The Altars in York Minster in the Early Sixteenth Century

Abstract

Good God! what a pomp of silk vestments was there, of golden candlesticks.’ The dismissive satire of Erasmus’s pilgrim on looking down on Canterbury Cathedral not only brought traditional piety into disrepute among significant sectors of the educated, both clerical and lay, in early sixteenth-century England, but has also helped to colour the views of historians of the later medieval Church until recently. The work on parochial, diocesan, and cathedral archives since the 1960s, undertaken and inspired by the publication of A. G. Dickens’ The English Reformation, has refined that view, which saw traditional piety as something of a clerical confidence trick designed to impoverish a credulous laity, and recovered the reputation of the early sixteenth-century Church. The most recent, and most eloquent, account of the strength of traditional piety among the people is that by Eamon Duffy. His work has concentrated on the parochial context, where he has shown how intercessory prayer, through gilds, obits, and chantries, remained at the centre of a liturgical tradition which commanded great loyalty from the laity up to and, in some cases, beyond the dissolution of those institutional expressions of that devotion in 1547. The place of such devotion within a cathedral context has largely been ignored, despite the recently published histories, and this paper sets out to fill that gap a little by looking at the minor altars of York Minster and the clergy which served them.