The Story of England, page 33
Clearly there was some kind of reciprocity between the college and Kibworth from the start. But was there some kind of medieval village school, with a teacher? It is certainly possible – teaching might have been held for example in an aisle of the church or in a private house. This might account for educated villagers like William Brown and Walter Gilbert being able to preach with the help of English texts, rather like William Smith, the self-taught Leicester smith, with his compilations of ‘English books’. Though Roger and Alice Dexter were most likely illiterate, Adam Brown the Coventry draper may well have been literate, as his grandson certainly was. The same might go for some village women: like the three Kibworth women, Margaret and Mary Harcourt and Maud Polle, from a small nunnery down the Welland near Stamford, who in their wills, which also found their way into the school box, donated lands in Kibworth for the purposes of prayer (Margaret died in 1407). In this context a fascinating and perhaps unique survival in the archives of Merton suggests that, exactly as tradition has it, there was already a teacher of grammar in the village as far back as the early fifteenth century.
Pychard the Butcher
In the summer of 1447, John Pychard, the Kibworth Harcourt butcher, was feeling ‘vexyd and trobuld gretely’ and furious with his neighbour Robert Polle in particular. Pychard was maybe in his forties, a butcher (and grazier?) like his father before him. He had a cottage and half a virgate on Main Street with his wife Agnes and his teenage son, John junior. He was clearly a quarrelsome figure. His tendencies earned him frequent entries in the court rolls – he had more than once drawn blood in brawls.
Off he went in August to one of the village scribes, and got things off his chest by composing a long letter addressed to the Warden of Merton. What follows is part of the text lightly modernized with a little added punctuation. It is perhaps, remarkably, the earliest English letter by an English peasant to survive:
Most worshipful and reverent lord I commend me unto your worthy lordship desiring to hear of your prosperity and bodily health, the which almighty God preserve and sustain unto his pleasans and your wealth and welfare. And if it be pleasing to your worthy lordship that I that am your own poor servant and man unto my power in what service that lieth in me abide upon your lord ye will with all my heart.
The issue bothering him sounds like a typical village conflict, a dispute which John says ‘cost me more than forty shillings’. His complaint was that the Kibworth bailiff had fiddled the court roll in his own favour – and once something was set down in writing in the medieval system, one imagines it was very difficult to gainsay it without a lot of time, expense and personal appearances at the manor court – even, as had already happened to John, a nine-mile ride to Leicester to petition a higher court. ‘And now foully and wrongfully am I put away from it by record of Robert Polle and all my neighbours.’
At the end of the letter comes the surprise that takes this letter out of the typical mundane world of the medieval manorial court:
And furthermore sir we have a young man with us, the which is a goodly scholar for a grammarian [grameryen] after the form of the country, and a likely man of person to do you service. And truly sir he is the son of one of your tenants that is to say the son of Agnes Palmer.
Will Palmer was twenty. His father John died in 1448, and was perhaps sick when Pychard wrote this letter to the fellows of Merton. Pychard’s letter continues, ‘not stopping on his points’:
And truly sir the man deserved to have cunning [knowledge] over all thing notwithstanding he might have masters in the king’s house and in diverse places but he wolde evermore have cunning. And truly sir we pray you all your tenants everyone that ye would cherish him for truly sir he shall be at you in haste and forsooth you will like his conditions have you assayed him a while both for governance and person. No more at this time but almighty god have you in his keeping. Written at Kibworth in the feast of St Hugh the Martyr.
He your own man and poor servant John Pychard.
Pychard’s letter takes us right into social relations in Main Street in the 1440s, into village politics and relations between families. What was his relation with Agnes Palmer? Why had he taken young Will under his wing? And how had Will already in his teens acquired the skills to be accounted a ‘grameryen’? Evidently Palmer was not one of the poor scholars of Kibworth at Merton, otherwise the fellows would already have known him, but he had obviously already taken the first steps up what medieval schoolmen called the ‘tower of learning’. Pychard’s interest in him (for all his cantankerous character) recalls later injunctions by Tudor educationalists that ‘no man goeth about a more godlie purpose, that he is mindfull of the good bringing up, both of hys owne, and other mens children.’
The letter is a clear indication that there was indeed a teacher of grammar in the village by this time. Most likely he was one of the chantry priests paid for by the villagers’ gifts of fields that remained in the school’s possession from the sixteenth century until modern times. Our village story is the same as so many across England in the Middle Ages. To administer the fields and strips Nicholas Polle used writing. Lollards like Gilbert and Brown read vernacular books. The estate manager made notes itemizing nails, boards, plaster and slate on strips of parchment or paper sent in a bundle to Merton. And the butcher (on behalf of ‘all your tenants’) recommends a neighbour’s young son for higher education. For the ordinary folk of England education was a passport to wealth, to changing status and freedom, and to new mental horizons.
The horizon of the fifteenth century
Complex changes in history are thus revealed in the fortunes of ordinary families. This slow crystallization was already under way before the Black Death but accelerated after the plague, with changes in employment, in the culture of the people, in personal self-awareness and in religious autonomy (as is evidenced in the Lollard heresy). Education and literacy too played a part in a process which emerges from the lower reaches of society, instigated by the villagers themselves. By the late fifteenth century the manorial labour discipline and all its implications were gone, and Kibworth had taken its first steps on the way to becoming a modern village.
The changes in the mentalities of the English people in this period were psychological and material. Both played a part in the transformation of society which would lead England to become the first capitalist society in history. Historians now agree on the broad picture, but till recently they have been in the dark over how agrarian society changed at grass-roots level between the late fourteenth century and the eighteenth, laying the basis for the swift and radical social and political changes that transformed England from around 1700. Only in recent years as the court rolls of villages across the English Midlands have been examined has it become clear how these things happened. It is clear now that the change was not only in laws and structures of government imposed from above: by 1500 new mentalities are apparent that would shape England’s future path. And these were created not only by the rulers, the jurists and the authors of medieval management texts, but by the peasants themselves.
14. The Reformation in Kibworth
In the summer of 1535, with candles burning before the image of Our Lady of Kibworth, the light from the stained glass glinting on the painted rood above him, the vicar William Peyrson had to make an extraordinary series of church announcements to his parishioners. During the previous months Henry VIII’s Parliament had enacted a short piece of legislation which would have a significance to the English people out of all proportion to its length: an Act of Supremacy asserting that ‘the king our sovereign Lord his heirs and successors kings of this realm, shall be taken accepted and reputed the only supreme head on earth of the Church of England.’ With that the Pope, whose predecessor Gregory the Great had sent the famous mission to convert the English almost a thousand years before, was no longer the head of the Christian Church in England.
This was the crowning moment in a religious revolution which had gathered momentum over the previous five years. King Henry’s Reformation had begun earlier in the 1530s over his divorce from Katherine of Aragon and his love for Anne Boleyn, but had now become an issue for all in his realm. How it was to be interpreted on the ground at parish level in Kibworth was now Peyrson’s responsibility. That summer of 1535 the government abolished ‘the abuses of the Bishop of Rome. His authority and jurisdiction.’ The English clergy were ordered to teach the doctrine of Royal Supremacy to their parishioners and:
to cause all manner prayers orisons, rubrics, canons in mass books, and all other books used in the churches, wherin the said Bishop of Rome is named or his presumptuous and proud pomp and authority preferred, utterly to be abolished eradicated and erased out, and his name and memory to be nevermore (except to his contumely and reproach) remembered.
In the chancel behind the medieval oak screen, Peyrson now had to watch his curate apply a metal scraper to the ink in his old vellum mass book, scraping out the Pope’s name and titles. From now on there would be no mention of the holy father in Sunday prayers.
Up to that point Kibworth had been still a traditional society: a community where the rich local brand of late-medieval Christianity was still robustly thriving after many centuries. Inside the church there were the old familiar images, the glowing stained glass and brightly painted rood screen, the incense and the lamps; and there too were practised the old familiar rituals, the saint’s day processions and relic cults, the church alms and masses for the dead, the suspended moment in time when the Host was raised and the Body became present in the Mass. From Kibworth there were visits to Walsingham and to the ‘mother church’ in Lincoln (which no Kibworthian omitted to mention in his or her will); and to the network of local shrines: the holy well at Hallaton and the shrine of St Wistan with its little painted statue of the royal prince and martyr, whose golden hair, it was said, waved each year at the end of May in the long grass of the water meadows below Kibworth.
It is likely that so far, as elsewhere in England, the parishioners of Kibworth took these new developments in their stride. They had their lives to get on with; in an agricultural community life was bounded by work. Matters of supremacy were something for kings and ministers to worry about, not the man who cuts the hay or the woman who brews the ale. But the same year a heavy new tithe was imposed on all parishes and as the dissolution of the great monasteries began, through the summer of 1536, reformation of religious practices at local level gathered momentum. One new law abolished all holy days which fell in the law term and the harvest period, with a handful of exceptions; it was claimed they were damaging the country’s economy, stopping vital work and impoverishing workers. Services could be held, but people must work as usual. As might be imagined, there was widespread anger over this attack on traditional religion, with some daring to call King Henry and his henchmen a ‘false secte of heretiques’. In the north the response was a mass armed rising which came close to toppling Henry’s government, and news of these sensational events, along with disturbing omens and prophecies of further threats to the Commonwealth, no doubt reached Kibworth.
In September 1538 Peyrson again addressed his parishioners from the pulpit to inform them of a new and still more hardline series of injunctions. There was to be a new Great Bible (or ‘King’s Bible’) kept on a chain in each parish church; to be read out aloud in church services; the first authorized Bible in English. The vicar was now required to make a register of births, marriages and deaths for the parish in a vellum manuscript to be carefully kept in church, effectively gathering information on the conformity of the people. He was also to conduct regular examination of the laity in the principles of faith, to see that they were not slipping back into ‘childish superstition’. But most disconcerting to Peyrson and his flock was the ferocity of the government’s new language against traditional English piety. For in their pronouncements now was a sneering contempt for the old customs and practices of the faith which had sustained ordinary English men and women for so long: pilgrimage, devotion to images and worship of saints, the old rituals of confession and absolution, the masses for the dead. To a traditionalist like Peyrson this must have been a devastating blow. He was now instructed to exhort the people of the village ‘not to repose their trust in any other works devised by mens phantasies, as in pilgrimages, offering of money or candles or tapers to images and relics … or in kissing or licking them, or such like superstitions’. To avoid the ‘detestable sin of idolatry’ he should remove from his church all such ‘feigned images’, even the beloved Virgin of Kibworth herself. Though Peyrson could perhaps not see it yet, with that the process was set in train which would lead inexorably to the rubbing away of the traditional spirit world of the English.
Will Peyrson was a conventional clerk, son of a staunchly Catholic mother, a man who lived and died in the Old Faith. Devoted to the cult of Mary, as he put it, ‘to Our Blessed Ladye, Most Purest Virgyne, and to all the companye of heaven’, he was punctilious in observing the solemn rituals of the past, and among his possessions was a little stone crucifix plated with silver which he used for prayer in his own chamber. Not surprisingly he could not conceal his anger about these new developments. That September in Kibworth church an argument over the government’s reforms took place in front of the parishioners and led to Peyrson making an outburst against King Henry. This was reported to the authorities by some of them, led by a man identified in the offical report only as ‘R. O’. The core of R. O.’s information was that ‘Peyrson the priest in Kybworth church most devilishly spake these words: “If the King had died seven years agone it had been no hurt.” ’ Wishing the king dead of course could be construed in many ways and was not wise given Henry’s malevolent obsession with crushing any kind of dissent. Peyrson was hauled off to Leicester and thrown in prison by Henry’s local enforcers, one of whom, Sir John Beaumont, wrote to Henry’s chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, concerning the case: ‘The wretch is in prison. His accusers are sworn before the sheriff.’
The tale would be repeated up and down the land over the next few years. Peyrson was an old-fashioned country vicar: his traditional regime of memorial masses, miracle plays, pilgrimages and church alms was not to the liking of the new order in the shires whose inquisitions will soon enough dismiss men like him as ‘unsound in religion … massemongers who useth incantation … and who dice and play games’. One Midland vicar was even said to be ‘a drunkard and dumbe, and it is thought a sorcerer’. Peyrson’s chief accuser, Sir John Beaumont, on the other hand, was typical of the unscrupulous ‘new rich’ partisans of Cromwell: he acquired the lands and buildings of Grace Dieu Priory for himself after claiming two nuns had been guilty of fornication and had given birth to children. He was eventually dismissed for corruption and misappropriation, though too late to save Peyrson’s career.
But who were the Kibworth informants who had been so angry with their vicar that they had informed on him, and did they genuinely hold more Protestant views? ‘R. O.’ perhaps was Robert Oswin, who lived at the end of Hog Lane by the village ditch (his plot is occupied by a modern house today, but the arable just north of it is still called Oswins Leys). Unless there was a personal animus against Peyrson, the tale suggests that Henry’s reformation of the old religion already had some supporters among old families of the village, and perhaps even (though this is harder to quantify) that some of the dissenting ideas spread by the Lollards might have been still current in the village. As in the early fifteenth century there may well have been splits in the village, and even in families, over religion. But these were increasingly uneasy times and when talk went astray there was no telling where ‘Scandalous, Seditious and Treasonable Speech’ might end.
The reign of Edward VI: ‘commocion tyme’
The writing was on the wall. Nevertheless Henry’s Six Articles of 1539 reaffirmed the centrality of the traditional mass and even threatened its critics with burning. So the English religious establishment for now continued as a compromise with a part-Protestant, part-Catholic prayer book. As far as we can tell from wills of the time, most of the people in Kibworth as in England generally were still satisfied with the old religion and were devoted and generous to their local church and clergy. The turning point came with Henry’s death in 1547. The new king, Edward, a pious and cold-hearted swot, was ardently Protestant, and with the evangelical party triumphant in Court, rumours spread across the country like wildfire through ‘markets fairs and ale-houses’ of ‘innovations and changes in religion’. Within months the commissioners moved into the regions with a draconian set of enquiries. A root-and-branch reform was to take place of the people’s ‘blindness and ignorance’, which was founded on ‘devising and phantasising vain opinions of purgatory and masses’.
Over the next five years Edward and his advisers imposed sweeping changes on the fabric, furnishings, customs and liturgy of the parish church. Images, stone altars and rood lofts were taken down and destroyed. Whitewash and biblical texts replaced the gorgeous medieval wall paintings. And with this physical desecration came the destruction of the valued local institutions – chantries, free chapels and guilds – which had provided teaching, dispensed charity and performed anniversary masses. In Kibworth the little free chapels of St Leonard in Smeeton, St Lawrence in Beauchamp and St Cuthbert in Harcourt were closed down and demolished, their rubble sold off for building stone.
So Edward’s reformation became a wholesale wrecking of the old church at parish level, and an attack on the traditional beliefs and rituals long followed by the English people, even striking at that most natural and intimate of human needs: the remembrance of the dead. And though Catholicism was briefly and bitterly restored under Mary in 1553, the Protestant religion was finally settled under Elizabeth after 1558 when the last phase of iconoclasm began – a third change of regime and religious policy in twelve years. No specific information survives on this from Kibworth, but it is very likely that it was in Edward’s day that the interior of St Wilfrid’s parish church, with its fourteenth-century rood lofts, screens, saints’ panels, wall paintings and altars, was effaced, leaving what is seen today. No doubt there were those who were glad to see these ‘marks of idolatry’ destroyed, but to others it was a time when ‘all godly ceremonies were taken out of the church … all goodness and godliness despised and in manner banished … when devout religion and honest behaviour of men was accounted and taken for superstition and hypocrisy.’ The argument between those two points of view would take centuries to resolve – and is not over yet.
Pychard the Butcher
In the summer of 1447, John Pychard, the Kibworth Harcourt butcher, was feeling ‘vexyd and trobuld gretely’ and furious with his neighbour Robert Polle in particular. Pychard was maybe in his forties, a butcher (and grazier?) like his father before him. He had a cottage and half a virgate on Main Street with his wife Agnes and his teenage son, John junior. He was clearly a quarrelsome figure. His tendencies earned him frequent entries in the court rolls – he had more than once drawn blood in brawls.
Off he went in August to one of the village scribes, and got things off his chest by composing a long letter addressed to the Warden of Merton. What follows is part of the text lightly modernized with a little added punctuation. It is perhaps, remarkably, the earliest English letter by an English peasant to survive:
Most worshipful and reverent lord I commend me unto your worthy lordship desiring to hear of your prosperity and bodily health, the which almighty God preserve and sustain unto his pleasans and your wealth and welfare. And if it be pleasing to your worthy lordship that I that am your own poor servant and man unto my power in what service that lieth in me abide upon your lord ye will with all my heart.
The issue bothering him sounds like a typical village conflict, a dispute which John says ‘cost me more than forty shillings’. His complaint was that the Kibworth bailiff had fiddled the court roll in his own favour – and once something was set down in writing in the medieval system, one imagines it was very difficult to gainsay it without a lot of time, expense and personal appearances at the manor court – even, as had already happened to John, a nine-mile ride to Leicester to petition a higher court. ‘And now foully and wrongfully am I put away from it by record of Robert Polle and all my neighbours.’
At the end of the letter comes the surprise that takes this letter out of the typical mundane world of the medieval manorial court:
And furthermore sir we have a young man with us, the which is a goodly scholar for a grammarian [grameryen] after the form of the country, and a likely man of person to do you service. And truly sir he is the son of one of your tenants that is to say the son of Agnes Palmer.
Will Palmer was twenty. His father John died in 1448, and was perhaps sick when Pychard wrote this letter to the fellows of Merton. Pychard’s letter continues, ‘not stopping on his points’:
And truly sir the man deserved to have cunning [knowledge] over all thing notwithstanding he might have masters in the king’s house and in diverse places but he wolde evermore have cunning. And truly sir we pray you all your tenants everyone that ye would cherish him for truly sir he shall be at you in haste and forsooth you will like his conditions have you assayed him a while both for governance and person. No more at this time but almighty god have you in his keeping. Written at Kibworth in the feast of St Hugh the Martyr.
He your own man and poor servant John Pychard.
Pychard’s letter takes us right into social relations in Main Street in the 1440s, into village politics and relations between families. What was his relation with Agnes Palmer? Why had he taken young Will under his wing? And how had Will already in his teens acquired the skills to be accounted a ‘grameryen’? Evidently Palmer was not one of the poor scholars of Kibworth at Merton, otherwise the fellows would already have known him, but he had obviously already taken the first steps up what medieval schoolmen called the ‘tower of learning’. Pychard’s interest in him (for all his cantankerous character) recalls later injunctions by Tudor educationalists that ‘no man goeth about a more godlie purpose, that he is mindfull of the good bringing up, both of hys owne, and other mens children.’
The letter is a clear indication that there was indeed a teacher of grammar in the village by this time. Most likely he was one of the chantry priests paid for by the villagers’ gifts of fields that remained in the school’s possession from the sixteenth century until modern times. Our village story is the same as so many across England in the Middle Ages. To administer the fields and strips Nicholas Polle used writing. Lollards like Gilbert and Brown read vernacular books. The estate manager made notes itemizing nails, boards, plaster and slate on strips of parchment or paper sent in a bundle to Merton. And the butcher (on behalf of ‘all your tenants’) recommends a neighbour’s young son for higher education. For the ordinary folk of England education was a passport to wealth, to changing status and freedom, and to new mental horizons.
The horizon of the fifteenth century
Complex changes in history are thus revealed in the fortunes of ordinary families. This slow crystallization was already under way before the Black Death but accelerated after the plague, with changes in employment, in the culture of the people, in personal self-awareness and in religious autonomy (as is evidenced in the Lollard heresy). Education and literacy too played a part in a process which emerges from the lower reaches of society, instigated by the villagers themselves. By the late fifteenth century the manorial labour discipline and all its implications were gone, and Kibworth had taken its first steps on the way to becoming a modern village.
The changes in the mentalities of the English people in this period were psychological and material. Both played a part in the transformation of society which would lead England to become the first capitalist society in history. Historians now agree on the broad picture, but till recently they have been in the dark over how agrarian society changed at grass-roots level between the late fourteenth century and the eighteenth, laying the basis for the swift and radical social and political changes that transformed England from around 1700. Only in recent years as the court rolls of villages across the English Midlands have been examined has it become clear how these things happened. It is clear now that the change was not only in laws and structures of government imposed from above: by 1500 new mentalities are apparent that would shape England’s future path. And these were created not only by the rulers, the jurists and the authors of medieval management texts, but by the peasants themselves.
14. The Reformation in Kibworth
In the summer of 1535, with candles burning before the image of Our Lady of Kibworth, the light from the stained glass glinting on the painted rood above him, the vicar William Peyrson had to make an extraordinary series of church announcements to his parishioners. During the previous months Henry VIII’s Parliament had enacted a short piece of legislation which would have a significance to the English people out of all proportion to its length: an Act of Supremacy asserting that ‘the king our sovereign Lord his heirs and successors kings of this realm, shall be taken accepted and reputed the only supreme head on earth of the Church of England.’ With that the Pope, whose predecessor Gregory the Great had sent the famous mission to convert the English almost a thousand years before, was no longer the head of the Christian Church in England.
This was the crowning moment in a religious revolution which had gathered momentum over the previous five years. King Henry’s Reformation had begun earlier in the 1530s over his divorce from Katherine of Aragon and his love for Anne Boleyn, but had now become an issue for all in his realm. How it was to be interpreted on the ground at parish level in Kibworth was now Peyrson’s responsibility. That summer of 1535 the government abolished ‘the abuses of the Bishop of Rome. His authority and jurisdiction.’ The English clergy were ordered to teach the doctrine of Royal Supremacy to their parishioners and:
to cause all manner prayers orisons, rubrics, canons in mass books, and all other books used in the churches, wherin the said Bishop of Rome is named or his presumptuous and proud pomp and authority preferred, utterly to be abolished eradicated and erased out, and his name and memory to be nevermore (except to his contumely and reproach) remembered.
In the chancel behind the medieval oak screen, Peyrson now had to watch his curate apply a metal scraper to the ink in his old vellum mass book, scraping out the Pope’s name and titles. From now on there would be no mention of the holy father in Sunday prayers.
Up to that point Kibworth had been still a traditional society: a community where the rich local brand of late-medieval Christianity was still robustly thriving after many centuries. Inside the church there were the old familiar images, the glowing stained glass and brightly painted rood screen, the incense and the lamps; and there too were practised the old familiar rituals, the saint’s day processions and relic cults, the church alms and masses for the dead, the suspended moment in time when the Host was raised and the Body became present in the Mass. From Kibworth there were visits to Walsingham and to the ‘mother church’ in Lincoln (which no Kibworthian omitted to mention in his or her will); and to the network of local shrines: the holy well at Hallaton and the shrine of St Wistan with its little painted statue of the royal prince and martyr, whose golden hair, it was said, waved each year at the end of May in the long grass of the water meadows below Kibworth.
It is likely that so far, as elsewhere in England, the parishioners of Kibworth took these new developments in their stride. They had their lives to get on with; in an agricultural community life was bounded by work. Matters of supremacy were something for kings and ministers to worry about, not the man who cuts the hay or the woman who brews the ale. But the same year a heavy new tithe was imposed on all parishes and as the dissolution of the great monasteries began, through the summer of 1536, reformation of religious practices at local level gathered momentum. One new law abolished all holy days which fell in the law term and the harvest period, with a handful of exceptions; it was claimed they were damaging the country’s economy, stopping vital work and impoverishing workers. Services could be held, but people must work as usual. As might be imagined, there was widespread anger over this attack on traditional religion, with some daring to call King Henry and his henchmen a ‘false secte of heretiques’. In the north the response was a mass armed rising which came close to toppling Henry’s government, and news of these sensational events, along with disturbing omens and prophecies of further threats to the Commonwealth, no doubt reached Kibworth.
In September 1538 Peyrson again addressed his parishioners from the pulpit to inform them of a new and still more hardline series of injunctions. There was to be a new Great Bible (or ‘King’s Bible’) kept on a chain in each parish church; to be read out aloud in church services; the first authorized Bible in English. The vicar was now required to make a register of births, marriages and deaths for the parish in a vellum manuscript to be carefully kept in church, effectively gathering information on the conformity of the people. He was also to conduct regular examination of the laity in the principles of faith, to see that they were not slipping back into ‘childish superstition’. But most disconcerting to Peyrson and his flock was the ferocity of the government’s new language against traditional English piety. For in their pronouncements now was a sneering contempt for the old customs and practices of the faith which had sustained ordinary English men and women for so long: pilgrimage, devotion to images and worship of saints, the old rituals of confession and absolution, the masses for the dead. To a traditionalist like Peyrson this must have been a devastating blow. He was now instructed to exhort the people of the village ‘not to repose their trust in any other works devised by mens phantasies, as in pilgrimages, offering of money or candles or tapers to images and relics … or in kissing or licking them, or such like superstitions’. To avoid the ‘detestable sin of idolatry’ he should remove from his church all such ‘feigned images’, even the beloved Virgin of Kibworth herself. Though Peyrson could perhaps not see it yet, with that the process was set in train which would lead inexorably to the rubbing away of the traditional spirit world of the English.
Will Peyrson was a conventional clerk, son of a staunchly Catholic mother, a man who lived and died in the Old Faith. Devoted to the cult of Mary, as he put it, ‘to Our Blessed Ladye, Most Purest Virgyne, and to all the companye of heaven’, he was punctilious in observing the solemn rituals of the past, and among his possessions was a little stone crucifix plated with silver which he used for prayer in his own chamber. Not surprisingly he could not conceal his anger about these new developments. That September in Kibworth church an argument over the government’s reforms took place in front of the parishioners and led to Peyrson making an outburst against King Henry. This was reported to the authorities by some of them, led by a man identified in the offical report only as ‘R. O’. The core of R. O.’s information was that ‘Peyrson the priest in Kybworth church most devilishly spake these words: “If the King had died seven years agone it had been no hurt.” ’ Wishing the king dead of course could be construed in many ways and was not wise given Henry’s malevolent obsession with crushing any kind of dissent. Peyrson was hauled off to Leicester and thrown in prison by Henry’s local enforcers, one of whom, Sir John Beaumont, wrote to Henry’s chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, concerning the case: ‘The wretch is in prison. His accusers are sworn before the sheriff.’
The tale would be repeated up and down the land over the next few years. Peyrson was an old-fashioned country vicar: his traditional regime of memorial masses, miracle plays, pilgrimages and church alms was not to the liking of the new order in the shires whose inquisitions will soon enough dismiss men like him as ‘unsound in religion … massemongers who useth incantation … and who dice and play games’. One Midland vicar was even said to be ‘a drunkard and dumbe, and it is thought a sorcerer’. Peyrson’s chief accuser, Sir John Beaumont, on the other hand, was typical of the unscrupulous ‘new rich’ partisans of Cromwell: he acquired the lands and buildings of Grace Dieu Priory for himself after claiming two nuns had been guilty of fornication and had given birth to children. He was eventually dismissed for corruption and misappropriation, though too late to save Peyrson’s career.
But who were the Kibworth informants who had been so angry with their vicar that they had informed on him, and did they genuinely hold more Protestant views? ‘R. O.’ perhaps was Robert Oswin, who lived at the end of Hog Lane by the village ditch (his plot is occupied by a modern house today, but the arable just north of it is still called Oswins Leys). Unless there was a personal animus against Peyrson, the tale suggests that Henry’s reformation of the old religion already had some supporters among old families of the village, and perhaps even (though this is harder to quantify) that some of the dissenting ideas spread by the Lollards might have been still current in the village. As in the early fifteenth century there may well have been splits in the village, and even in families, over religion. But these were increasingly uneasy times and when talk went astray there was no telling where ‘Scandalous, Seditious and Treasonable Speech’ might end.
The reign of Edward VI: ‘commocion tyme’
The writing was on the wall. Nevertheless Henry’s Six Articles of 1539 reaffirmed the centrality of the traditional mass and even threatened its critics with burning. So the English religious establishment for now continued as a compromise with a part-Protestant, part-Catholic prayer book. As far as we can tell from wills of the time, most of the people in Kibworth as in England generally were still satisfied with the old religion and were devoted and generous to their local church and clergy. The turning point came with Henry’s death in 1547. The new king, Edward, a pious and cold-hearted swot, was ardently Protestant, and with the evangelical party triumphant in Court, rumours spread across the country like wildfire through ‘markets fairs and ale-houses’ of ‘innovations and changes in religion’. Within months the commissioners moved into the regions with a draconian set of enquiries. A root-and-branch reform was to take place of the people’s ‘blindness and ignorance’, which was founded on ‘devising and phantasising vain opinions of purgatory and masses’.
Over the next five years Edward and his advisers imposed sweeping changes on the fabric, furnishings, customs and liturgy of the parish church. Images, stone altars and rood lofts were taken down and destroyed. Whitewash and biblical texts replaced the gorgeous medieval wall paintings. And with this physical desecration came the destruction of the valued local institutions – chantries, free chapels and guilds – which had provided teaching, dispensed charity and performed anniversary masses. In Kibworth the little free chapels of St Leonard in Smeeton, St Lawrence in Beauchamp and St Cuthbert in Harcourt were closed down and demolished, their rubble sold off for building stone.
So Edward’s reformation became a wholesale wrecking of the old church at parish level, and an attack on the traditional beliefs and rituals long followed by the English people, even striking at that most natural and intimate of human needs: the remembrance of the dead. And though Catholicism was briefly and bitterly restored under Mary in 1553, the Protestant religion was finally settled under Elizabeth after 1558 when the last phase of iconoclasm began – a third change of regime and religious policy in twelve years. No specific information survives on this from Kibworth, but it is very likely that it was in Edward’s day that the interior of St Wilfrid’s parish church, with its fourteenth-century rood lofts, screens, saints’ panels, wall paintings and altars, was effaced, leaving what is seen today. No doubt there were those who were glad to see these ‘marks of idolatry’ destroyed, but to others it was a time when ‘all godly ceremonies were taken out of the church … all goodness and godliness despised and in manner banished … when devout religion and honest behaviour of men was accounted and taken for superstition and hypocrisy.’ The argument between those two points of view would take centuries to resolve – and is not over yet.
