued, only to be renewed again in the later seventeenth century, before being swallowed up into the landscaped gardens of Lord Godolphin.~”” But in other cases, the silence of pre-Reformation sources has led to speculation that such gargantuan images may be belated fabrications reflecting and projecting fashionable myths about the past. The Long Man of Wilmington is situated in countryside rich

with Neolithic, Bronze Age, and Iron Age remains, but the fact that no reference is made to it by mapmakers and topographers before 1710 has fuelled the thesis that it too may be some kind of folly.~”°

Even more controversy surrounds the famous club-bearing giant inscribed on a sloping field above Cerne Abbas in Dorset. This is conspicuous by its absence from the written record prior to 1694, in which a single line

occurs in the churchwardens’ accounts noting the sum of 3s. paid for ‘repaireing’ it. Together with suggestions made by commentators in the 254. Wise, Further Observations, 48. Edwards, ‘Scouring of the White Horse Country’, 90-1, 104-9. See also Marples, White Horses, 17-18 and passim. For a list of chalk figures dating from after 1700, see Paul Newman, Lost Gods of Albion: The Chalk Hill-Figures of Britain (Stroud, 1987), Appendix B, pp. 197-209. 255. Mercurius Britannicus [Joseph Hall], Mundus alter et idem sive terra australis (Frankfurt [London, 1605?]), trans. as The discovery of a new world or a description of the South Indies.

Hetherto unknowne ([1608?]), 44. On the Plymouth and Wandlebury giants, see Marples, White Horses, ch. 10; Newman, Lost Gods of Albion, chs. 6-7; Rodney Castleden, Ancient British Hill Figures (Seaford, East Sussex, 2000), 87-92; W. Lindsay Scott, “The Chiltern White Crosses’, Antiquity, 11 (1937), 100-4 at 104. 256. See Martin Bell and Ronald Hutton, ‘Not so Long Ago’, British Archaeology, 77 (July 2004), 15-21. See Marples, White Horses, ch. 9; Newman, Lost Gods of Albion, ch. 8; Castleden, Ancient

British Hill Figures, 72-86. For changes to its shape over time, see Rodney Castleden, ‘Daddy Long-Legs: The Shape-Shifting Wilmington Giant’, 3rd Stone, 47 (2003), 41-7.

324 RELIGIOUS REGENERATION OF THE LANDSCAPE

1740s that it was a ‘modern thing’, this has stirred ongoing debate about whether it was a prehistoric fertility symbol or another manifestation of the whimsical impulse to create quasi-historical landmarks. A spirited case has been made in support of the claim that it was first cut and scoured by the servants of Lord Denzil Holles, MP for Dorchester, in the mid-seventeenth century, as ‘a grand gesture of defiance’ against Oliver Cromwell, whom he blamed for ruining the kingdom. Joseph Bettey sees it as a massive satirical

cartoon etched on his land in mockery of a man who was being heralded by his supporters as England’s Hercules. Other ideas, also recorded by John Hutchins, late eighteenth-century historian of the county, include the notion that it was a piece of early Reformation propaganda against the sexual immorality of the abbot of the local Benedictine monastery and the suggestion that it was an ancient memorial of the Saxon God Heil (or Helith). Advocates of an early modern rather than ancient giant argue that stories of the latter helped to inspire the great carving rather than

vice versa.~°’ It is unlikely that either side will ever be able to claim definitive victory and in any case these diverting academic parlour games should not deflect our attention from the tendency of chalk figures of all types to shape-shift over time. An obsession with origins carries the risk of obscuring the way in which each successive generation overlays the palimpsest of the landscape with its own meanings. As Barbara Bender has observed, ‘biography is as important as date of birth’.°* Every renewal is an act of re-creation. Gardeners and folly makers, therefore, augmented the process by which the landscape, rural and urban, became a theatre of religious history and national memory, a manifestation of the consuming interest in the classical, British, and Gothic past that gripped the upper classes of Britain and Ireland in the long eighteenth century. The real and mock antique statuary, mo257. Timothy Darvill, Katherine Barker, Barbara Bender, and Ronald Hutton, The Cerne Giant: An Antiquity on Trial, Bournemouth University School of Conservation Sciences Occasional Paper 5 (Oxford, 1999), Part I for the case for prehistoric antiquity; Part II for it as an early

modern development, esp. Joseph Bettey, “The Cerne Giant Revisited’, 75-88. See also earlier contributions by Leslie Grinsell, “The Cerne Abbas Giant: 1764-1980’, Antiquity, 54 (1980), 29-33; J. H. Bettey, “The Cerne Abbas Giant: The Documentary Evidence’, Antiquity, §5 (1981), 118-21; D. Morgan Evans, “Eighteenth-Century Descriptions of the Cerne Abbas Giant’, Antiquaries Fournal, 78 (1998), 463-71; Ronald Hutton, The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles: Their Nature and Legacy (Oxford, 1991), 160. Note that

Wise, Further Observations, 48, believed it to be of later date than the White Horse of Uffington, but did not examine the issue in detail. 258. Barbara Bender, ‘A Living Giant’, in Darvill et al., The Cerne Giant, 126-9 at 127.

RELIGIOUS REGENERATION OF THE LANDSCAPE 325 nastic ruins, and druid monuments they placed around their country houses

to enhance their picturesque character became a virtual prerequisite for

membership, not to say a defining emblem of the age. This did not, however, sweep away all remnants of the anxieties engendered by the Reformation. The praise of the founder of Methodism, John Wesley, of the gardens of Stourhead, for instance, was mixed with disgust at the ‘images

of devils’ in its temples: he defied ‘all mankind to reconcile statues with nudities to common-sense or common decency’.~”” Fear that the landscape might pervert its spectators had not evaporated. The Protestant struggle to eliminate the popish and pagan idols that profaned it was carried on by those

who pioneered the next phase of the movement to intensify piety and restore religion to its primitive purity. This chapter has explored a series of diverse but intersecting ecclesiastical and cultural trends which add density and complexity to the picture of the Reformation of the landscape delineated in the preceding ones. Protestantism’s vocal insistence on the omnipresence of the divine in the world and on the spiritual character of worship cannot eclipse the way in which it sacralized spaces of its own. The historic presence of the godly contributed to hallowing particular sites, albeit not to the same extent or in the same manner as medieval shrines. Alongside this, the retention and emergence of liturgical rites and ceremonies invested ecclesiastical buildings, churchyards, and parishes with an aura of reverence that was intensified by the rise of new ecclesiastical priorities. With

the movement to restore the beauty of holiness came a resurgence of the concept of sacrilege and a reassessment of the medieval past that fostered antiquarian impulses to preserve its vanishing traces. The wave of destruction inaugurated by the Reformation engendered a rhetoric of sentimental lament and rueful regret which fed into and fused with the cult of the picturesque.

Meanwhile, a new body of myth was entwining itself around the physical environment, in the guise of learned speculation about the significance of both prehistoric structures and geological features. This also found expression 1n the spheres of architecture and gardening. As we have seen, the landscape became a field of conflict between rival factions within the established Church and state, as well as a stimulus for intellectual speculation and an arena for displaying

259. John Wesley, The Journal of Fohn Wesley, ed. N. Curnock, 8 vols. (1909-16), vi. 127-8. Quoted in Robert J. Mayhew, Landscape, Literature and English Religious Culture, 1660-1800: Samuel Fohnson and Languages of Natural Description (Basingstoke, 2004), 49.

326 RELIGIOUS REGENERATION OF THE LANDSCAPE

cultural taste. Efforts to protect and defend, invent and reinvent traditions inscribed upon it were integrally connected with continuing attempts to excise them, as both cause and effect. To echo Margaret Aston, the tangled legacies left by the religious and political events that comprised the Reformation were not merely negative and iconoclastic. They also took creative directions.”°”

260. Aston, ‘English Ruins’, 336.

God’s Great Book in Folio: Providence, Science, and the Natural Environment

he idea that the visible world was a repository of “popish’ error and

LT a source of perpetual temptation to commit ‘heathenish’ idolatry exerted enduring influence in early modern Britain and Ireland. As we have seen, it inspired repeated episodes of iconoclastic violence designed to purge the

landscape of lingering reminders of the Catholic and pagan past and to demonstrate that sacred power did not reside in physical objects, structures, or places. However, the corrosive distrust of the immanence of the holy that underpinned these successive phases of godly reformation coexisted with the notion that the natural environment was alive with moral, supernatural, and spiritual significance. The subject of this chapter is the persistence of the long-standing assumption that the landscape bore witness to the activities of God as its initial Creator and eternal curator, and to His plan for its human inhabitants. It considers the ways in which Protestantism sustained the belief

that the surface of the earth had been directly shaped by the deity and displayed the marks of the momentous events described in the pages of Scripture. Underlining important areas of overlap between pre- and post-

Reformation mentalities, it shows that strange aberrations in nature continued to be regarded as prodigious and admonitory and that calamitous happenings that wrought environmental havoc were interpreted as telling evidence of divine anger. These inherited tenets were not seriously disputed

in the course of the period, but they were tested by developments that constantly redefined the frontiers between nature and supernature and questioned the precise mechanisms by which Providence worked. Although

328 GOD’S GREAT BOOK IN FOLIO they were not intrinsically challenged by the rise of scientific empiricism and the gradual transfiguration of natural philosophy, they did undergo alterations and adaptations that deserve our attention. In particular they fostered a tendency to read the landscape metaphorically rather than sacramentally, and to see it as a symbol of the loving mercy rather than the ireful jealousy of an implacable deity. The discussion that follows reflects historiographical trends that have emphasized the fundamental ambivalence of Protestant attitudes towards older ways of understanding the universe and complicated traditional narratives about the impact and character of early modern advances in science, as well as their relationship with religion and piety. The rhetoric of ‘enlightenment’ and antagonism towards ‘superstition’ that suffuses both these movements obscures the extent to which they perpetuated the idea that Nature stood alongside the Bible as a source of ethical and theological instruction, even as it draws our attention to their efforts to dispel popular misunderstand-

ings of how it functioned in practice. The aim of this chapter is both to illuminate and to nuance the claim that the period between 1500 and 1800 saw a ‘profound shift in sensibilities’ which transformed how contemporaries perceived the physical landscape by which they were surrounded.'

The Wonderful Workmanship of the World: Creation and Providence When early modern Protestants pondered the origins of their world, they intuitively turned to the book of Genesis for guidance. The first chapter told how, in the beginning, God had created heaven and earth by the almighty

instrument of His divine word. Over the space of a week, He had then carefully perfected His Creation. After dividing night from day, He had distinguished the firmament of the skies and the waters of the oceans from the dry land, before covering it with vegetation and populating it with birds, fish, reptiles, and beasts. His final act was to create mankind in His own 1. Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500-1800 (Harmonds-

worth, 1983), 15 and passim. The main thrust of Thomas’s argument concerns the changing relationship between humanity and the natural world and the gradual transformation of the

view that man as the dominant species had the right to exploit plants, animals, and the landscape for his own advantage, though he considers some of the issues addressed in this chapter in ch. 2.

GOD’S GREAT BOOK IN FOLIO 329 image, giving him dominion over all other species and commanding him to be fruitful and multiply, to replenish, cultivate, and subdue the environment. On the seventh day, He ended His work and rested, sanctifying it in

perpetual memory of the ineffable act that had brought the world into being.” Preachers and ministers who prepared sermons and commentaries on this

Old Testament text stressed the sheer brilliance of the deity who had accomplished this remarkable feat, producing the universe out of nothing and doing so without the assistance of any tools, engines, or instruments. In

his exposition of the first book of Moses, John Calvin was at pains to underline the point that the world was not eternal and that God had not simply remoulded a pre-existing but shapeless mass. He had made it from scratch. It was unwarrantable and intolerable for Christians to labour to defend the contrary opinion—a ‘filthie errour’ that had been maintained ‘in olde time among heathen men’ who falsified the truth with ‘strange imaginations’.” Ina tract entitled The wonderfull workmanship of the world, his fellow

French Protestant exile in Geneva, the natural philosopher Lambert Daneau, also determinedly refuted the view that the Lord had merely brought it forth out of ‘a certeine disordred heape...whiche was extant before’. He was ‘verie farre separated from all sortes of other woorkmen’: whereas they were unable to manufacture anything unless they were supplied with raw materials, He had forged these very substances Himself. They were not ‘alreadie prepared, or ministred from some other place’. “Take away yron from the Smith, timber from the Carpendour, yearne from the

Weaver, what other good can they doe but stand still gaping in their shoppes?’ God was an entirely difterent kind of artificer, the sole exception to the rule that “Nothyng is made of nothyng’. It was blasphemous to imply that he was just ‘the distinguisher, trimmer, and setter foorth’ of a confused chaos or ‘mole’ that had always been present."

Reformed writers on the story of Creation went on to underline the significance of the fact that the Lord had devoted six days to this extraordinary 2. Fora contemporary broadside that encapsulated the story in verse, see The creation of the world. Being the first chapter of Genesis (1646).

3. John Calvin, A commentarie... upon the first booke of Moses called Genesis, trans. Thomas Tymme (1578), 25-6. See Susan E. Schreiner, The Theater of his Glory: Nature and the Natural Order in the Thought of fohn Calvin (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1991), ch. 1. 4. Lambert Daneau, The wonderfull woorkmanship of the world: wherein is conteined an excellent discourse of Christian naturall Philosophie, concernying the fourme, knowledge, and use of all thinges created, trans.

Thomas Tymme (1578), ch. 18, fos. 39°—44".

330 GOD’S GREAT BOOK IN FOLIO process. The world as He first formed it was an obscure void enveloped in darkness: a ‘rude’, ‘unfurnished’, ‘deformed’, and ‘undigested’ clump of matter. Although stabilized by ‘the secrete efficacie of the spirite’, it did not long continue in this ‘imperfect estate’, lacking either beauty or ornament.” God had proceeded to transform it in a systematic fashion into a yet more marvellous entity, embellishing its surface with a vast array of topographical features and filling it with living and breathing creatures. For Protestants who adhered to the axiom that the Almighty had unlimited power, the rather leisurely pace at which these subsequent acts of generation had taken place raised one or two questions. The capacity of an omnipotent deity to whisk the complete structure into existence instantaneously could not be doubted: why then had He chosen to linger so long over this simple task? Calvin sharply reproved those who tried to resolve the apparent problem by suggesting that the Bible should be read as an allegory rather than a literal statement of fact. It was ‘too violent a cavill’ to suggest that Moses had devised the notion ofa six-

day programme of work ‘for instruction sake’, to enable his readers to comprehend the scale and complexity of this mind-boggling event. Rather, he argued, it was God Himself who had stooped to the weakness of man and accommodated His method of working to human understanding. He had

distinguished his Creation into ‘certain degrees’ to make people ‘more attentive’.° In his examination of the ‘Original Diary of the World, and Chronicle of the Universe’, the Sussex divine John Maynard likewise saw the decision ‘to proceed distinctly and orderly’ as evidence of divine condescension: ‘this stay and pause in working’ was a concession to the minds of

mortal beings, which were ‘of narrow capacity’ and able only to ‘take in things by peece-meale into their consideration’. It was designed to teach them to dwell on the glorious work this supreme architect and sculptor had invented chiefly for their benefit, but especially for the sake of the elect. The landscape stood as a constant reminder of His merciful dispensations to the

species He had made vicegerent over all His Creation. It attested to His solicitude towards and paternal care of those He had predestined to eternal salvation. With every step they took upon the ground, men and women should remember ‘that thou treadest upon the Lord’s worksmanship, and that 5. Calvin, Commentarie, 2; William Pemble, The workes (3rd edn., 1635), 267; Andrew Willet, Hexapla in Genesin: that is a sixfold commentarie upon Genesis (Cambridge, 1605), 3; William Ames, The marrow of sacred divinity (1642), 40-1.

6. Calvin, Commentarie, 30. On the extent to which Calvin parted company with Augustine, who argued that Creation was a non-temporal process, see Schreiner, Theater, 11, 15—16.

GOD’S GREAT BOOK IN FOLIO 331 thou couldest not stir a Foot, but that he hath made this ground to bear thee’.’ The ‘breathtakingly anthropocentric spirit’ in which contemporaries interpreted these critical passages strongly influenced how they viewed the physical environment in which they found themselves.”

Above all, though, the world had been created to instruct humanity about its Maker. Contemplation of it provided manifest evidence of both His existence and His continuing presence. ‘A strong Antidote against all Atheisticall thoughts’,’ it revealed the essential traits of God in technicolour. Building on earlier Christian writers and inspired by the praises uttered by

King David in the Psalms, this was a lesson which the Protestant clergy

never tired of reiterating. They vied with each other to find the most eloquent way of expressing it. In his Institutes, Calvin spoke of the world as a ‘most beautiful theatre’ and ‘a large and splendid mansion gorgeously constructed and exquisitely furnished’. ‘Holy meditation’ of it enabled people to see ‘the immense treasures of wisdom and goodness exhibited in the creatures, as in so many mirrors’. It was impossible to look upon the ‘fabric’ and ‘furniture’ of the universe without being overwhelmed by ‘the immense weight of glory’ that it radiated. This was ‘so bright, so distinct, and so illustrious, that none, however dull or illiterate, can plead ignorance as their excuse’.'” Lambert Daneau used the metaphor of a ‘looking glasse’, wherein divine power ‘is laid before us to bee seen, beholden and acknowledged’. He also invoked the analogy of the art of printmaking, declaring that ‘God hath engraven in the world greate and wonderfull tokens’ of his divine sovereignty and ‘distinguished and depainted [them] with lively colours. . _as it were, by a certaine ingraving’.'’ Re-polishing a favourite commonplace, John Maynard urged his readers: to spend more hours in studying this great Book of Nature, which the Lord hath spread open before us, therein describing unto us those invisible things of his Eternal Power and God-head in such plain and legible Characters, that he which runneth may read them: every main part being (as it were) a several Volume, the Heaven, the Aire the Earth and Waters, every Creature in these 7. John Maynard, The beauty and order of the creation, ed. William Gearing (1668), 29, 37, 12 respectively. 8. Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 18. 9. George Walker, The historie of the creation as it is written in the first and second books of Genesis (1641), 36.

to. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge, 2 vols. in 1 (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1989 edn.), 1. 156-7, 51 respectively. 11. Daneau, Wonderfull woorkmanship, fo. 68° ~.

332 GOD’S GREAT BOOK IN FOLIO being a several Leaf or Page: every part of each Creature; every natural property, quality or created virtue in each, being a several line, or (at least) word or syllable...”

His editor, William Gearing, talked of the Creatures as “Spectacles to see God in them’ and as ‘Doctores Theologici’.'” Taking their cue from St Paul in Romans 1: 20, Protestants believed that in the created world the invisible was made visible. The external works of the Almighty provided mere mortals with a glimpse of the infinite mystery of the Trinity, of an incorporeal being who was, by definition, sublime and inscrutable. “What is this worlde’, asked Calvin, glossing the paradox at the

heart of this key New Testament passage, ‘but a lively image...in the which God sheweth and declareth himself: For albeit he be invisible in his

essence, yet sheweth he himselfe by his workes, to the end we should worship him.’'* In a tract published in 1641, the London pastor George Walker similarly insisted that it was through His exterior operations that Christians were able ‘as in a glasse [to] behold the glory of God with open face (the vaile of ignorance being removed)’. “So often as we see and behold the visible outward workes of God’, he repeated a page or two later, ‘let us in them behold the face of God, and remember his glorious attributes.’'” The same trope was invoked by David Dickson, Professor of Divinity at

Edinburgh, and Hugh Binning, minister of Govan near Glasgow: ‘In a word’, wrote the latter, ‘the beeing, the beauty, the harmony, and proportion of this huge frame, is but a visible appearance of the invisible God.’’® For Calvinists who believed that it was the height of impiety to conceive of or depict the Lord in bodily form, such statements carried the risk of self-

contradiction. They were difficult to reconcile with the precept that to imagine the deity anthropomorphically was ‘an absurd and indecorous fiction’, which defiled and corrupted His majesty.'’ They did not think that they saw the Lord’s physiognomy on the landscape in the same way that

12. Maynard, Beauty and order of the creation, 38.

13. William Gearing, ‘Epistle dedicatory’, ibid., sig. A7”. 14. John Calvin, Sermons... upon the X. commandements of the lawe, geven of God by Moses, otherwise

called the Decalogue, trans. I. H. (1579), fo. 29°. See also Gervase Babington, Certaine plaine, briefe, and comfortable notes upon everie chapter of Genesis (1592), fo. 6° ~. 15. George Walker, God made visible in his workes, or a treatise of the externall workes of God (1641),

16. David Dickson, A brief explication of the first fifty Psalms (1655), 101; Hugh Binning, Fellowship with God: or, XXVIII sermons on the 1 epistle of fohn, chap. 1, and 2 (Edinburgh, 1671).

17. See Calvin, Institutes, bk. 1, ch. 11.

GOD’S GREAT BOOK IN FOLIO 333 papists claimed to perceive the visage of Christ on Veronica’s veil; rather that He was represented to them via this medium in the guise of a symbol or sion. Nature was an emblem rather than a photograph of the divine. It was a hieroglyphical projection of the personality of the Almighty into and upon the physical world.

Nevertheless clerical writers continued to employ these and other equally misleading figures of speech. They described the surface of the earth as the work of His ‘hands’ and detected the deft touch of His ‘fingers’

in the intricate vegetable and mineral organisms with which it was adorned. The puritan exile William Ames wrote of the ‘footsteps’ of the divine essence that were expressed in the creatures, while the Restoration Exeter minister Thomas Manton declared that there was not one living thing ‘but had some Impress of God upon it, for every thing which hath

passed his hand, carrieth God’s Signature and Mark’. In them it was possible to ‘discern God’s tract and footprint’.'° Once again, such authors did not mean that He had literally left a facsimile or plaster cast of his limbs in the natural world, but simply that within it people could see the spiritual lineaments of His divinity. The use of this language was defended by the precedent of Scripture itself, which employed such metaphors ‘in respect of the weakenesse of our understanding’.'” Indeed, like their Catholic predecessors and counterparts, Protestants typically regarded Nature as a secondary source of revelation alongside the Bible. They acknowledged that in and of itself it was insufficient to teach Christians all the tenets of their religion: it revealed much about the Father but relatively little about his son Jesus Christ as mankind’s saviour, redeemer,

and mediator. As Daneau commented, “wee are not able to atteine to that knowledge without the preachinge of the Gospel’.*” Moreover, however

compelling were the manifestations which the Lord provided of His immortal kingdom in the mirror of His works, man’s stupidity was so far-reaching that he failed to derive benefit from them. Humans had ‘no eyes to perceive’ the invisible Godhead until they were ‘enlightened through faith by internal revelation from God’. The ‘bare and simple, but magnificent testimony which the creatures bear to the glory of their Creator’, said Calvin,

18. Ames, Marrow of sacred divinity, 28; Thomas Manton, One hundred and ninety sermons on the hundred and nineteenth Psalm (1681), 495. 19. Daneau, Wonderfull woorkmanship, fos. 70°—71".

20. Ibid., fo. 67”.

334 GOD’S GREAT BOOK IN FOLIO could not alone provide adequate instruction. The sacred word of Scripture remained pre-eminent as a mode of communication, not least because of the perennial tendency of people to transform visible things into idols. Their readiness to venerate the effects of Creation rather than their author and progenitor carried them into dangerous error, if not down the slippery slope towards pantheistic heathenism.~' Special care had to be taken that moun-

tains, valleys, and the rich veins of precious metals and useful minerals deposited in them did not steal away the hearts of the faithful like the brazen

serpent. The deification of nature was a danger of which all Christians should be acutely aware. Nevertheless, reformed clergy and laypeople remained convinced that the physical world was an important unwritten supplement to the canonical books which the patriarchs, prophets, gospel writers, and apostles had inscribed on parchment in ages past. It was, moreover, far more trustworthy as a teacher than the man-made

images upon which the papists so heavily relied. The lollard and early evangelical precept that trees, stones, and growing plants supplied greater spiritual guidance and a better incentive to piety than the ‘stocks and blocks’ fabricated by sculptors and artists continued to find a echo in the writings of later reformers.” The Elizabethan bishop of Durham James Pilkington revived this idea in his 1562 commentary on Haggai, recounting an anecdote about Anthony, the illiterate desert father who was asked by a friend how he passed his time in the wilderness: ‘I want no books; for all the creatures of God are my books, and I read and learn his majesty out of his creatures, as you do out of your books.’ Even the poor and uneducated, Pilkington went on to suggest, could not excuse their religious indifference by ignorance, because they had the ‘goodly books’ of the sun, moon, stars, fishes, birds, beasts, herbs, corn, grass, trees, hills, and rivers to instruct them.

With a deliberate dig at Gregory the Great’s famous dictum, he declared: “These may better be called laymen’s and the unlearned people’s books than images and idols, which be like unto whomsoever it pleases the painter to make them like.’** The iconography of nature was infinitely more profitable as a source of edification than any object contrived by a human artist. 21. Calvin, Institutes, 1. 62-3 and bk. 1, ch. 11 passim. 22. Maynard, Beauty and order of the creation, 59.

23. See Ch. 2, above, p. 89. 24. James Pilkington, Aggeus and Abdias Prophetes, the one corrected, the other newly added, and both at large declared (1562), in The Works of James Pilkington, B.D., ed. James Scholefield, PS (Cam-

bridge, 1842), 146-7.

GOD’S GREAT BOOK IN FOLIO 335 ‘A very nettlebush may prove a book of instruction’ to those skilled in the art of reading it, said the Norfolk minister Edmund Gurnay eighty years later.~” Interpreted through the lens of Scripture, the physical landscape provided the godly with unique insight into the mind of their Maker. Yet it was not just the mere existence of the world that was a source of

wonder to the devout Christians of early modern Britain and Ireland. Equally important as evidence of the boundlessness of divine benevolence and mercy was its ongoing operation. For Protestants, God was not merely a passive spectator who had set the laws of nature in motion and then sat back to watch them work of their own accord. He was an active governor who was ceaselessly involved in the conservation and continuation of the environmental system He had devised. No normal process was able to persist without His direct concurrence: according to William Ames, schoolmen not ‘unfitly’ called this “Manutenentia Dei, Gods holding in his hand, because by it God doth sustaine all things as with his Hand’. Neither a blade of grass nor a single sparrow perished without His permission and the government

or ‘gubernation’ of the works of creation also required His providential intercession. He infused living things with motion and influence, effected their mutation and alteration, and checked and bridled the elements by ‘cohibition’ in accordance with His eternal counsels.*° Without His restraining power, for instance, the waters would cover the dry places of the earth and prevent life from flourishing. Only the firm hand of the Almighty kept the oceans within their designated bounds. The order of nature was

fragile and precarious, lacking any inherent capacity to sustain itself.~’ Providence was divided into two chief categories, ordinary and extraordinary: in the first the Lord observed the pattern of events He had appointed at the beginning; in the second He worked in a more unusual fashion, and might even override or ignore these mechanisms altogether if the whim took Him.** The universe as envisaged by theologians and pastors was thus not static but dynamic: it was constantly evolving and changing in response to the will of the deity. The visible world that contemporaries saw before them was a testament to the perpetual intervention of the Almighty in the cosmos He had created ex nihilo. 25. Edmund Gurnay, Toward the vindication of the second commandment (Cambridge, 1639), 108. 26. Ames, Marrow of sacred divinity, 45-50; Walker, History of the creation, 274-95, esp. 287-90.

27. On this theme, see Schreiner, Theater, 22-30. 28. For a fuller discussion, see my Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1999), 8-15. See also Paul H. Kocher, Science and Religion in Elizabethan England (New York, 1969 edn.), ch. s.

336 GOD’S GREAT BOOK IN FOLIO This body of belief and discourse has been critical in contributing to a new historical consensus that Protestantism played a less decisive part in the ‘oreat historic process’ Max Weber called ‘the disenchantment of the world’ than has often been implied.~’ Although it presented itself as intent upon shearing away the magical and miraculous elements from religion, it never denied that divine and demonic forces could and did intrude into the earthly realm. The cult of saints had been severely shaken and pruned; the sacra-

ments were reduced from bearers of salvific virtue and grace to semiotic markers; and the precept that holy power was more potent at particular locations was vehemently rejected. However, as Bob Scribner argued, ‘the hard-edged sacramentalism of Catholicism was not replaced but modified into a weaker and more ill-defined form of sacrality’. God emphatically retained His capacity to manipulate nature and to use it to communicate with human beings. Protestants may have asserted that miracles had ceased and declared that the Lord now largely worked through secondary and subordinate causes, but they remained convinced that He employed the elements to convey coded messages from heaven.”” They redefined many puzzling phenomena as preternatural rather than supernatural, as incidents whose natural explanations were merely hidden from feeble human cognition, rather than events that actually transcended or contradicted the regular laws of nature established at the Creation. But they did not eliminate the long-standing ambiguity about where to situate the permeable boundary between these two categories. Indeed they contributed to their epistemological instability and fluidity in the early modern era. Nor did that master magician, the devil, lose his ability to bring about strange effects and precipitate disastrous occurrences, even if these were technically no more than clever illusions and tricks permitted by the Almighty

29. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (1930 edn.),

30. RW. Scribner, “The Reformation, Popular Magic and the “Disenchantment of the World”’, Fournal of Interdisciplinary History, 23 (1993), 475—94; id., ‘Reformation and Desacralisation:

From Sacramental World to Moralised Universe’, in R. Po-Chia Hsia and R. W. Scribner (eds.), Problems in the Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Europe, Wolfenbtitteler Forschun-

gen, 78 (Wiesbaden, 1997), 75-92, quotation at p. 76; id., “The Impact of the Reformation on Everyday Life’, in Mensch und Objekt im Mittelalter und in der friihen Neuzeit, Osterreichische

Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosphisch-Historische Klasse, Sitzungsberichte 568 (Vienna, 1990), 315-43. See also Ulinka Rublack, Reformation Europe (Cambridge, 2005), esp. IO-II, 155-7. For an extended discussion of this historiographical problem, see my ‘The Reformation and the Disenchantment of the World Reassessed’, Hf 51 (2008), 497-528.

GOD’S GREAT BOOK IN FOLIO 337 for his own arcane, but ultimately just and benign, purposes.”' While the line between deceptive signs fabricated by Satan and genuine ones sent by God and His angels was blurred and hard to discern, contemporaries could not

afford to ignore them. Nature was not a neutral or autonomous forum. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Protestants continued to live in what Scribner called ‘a moralized universe’. The Reformation wrought far more subtle modifications in traditional mentalities than an earlier generation of historians assumed. The significant points of intersection between medieval Catholic and Protestant attitudes towards the natural world should not be overlooked. Far from a function of the failure of the clergy to convince the populace of its central theological tenets, they may be seen as one of the keys to its ability to put down deep and permanent roots. To this extent, reformed thinking did not entirely denude the landscape of its super- and preternatural resonances. In the guise of the doctrine of providence, it upheld the notion that the physical world was a canvas on which God frequently chose to etch His intentions. Rocks, trees, caverns, rivers, and wells could still be instruments of divine education and warning. Alongside meterological and zoological anomalies, unusual geological occurrences and aberrations in the mineral and vegetable worlds were graphic demonstrations of the wrath of the Almighty and prophetic forewarnings of

oreater calamities, if not the end of the world. The first phase of the Reformation coincided with and stimulated a surge of anxiety about the significance of such occult phenomena. Closely linked with apocalyptic expectation about the coming of Antichrist and the advent of the millennium, German Lutherans like Philipp Melanchthon obsessively catalogued wonders and subjected them to detailed exegesis. They interpreted earthquakes, floods, and other catastrophes as portents of the final Apocalypse

described in the book of Revelation and sought to unravel from the proliferation of the ‘last things’ vital clues about the future. This climate of eschatological anticipation stretched into the seventeenth century, colouring the conflicts that culminated in the Thirty Years War.°~ In France and Italy too, the religious and dynastic upheavals of the era fostered a 31. Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford, 1997), esp. chs. 11, 16, 17, and pp. 154, 172, 177, 261-2. 32. See especially Robin Bruce Barnes, Prophecy and Gnosis: Apocalypticism in the Wake of the

Lutheran Reformation (Stanford, Calif., 1988); Andrew Cunningham and Ole Peter Grell, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Religion, War, Famine and Death in Reformation Europe

(Cambridge, 2000), esp. ch. 1.

338 GOD’S GREAT BOOK IN FOLIO heightened sensitivity to the incidence and import of disasters and prodigies which transcended denominational barriers. Political and confessional strife

proved highly conducive to the view that these were signs that the prophecies embedded in Scripture would very soon be fulfilled. Anomalies and catastrophes in the natural world symbolized the great cosmic crisis which many contemporaries believed they were living through.”” These tendencies converged with renewed Renaissance interest in seminal Greek and Roman texts like Pliny’s Natural History, which described plants, fountains, and stones that had performed mysterious oracular func-

tions. The simultaneous revival of notable strands of the Neoplatonic tradition by figures like Marsilio Ficino, meanwhile, served to reinforce the notion that earthly phenomena were connected with the celestial sphere by a web of hidden links, the deciphering of which would provide insight into the metaphysical structure of the universe. The growing fascination with secrets and wonders, which Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston have expertly charted, manifested itself in many genres of text—from chronicles and encyclopedias to travel narratives, philosophical treatises, and popular anthologies of marvels. Loosely reconciled with both Catholic and Protestant Christianity, this classical and hermetic lore reinforced the sense that nature was a clairvoyant medium and that its mutations were fraught with

spiritual meaning.°* Whenever ‘we see the workes of Nature, not only turned arsiversie, misshapen and deformed’, declared the author of one compilation, ‘they do for the most part discover unto us the secret judgement and scourge of the ire of God... often times, the elementes have bene haroulds, trumpetters, ministers and executioners of the Justice of God’.

33. See Jean Céard, La Nature et les prodiges: l’insolite au XVI siecle en France (Geneva, 1977); Denis Crouzet, Les Guerriers de Dieu: La violence au temps des troubles de religion (vers 1525—vers 1610),

2 vols. (Seyssel, 1990); Ottavia Niccoli, Prophecy and People in Renaissance Italy, trans. Lydia

G. Cochrane (Princeton, 1990). 34. There were several editions of Pliny published in English in the period, including The secrets and wonders of the worlde. A booke right rare and straunge, containing many excellent properties, given to

man, beastes, foules, fishes, and serpents, trees and plants (1587) and The historie of the world. Commonly called, the naturall historie, trans. Philemon Holland (1601). For the broad European context, see Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature 1150-1750

(New York, 1998), esp. chs. 4-5. 35. Pierre Boaistuau, Certaine secrete wonders of nature, containing a description of sundry strange things,

seeming monstrous in our eyes and judgement, ed. Edward Fenton (1569), sig. Ag’. A number of

other Continental collections of wonders were translated into English in the early modern period including Simon Goulart, Admirable and memorable histories containing the wonders of our

time, trans. Edward Grimeston (1607).

GOD’S GREAT BOOK IN FOLIO 339 Such sentiments found a ready and resounding echo in post-Reformation Britain and Ireland.°° Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Protestants from all social levels speculated feverishly about the significance of the portents and providences they observed in the world around them. Eliza-

bethan divines like Stephen Batman shared the conviction of Continental writers that disorder in nature foretold the doom that would fall upon mankind at the Last Judgement and that destructive events which distorted and damaged the physical environment revealed that the Lord was enraged with humanity: Whatsoever hath bene, is, or shal be to proceede, either Celestial or Terrestriall, can not be without the fore-ordinance and providence of God, who sending these fore-warnings, as instruments to former ages, doth by the like wonderful shewe of manifest appearance foretell no lesse dangers to happen among the generations of this last posterity.”’

It was a homiletic commonplace that prodigies and calamities of this kind were ‘visible sermons’. In the words of Anthony Anderson, preaching at Paul’s Cross in 1581, they were the ‘extraordinary preachers’ God sent when

people refused to heed the exhortations issued by ordained clergymen; speaking two decades later, the Welsh minister Hugh Roberts restated the precept that every adversity was ‘a memento to every one of us to looke to our selves and to call to remembrance our owne sinns’, a token that He would take vengeance for the transgressions of men.”* Combining journalistic description with moralizing reflection, many ephemeral news pamphlets and ballads

pressed home the same message that such events were designed to induce individuals and communities to abandon their wicked ways and display humble contrition. Lay and clerical compilers of wonders recurrently declared that the terrestrial world was ‘Gods great booke in Folio’. Perturbing events provided ‘a prospective glasse’ through which Christians could see their heavenly Father (albeit opaquely), a ‘Jacobs ladder’ by which they could ascend to a higher level of religious insight. One Caroline treatise on the topic compared them with the ominous handwriting which appeared on the wall of King Belshazzar’s palace in Daniel 5: ‘we may truly say, God wrote his minde 36. See Walsham, Providence; Raymond Gillespie, Devoted People: Belief and Religion in Early Modern Ireland (Manchester, 1997), ch. 6; David George Mullan, Scottish Puritanism 1590-1638 (Oxford,

2000), 88-9. 37. Stephen Batman, The doome warning all men to the judgemente (1581). This was a translation with additions of Conrad Lycosthenes’ Prodigiorum ac ostentorum chronicon (Basel, 1557). 38. Anthony Anderson, A sermon preached at Paules Crosse (1581), sig. G1’; H[ugh] R[oberts], The day of hearing (Oxford, 1600), 110. See Walsham, Providence, chs. 3-4.

340 GOD’S GREAT BOOK IN FOLIO in most lively Characters’. It was the duty of the faithful to read these sentences carefully and turn them to their ‘holy improvement’.”” Later writers continued to invoke the metaphor of prodigious nature as a lecture and text. It was ‘a lively quickning Sermon to the whole Nation. . . that they may... break off their Sins by a timely Gospel-Repentance’; ‘a publick Theater’ in which he preached ‘in the sight of all men’; a series of “most certain and infallible Commentaries upon the word of Threatning, and the word of

Promise recorded in the Scriptures’.*” Writing in 1681, the Independent minister Christopher Ness spoke of both celestial and terrestrial wonders as ‘prodigious preachments’ and reiterated the tenet that the Lord resorted to them when people ignored the calls issued by His human deputies for mass repentance: ‘to bring men to it, when they will not comply with the Council of Mortal Ministers upon Earth... God sends some Signs Extraordinary from Heaven’. ‘A Divinity-Lecture to us... terrifying and testifying Gods Anger against Mans Sin’, they were not to be treated as ‘Inania Terriculamenta, insignificant Scar-crows’ and empty threats. They might not be actual miracles (such events were ‘the swaddling bands of the Infant Church’, for which it now had neither need nor use) but they were nevertheless compelling manifestations of His omnipotence and providence.’ Protestants may have scoffed at legends about the footprints which the saints had left upon the British and Irish landscape, but they tirelessly traced and pondered the patterns which the finger of the Lord, digitus Dei, continued to deposit on the world He had created.

Extraordinary Preachers: Prodigious Nature and Catastrophic Events Evidence abounds of the pervasive influence and appeal of this outlook. We may begin by considering events that dramatically altered the external appearance and shape of the countryside. In February 1572, for instance, a series of

geological tremors overthrew Much Marcle in Herefordshire, uprooting 39. L. Brinckmair, The warnings of Germany. By wonderfull signes, and strange prodigies seene in divers parts of that countrey of Germany, betweene the yeare 1618 and 1638 (1638), sigs. *2°—*3”, **4"—s". 40. Eniautos terastios. Mirabilis annus, or the yeare of prodigies and wonders ([London], 1661), sig. A2'; Mirabilis annus secundus; or, the second year of prodigies ((London], 1662), sigs. A2", A3”; Mirabilis annus secundus: or, the second part of the second years prodigies ([London], 1662), unpaginated preface. 41. Christopher Ness, The signes of the times (1681), unpaginated dedication, pp. 41, 83, 10-11, and passim.

GOD’S GREAT BOOK IN FOLIO 341 hedges, trees, highways, and sheep, crushing Kinnarton Chapel, and translat-

ing a tract of more than twenty acres of land from its original location. Contemporary and later commentators told how a hillock at the foot of the village had ‘rouzed it selfe out of a dead sleepe, [and] with a roaring noise removed from the place where it stood, and for three daies together travelled from her first site, to the great amazement and feare of the beholders’. They insisted that this should foster ‘no servile dread of the thing itself’ but rather ‘a reverential awe to God’, who was the author all such sudden eruptions of the earth. The violent transformation of the local landscape was “his marke that so

laid his hand upon this Rock, whose power hath poised the Hils in his Ballance’. Seen through the double lens of Scripture and Providence, this was undoubtedly an admirable ‘worke of the Omnipotent’.*~ The displacement and sinking of a plot of ground at Westerham in Kent in December 1596 was similarly described in a pamphlet as nothing less than “‘myraculous’, ‘a sencible testimony of his most certaine beeing’. Such extraordinary eftects were not to be attributed to ‘blind chaunce, casualtie, and fortune’ or reduced solely to ‘naturall causes measurable by philosophicall reason’. They were to be

regarded as ‘heedefull documents’ delivered by the Almighty about the manifest dangers of “blasphemous contempt’ and ‘damnable impietie’. Four thousand people reportedly travelled from London and other places to visit the site, which induced some to meditate upon ‘that great opening of the earth’ and yielding up of the dead that would precede the day of reckoning, and others to reflect on the ‘fearefull gaping of the ground where in Corah and his company were devoured’ in Numbers 16 (see Fig. 5.1).*° Purchasers of a printed account of an earthquake in the German province of Munster in 1612, which rattled the foundations of buildings and brought steeples and battlements tumbling to the ground, were likewise urged to ‘read and tremble’. The

desolation that it left in its wake was presented as evidence that God had determined ‘to make this an example to other places of his Judgement, as hee 42. The Much Marcle incident was widely recorded and frequently remembered: see Batman, Doome, 396; Shrewsbury School, MS Mus X 31 (‘Dr Taylor’s book’), fo. 109°; William Camden, Britain (1610), 620; John Speed, The theatre of the empire of Great Britaine (1611), 49; BL, Sloane MS 3890 (John Collet, ‘Historical Anecdotes’), fo. 45°; BL, Additional MS 38599 (Commonplace book of the Shanne family), fo. 103”; Thomas Fuller, The history of the worthies

of England (1662), 2nd pagination, quotation at p. 34 (and see p. $9 for a similar incident at Mottingham in Kent); CUL, MS Oo. 6. 115 (Commonplace book of William Jackson, c.1695), fo. 150°. The scriptural allusions are to Job 28: 9; Isaiah 40: 12. The quotations above are from the accounts in Speed and Fuller. 43. John Chapman, A most true report of the miraculous moving and sinking of a plot of ground, about nine

Acres, at Westram in Kent (1597), sigs. A4’, B3”, and passim.

342 GOD’S GREAT BOOK IN FOLIO

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GOD’S GREAT BOOK IN FOLIO 383 prophesy that in the future fire would destroy the present earth, from which it would re-emerge once more in its perfect primeval state.'””

Burnet’s thesis of a post-diluvian earth that bore no evidence of providential design seemed to many proof of his adherence to Cartesian principles. It appeared to epitomize the coldly mechanical universe and distant clockmaker God inherent in the French philosopher’s scheme and to revive the heresy of the ancient Epicureans, who had believed that the world was framed by ‘a fortuitous Congress of Atoms’ and subsequently ruled by blind chance, and who envisaged a lazy and impotent deity who did not concern Himself with its mundane day-to-day workings.'*’ Burnet certainly drew

in part from the account of the Creation outlined in Rene Descartes’ Principia philosophiae (1644), but the differences between the two schemes were perhaps more pronounced than the similarities. Nevertheless, despite his earnest protestations against the charge, Burnet’s pious effort to synthesize Genesis and geology earned him the condemnation of the orthodox and won him an enduring reputation as one of the fathers of deism. A no less controversial feature of his ‘sacred theory’ was his assertion that the biblical

account of Creation had been simplified by Moses to suit the limited comprehension of the Israelites and that it should therefore be read metaphorically or mythologically rather than literally.'°’ This affront to the scriptural fundamentalism of the age greatly disturbed the Christian majority, who regarded it as opening the way to outright atheism. It is therefore hardly surprising that Burnet’s book engendered a long and heated debate that rumbled on into the eighteenth century and had reverberations in Europe, as well as across Britain and Ireland. Scholarly

179. Thomas Burnet, The sacred theory of the earth: containing and account of the original of the earth, and of all the general changes which it hath already undergone, or is to undergo, till the consummation of all

things, 2 vols. (1719 edn.; first publ. 1684), 1. 88-91, 150, 208, 190—9, and xxii1. For discussion

of Burnet and the extended controversy about his theory that followed, see E. G. R. Taylor,

‘The English Worldmakers of the Seventeenth Century and their Influence on the Earth Sciences’, Geographical Review, 38 (1948), 104-12; Nicholson, Mountain Gloom, chs. 5, 6; Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore, ch. 8, esp. pp. 406-15; Paolo Rossi, The Dark Abyss of Time: The History of the Earth and the History of Nations from Hooke to Vico, trans. Lydia G.

Cochrane (Chicago and London, 1994), 33-41. See also Gordon L. Davies, The Earth in Decay: A History of British Geomorphology 1578-1878 (1969), 68-86; Roy Porter, The Making of Geology: Earth Science in Britain 1660-1815 (Cambridge, 1977), esp. ch. 3.

180. As described by John Woodward, An essay toward a natural history of the earth: and terrestrial bodies (1695), 58.

181. This argument was even more pronounced in Burnet’s replies to various books written against him and in Archaeologiae philosophicae (1692). See Scott Mandelbrote’s entry on Burnet

in the ODNB.

384 GOD’S GREAT BOOK IN FOLIO refutations were quickly forthcoming, with Bishop Herbert Croft of Hereford’s Animadversions appearing in 1685. One of the longest rejoinders was the Suftolk rector Erasmus Warren’s Geologia (1690), which accused

Burnet of impeaching Scripture and advancing ‘an intrenchment upon Divine Revelation’.'°* The Scottish physicians Matthew Mackaile and Robert Saint Clair dealt further blows against the theory and reiterated the charge that this was ‘a Spurious Brat’ of the author’s own invention. He had overturned the Bible in favour of his unsubstantiated fancies about a ‘britle

Ege-World’. Why would ‘God have built so pleasant a Theatre’, asked Mackaile, and then turned it into ‘a most deformed Ruine’: if mountains were emblems of wrath and destruction, why were they celebrated in the Psalms and other parts of Scripture? For all the confusion on the earth’s surface caused by the Deluge, ‘not a crum of it could fall but by Divine Direction’. This was ‘a stupendious proof of God’s Power, which we ought to sit still and admire’.'®’ One particularly intemperate reviewer scathingly dismissed Burnet’s book as a ‘rotten egg thrown by a left-handed Philosopher in Holy Orders’.'** More polite and substantial responses came from the professor of physic at Gresham College and Fellow of the Royal Society John Woodward, the Cambridge divine and episcopal chaplain William Whiston, and the Balliol mathematician John Keill. Woodward’s Essay (1695) set out to assert ‘the Superintendence and Agency of Providence in the Natural World: as also

to evince the Fidelity and Exactness of the Mosaick Narrative of the Creation, and of the Deluge’ and revolved around that proposition that during the Flood the whole terrestrial globe had been dissolved into a promiscuous mass of liquid, rock, and organic matter, which had then settled into sedimentary layers by the action of gravity, leaving behind petrified remains.'*? This was defended by John Harris in his Remarks on some late papers on the subject published in 1697, who cleared Woodward from the charge of plagiarizing Nicholas Steno’s thesis that the marine bodies present in geological strata definitively proved that the dissolution 182. Erasmus Warren, Geologia: or, a discourse concerning the earth before the deluge (1690), 42. 183. Matthew Mackaile, Terrae prodromus theoricus: containing, a short account of, Moses Philosophizans (Aberdeen, 1691), sig. 92", pp. 15, 26; Petrus Ramazzini, The Abyssinian philosophy confuted: oF, Telluris theoria neither sacred nor agreeable to reason, trans. Robert Saint Clair (1697), sigs. a5”, 184. Archibald Lovell, A summary of material heads which may be enlarged and improved into a compleat

answer to Dr Burnet’s theory of the earth (1696), 25. 185. Woodward, Essay, sig. A7™.

GOD’S GREAT BOOK IN FOLIO 385 had indeed occurred.'*° Privately, Edward Lhwyd thought this thesis no less far-fetched than Burnet’s and declared that both served ‘to no other

use, but to give us some shew of ingenuity in ye inventors’. Various scholars with whom he corresponded shared the same view: Tillem Bobart reported that Martin Lister was paralytic with laughter at this “great bogeg of Hasty-pudding’ and John Ray was offended by the ‘strain of confidence and presumption’ which ran through the book. Thomas Robinson, rector

of Ousby in Cumberland, urged Lhwyd to publish his own work on lithology forthwith, in which he expected to find no such “‘Chimerical whimasies or Castles in the Air’.'°’ Whiston’s New Theory (1696) adopted a similar standpoint, insisting upon the truth of the ‘obvious or literal Sense of Scripture’ and seeing the fossilized shells, animal bones, and vegetables that could be found in geological strata as forensic evidence of the Deluge. Drawing on recent work by Isaac Newton and Edmund Halley, he argued

that this cosmic catastrophe had been precipitated when a comet had passed close to the earth, initiating its diurnal rotation, altering its circular orbit to an elliptical path, and causing water to submerge it through the condensation of vapour from the meteor’s tail.'°° Keill’s Examination (1698) attacked Whiston as well as Burnet, seeing the naturalistic explanation for the

Flood provided by the former as supplying ammunition to atheists and dismissing the philosophy underpinning the latter as fatally flawed since it

was based on neither observation nor numerical calculation.'®’ Taking advantage of the convenient lacunae in Genesis, these writers sought to integrate the empirical discoveries made by Galileo, Kepler, and Newton with the account of the formation and subsequent alteration of the world inscribed in the canon of Scripture. Ultimately they disputed the detail of Burnet’s grand theory rather than contested its underlying premisses. They were working within the same conceptual and theological parameters.

186. John Harris, Remarks on some late papers, relating to the universal deluge: and to the natural history of

the earth (1697), sig. A3’ and passim.

187. Early Science in Oxford, ed. Gunther, xiv. 268-9; Bodl., MS Eng. Hist. c. 11 (Letters to Lhwyd, 1671-1705), fos. 21°, 22°, so’. Thomas Robinson’s own contribution to the debate was New observations on the natural history of this world of matter, and this world of life in two parts: being a philosophical discourse, grounded upon the Mosaick system of the creation and the flood: to which are added some thoughts concerning paradise, the conflagration (1696).

188. William Whiston, A new theory of the earth, from its original, to the consummation of all things (1696), 95. 189. John Keill, An examination of Dr Burnet’s Theory of the Earth. Together with some remarks on Mr Whiston’s New Theory of the Earth (Oxford, 1698).

386 GOD’S GREAT BOOK IN FOLIO The scholarly squabbles ignited by these competing publications did not bypass pastorally active clergy in the provinces. The autobiography of the nonconformist minister John Rastrick reveals how far a reading of the work of Burnet and his critics influenced his perception of the landscape, alongside the Bible. In the late 1690s, he undertook a journey through the Peak District, in the course of which he climbed the precipitous cliff of Stannage

Edge. Reaching the top, he ‘did not at all wonder that ten thousand Edomites should be Slain by being cast down from the top of a Rock’ (2 Chronicles 29: 12). The ‘vast Wall of rugged Stones looking like Ruines’ visible from this vista seemed to him ‘the apparent tokens of some former oreater Convulsion or Concussion of the Earth’. ‘[A]wful to behold’, they gave occasion to “more inquisitive thoughts about the Formation of the Earth than any thing one can see in the Plainer Countries’ and inspired him to read Burnet’s Sacred theory of the earth. Rastrick inclined ‘not to his Hypothesis’ but rather to that of Robert Hooke, ‘viz that the Mountainous Hilly parts of the Earth were raised by an Universall Earthquake by protrusion of the lower parts upward, and not by the Fall of upper parts inward’.

Much, however, remained bewildering to him and he was obliged to confess that ‘what we cannot understand we must admire’.'”” The repercussions of the conflicts between Burnet and his critics thus spilt far beyond the confines of academic circles. One theme on which many of Burnet’s fractious opponents agreed was that the Flood involved the active intercession of divine providence. Some even spoke of it using the contested terminology of the miracle. For Warren it was “in great measure a miraculous work’: it ‘had so much miracle running

through it, and interwoven with it; that all passages in it, are not be accounted for by Reason and Philosophy’. Others described the secondary mechanisms that had brought about the disaster and its aftermath in similar terms. For Woodward and Whiston, the force of gravity ‘depended entirely

on the constant and efficacious, and, if you will, the supernatural and miraculous influence of Almighty God’. It required his ‘direct concourse’, without which ‘this stupendous Fabrick of the Universe... would instantly shiver into Millions of Atoms, and relapse into its primitive Confusion’. The comet that Whiston alleged had set off this “mighty Turn and Catastrophe of

190. John Rastrick, The Life of fohn Rastrick 1650-1727, ed. Andrew Cambers, Camden Society, sth ser. 36 (2010), 139-40.

GOD’S GREAT BOOK IN FOLIO 387 Nature’ also revealed the divine Finger ‘remarkably and extraordinarily’ at

work. “Twere infinite odds that such a Conjunction or Coincidence’ of planet and shooting star could have happened “at such a critical point of time

when Mankind, by their unparallell’d Wickedness were deserving of, and only dispos’d for this unparallell’d Vengeance, no less than almost an utter Excision’.'”' Such statements reflect a wider redefinition of the category of miracle to

comprehend the entire natural order itself. Parting company with the scholastic idea that an essential attribute of the miraculous was its violation of the rules established at the Creation, Newton, Boyle, and their associates began to revert to Augustine’s earlier emphasis on the subjective quality of awe and amazement excited by unusual phenomena, as Peter Harrison and others have shown. In this sense, the continual, regular processes by which the world was sustained could themselves be seen as evidence of the special

intercession and ceaseless activity of Providence, no less than dramatic upheavals like earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.'”~ In the words of Nehemiah Grew’s Cosmologica sacra (1701), “Nature it self is a Standing

Miracle, the operations whereof, we should as much wonder at, as any Miracle, if we did not see them every day.’’”’ Such scholars keenly preserved a place for the notion of an interventionist deity in the mathematically calculable universe ruled by regular laws that their thinking and experimentation served to delineate. They merged general and special providence in a way that did not reduce God to a celestial engineer who had nothing more to do after the Creation than sit back and watch the mechanism of the world whirr away on its own. They retained the idea that

the Lord continued to exercise direct dominion over it, down to the last blade of grass and the merest sparrow. He continued to place His imprint on the physical landscape which He had moulded with His own hands at the beginning of time.

_ _ 194

191. Warren, Geologia, 351; Woodward, Essay, 53; Whiston, New Theory, 218, 357-9. 192. Peter Harrison, ‘Newtonian Science, Miracles and the Laws of Nature’, Fournal of the History

of Ideas, 56 (1995), 531-53; J. J. Macintosh, ‘Locke and Boyle on Miracles and God’s Existence’, in Michael Hunter (ed.), Robert Boyle Reconsidered (Cambridge, 1994), 193-214.

See also Peter Dear, “Miracles, Experiments, and the Ordinary Course of Nature’, Isis, 81 (1990), 663-83; Jane Shaw, Miracles in Enlightenment England (New Haven and London, 2006), ch. 7. 193. Nehemiah Grew, Cosmologica Sacra: or a discourse of the universe as it is the creature and kingdom of

God (1701), 195, 316. 194. See Force, ‘Nature of Newton’s “Holy Alliance’”’, and Brooke, Science and Religion, ch. 4.

388 GOD’S GREAT BOOK IN FOLIO These arguments were closely linked with the conviction that the regular workings of nature were a more powerful testament to the presence of an

omnipotent deity than dramatic supernatural aberrations. Rooted in the writings of the Cambridge Platonists and latitudinarian divines, the idea that the exquisite design of the universe supplied evidence that it had been constructed by an ‘intelligent architect’ whose skill far surpassed that of any human artisan was given classic expression in John Ray’s The wisdom of God (1691) and William Derham’s Physico-Theology (1713). The latter was an expanded version of the Boyle lectures (endowed to defend Christianity against infidelity) which Derham had delivered in 1711-12. Providing a pious justification for scientific investigation, these and other works declared God had not bestowed so much effort and ingenuity upon Creation for it ‘to be looked upon with a careless, incurious Eye’. Rather he intended its infinite variety to be admired and scrutinized “by the Rational Part of the World’ to proclaim His greatness and to stir up humility and gratitude. By

‘tracing the Footsteps’ of the Almighty in the composition, order, and harmony of the “‘terraqueous globe’, men and women could reach a higher understanding of His nature and attributes. Such views were diffused across

the ecclesiastical spectrum.'”? As the providential anthologist William Turner declared in 1697, the wonders of the mineral, vegetable, and animal

worlds bore witness to the Lord’s glory and foresight: ‘if all the other Preachers of Nature were suspended from their Office, and commanded to be silent, the very Stones would speak and declare the Wisdom and Power of their Creator’.'”° Archbishop John Tillotson also spoke of ‘the visible frame of the world, which we behold with our eyes, which way soever we look’ as filled with ‘ocular Demonstrations’ of God’s providence.'’’ Such texts index a growing emphasis on divine benevolence,

195. John Ray, The wisdom of God manifested in the works of the creation (1691), 19, sig. A6”, and passim; William Derham, Physico-theology: or a demonstration of the being and attributes of God,

from his works of creation (1713), 466-7, 471. On Ray and Derham, see Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore, 415—26; on the theology of design, see P. M. Harman, The Culture of Nature in Britain 1680-1860 (New Haven and London, 2009), ch. 2. For earlier expressions, see John Wilkins, A discourse concerning the beauty of providence in all the rugged passages of it (1649); Seth

Ward, A philosophicall essay towards an eviction of the being and attributes of God... (Oxford, 1652); Henry More, An antidote against atheism, or an appeal to the natural faculties of the minde of man, whether there be not a god (1653).

196. Turner, Compleat history, part II, p. 67. 197. John Tillotson, Works... containing fifty four sermons and discourses, on several occasions, 3 vols.

(1735 edn.), u. §51 and sermon LXXXIII (‘The wisdom of God in the Creation of the world’) passim.

GOD’S GREAT BOOK IN FOLIO 389 which in turn signals a change in perceptions of the personality of the deity Himself—from an angry Jehovah who relentlessly punished sinners to a

bountiful and merciful Father who had thoughtfully provided for the minutest needs of His creatures. A significant side-effect of the response to The sacred theory of the earth and

the rise of ‘physico-theology’ was an emerging awareness of the utility and beauty of geographical features that earlier commentators had dismissed as warts and disfigurements. Reacting against the insistence on the ugliness and inhospitability of the post-diluvian earth Burnet had inherited from earlier commentators,'”* many divines and natural philosophers were at pains to stress instead the testimony it offered of God’s ultimate goodness. Woodward shared Burnet’s ambivalence about the ‘tumult and disorder’ which now confronted the observer, describing how as a result of the Deluge ‘an elegant, orderly, and habitable Earth’ had been ‘quite unhinged, shattered all to pieces, and turned into an heap of ruins’. However, he went on to declare

that upon closer scrutiny it was possible to discern the hand of God producing ‘the most consummate and absolute Order and Beauty, out of the highest Confusion’ and taking steps for the benefit and ‘happiness of the whole race of Mankind’. God had destroyed the idyllic and fertile environ-

ment in which the generations before Noah had resided because this had proved ‘a Continual Decoy and Snare’ to them: free of the need to toil and labour for its cultivation, they had fallen into vice and depravity. The ‘ransacking of Nature, and turning of all things topsie-turvy’ was thus necessary to render it fit for occupation for their posterity and to prevent them from falling into the same sinful state. Its current constitution was ‘more nearly accommodated to the present Frailties of Its Inhabitants’. The crumbling ruins of God’s original Creation left behind by the Flood were now not a symbol of the consequences of sin but instead provided ‘the most monumental proof that could ever possibly have been’ of His compassion

and tenderness.’ Transformed by diligent agriculture and embellished with cities, castles, villages, and magnificent residences, landscapes reduced to order by human endeavour were seen as redemptive in character. In an apology for colonization, John Ray believed that God preferred ‘a Country 198. See e.g. Gabriel Plattes, A discoverie of subterraneall treasure of all manner of mines and mineralls

(1639), 5, who commented on contemporaries who thought mountains ‘were produced by accretion in length of time, even as Warts, Tumours, Wenns, and Excrescences are engendred in the superficies of mens bodies’. 199. Woodward, Essay, 82-08.

390 GOD’S GREAT BOOK IN FOLIO thus planted and adorned, thus polished and civilised, thus improved to the

height of all manner of Culture for the Support and Sustenance, and convenient Entertainments of innumerable multitudes of People’ above ‘a Barbarous and Inhospitable Scythia...or a rude and unpolished America, peopled with slothful and naked Indians’.*°” English settlers in Ireland justified and celebrated the ‘improvements’ they initiated in this ‘wild’

and ‘uncivilised’ country in the same terms, comparing this with the recovery of ‘paradise’ and the garden of God. By contrast, as William Henry wrote in 1756, the traditional terrain of the Gaels was covered ‘with thickets of woods and briars, and those vast extended bogs, which

are not natural, but only the excrescences of the body’. The physical appearance of the earth reflected the ‘barbarous’ state of its inhabitants,

neglecting husbandry and maiming the face of it with their ‘intestine quarrels’ and feudal ‘broils’.*’’ The dominion man had been granted over the earth carried with it a responsibility to tame the wilderness that covered so much of its surface. Others pursued these arguments in a different direction, explicitly reject-

ing the notion that topographical features like mountains were simply shapeless eyesores and stressing their absolute necessity for human wellbeing as well as the visual delight they afforded. ‘The truth is’, observed Erasmus Warren, ‘several of those appearances, which we are apt to call rude, confused and uncouth; and to count but Blemishes, Scars and Deformities; are commonly so well placed and suted to one another, as to become very taking in artificial Draughts, and a kind of natural Landskips.’ What seemed chaotic and inelegant at first sight, “to thinking Men, will appear to be as the Tornings, and Carvings, and ornamental Sculptures; that make up the Lineaments and Features of Nature, not to say her Braveries’. “Though some would take them for flaws and botches, and the fag ends of Nature; yet in them, a quick and piercing Eye can easily discern, not only her pretty dextrous Mechanisms; but the marvellous and adoreable Skill of her Maker, most rarely Expressed.’~”*

The Cumbrian rector Thomas Robinson similarly rejected the view that mountains were ‘Warts and Wens’ on the earth’s surface, insisting that they 200. Ray, Wisdom of God, 117-18. 201. William Henry, Love of our country. A sermon preached in the cathedral church of St Patrick, Dublin

(Dublin, 1756), 18-19. See Toby Barnard, A New Anatomy of Ireland: The Irish Protestants, 1649-1770 (New Haven and London, 2003), 290-1. 202. Warren, Geologia, 144-6.

GOD’S GREAT BOOK IN FOLIO 391 contributed to ‘the Entertainment of our visive Faculty, with most curious

and delightful Landskips’. Supplying the soil in which a unique set of vegetables grew for the benefit of grazing sheep and other animals, they were ‘not only Ornamental but useful’.*’’ Drawing an unflattering comparison between the Isle of Ely and the rolling Sussex Downs, Ray declared the irregular undulation of the landscape into hills and valleys, rocks and promontories was ‘a very beautiful and pleasant object... far more grateful to behold, than a perfectly level country without any rising or protuberancy, to terminate the sight’.~”" Behind such statements we can discern the beginnings of what Marjorie

Hope Nicholson called ‘the aesthetics of the infinite’. Even in Burnet’s book itself, we find a paradoxical combination of violent disparagement and lyrical rhapsody, a ‘conflict between intellectual condemnation of asymmetry and emotional response to the attraction of the vast’.~”” In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the latter sensibility would triumph and manifest

itself in a fascination with the picturesque and romantic in the physical environment that left a decisive mark on British art and literature.“’° The Wicklow mountains gave a traveller in the 1730s ‘a pleasing idea of the infinite power’ and magnanimity of ‘the omnipotent creator’ and other Insh Protestants were also beginning to admire untamed landscapes.~”’ The same assumptions colour the wild places described by ministers who contributed to the Statistical Account of Scotland in the 1790s. The deep chasm or abyss of Craig-ground near Kiltearn inspired a ‘gloomy horror’ in its incumbent, but also feelings of amazement, while Alexander Fraser of Kilmalie in Argyllshire wrote that Ben Nevis and surrounding mountains could not but impose upon the heart of their beholders ‘the greatness and majesty of the ALMIGHTY ARCHITECT’, unless they were ‘strangely void of sense, of taste, and of sentiment’. The author of a Survey of the province of Moray published at the end of the decade was similarly enraptured by the ‘lofty naked cliffs’ in the parish of Laggan, from which cascades of water plummeted impetuously.

203. Thomas Robinson, An essay towards a natural history of Westmorland and Cumberland (1709), 4, 40.

204. John Ray, Three physico-theological discourses (2nd edn., 1693), 35—6. See also id., Wisdom of

God, 63, 113-14, 148-50; Derham, Physico-theology, 71-2. On the utility of mountains, see Keill, Examination, 47-61. 205. Nicolson, Mountain Glory, 213 and passim.

206. Harman, Culture of Nature, argues that the aesthetic of nature and language of design connected with natural theology was fundamentally disrupted by the rise of Romanticism. See esp. pp. 121-47. 207. Quoted in Barnard, New Anatomy of Ireland, 291-2.

392 GOD’S GREAT BOOK IN FOLIO ‘If the summit can be attained with an unclouded sky’, the view was ‘immense and transportingly sublime’.~°’ As Roy Porter has remarked, ‘these tides of taste were in dialogue with intense scientific debate’, which reassessed both the nature of beauty and the beauty of nature.~”” And as time progressed, the capacity of wild and spectacular scenery to inspire a mixture

of emotions including pleasure, terror, and exultation acquired a semimystical dimension.*'° Once a sobering reminder of the Lord’s controversy with sinful man, the landscape itself had once again become, albeit in a more metaphorical sense, the subject of a sacred cult. Nor did the biblical and theological assumptions that buttressed early modern cosmology lose their power to shape perception and interpretation

of the environment with any rapidity. ‘Physico-theology’ continued to exert considerable influence on the theory and practice of the earth sciences

long after 1700. Despite continuing adjustments in the light of new dis-

coveries, it was not until the era of Darwin that the principles which underpinned it met with a drastic challenge to their underlying validity. Scripture was still the ultimate prism through which the majority viewed the natural environment. To this extent it is not very helpful to speak of seology as having been ‘retarded by Genesis’ and to dwell on the “pernicious’ and ‘cramping influence’ exerted by ‘bibliolatry’ on the development

of the subject.*'' Linear paradigms which have sought to trace its emergence as a ‘scientific discipline’ and seen the ‘liberation’ of geological knowledge from its ‘religious straitjacket’ as a prerequisite for its ‘birth’ as a ‘scientific discipline’ do violence to the subtlety and flexibility that has always been a feature of the relationship between religion and science.*'* 208. Sir John Sinclair (ed.), The statistical account of Scotland. Drawn up from the communications of the ministers of the different parishes, 21 vols. (Edinburgh, 1791-9), 1. 294-5; vil. 418; A survey of the province of Moray; historical, geographical, and political (Aberdeen, 1798), 251-2.

209. Roy Porter, “The Terraqueous Globe’, in G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter (eds.), The Ferment of Knowledge: Studies in the Historiography of Eighteenth-Century Science (Cambridge, 1980),

285-324 at 299-300. See also Peter Howard, Landscapes: The Artists’ Vision (London and New York, 1991). On the picturesque, see also Ch. 4, pp. 294-6, above. 210. Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 259-61; Schama, Landscape and Memory, esp. ch. 8. 211. Nicolson, Mountain Gloom, 146; Davies, Earth in Decay, 24, and see p. 58. 212. This is implicit in Frank Dawson Adams, The Birth and Development of the Geological Sciences

(New York, 1954; first publ. 1938) and Martin Guntau, “The Emergence of Geology as a Scientific Discipline’, History of Science, 16 (1978), 280—90, but cf. the more subtle picture

presented in id., “The Natural History of the Earth’, in Jardine, Secord, and Spary (eds.), Cultures of Natural History, 211-29 and Martin J. S. Rudwick, ‘The Shape and Meaning of Earth

History’, in David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers (eds.), God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter between Christianity and Science (Berkeley, CA, 1986), pp. 296-321. Such assumptions are also residually present in Porter, Making of Geology, esp. pp. 216-21.

GOD’S GREAT BOOK IN FOLIO 393 They also eclipse the many complexities of the connection between the long Reformation and the British and Irish landscape. Throughout the period, then, the natural world remained for many God’s sreat book in folio, a text carefully crafted at the Creation to teach mankind key lessons about the deity who made it. The idea that the environment was charged with religious and spiritual significance was not undermined by either the Reformation or the developments in philosophical perspective and experimental method historians have christened ‘the Scientific Revolution’, though both did help to curtail assumptions about the localization of

the holy and reshape the theological and epistemological lens through which the landscape was interpreted. The effects of these movements were at root equivocal. They stimulated an ongoing reassessment of where to locate the boundaries between the technical categories of natural, preternatural, and supernatural and cast doubt on many inherited traditions about the genesis of particular topographical features. At the same time,

however, Protestantism reinforced the belief that nature was a sensitive barometer of moral disorder and a vehicle by which God habitually communicated with human beings. The surface of the earth continued to be envisaged as a kind of palimpsest upon which the Lord inscribed messages to

the people of Britain and Ireland, a supplement to the written canon of Scripture as a source of doctrinal and ethical instruction. Although there are sions that anxiety was gradually being supplanted by an attitude of admiration and wonder, a significant proportion of the populace was still inclined to view prodigious trees, prognosticating wells, and calamitous geological

processes as divine warnings of further punishment. The sacramentalism that had shaped the mentality of medieval Catholics was displaced by a tendency to read the landscape as a symbol or allegory. Embroiled in the polemical battles that propelled Britain and Ireland into

civil war in the mid-seventeenth century, the meaning of anomalous phenomena became increasingly contested and their status uncertain and subjective. Nevertheless, in the context of growing concern about the spread of religious apathy and scepticism, some celebrated them as compelling evidence that the Almighty remained present and active in the world. Others turned to the more regular and less tendentious workings of nature.

Heralded as testimonies of the Lord’s benevolence, these too were perceived as a weapon with which to beat back the burgeoning forces of atheism. The precept that the earth was an arena for the operations of

394 GOD’S GREAT BOOK IN FOLIO divine will survived the profound intellectual challenges that characterized the first stirrings of the Enlightenment. Indeed, it may be argued that it was integral to them. The mechanical universe that Newton, Boyle, and other natural philosophers brought into being remained in essence a providential one. Yet, designed as it was to uphold the sovereignty of God, in the hands of freethinkers it could ironically be harnessed to suggest that He was no

more than an absentee landlord.*'’ It could be utilized to evacuate the divine from the physical environment. 213. See Brooke, Science and Religion, 143; id., “Science and Religion’, 771.

Therapeutic Waters: Religion, Medicine, and the Landscape

s we saw in Chapter 1, in the course of the Middle Ages many A hallowed places in the landscape became renowned for miraculous healing. Pilgrims flocked to a vast and proliferating network of sites in search of supernatural relief from their physical and mental afflictions. As well as resorting to relics and shrines enclosed in cathedrals and churches, they also

turned to sacred trees, stones, and springs in the hope that the saints to whom they were dedicated might intercede to cure conditions which conventional human medicine had failed to alleviate. The trust that the laity placed in the efficacy of holy wells, and the rituals they performed around them, sometimes aroused the concern of the episcopal and parochial clergy, to whom such assumptions and practices were reminiscent of heathenism. Nevertheless, the cult largely enjoyed the support of the ecclesias-

tical hierarchy and on the eve of the Reformation the Church actively promoted the resort of sick visitors to miraculous fountains like those at Walsingham, Buxton, Holywell, and Liberton in Scotland. Along with charitable hospitals and monastic infirmaries, such wells were the institutional foci of its flourishing department of health. On the feast days of their patron saints, patients congregated at such places in considerable numbers, leaving behind discarded crutches, wax replicas of body parts, and other ex-voto gifts in fervent thanks for the thaumaturgic services rendered by their sanctified waters. They were an important resource for people who could not afford to consult physicians, surgeons, apothecaries, or astrological doctors and whose illnesses had proved immune to professionally prescribed or self-admuinistered remedies. Together with the panoply of lesser holy wells people frequented in

396 THERAPEUTIC WATERS the vicinity of their own towns and villages, they reflected the eclecticism that was the chief hallmark of late medieval medical culture. '

In several respects, the Reformation represented a serious threat to the nexus between religion and healing to which these numinous locations gave concrete expression. By repudiating many traditional sources of sacred therapy, reformed theologians and pastors may be argued to have played a part in demarcating sharper boundaries between the care of the soul and the cure of the body. However, as much recent research has shown, the ties between medicine and piety were reconstituted rather than severed by the

advent of Protestantism in the mid-sixteenth century and the ongoing confessional conflicts it engendered.” Reinforcing these insights, this chapter explores the intertwined processes by which some ancient holy wells were rehabilitated in a reformed guise and by which other springs that acquired a reputation for curing disease and evolved into health resorts in the course of

the period were absorbed within the parameters of Calvinist theology. As we shall see, the doctrinal and liturgical upheavals of the era did not spell the end of the vibrant culture of religious healing that had burgeoned at shrines scattered across the landscape of the British Isles. Rather, against the back-

drop of wider shifts in the theory and practice of medicine, it underwent more subtle forms of transmutation. Repudiating any simple link between the demise of medieval holy wells and the apotheosis of fashionable spas, the discussion that follows further illuminates the complexities of the connec-

tion between the Protestant Reformation and the physical environment.”

1. See Ronald C. Finucane, Miracles and Pilgrims: Popular Beliefs in Medieval England (1977), chs.

4—5. On the medieval culture of healing more generally, see Nancy G. Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice (Chicago, 1990), ch. 5; Carol Rawclifte, Medicine and Society in Later Medieval England (Stroud, 1995), esp. ch. 1. 2. Some key contributions include Charles Webster, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine and Reform 1626-1660 (1975); W. J. Sheils (ed.), The Church and Healing, SCH 19 (Oxford, 1982);

Roger French and Andrew Wear (eds.), The Medical Revolution of the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 1989); Ole Peter Grell and Andrew Cunningham (eds.), Medicine and the Reformation (London and New York, 1993); Ole Peter Grell and Andrew Cunningham (eds.), Religio Medici: Medicine and Religion in Seventeenth-Century England (Aldershot, 1996); Andrew Wear,

‘Religious Beliefs and Medicine in Early Modern England’, in Hilary Marland and Margaret Pelling (eds.), The Task of Healing: Medicine, Religion and Gender in England and the Netherlands

1450-1800 (Rotterdam, 1996), 145—69; Ole Peter Grell, ‘Medicine and Religion in SixteenthCentury Europe’, in Peter Elmer (ed.), The Healing Arts: Health, Disease and Society in Europe 1500-1800 (Manchester, 2004), 84-107. For briefer discussions, see Mary Lindemann, Medicine and Society in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1999), 206-12; Andrew Wear, Knowledge and Practice in English Medicine, 1550-1680 (Cambridge, 2000), 29-34.

3. Partial anticipations of the argument presented in this chapter can be found in my ‘Reforming the Waters: Holy Wells and Healing Springs in Protestant England’, in Diana Wood (ed.), Life

THERAPEUTIC WATERS 397 Reforming the Waters: From Holy Wells to Healing Springs? The first phases of the Reformation were accompanied by the physical destruction of a number of prominent wonder-working springs and by a sustained campaign of polemic against continuing pilgrimage to them. This crusade was driven by several key convictions. People who undertook ritual

journeys to holy wells for medical reasons were believed to be guilty of idolatry: of venerating God’s creation of nature as if it were a deity, and of crediting the saints to whom such sites had been formally consecrated with

power that rightfully belonged to the Almighty. Harping on the early evangelical theme that true miracles had ceased at the end of the apostolic era, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Protestants went on to declare that the marvellous cures alleged to have been wrought by these fountains were the product of diabolical guile or human fraud. They were the stratagems by which the devil corrupted the weak or deceitful stories spread by greedy clerics intent upon lining their own pockets or filling the coffers of churches and monasteries. Writing in the 1570s, the Elizabethan rector of Radwinter in Essex, William Harrison, dismissed them as fables “devised at the first by Satan, the father of lies, for the holding of the ignorant and credulous in their superstitions and errors’. The virtues of St Botolph’s Well in Hadstock, St German’s Well at Faulkbourne, and sundry other springs, he declared triumphantly, ‘are now found out to be but baits to draw men and women unto them, either for gain unto the places where they were or satisfaction of the lewd disposition of such as hunted after other game’.* Alternatively, the mystery of thaumaturgic springs could be undermined by attributing their effects to secondary causes. Richard Carew treated claims about the efficacy of St Nun’s well in Cornwall in reducing ‘frantic persons’ to sanity with playful scepticism, suggesting that any success it had in taming madness was due to the shock of being ducked under cold water rather than the intercession of its celestial patron. The same technique for cooling maniacal fury,

and Thought in the Northern Church c. 1100-1700: Essays in Honour of Claire Cross, SCH, Subsidia,

12 (Woodbridge, 1999), 227-55; and ‘Sacred Spas? Healing Springs and Religion in PostReformation Britain’, in Ole Grell and Bridget Heal (eds.), The Impact of the European Reformation (Aldershot, 2008), 209-38.

4. William Harrison, The Description of England, ed. Georges Edelen (Ithaca, NY, 1968), 273-4.

398 THERAPEUTIC WATERS he observed, had long been employed by the master of Bedlam.” Stories of the stupendous miracles worked by other springs were also integrated into the narrative of Catholic credulity and papal corruption which Protestant controversialists constructed to defend and justify the Reformation.° The corrosive anti-popery that was such a pronounced feature of its first generation created a climate of intense hostility to hallowed wells. Against the

backdrop of the reformers’ wider attack on Catholic amulets and sacramentals and the spells and charms peddled by local wizards and sorcerers, the ongoing efforts of consistory courts and kirk sessions to eradicate resort to

them may be viewed as one strand of a vigorous drive to curtail a vibrant tradition of magical and mystical healing. Yet it would be wrong to imply that the religious revolution of the midsixteenth century was inherently antagonistic to the practice of frequenting therapeutic waters in search of medical aid. In fact the period from 1570

onwards saw the revival of several springs that had enjoyed a notable reputation for performing cures before the break with Rome, but which had withered in the face of the iconoclastic fury of the previous three decades. Within less than a half century after the advent of Protestantism in England and Scotland various wells that had initially been suppressed were actively rehabilitated as spas with the tacit or explicit consent of the ecclesiastical and political establishment.’ These developments owed something to medical and cultural trends that were seeping in from the Continent. The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries saw a significant reawakening of interest in the classical practice of bathing and the recovery of a number of ancient texts that detailed the regimen to be

5. Richard Carew, The Survey of Cornwall (1602), fo. 122°. See William Lambarde, A perambulation of Kent (1576), 354—5 for strikingly similar comments about Swanscombe Church, which was

also resorted to by those who sought ‘restitution of their wits’ from St Hildeferth. He commented scoffingly that she might ‘be spared’ of responsibility, “seeing we have ye keeper

of Bethelem, who ceaseth not (even tyll this day) to woorke mightily in the same kinde of Myracle’. 6. For this narrative, see Helen L. Parish, Monks, Miracles and Magic: Reformation Representations of the Medieval Church (London and New York, 2005), esp. chs. 3, 6.

7. On the development of English spas, see A. B. Granville, Spas of England and Principal Sea Bathing Places, 2 vols. (Bath, 1841; repr. 1971); Reginald Lennard, “The Watering Places’, in id. (ed.), Englishmen at Rest and Play: Some Phases of English Leisure 1558-1714 (Oxford, 1931), 3-78; Charles F. Mullett, Public Baths and Health in England, 16th—18th Century, Bulletin of the History

of Medicine Supplement, 5 (Baltimore, Md., 1946); William Addison, English Spas (1951); Peter T. Neville Havins, The Spas of England (1976); and esp. Phyllis Hembrey, The English Spa 1580-1815: A Social History (1990). Almost nothing has been written on this topic in the context of early modern Scotland and Ireland.

THERAPEUTIC WATERS 399 followed by patients. Especially in Italy learned interest in thermal medicine also engendered a new balneological literature that both signalled and fostered an evolving social fashion. This filtered across the Channel to Britain via a book on the nature and properties of baths prepared by the noted botanist and Protestant divine Dr William Turner, and published in Cologne in 1562. Turner compared English watering places unfavourably with their counterparts in Germany and the Mediterranean and called for an energetic programme of renovation sponsored by wealthy patrons. He promoted Bath, the Christianized Roman shrine of Aquae Sulis Minerva,

as ‘a verye excellent tresure’ with as yet unrecognized potential as an international centre for hydrotherapy.” Two more works in recommendation of its “wonderfull’ healthful qualities were written by doctors in 1572 and 1580 respectively, the latter by Robert Lesse, at the behest of Gilbert Berkeley, the bishop of Bath and Wells. The civic authorities were quick to encourage the development of the town’s lodging and leisure facilities, and by 1590, when it received a new charter of incorporation, it was rapidly emerging as a premier destination of the English nobility and gentry.'? In the seventeenth century, further “compendious’ treatises advertising the

merits of Bath were written by the resident physicians Tobias Venner and Thomas Guidott (see Fig. 6.1).'' Such spas were part of an emerging 8. See Ralph Jackson, “Waters and Spas in the Classical World’ and Richard Palmer, ‘“In this our Lightye and Learned Tyme”: Italian Baths in the Era of the Renaissance’, in Roy Porter (ed.), The Medical History of Waters and Spas, Medical History Supplement, 10 (1990), I-13, 14-22 respectively; Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature 1150-1750

(New York, 1998), 138-46. See also Katherine Park, ‘Natural Particulars: Medical Epistemology, Practice and the Literature of Healing’, in Anthony Grafton and Nancy Siraisi (eds.), Natural Particulars: Nature and the Disciplines in Renaissance Europe (Cambridge, Mass., 1999), 347-67. 9. William Turner, A booke of the natures and properties, as well of the bathes in England as of other bathes in Germany and Italy (Cologne, 1562), sig. A2" and passim. 10. John Jones, The bathes of Baths ayde: wonderfull amd most excellent against very many sicknesses

(1572); Washington, DC, Folger Shakespeare Library, MS V. a. 483 (Robert Lesse, “A brief view of all baths’(c.1580)). See Hembrey, English Spa, 25-38. 11. Tobias Venner, The baths of Bathe (1628). This was also appended to his Via recta ad vitam longam (1620). ‘An appendix concerning Bathe’ by Thomas Guidott was added to the 1669 edition of Edward Jorden’s A discourse of natural bathes, and mineral waters (first publ. 1631). Guidott also wrote A discourse of Bathe, and the hot waters there also some enquiries into the nature of the water of St. Vincent’s rock, near Bristol, and that of Castle-Cary (1676); The register of Bath, or, Two hundred observations containing an account of cures performed, and benefit received, by the use of the

famous hot waters of Bath, in the county of Somerset (1694). Robert Pierce, Bath memoirs: or, observations in three and forty years practice, at the Bath what cures have been there wrought, (both by

bathing and drinking these waters by God’s blessing .. .) (Bristol, 1697). On Bath, see Roger Rolls, The Hospital of the Nation: The Story of Spa Medicine and the Mineral Water Hospital at Bath (Bath, 1988).

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experience (Edinburgh, 1618), verso of title page. (Reproduced by permission of the Bodleian Library, University of Oxtord. Shelfmark Gough. Scotl. 229)

pamphlet by Andrew Mure, Professor of Medicine at King’s College,

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Aberdeen. Dedicated to Lady Mary Erskine, Countess Marichal, who had made it accessible to patients, Mure declared it a ‘universall balsamick medicine’ and ‘Panacea’ and made bold comparisons between the natural processes which had imbued it with medicinal virtue and the fabled philo-

sopher’s stone. He noted that it had been known to his forefathers as St Peter’s Well, who supposed that the great apostle (unable to travel to

THERAPEUTIC WATERS 419 Scotland himself because of the ‘necessary affaires’ in which he was employed as the Pope) had sent a special faculty for curing diseases from Rome. Mure dismissed this as ‘meer superstition, like that of the heathen’.°~ Shortly after the Restoration Matthew Mackaile prepared a ‘topographical-spagyncall description’ of the springs at Moffet in Annandale, whose limpid waters

were found to be impregnated with sulphur, antimony, nitre, and saltamoniac. These had been discovered by a ‘valetudenary Rustick’ who noticed the similarity between the smell that emanated from them and the odour of the already well-known Brampton Wells and recommended them to his friends and acquaintances. Cleared of mire and clay, the sick began to

resort to them and two years later the earl of Harsfield financed their development.®” Richard Pococke, bishop of Meath, paused at Hartfell (discovered as recently as 1748) and several other spas in the course of his tour of Scotland in 1760.°" In Ireland, spas appear to have been a more belated development, linked partly with the spread of English and European cultural values. In the 1650s a number were identified in Dublin and Thomas Dineley listed several in other parts of the country he visited in the reign of Charles II, including

Drumkitt, near Ballenderry, which sprouted out of a rock, had a tawny orange colour, and spilled into a pool that was usually covered by a blue scum.” The so-called ‘Irish Spaw’ stood conveniently just outside the capital, a factor that compensated for the weakness of its mineral content, along with its recommendation by the eminent French medic Pierre Bellon

in a treatise addressed to the Lord Lieutenant, James, duke of Ormond.

62. Andrew Mure, Pidax Petreia, or the discoverie of S. Peters well, at Peter-head, in Scotland (Edinburgh, 1636), sigs. B1’—2", Bs" “, Bo’, C1’. A broadside summary of this was published as Pegiama. Or the vertues of, and way how to use the mineral and medicinall water at Peterhead in

Scotland (Aberdeen, 1668). For a contemporary call for a register of cures, see Walter Macfarlane, Geographical Collections Relating to Scotland Made by Walter Macfarlane, ed. Arthur

Mitchell, 3 vols. (Edinburgh, 1906-8), i1. 228-9. 63. Matthew Mackaile, Moffet-well: or, a topographico-spagyricall description of the mineral wells, at Moffet in Annandale of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1664), esp. 43-—S. 64. Richard Pococke, Tours in Scotland 1747, 1750, 1760 by Richard Pococke, Bishop of Meath, From the

Original MS and Drawings in the British Museum, ed. Daniel William Kemp, Scottish History Society (Edinburgh, 1887), 39-40, 349. On Hartfell, see William Horseburgh, ‘An Account of the Medicinal Virtues of the Hartfell Spaw’, Scots Magazine, 16 (1754), 373-S. 65. Gerard Boate, Irelands naturall history, ed. Samuel Hartlib (1657), 55; Evelyn Philip Shirley (ed.),

‘Extracts from the Journal of Thomas Dineley, Esquire, Giving Some Account of his Visit to Ireland in the Reign of Charles II’, Journal of the Kilkenny and South-East of Ireland Archaeological

Society, I (1856-7), 143-6, 170-88; 2 (1860-1), 22-32, 55-6; 4 (1862-3), 38-52, 103-9, 320-38; § (1864-6), 40-8, 268-90, 425-46. Citation at Iv. $0.

420 THERAPEUTIC WATERS Written after a visit to the kingdom in the early 1680s, this also made reference to a walled spring at Chapelizod.®° It is quite possible that these were among the ‘sundry sanctified and holy wels’ of which Barnaby Rich had complained some seventy years earlier, lamenting the ‘rascall people’ who flocked to them on traditional feast days to engage in foolish ceremo-

nies.°’ Purging waters reminiscent of those at Tunbridge were noted to have been lately found at the market town of Fermoy in Co. Cork in 1685,

around the same time as the tepid limestone springs at Mallow (one of which had long been hallowed to the memory of St Patrick) began to draw health-seeking visitors who later christened it the Irish Bath.°® By 1740 a

sulphur spa at Pettigoe in Co. Donegal had an established reputation. Though it stank of rotten eggs, it had proved ‘a grand Antiscorbutic and sood purger of watry Humours & a speedy remedy for ye Cholic’. Considerable numbers had resorted there and met with success in the treatment of these disorders. The Copper Springs in Co. Wicklow attracted attention fifteen years later, after their properties were the subject of experimentation by various members of the Royal Society.®” Spas were by now a necessary accoutrement of polite and respectable society across the British Isles. The roots that they sometimes possessed in the medieval past did not prevent

them from becoming key features of the medical landscape of the postReformation era (see Fig. 6.5).’” English colonists also imported the fashion with them to North America, where it was unexpectedly aided by the faith

66. Pierre Bellon, The Irish spaw; being a short discourse on mineral waters in generall (Dublin, 1684).

The spa at Chapelizod 1s also referred to in TCD, MS 883/1, pp. 18-23. 67. Barnaby Rich, A new description of Ireland (1610), 52-3, and see Chs. 2, 3, pp. 109, 173 above.

68. Swift Paine Johnston (ed.), ‘On a Manuscript Description of the City and County of Cork, cir. 1685, Written by Sir Richard Cox’, Fournal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, 32 (1902), 353-76 at 356; Charles Smith, The antient and present state of the county and city of Cork, in four books, 2 vols. (Dublin, 1750), 1. 335-6; 11. 276-7.

69. Austin Cooper, ‘A Journey to Lough Derg’, ed. Isaac Butler, Fournal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, 5th ser. 2 (Consecutive Series 22) (1892), 13-24, 126-36 at 136. For the

Copper Springs, see John Bond, ‘A Letter to Sir Peter Thompson; Knt: F. R. S. Containing Experiments on the Copper Springs in Wicklow in Ireland, and Observations Thereon, by John Bond, M. D.’, PT of the Royal Society, 48 (1753-4), 181-190; ‘An Account of the Copper Springs by the learned W. Henny, D.D.’, Universal Magazine, 14 (1754), 7-11. For other Irish mineral springs flourishing in the 18th c., see Charles Smith, The antient and present state of the county and city of Waterford (Dublin, 1746), ch. 9; 1d., The antient and present state of the county of

Down (Dublin, 1744), ch. 9. 70. James Rattue, The Living Stream: Holy Wells in Historical Context (Woodbridge, 1995), 121, 1s more cautious in drawing this link, identifying only fourteen which ‘degenerated’ from holy wells.

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age SSS “ay ee aT4 oe SseSee. REE) eR =ee ae Ca “Selec = Comparable concerns about immorality had clustered around spas in Britain from the very beginning. Sixteenth-century writers like William Turner and John Jones had called for the abolition of the practice of mixed bathing on the grounds that it was contrary to divine law for men and women ‘to go together lyke unreasonable beastes to the destruction of both body and soul of very manye’. It was ‘a thing not onely so undecent’ for members of the opposite sex to intermingle ‘but also a thing moste uncivill, and barbarous’. To the puritanical like Stanhope, this ‘heathenish custome’ was all too often an occasion for ‘begetting lustfull fires’. Such ‘beastly filthiness’ revealed a flippant regard for the ‘high and excellent Gifts of Almighty God’.'”°® Others expressed anxiety about other personal vices. John Peter was scandalized by the ‘rabble’ of Londoners who came to the Lewisham wells on Sundays and spent ‘that Holy Day in great

Prophaneness’, gorging themselves on brandy and other strong liquors, compounding the offence of sabbath-breaking with drunkenness.'”’ Anthony Walker warned his auditors not to make the Tunbridge waters like those that sprang from the rock at Meribah—a source of division between God and His chosen people—by indulging in ungodly pleasures. He severely reproved ‘the Sin of common Swearing’ that ran rife at the Kentish

194. Henry Bourne, The history of Newcastle upon Tyne: or, the ancient and present state of that town

(Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 1736), 82. 195. Lotz-Heumann, ‘Holy Wells and Wundergelduf’. 196. William Turner, Booke of the nature and properties, fos. 1-2"; Jones, Bathes of Baths ayde, fo. 33".

Stanhope, Newes out of York-shire, 21. This was echoed by Short, Natural, experimental, and medicinal history, 51.

197. Peter, Treatise of Lewisham... wells, sig. A1o’—11'.

THERAPEUTIC WATERS 453 resort, too many esteeming ‘it a piece of good Breeding to blaspheme the Name of God’.'”® It was no coincidence that in early Stuart Bath the godly ruling elite sought to implement a strict reformation of manners, to clean up the streets of a city whose sinful excesses were angering God, or that its reputation for respectability in Georgian times was tempered and complicated by a counter-image of moral degeneracy. The same was true of springs like Tunbridge and Epsom. The latter was the subject of a satirical comedy by Thomas Shadwell, in which a cast of strumpets, cuckolds, adulterers, and gallants sketch a graphic picture of the sexual dalliance and idle decadence for which the Surrey resort was rapidly becoming a byword.'”” The tensions between the pursuit of health and pleasure at such sites became even

more pronounced in the eighteenth century. In 1734 the Presbyterian physician Thomas Short was lamenting the fact that spas like Harrogate were no longer ‘the Hospital of Invalids’ so much as ‘the Rendezvous of Wantonness’: ‘Luxury, Intemperance, unseasonable Hours, Idleness, and Gratification of Taste and Appetite, are become so fashionable.’*’’ A Wesleyan tract published in 1751 admonished the corrupt clientele of Bath and the Bristol Hotwells to reform or risk the possibility that the Lord would transfer their healing powers to Glastonbury. “The Seat of Health is made the Scene of sensual Pleasure’, the author thundered, ‘a Cage of every hateful and unclean Bird.’~”!

Ironically, the worries about recreational excess that clustered around fashionable spas were in part a product of the method of protracted treatment prescribed by doctors themselves: leisure activities filled the gaps between sessions of bathing and drinking and were recommended as a means of aiding digestion and of turning away the troubles and cares that might inhibit a patient’s recovery.~’” Andrew Mure, for instance, advised visitors to the Peterhead well near Aberdeen to exercise themselves with golf, bowls, or some other strenuous pastime while they waited for the

198. Walker, Fax fonte accensa, 67, 70-1. The allusion is to Exodus 17: 1-7. 199. John Wroughton, “Puritanism and Traditionalism: Cultural and Political Division in Bath,

1620-1662’, Bath History, 4 (1992), 52-70; Peter Borsay, ‘Image and Counter-Image in Georgian Bath’, British Fournal of Eighteenth-Century Studies, 17 (1994), 165-79. Thomas Shadwell, Epsom Wells. A comedy, acted at the Duke’s theatre (1673). 200. Short, Natural, experimental, and medicinal history, 244-06. 201. An address to the inhabitants of Glastonbury, and those that resort thither on account of the medicinal waters, lately discover’d there (Bristol, 1751), 6, 8, and passim. My thanks to Jonathan Barry for

passing on this reference. 202. For example, Rowzee, Queenes welles, 56.

454 THERAPEUTIC WATERS waters to be voided; in the afternoon they should ‘beguile the time, with reading, talking, walking, dauncing, singing, dicing, carding &c’.~°’ The emphasis that many placed on the need for moderation in one’s diet and drink and the avoidance of forms of debauchery, including ‘lascivious and venerous sports’, was counter-balanced by their stress on the impor-

tance of disengaging the mind from ‘too serious or melancholic thoughts’.-’* Lightness of heart was thought to be medically advantageous.

An uneasy alliance of contradictory impulses—sickness and sociability, compassion and commercialization, religion and profit—was central to the identity of the celebrated wells and spas of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Yet it should not be supposed that this was an exclusively post-Reformation phenomenon: a carnival atmosphere had surrounded many medieval pilgrimage shrines, which were likewise magnets for pleasure-seeking tourists whose lack of decorum was sharply reproved by contemporary churchmen and moralists. The rampant secularism that was a feature of health resorts centred on medicinal waters cannot be ignored, but nor should we fall into the trap of assuming that it was inherently incompatible with devotion and piety. Healing springs continued to be seen by many as divine blessings which human beings might forfeit through their immoral behaviour.

The Reformation did not, therefore, wholly eliminate the notion that heavenly grace was concentrated at particular locations. The landscape was still seen, albeit in an attenuated sense, as a channel to the sacred.~”” This attitude was as much a function of a renewed emphasis on the doctrines of Creation and Providence as a consequence of the resilience of older assumptions. Protestants maintained that the Almighty could and did imbue springs with preter- and even supernatural power. Moreover, in shifting attention away from the intercession of patron saints towards the mineral and physical properties which God had instilled in these waters, the reformers may have inadvertently encouraged some to a near reverence of nature itself. Protestant preachers found it necessary to warn the laity about honouring healing springs as if they were gods. After tracing the process by which previous ages

203. Mure, Pidax Petreia, sig. C6’—7". 204. For need for frugality and chastity, see Bailey, Briefe discourse, 18; Madan, Phylosophical, and

medicinal essay, 15. For need to avoid melancholy, see Bellon, Irish spaw, 75-6; Rowzee, Queenes welles, 62, 66.

205. See the remarks of Gillespie, Devoted People, 94.

THERAPEUTIC WATERS 455 had venerated fountains and their ‘tutelary Guardians’ as deities, Anthony Walker added the prayer: as we abhor that gross Idolatry, of worshipping the likeness of any thing that 1s

in the Waters under the Earth: So we pray thee preserve us from a more refined, but not less criminal Idolatry, of placing our Confidence in their Qualities and Virtues, and forgetting Thee the Maker of them: lest we provoke Thee to withdraw the Blessing we expect, and inflict the Curse we have cause to fear; and to make them the Instruments of thy Vengeance, because we made them the Objects of our Trust, and Occasions of thy Jealousie.~”°

As well as carving out a place for healing springs that had no living link with the tainted Catholic and pagan past, Protestantism proved willing and able

to rehabilitate ancient hallowed wells in ways that did not entail their complete desacralization. The Reformation secularized these sites in the sense that it removed them from an explicitly ecclesiastical framework (and then only partially); they nevertheless remained fixed within a religious one. As it moved beyond its initial iconoclastic phase, the Reformation developed ways of accommodating the ongoing lay desire to access divine power embedded in the natural environment that might help to alleviate distress and disease.

Errours of the People in Matter of Physick: Wells beyond the Medical Mainstream The manner in which some medieval holy wells were reinvented as mineral springs and spas and formally absorbed within the medical mainstream in the course of the early modern period should not be allowed to eclipse the fact that many others continued to linger on 1n the wilderness. England, Wales, Scotland, and perhaps especially Ireland were filled with numinous places which ultimately failed to make the transition to accepted Protestant water-

ing places. Overshadowed by their more glittering and commercialized cousins, these springs largely lay outside the control of learned physicians

and elite entrepreneurs and beyond the reach of godly magistrates and ministers. They represent an important element of a contemporary lay 206. Walker, Fax fonte accensa, 44-7, 143-4.

456 THERAPEUTIC WATERS culture of medical self-help centred on the landscape that has so far eluded serious scholarly scrutiny. Some of these wells emerged spontaneously during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries before losing their popularity

with equal rapidity, lapsing back into obscurity when their therapeutic novelty wore thin with fickle patients or after Tudor and Stuart officials stepped in to suppress journeys to them as manifestations of disorderly mobility. Others were places whose reputation for sacred healing appears to have been virtually uninterrupted by the Reformation. Physicians and ministers found it hard enough to contain the conduct of those who visited reformed health resorts within legitimate boundaries. As the perennial complaints of spa doctors and Protestant preachers reveal, many individuals who frequented them did so in an unseemly and ‘superstitious’ fashion. It proved even more difficult to police popular belief and behaviour at marginal sites which the religious and scientific establishment either ignored or repudiated, or which quietly evaded the long arm of the law. As we saw in Chapter 2, ecclesiastical officials in Britain and Ireland were engaged in a prolonged struggle to suppress pilgrimage to these sacred places and to eradicate customary practices inherited from the Catholic past that continued to be performed at them. Especially in Scotland, concerned Protestant clergymen and elders regarded the triple circumambulation of such sites on key dates in the Christian and pre-Christian calendar and the depositing of symbolic offerings of pins, coins, rags, and ribbons as the

lamentable dregs of popish and heathen idolatry. Drawing down divine wrath upon these sinners and their communities at large, such remnants of the cult of saints and pagan deities were anathema to the hotter sort of Protestants. They were also the subject of the mocking contempt of doctors like James Primrose, who campaigned against the “common errours of the people in matter of physick’. Along with ‘old wives tales’ about magical remedies, mandrake roots, and bezoar stones, the ‘credulous’ assumptions and ceremonies associated with these holy wells clashed with the accepted

tenets of contemporary medicine no less than with those of reformed theology.~””

Despite the combined efforts of clerics and medics such practices persisted into the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, exercising a new generation of evangelical preachers and attracting the attention of antiqua207. Laurent Joubert, Erreurs populaires au fait de la medicine et regime de santé (Bordeaux, 1578); Primrose, Popular Errours. See Wear, Knowledge and Practice, ch. 2, esp. 55-65.

THERAPEUTIC WATERS 457 ries, topographers, and travellers. In Wales people continued to resort to wells at propitious times of the year, wash themselves, and sleep or keep an

overnight vigil in rock basins or beneath megaliths in close proximity. Mothers brought children with rickets to a well in Baglan parish for ‘three Thursdays in May, Ascension day to be on[e] wth out faile’, in the hope that its waters would cure them. After bathing in a spring near Llangybi church in Cardiganshire, the sick were led to a nearby cromlech: if they fell asleep under it this was regarded as an infallible sign of recovery; if not then an omen of death. Similar rituals were carried out at a well in Caermarthenshire, especially from 21 June to the feast of St Peter, and at the tomb of St Beuno at Clynnog, on which children were laid after ablutions in a neighbouring fountain.~’* They were also common in the Scottish Highlands and Islands in the same period, as Martin Martin and others discovered. Crowds of people were still resorting to a chapel and spring in Inverness-shire on St Patrick’s Day 1n the 1680s, confident of securing relief from disease by drinking from it. If a dead worm was found floating in a fountain in the town of Achnacloich, the patient would die; a ‘quick’ one indicated that he or she would shortly be restored to full health. On the island of Isla, patients

drank from a well and then made ‘a Tour Sunways round it’, leaving a token, such as a pin, needle, or farthing on its stone lid.7°” Among the ‘sinful

and Corrupt Customs’ John Brand found surviving in the Orkneys around 1700 was the practice of making circuits around St Tradwell’s Loch on Papa Westray before bathing in it: this had to be done in silence, otherwise the cure would be marred.*'” Half a century later William Borlase heard that Cornish people were continuing to creep through the holed stone known as Men an Tol near Madron in the hope of relieving severe backache, as well as

washing in ancient holy wells and reclining on the cold floor of the ruined chapels situated nearby them. At St Euny’s Well in Sancreed two women told him that to be assured of receiving any benefit babies had to be brought

208. Parochialia: Being a Summary of Answers to ‘Parochial Queries’ in Order to a Geographical Dictionary,

etc. of Wales Issued by Edward Lhwyd, 3 parts, Archaeologia Cambrensis, Supplements (London 1909-11), 111. 29, 68, 76, and see i. 110, 144, 156; 11. 933 111. 4, II, 26, 45, 47, 60, 65-6, 75, 88, 91; Thomas Pennant, Tours in Wales, 3 vols. (1810 edn.; first publ. 1778), 11. 397, andsee 11. 15, 329, for similar examples.

209. NLS, Advocates MS 34.2.8, fos. 85", 178’; Mitchell (ed.), Geographical Collections, iti. 516; Martin Martin, A description of the western islands of Scotland (1703), 242 and see 7, 33, 140-1,

229-30, 276-8. 210. John Brand, A brief description of Orkney, Zetland, Pightland-Firth & Caithness (Edinburgh, 1701), 58-9.

458 THERAPEUTIC WATERS there on the first three Wednesdays in May.~'' Ailing infants were likewise immersed in Bede’s Well, west of Jarrow near Newcastle-upon-Tyne, three times, with a crooked pin being added and the well laved dry after each dipping. As many as twenty children had been seen at the spring on Sundays in the 1740s. '~ Practices of this kind were also rife in Ireland. Late Stuart commentators noticed many instances of sick persons frequenting hallowed wells and chapels expecting to be cured of their ills by ntual means. They lay overnight in a green field overlooking the sea on one of the Arran islands, reputed to be the burial

place of St Colman, believing contact with the sacred ground would secure them relief from their afflictions. A chapel dedicated to St Ibarus on the isle of Beggerin off the coast of Wexford also continued to be visited by infirm pilgrims optimistic of finding ‘consolatory Ease to theyre Malydes’ if they performed a series of accustomed devotions. Others resorted to sanctified springs and natural hollows of rock which filled with rainwater in search of relief from a variety of human and animal distempers, including murrain in cattle.7'” Examples of popular healing rites associated with wells and landmarks can

be replicated from across the British Isles in the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Although they were possibly more prevalent in areas with a Celtic heritage, they can be found documented throughout England too.~'* It is clear from the voluminous collections of contemporary folklor-

211. BL, Egerton MS 2657, fos. 28” and 11’, and see fos. 10’, 14°, 38, 43'—44'; Borlase, Natural History of Cornwall, 31-2. 212. John Brand, The history and antiquities of the town and county of the town of Newcastle upon Tyne,

2 vols. (1789), 11. 54. Robert Charles Hope, Legendary Lore of the Holy Wells of England Including Rivers, Lakes, Fountains, and Springs (1893), 92, 109.

213. Roderic O’Flaherty, A Chorographical Description of West or H-Iar Connaught, Written A.D. 1684, by Roderic O’ Flaherty, Esq., Author of the ‘Ogyia’, ed. James Hardiman (Dublin, 1846), 88—90, 113, 121; J. Synott, ‘An Account of the Barony of Forth, in the County of Wexford,

written at the Close of the Seventeenth Century’, ed. Herbert F. Hore, Fournal of the Kilkenny and South-East of Ireland Archaeological Society, NS 4 (1862), 53-84 at 61. See also

TCD, MS 883/1, pp. 193-9, 230. 214. For England, see John Brand, Observations on the Popular Antiquities of Great Britain, ed. Henry

Ellis, 3 vols. (1890-3), 1. 366-87; Hope, Legendary Lore. The various volumes in the County Folk-Lore (Printed Extracts) series produced by the Folk-Lore Society in the late 19th and early

20th centuries all contain sections on wells. Other contributions on particular counties include Charles Hardwick, Traditions, Superstitions, and Folk-Lore, (Chiefly Lancashire and the North of England) (Manchester, 1872), ch. 14; Charlotte Sophia Burne (ed.), Shropshire Folklore: A Sheaf of Gleanings (1883), ch. 30; M. and L. Quiller Couch, Ancient and Holy Wells of Cornwall (1894); Edgar MacCulloch, Guernsey Folklore, ed. Edith F. Carey (1903), ch. 5; Henry Taylor,

The Ancient Crosses and Holy Wells of Lancashire (Manchester, 1906); Ethelbert Horne, Somerset Holy Wells and Other Named Wells (1923); R. C. Steyning Walters, The Ancient Wells, Springs, and Holy Wells of Gloucestershire: Their Legends, History, and Topography (Bristol,

THERAPEUTIC WATERS 459 ists that hundreds of wells retained a reputation for dealing with complaints from rheumatism, epilepsy, infertility, and cancer, to smallpox, migraines, and failing eyesight. Many, like St Peter’s Well in Leeds and St John’s Well in Ribchester, were renowned paediatricians, specializing in helping children with fragile joints and feeble limbs. In the 1790s, rickety infants were bathed in a stream in the Scottish parish of Portpatrick and then dried in a nearby cave on quarter days.~'? Others were accomplished veterinarians: in 1771 St Anthony’s Well, near Mitcheldean, was believed to be an infallible

cure for canine mange as well as human skin conditions; a spring in Radnorshire was reputed to remove warts from the udders of cows; and St George’s well at Cegidog specialized in equine distempers.~'° In some places visitors persisted in leaving behind scraps of cloth or rag, bent pins, and small coins. At St Oswald’s Well, near Roseberry Topping, a shirt or

1928). For Wales, Peter Roberts, The Cambrian Popular Antiquities; or, the Account of Some Traditions, Customs, and Superstitions, of Wales, with Observations as to their Origin (1815), 234-67; Francis Jones, The Holy Wells of Wales (Cardift, 1954). For Scotland, many examples can be found in Sir John Sinclair (ed.), The Statistical Account of Scotland. Drawn up from the Communications of the Ministers of the Different Parishes, 21 vols. (Edinburgh, 1791-9); John Graham Dalyell, The Darker Superstitions of Scotland (Glasgow, 1835); J. Russel Walker, ‘“Holy Wells” in Scotland’, Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 17 (1882-3), 152-210; James M. Mackinlay, Folklore of Scottish Lochs and Springs (Glasgow, 1893); M. MacLeod Banks (ed.), British Calendar Customs: Scotland, 1: Movable Festivals, Harvest, March Riding and Wapynshaws, Wells, Fairs (1937), 125-70; Ruth and Frank Morris, Scottish Healing Wells (Sandy, 1982); Finlay MacLeod, The Healing Wells of the Western Isles (Stornoway, 2000). For Ireland, see the numerous references in A Statistical Account, or Parochial Survey of Ireland, Drawn up from the Communications of the Clergy, ed. Wiliam Shaw Mason, 3 vols. (Dublin, 1814-19) and in Letters containing Information Relative to the Antiquities of the Counties of [Ireland]... Collected during the Progress of the Ordnance Survey [Written by John O’Donovan

and Thomas O’Conor], ed. Michael O’Flanagan, 35 vols. (Bray, 1927-34). See also Patrick Logan, The Holy Wells of Ireland (Gerrards Cross, 1980). For a selection of publications on particular counties and localities, see Edward O’ Toole, “The Holy Wells of County Carlow’, Bealoideas: The Journal of the Folkore of Ireland Society, 4 (1933), 3-23; S. O Coindealbhain, ‘Holy Wells’, Fournal of the Cork Historical and Archaeological Society, 2nd ser., 51 (1946), 158-63; P. J. Hartnett, “Holy Wells of East Muskerry, Co. Cork’, Fournal of the Cork Historical and Archaeological Society, 52 (1947), 5-17; Caoimhin O Danachair, “The Holy Wells of Co. Limerick’, Fournal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, 85 (1955), 193-217; id., ‘The Holy Wells of North County Kerry’, Fournal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, 88

(1958), 153-63; 1d., “The Holy Wells of County Dublin’, Reportorium Novum: Dublin Diocesan Historical Record, 2 (1958), 68-87; id., “The Holy Wells of Corkaguiney, Co. Kerry’, Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, 90 (1960), 67-78; Cian Marnell, ‘Healing Wells of Kiltartan’, Journal of the Galway Archaeological and Historical Society, $1 (1999 ), 182-8. 215. Hope, Legendary Lore, 186; Taylor, The Ancient Crosses and Holy Wells of Lancashire, 8; Sinclair (ed.), Statistical Account, 1. 47.

216. Walters, Ancient Wells... of Gloucestershire, 77; Jones, Holy Wells of Wales, 106; Pennant, Tours, 11. 157-8.

460 THERAPEUTIC WATERS shift taken from the sick person and tossed in would provide a sure prognosis and visitors would tie a piece of the fabric to nearby briar bushes as a token

of thanks.*'” The same sources suggest that the custom of placing heads, limbs, and sickly infants through the holes and apertures of ancient monuments and of slumbering in rocky ‘chairs’ and ‘beds’ was likewise slow to disappear in its entirety. So was the assumption that passing parts of the body

through the clefts or branches of certain oak, beech, and hawthorn trees could have therapeutic efficacy. In early nineteenth-century Co. Fermanagh people lay in a stone trough where St Moluish was said to have slept and repeated prayers hoping for relief from their aches and pains; at Harbottle in Northumberland, ill children were brought to a prehistoric mono-

lith known as the Drake Stone and lifted over it. In a case from Aberdeenshire, by contrast, the practice of placing a diseased child under a cromlech seems to have attached itself to the ruins of an old church: in the 1880s infants were taken from Paul’s Well and passed under the ‘Shargar Stone’ in the belief that this would take away the condition that had stunted

their growth. On Exmoor in Somerset splitting an ash and threading an infant through the gap seven times before sunrise was believed to heal hernias as late as 1938.~'° Throughout these islands, places in the natural and man-made environment continued to be the focus of traditional rituals which it was thought might cure chronic and congenital afflictions.

The learned clergy and laypeople who recorded these visitations and customs instinctively described them as hangovers from the Catholic and indeed the remote heathen past.*'” Convinced of the superiority of modern medical practice and theory, they condescendingly relegated these techniques to the rubbish heap of ineffective therapies and heartily ‘wished, that the light of truth should entirely remove all such superstitious practices’.7~” The fascination and nostalgia that compelled them to record these disappearing traditions for posterity was mingled with an underlying conviction

that such pseudo-medical rituals were an affront to the dignity of the nominally Protestant countries in which they lingered. There was probably 217. Brand, Popular Antiquities, 380 n. 218. Mason, Statistical Account, 1. 194; M. C. Balfour, County Folk-Lore, iv: Printed Extracts No. 6. Examples of Printed Folk-Lore Concerning Northumberland, ed. Northcote W. ‘Thomas (1904), 1;

Macleod Banks (ed.), British Calendar Customs Scotland, 1. 144-5; R. L. Tongue, Somerset Folklore, ed. K. M. Briggs (1965), 221. 219. Such assumptions also pervade William George Black’s Folk Medicine: A Chapter in the History of Culture (1883). 220. Mason, Statistical Account, 11. 194.

THERAPEUTIC WATERS 401 more than a grain of truth in the claim that such traditions were survivalist vestiges, especially in the first fifty years after the Reformation and in parts of the British Isles, notably Ireland, where Protestantism experienced significant difficulties in establishing political and cultural hegemony. In 1727 John Richardson was still labouring to persuade the Irish laity of the error of frequenting them and insisting that their remedial effects should be ascribed

‘to the vertue and operation of the Water, and not to any Saint, Male or Female’. This was physically impossible, he declared scathingly, since ‘no Being can act or operate upon any Thing, that is at a Distance from itself. We have as little Ground to believe, that a Saint in Heaven can cure us of any Distemper, as a Friend in Japan, and therefore it is as needless to pray to the one, as to the other.’**' Holy wells were places to which committed Catholics of both humble and high rank instinctively gravitated in the hope

of miraculous cures. Undoubtedly they did attract men and women of a conservative bent who regretted the emergence of the ‘new religion’ and clung stubbornly to old-fashioned practices whose familiarity was a source of psychological comfort, if not real physical relief. However, there are also grounds for arguing that they survived in popular culture as much because of the advent of Protestantism as in spite of it. Did early modern men and women in England, Scotland, Wales, and parts of Ireland turn to these hallowed places in the landscape to help compensate for the loss of the sacramental methods of combating disease and curing illness

that had once enjoyed ecclesiastical approval, but which the reformers emphatically rejected? By drastically reducing the repertoire of remedies that had been supplied and sanctioned by the dismantled medieval Church,

might the Reformation have unwittingly encouraged illicit recourse to them?*~~ Could it be that obscure wells that had evaded the fate of famous

thaumaturgic fountains like Walsingham and Buxton rose to greater prominence when these major shrines were closed? Like their counterparts in Lutheran Scandinavia, should we perhaps see such visits less as an undersround alternative than as a supplement to the new faith imposed upon the populace by the state—as evidence of Protestantism’s relative success in

221. John Richardson, The great folly, superstition and idolatry of pilgrimages in Ireland; especially of that

to St Patrick’s Purgatory (Dublin, 1727), 85-6.

222. Cf. Keith Thomas’s thesis that one of Protestantism’s most profound and paradoxical effects was to encourage greater recourse to ‘non-religious’ strategies for explaining and tackling everyday problems such as ‘magic’ and astrology: Religion and the Decline of Magic, 89, 132, and chs. 7-12.

462 THERAPEUTIC WATERS weaning the laity from traditional piety and of the creativity with which ordinary people adapted to the dramatic ideological ruptures of the midsixteenth century? Jens Johansen argues that resort to healing springs in Denmark emerged as a partial substitute for aspects of religious practice that had been proscribed from reformed churches: in search of sources of sacred healing, parishioners turned to natural sites close to the destroyed shrines they had formerly patronized.**” Whether we interpret these processes as a manifestation of vigorous resistance to Protestantism or as a reflection of the manner in which society creatively adjusted to it, their effect was at once to perpetuate and to reshape inherited medical practices associated with sanctified places in the rural environment. Particularly when applied to later centuries, allegations about the “back-

wardness’ of such customs should not be taken too much at face value. While the outward resemblances between the rituals performed at such sites and Catholic and pre-Christian practices may appear very striking, we can hardly conclude that nothing had changed. As time progressed, the original meaning of the ceremonies performed around ancient holy wells and other topographical features was probably completely forgotten. Memories of the

saints whose cults they had once served to sustain were erased, leaving behind a mere residue of the ceremonies that had been designed to secure their intercession. Gradually stripped of their association with the heavenly patron whom earlier generations of pilgrims had supplicated, what remained was a residual notion that symbolic actions and words could tap and channel supernatural power. Ecclesiastical ritual and prayer ‘degenerated’, or rather

evolved, into something that looked remarkably like a charm, wish, or spell.°°* With Bob Scribner, we may perhaps describe this as a species of Protestant ‘magic’: not as a survival of ‘popish’ (let alone pre-Christian) belief so much as an example of the pragmatism that made people willing to

experiment with any technique that might help them cope with their adversities..~” Eventually, as one Scottish minister commented in the 1790s, the ‘superstitious principle’ underpinning the practice of leaving votive gifts and sacrificial scraps of cloth withered and ceased to exist, reducing them to little more than empty gestures that persisted through 223. Johansen, ‘Holy Springs and Protestantism’. 224. See Jones, Holy Wells of Wales, 68, who remarks in passing that “Protestantism and Nonconformity quite unwittingly helped to perpetuate the earlier paganism’.

225. R. W. Scribner, ‘Magic and the Formation of Protestant Popular Culture in Germany’, in id., Religion and Culture in Germany (1400-1800), ed. Lyndal Roper (Leiden, 2001), 323-45.

THERAPEUTIC WATERS 463 the force of habit alone.**° Elsewhere, the ritual element fell into total abeyance. Similarly, the memory of the saints’ days upon which their forbears had flocked to holy wells eventually evaporated. In nineteenthcentury Ireland springs were still frequented by those seeking relief for eye conditions but the festival dates of their patrons had long been forgotten.~~’ We should also consider the possibility that some of the wells to which

people resorted for the sake of their health and around which the rites recorded by folklorists crystallized were relatively recent discoveries, or rediscoveries, rather than medieval holy ones with an unbroken tradition of cures stretching back many centuries, if not millennia. They might well have been ‘new found spaws’ of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that had simply failed to take off and, marginalized by the medical establishment, become the renewed focus of practices which Protestant elites then mistook for venerable remnants of Catholic and pagan antiquity.~~° St Swithin’s

Well at Stanley near Wakefield illustrates the potential for confusion. A chapel in existence since before 1284 was pulled down in 1571, but the fame of the spring persisted and later a bathhouse was built over it, together with a cottage for a caretaker, by a local gentleman by the name of Sir Michael Pilkington. By 1766, when the vicar of Kirkthorpe remarked that the ‘vulgar’ still believed it had curative properties, its reputation as a minor spa had evidently passed. In 1822, a milkman remembered how the hedges around it had been hung with rags.**” Far from static relics of a distant prehistoric past, such visits to holy springs must be recognized as examples of popular Protestant medicine. However much godly ministers of the early modern period may have frowned upon the rituals people continued to perform around unreclaimed wells, in the final analysis they had to find a way of explaining the cures

wrought by them. They were obliged to admit that many might have hidden mineral or other physical properties. Nor could they overlook the power of psychology or exclude the possibility that they might derive their efficacy from the devil himself. Writing in 1701, John Brand could not

226. Sinclair (ed.), Statistical Account, xi. 76. 227. See the examples cited in Letters Relative to the Antiquities of the County of Carlow Collected during the Progress of the Ordnance Survey in 1835, ed. Michael O’Flanagan (Bray, 1934), 119 and Letters Relative to the Antiquities of the County of Limerick, ed. Michael O’Flanagan, 2 vols. (Bray, 1929), 1. 47.

228. See the comments of Jones, Holy Wells of Wales, 75. 229. James Rattue, “The Wells of St Swithin’, Source, Ns 4 (1995), 6.

464 THERAPEUTIC WATERS ignore the Highland ladies and gentlemen who bathed in St Tradwell’s loch and returned from it relieved of lameness and with improved eyesight, as attested by the local minister. ‘How it cometh to pass’, he left his reader to judge: whether it be any Medicinal or healing Vertue in the water, which I incline not to think... or if the force and strength of the imagination of the Persons afflicted, may have any tendency that way; which, some judge, hath its own influence, in some such like case: Or, rather, by the Aid and assistance of Satan, whom God in his Holy and wise Providence may permit so to do for the further judicial blinding and hardning of those who follow such unwarrantable and unlawful courses: God so punishing them, by giving them up to such strong delusions.~”

Ultimately, moreover, they had to leave room for the thesis that their healing effects might indeed come directly from the Almighty Himself. Noting the cures attributed to St Michael’s Well near Ballykett in Co. Clare, an Irish Protestant thought it best to reserve judgement: ‘whether it be by any Extraordinary miracle or by some Minerals through which the Waters run I censure not’.~’' No less than healing springs and spas, ancient sacred wells that had not been formally rehabilitated by medical science might

be the designated instruments of God. The boundary dividing the two was highly porous and fluid. Perhaps this is a further reason why so many escaped the Reformation, especially in England, more or less unscathed. The theological ambiguity surrounding these sites may have enabled many officials to justify turning a blind eye, if not to acknowledge that the Lord might indeed

be working through them. St Madron’s Well in Cornwall exemplifies these themes. Renowned as a thaumaturgic spring in the late Middle Ages, by the end of the sixteenth century its reputation had declined and pilgrimages to it had greatly dwin-

dled. Norden remarked sarcastically that the saint had ‘of late’ denied visitors ‘pristine ayde’: and ‘as he is coye of his Cures, so now are men coye of cominge to his conjured well’. Even so, he noted, “soom a daye resorte’ to it.~°* But when a crippled youth by the name of John Trelille was

healed around 1640 after being admonished to wash in it three times in a

230. Brand, Brief description of Orkney, 58-9.

231. TCD, MS 883/1, p. 230. 232. John Norden, Speculi Britannicae Pars. A topographical and historical description of Cornwall (1728), 28.

THERAPEUTIC WATERS 405 series of dreams Bishop Joseph Hall of Exeter felt compelled to investigate the incident himself. After taking a strict and impartial examination of the case at his visitation, he found ‘neither art nor collusion’ and concluded that the boy’s recovery was ‘no lesse then miraculous’ and its ‘Author invisible’. By contrast, a rival Catholic account of the episode written in Latin by the Franciscan controversialist Francis Coventry attributed the cure to the well’s ancient celestial patron. As well as describing how the decaying chapel over

the spring was overgrown by a thorn tree, it added the detail that after bathing Trelille had slept in the saint’s nearby turf bed. Trelille’s subsequent enlistment in the Royalist army and death in the siege of Lyme Regis was another feature which Protestants of a particular stripe subsequently chose

to omit. Nevertheless, Thomas Fuller later asserted that the story was ‘enough to get belief in any, save, such surly souls, who are resolved on Infidelity of what their own Eyes have not beheld’. It was an antidote to unbelief and atheism. In this instance, the Church of England can be seen effectively condoning a popular tradition of healing. However, this came back to haunt it because the case led many to frequent the spring ‘superstitiously’, ‘so that the Rector of the neighbouring Parish was fore’d to reprove several of his Parishioners for it’. Ironically, the cleric himself was eased of colic by drinking water from a bottle which a woman had filled at the same well. A contributor to the enlarged 1695 edition of Camden’s Britannia insisted that these examples were too recent and well attested ‘to fall under the suspicion of bare traditions or Legendary fables’, though he observed that the last proved that ‘the ceremonies of offering, lying on the ground,

&c contributed nothing’ to the remedy.~” Despite its lack of attested mineral or sanative qualities, this was a holy well for which Protestants were compelled to carve out a space in their reformed universe. The solemn

customs people carried out around it might be vestiges of popery, but to dismiss the cures wrought by its waters would be to deny the mysterious power and wonderful omnipotence of the God of nature. In his Natural History of the county published in 1758, Borlase displayed characteristic contempt for the silly divinatory rituals he witnessed when he visited this and other springs, but leaving ‘folly to its own delusion’, he had to admit 233. Joseph Hall, The great mysterie of godliness (1652), bk. 1, pp. 169-70. Francis Coventry, Paralipomena philosophica de mundo peripatetico (Antwerp, 1652), 68—9. For a translation of

this passage, see Nicholas Orme, The Saints of Cornwall (Oxford, 2000), 68-9. Fuller, Worthies, Ist pagination, p. 196; Camden’s Britannia, ed. Gibson, 21-2. See also Bodl., Carte MS 269, fo. 44° ~.

466 THERAPEUTIC WATERS that “it is certainly very gracious in Providence to distribute a remedy for so many disorders in a quality so universally found as cold is in every unmixed well-water’.~°* The precise mechanisms by which such springs relieved pain and sickness may have been the subject of doctrinal conflict and philosophical disagreement, but few dared to dispute their divine origin. It is, therefore, a mistake to draw any hard and fast distinction between ‘sainted’ wells that survived the assaults of the early reformers and mineral springs ‘discovered’ in the wake of these momentous events. The same is true of the constituencies of people who travelled to them. These cannot be segregated neatly along either social or confessional lines. At the sulphur

spring at Knaresborough impoverished lepers mingled with the rich and fashionable, polluting it with their ‘besmeared clouts’ and “putrid rags’. The genteel credentials of Bath and Buxton were compromised by the poor and indigent who assembled in such numbers for the ‘ease of their Greef’ that

Parliament legislated to discipline them as vagrants in 1572 and 1s97.> Likewise, 1t was not solely recusants who resorted to St Winefride’s spring at

Holywell to seek relief from their ills. Regardless of what Protestant ministers “prated in the Pulpit’, noted an observer in 1713, heretics themselves journeyed to it in their multitudes. Some came from as far afield as the North of England and Scotland, including the spinster Catharine Young, who sold off the ass that had carried her from Rockcliffe in Cumberland

after she was cured here in June 1721 (see Fig. 6.6).-°° The number of conversions to the Church of Rome recorded by the Jesuits also contradicts any suggestion that it was a kind of Catholic ghetto, not to mention the late seventeenth-century travel journals of Celia Fiennes. As well as visiting Bath and Buxton she also bathed at Holywell and St Mungo’s Well in Yorkshire, alongside simple papists whose zeal and piety greatly impressed her.*”’ In 1656, Alice Thornton had sent her sickly infant daughter Betty to this cold spring, whose reputed benefits were still ridiculed by many doctors, in a last hope that it might cure her of consumption and rickets.*”® In reverse, the

234. William Borlase, The natural history of Cornwall (Oxford, 1758), 31-2. 235. Stanhope, Cures without care, 27; 14 Eliz. c. § §xxxvi and 39 Eliz. c. 4 §vii. Holywell suffered from the same problem, as described by John Taylor, A short relation of a long journey, made round or oval by encompassing the principalitie of Wales (1653), 12. 236. Cited by William Fleetwood, The life and miracles of St Wenefrede, together with her litanies, with

some historical observations made thereon (1713), 9; London, Archives of the Archdiocese of Westminster, MS A XXXIX, no. 103 (Letter to Mr Meighan, from Holywell, 23 June 1733). 237. Fiennes, The Journeys of Celia Fiennes, ed. Morris, 17-21, 81-3, 102-4. 238. Brome, Travels, 226; Autobiography of Mrs Alice Thornton, ed. Jackson, 94.

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$26 INVENTED TRADITIONS The ‘icon events’ that comprised the patriotic chronicle constructed by early modern preachers and propagandists were themselves commemorated at particular places. Tradition told that a chapel dedicated to the Virgin on Shetland had been built in 1588 by sailors from a wrecked galleon of the Spanish Armada as a thank-oftering after they were received hospitably by the islanders.'’* But the story may well replace an older medieval explanation for its erection. The Houses of Parliament and St Stephen’s chapel became visual reminders of the Gunpowder Plot to Londoners after 1605,

along with Upper Lupp-Yate House in Gloucestershire, where it was alleged that this “grand conspiracy’ was “first Hatcht’ by its occupant Robert Catesby and his accomplices. Charles If himself erected a memorial to the Great Fire of London inscribed with details of their dastardly machinations to kill the capital’s Protestants to instruct passing spectators (see Fig. 7.6).'”” Reminding them of a critical juncture in Protestant history, this pillar was an artificial lieu de meémoire. It performed through sculpture and writing what natural topographical features achieved without the aid of literacy or art.

The centrality of the Tudor and Stuart monarchy in this evolving discourse also left a significant signature on the landscape. Springs and pools reputed to have dried up or turned the colour of blood after the regicide entered into popular memory, together with an oak tree in Cornwall on which Charles I had set up his standard and which later bore white leaves, reputedly as a sign of divine disapproval of his judicial murder in 1649.'°° Considerably more famous was the miraculous oak at Boscobel in Shropshire under which Charles II hid after the battle of Worcester in 1651. The tree that had served ‘for the shelter of our Earthly Angel... from the heat and fury of Rebellion’ rapidly acquired the status of a royal shrine. The institution

of Royal Oak Day in 1664 to commemorate his momentous escape and topic, see Diarmaid MacCulloch, Tudor Church Militant: Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation (1999), 44-5, 120-3, 126-7, 140-1; Ethan H. Shagan, ‘Protector Somerset and the 1549 Rebellions: New Sources and New Perspectives’, EHR 114 (1999), 34-63; id., ‘“Popularity” and the 1549 Rebellions Revisited’, EHR 115 (2000), 121-33; Andy Wood, The 1549 Rebellions and the Making of Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2007), ch. 6. Wood notes a 1589 map marked with ‘the Oke of Reformacon so-callyd by Kett the Rebel’ (p. 232).

178. James Murray MacKinlay, Ancient Church Dedications: Scriptural Dedications (Edinburgh, IQIO), 123-4.

179. Bodl., MS Top. Glouc. c. 3, fo. 217°. The monument to the Great Fire is mentioned in Henri Misson, M. Misson’s memoirs and observations in his travels over England. With some account

of Scotland and Ireland, trans. John Ozell (1719), 191.

180. For springs, see Ch. 5 above, pp. 346-8; William Borlase, The natural history of Cornwall (Oxford, 1758), 219.

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