Early Sixteenth-century England Research Articles

‘A competent mess’: food, consumption and retirement at religious houses in England and Wales, c.1502–38

ABSTRACT This article contributes to our knowledge of food habits in late medieval and early sixteenth-century England and Wales through an analysis of under-examined records of retirement agreements known as corrodies; these were struck between religious houses and individuals or married couples. Corrody texts, copied in records from the Court of Augmentations, are a rich source for patterns of consumption, particularly of beverages and foodstuffs, in the first four decades of the sixteenth century. People from a range of social backgrounds acted as careful consumers in their attempts to guarantee their preferred foods in their retirement years. These late retirement arrangements indicate an evolution of food entitlements in corrodies towards greater specificity in terms of what the corrodians were to receive. They also reflect larger food trends of this period, such as a move away from pottage and a desire to secure access to meat and other animal-derived foods.

Mortuary dues in early sixteenth-century England

AbstractMortuaries were death duties owed to parish priests. The early sixteenth century was a pivotal moment in their long history. In 1529, an act of parliament significantly altered these dues. This article explores mortuary practices in the preceding decades. It examines what mortuaries were, who gave them, and what purpose they served. The importance of local custom is emphasised. The article reconsiders the modern view that mortuary dues were generally disliked. A more complex attitude explains both why mortuaries were reformed and why they would survive for centuries thereafter. Mortuary dues exemplify the symbiotic relationship between law and custom.

Signed, stamped, and sealed: delivering royal justice in early sixteenth-century England

Abstract That Henry VIII’s will was stamped with a facsimile of his signature rather than authentically signed has long been taken as proof that it was ‘forged’ sometime around his death in 1547. This article explores the longer history of the stamp as an authorizing mechanism, locating its creation at the beginning of the reign for the purposes of justice-giving. An investigation of these earlier documents reveals that an initial ‘wet’ stamp served to expedite suits presented at the royal household and project the king’s authority outwards. The article therefore offers a revisionary account of the priorities and workings of Tudor governance.

God’s City: ‘Civic Humanism’ and the Self-Construction of the Ecclesia in Late Fifteenth- and Early Sixteenth-Century England

This article considers one element within the long tradition of the church’s self-identification as a city. It focuses on England, c. 1450 to c. 1510, and considers how the civic rhetoric developed by Italian humanists, pre-eminently Leonardo Bruni, was refracted through an ecclesiastical lens and so appropriated for English clerical use. It describes how two useful elements were quarried from recent writings imported from Italy: the first was the emphasis on the city and its buildings as a locus of virtue; the second was that, because of its virtue, that city was under attack. The discussion begins with the time of social unrest in the mid-fifteenth century,in the wake of which Thomas Chaundler wrote his praise of Thomas Bekynton, bishop of Bath and Wells, and his building works in his episcopal city. It ends in the first years of the sixteenth century with the relations between Christopher Urswick, dean of Windsor, and Thomas Goldstone, prior of Christ Church, Canterbury. Their re-use of older texts, specifically the Speculum regis Edwardi III, which they assumed to be by Archbishop Simon Islip, and more recent humanist ones, by Celso Maffei and Goldstone’s predecessor as prior, William Sellyng, identified other enemies who attacked the church: invoking the name of Thomas Becket, they saw those oppressing them to be not rebels against authority but those in authority. This allows us to reflect on how a few English readers of humanist civic rhetoric found in it potentially radical force.

‘Ovid was there, and with him were Catullus, Propertius and Tibullus’: Catullus and the shaping of early Tudor love poetry

ABSTRACTThis essay suggests that Petrarch's canzoniere, rather than being an originator of a mode of literary erotics, is a reception and mediator of classical Latin love elegy. Taking its starting point from Catullus’ searing erotic poems written to and about Lesbia, it investigates the evidence for reading Catullus as a source for Renaissance literary love, and considers the ways in which Catullan erotics shape the poetics of love in early sixteenth-century England. The first section clarifies Latin elegy's defining tropes and maps these onto Renaissance erotics. The essay then traces the transmission of Catullus to the Renaissance and the ways in which he was received by readers, commentators and writers. The generally-accepted position on Catullus in England is that Philip Sidney was the first to translate one of his poems into English, but this paper offers pressing evidence that Catullus had a hitherto underexplored position at the Henrician court. A close reading of Wyatt's ‘Whoso List to Hunt’ considers how framing this text with Catullus rather than just Petrarch reveals the complex intertextual dialogues in the poem. As well as elucidating an alternative model for Wyatt's erotics, the readings here provide a case-study in Wyatt's practice of imitatio.

Merchants and Explorers: Roger Barlow, Sebastian Cabot and Networks of Atlantic Exchange 1500–1560 by Heather Dalton

Reviewed by: Merchants and Explorers: Roger Barlow, Sebastian Cabot and Networks of Atlantic Exchange 1500–1560 by Heather Dalton Michael Bennett Dalton, Heather, Merchants and Explorers: Roger Barlow, Sebastian Cabot and Networks of Atlantic Exchange 1500–1560, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2016; cloth; pp. 256; R.R.P. £50.00; ISBN 9780199672059. This remarkable study begins with Roger Barlow, hitherto only known, if at all, as the author of A Brief Summe of Geographie, unpublished until the 1930s. In following Barlow's trail, Heather Dalton has opened surprising vistas on early sixteenth-century England, the Atlantic rim, and South America. Impressive archival research in Seville found Barlow among a group of English adventurers involved in business ventures in Spain. In 1526, he participated in a Genoese-financed expedition led by Sebastian Cabot. Its aim was to establish a good route to Moluccas but, heading south, Cabot decided to explore the Rio de la Plata. In his later work, Barlow included observations of the geography, natural history, and the Tupi-Garaní people of the region. He was the first Englishman to describe the humming bird and a cannibal feast. Dalton follows rather than concentrates on Barlow, broadening her focus to discuss Cabot, Barlow's English associates in the Atlantic enterprise, and Barlow's brothers who pursued clerical careers in England. Regarding Cabot, she offers new insights on his puzzling career. In discussing the activities of the Thornes and their Bristol colleagues, she demonstrates the accessibility of Spain to English enterprise through to the 1550s. Her study of Barlow's brothers, John and William, whose careers prospered after the break with Rome, provides a fresh perspective on the English Reformation. [End Page 161] The stories intertwine smoothly and the reframing exercise is always revealing. One revelation is how effectively networks of trust—often familial but surprisingly extended—worked in building capital and knowledge in this uncertain world. A bonus is that Dalton's approach brings into the frame the lives of some remarkable women, generally so fleetingly observed in the records. Catalina de Medrano, the widow of a conquistador and wife of Cabot, did more than mind the shop in Seville during her husbands' absences. She pursued her own interests, consolidated partnerships, and served as a conduit in the exchange of knowledge. On returning to England in 1530, Barlow settled first in Bristol but put down roots in southwest Wales. If he had helped finance the education of his brothers, they now assisted him in making connections and advancing socially. John was Anne Boleyn's chaplain, promoter of Henry VIII's divorce, and dean of Westbury. William became bishop of St David's in 1536. By this time, Roger had leased a substantial property at Slebech, upriver from Milford Haven. Far from the standard cashed-up merchant retiring from the counting-house to a country seat and landed gentility, he had the mindset of a colonist. His estate at Slebech became the centre of an enterprise that drew timber from the hinterland for shipbuilding, participated in illicit as well as licit trade, and profited from anti-piracy operations. Along with his brother, Roger served Thomas Cromwell in establishing the anglicizing and reformist agenda of the government in southwest Wales. Still looking for wider opportunities, Barlow assisted Robert Thorne in a proposal for exploring a northern route to Cathay in the early 1530s. Nicholas Thorne brought a ship from Seville and acted as Cromwell's agent in raising a fleet in 1539. Barlow may have supplied naval stores from Slebech. For some time, he had also been working on a translation of Martín Fernández de Enciso's Suma de Geographia (1519). A novel blend of mathematical and descriptive geography, the Suma was far in advance of work available in English. Barlow included his observations of the Rio de la Plata, expanded the coverage of northern Europe, and customized Enciso's work to reflect English needs. Around 1541, he presented it to Henry VIII, along with a map and a reworked version of the tract on the northern passage. It appears to have been simply filed away. Barlow probably kept in touch with Cabot, who returned to England in 1548. By this...

Pilgrimage and Travel Writing in Early Sixteenth-Century England: The Pilgrimage Accounts of Thomas Larke and Robert Langton

By 1500 more than 500 written accounts of the Jerusalem pilgrimage alone had been produced in the West, and yet such works continued to be written and, increasingly, printed. How did these works retain their popularity, who was writing them, and why? To address these questions, this article compares two early sixteenth-century English printed pilgrim guidebooks. It examines their distinctive features, charts their authors' careers and social and professional networks, and identifies, for the first time, the author of The Pylgrymage of Sir Richarde Guylforde, printed by Richard Pynson in 1511. It reveals the different ways in which two educated and eminently well-connected clerics adapted a conventional literary genre to address shared concerns and interests. Both works demonstrate how humanist learning, religious reformism, heresy, and new ideas about the nature and purpose of travel were reshaping religiously orthodox conceptions of pilgrimage before the Reformation.

Protestant evangelicals and addiction in early modern English

AbstractWhen the English word ‘addict' emerged in the sixteenth century, it did not mean the same as addiction today. This article uses the language of early modern addiction to not only determine the meaning and use of ‘addict', but also as a means of tracing a particular readership network in reformation England. It focuses initially on the first printed appearances in the work of two evangelical writers; the three meanings they applied to the word; and the etymology behind those meanings. Next, it traces appearances of the word in the writing of early protestant reformers in England, who made almost exclusive use of the term in printed sources before 1550. This is particularly notable because there was nothing conceptually unique about the word: non‐reformers expressed the same ideas, in similar contexts, but using different words. In examining uses of the word ‘addict’ within the religious context of early sixteenth century England, this article suggests the existence of a discrete evangelical vocabulary, and thus a means of tracing a reformist readership network. More than this, it potentially reveals one means by which a persecuted and suppressed group created a sense of shared identity and community.

Erasmus and the Politics of Translation in Tudor England

Desiderius Erasmus was a significant figure in early sixteenth-century England, and many of his works were translated into English during the reign of Henry VIII. In the process of translation the original intention of these works was subverted as Erasmus's reputation was appropriated by his translators and their patrons for their own purposes. His works were recast in English form to serve a variety of different agendas, from those of Henrician conservatives to Protestants pushing for more radical religious reform. This article looks at some of these translations, showing how they illustrate the variations in religious attitudes during these volatile years and the competing claims for validation. In particular, Erasmus's pronouncements on the importance of Scripture translation were annexed and deployed in the debate over the English Bible, demonstrating how his views about translation were in themselves translated to reflect the political and religious needs of the English situation.

Occupy! Historical geographies of property, protest and the commons, 1500–1850

This paper examines issues surrounding protest, trespass and occupation – brought to the fore as a result both of recent social movements including the global Occupy movement and of emerging critical discourses about so-called ‘new enclosures’ – through a historical lens. Wary of histories of property and protest that rely heavily on the notion of the ‘closing of the commons’, the authors present a different story about the solidification of property rights, the securitisation of space and the gradual emergence of the legal framework through which protest is now disciplined. They do so via an exploration of three episodes in the making of property in land and three associated moments of resistance, each enacted via the physical occupation of common land. The first examines strategies for opposing enclosure in early sixteenth century England; the second the Diggers' reimagining of property and the commons in the mid seventeenth century; and the third analyses the challenge to property rights offered by squatting and small-scale encroachments in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. These episodes also serve to detail some of the foundational ways in which the securitisation of space, and the attendant legal framework used to discipline protest, emerged. In so doing, the paper begins to rethink the relations between past and contemporary protest, considering how a more nuanced account of the history of common rights, enclosure and property relations might nevertheless leave space for new solidarities which have the potential to challenge the exercise of arbitrary power.

Humanism and Hellenism: Lucian and the Afterlives of Greek in More’s Utopia

This paper reexamines the influence of Plato and the Greek tradition on Thomas More’s Utopia, arguing that Plato’s reception within the Greek world profoundly shaped how More would have encountered Plato’s writings in early sixteenth-century England. Focusing on Lucian and Diogenes Laertius in particular, I demonstrate that their whimsical rewritings of Plato’s life and works, and the self-conscious belatedness of their postclassicism, guided Utopia’s own speculative fictionality and preoccupation with the past. In uncovering More’s attentiveness to this historically layered Greek tradition, I explore new paradigms for how scholarly recovery and imaginative representation interact in early modernity.

Saracens and Turks in William Caxton’s The Golden Legend

Abstract In the late fifteenth century, William Caxton translated into English and published a version of the best-known collection of saints’ lives in medieval Europe, the Legenda aurea. It was the longest and most expensive book he ever produced. Caxton used various sources, including Latin and French versions of the Legenda, to create a collection accessible to the book-buying public who were literate in the vernacular in late-fifteenth and early sixteenth-century England. The Golden Legend includes fifteen lives that incorporate Saracens or Turks into their narratives. It describes their interactions with Christians, both peaceful and violent, as well as their capacity for conversion. The depiction of Muslims in this popular sermon collection would have formed part of the cultural construction of Islamic people in England at the turn of the sixteenth century.

Making and Breaking Property: Negotiating Enclosure and Common Rights in Sixteenth-Century England

This paper explores the making – and breaking – of property in early sixteenth-century England, examining the range of strategies available to those engaged in negotiating and resisting enclosure, common rights and land-use change. It interrogates the relationship between litigation and direct action, paying particular attention to those self-help strategies other than hedge-breaking – itself already the subject of considerable scholarly interest – by which enclosure and agricultural change could be promoted or resisted. The paper focuses on strategies such as animal and human trespasses, animal rescues and mass ploughings, highlighting the importance of occupation and trespass as ways of resisting the extension of private property rights, even whilst possession was also property’s ultimate aim. In doing so, the paper explores enclosure and land use change as an ongoing process and a contested practice through which local communities and individuals played a key role in the making of modern property relations.

Humanist Hagiography in England, c. 1480 - c. 1520

In late medieval and early Tudor England, a handful of humanist writers attempted to combine the traditional religious genre of hagiography with humanist literary style, a style newly fashionable in England, which sought to imitate classical Latin literature. This created a strange hybrid genre: the humanist hagiography. The genre attracted some of the leading literary figures of late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century England, including the Tudor court poets, Pietro Carmeliano and Bernard André, the prolific humanist translator, Alexander Barclay, and the printer, Richard Pynson. Their humanist saints' lives experimented with classical Latin metres and were among the first works in England to adopt humanist script, printing and publishing practices. Despite this, they have been largely ignored by modern scholars, with the notable exception of David Carlson. This article introduces the most important examples, Carmeliano's Life of St Katherine, André's Hymni Christiani and Barclay's translation of Mantuan's Life of St George, discusses recent studies of these works, and suggests further areas for research in this largely and unjustly neglected field. The humanist hagiographies of England deserve more scholarly attention; they are a fascinating late example of medieval hagiography's rich tradition of reinvention and innovation, as well as important reminders of the centrality of religion in early English humanism.

“You Turn Me into Nothing”: Reformation of Queenship on the Jacobean Stage

ABSTRACT Henry VIII's divorce of Katherine of Aragon and execution of Anne Boleyn mark the beginning of the English Reformation and a substantial alteration of the queen consort role. Early modern plays that feature Henry VIII's queens, such as Samuel Rowley's When You See Me, You Know Me and William Shakespeare and John Fletcher's King Henry VIII, focus on the transition from a medieval to an early modern notion of queenship and represent the dismantled position of the queen consort in early sixteenth-century England. They also highlight the unstable and reduced position that future English queens would inherit.

New Evidence for the Social Reach of “Popular Romance”: The Books of Household Servants

This article explores the ownership/readership of romance in late fifteenth- and early sixteenthcentury England. In particular, it examines the copy of Amis and Amiloun in London, British Library MS Harley 2386, owned by household servants in early Tudor Herefordshire. It also examines the copy of Sir Isumbras in Oxford, University College MS 142, owned successively by servants of the archbishop of Canterbury and minor landowners from Surrey. It discusses the codicological evidence connecting these individuals to each manuscript and details archival findings about the owners of these codices. It also suggests how such detailed information about reception history might affect our understanding of the “popular” nature of Middle English romance in late medieval England.

Sanctuary and the Legal Topography of Pre-Reformation London

In early sixteenth-century England, the presence of ecclesiastical sanctuaries in the legal, social, and religious landscape was a matter of great controversy. Any English church could offer temporary sanctuary to an accused felon, a privilege that expired after about forty days, following which the felon had to abjure the realm. More contentiously, by the late Middle Ages a number of English religious houses used their status as royally-chartered liberties to offer sanctuary permanently, not only to accused criminals, but also to debtors, alien craftsmen, and, especially during the civil wars of the fifteenth century, political refugees. These ecclesiastical liberties, small territories that exercised varying extents of juridical and political autonomy, considerably complicated the jurisdictional map of late medieval England. London in particular, with its host of liberties and peculiars, constituted a patchwork quilt of legal jurisdictions. Although the mayor and aldermen of London were wont to say that the “chyeff and most commodyous place of the Cytie of London” constituted “one hoole Countie and one hoole Jurisdiccion and libertie” over which its citizens ruled, saving only the authority of the king himself, this confident as-sertion of the City's jurisdiction over the metropolitan square mile was constantly belied by the presence of these liberties. The most notable—and for the City, the most troubling—was the sanctuary at St. Martin Le Grand, a sizeable area within the bounds of the City, before 1503 governed by the dean and canons of the College of St. Martin, after 1503 absorbed into the lands attached to Westminster Abbey and ruled by the abbot. For about two centuries before St. Martin Le Grand was dissolved in 1542, its precinct was home to a thriving population of debtors, accused felons, and perhaps most numerously alien craftsmen, all seeking for various reasons to avoid civic or royal jurisdiction.5 The dissolution of religious houses which accompanied the English Reformation greatly lessened, although did not altogether eradicate, the privileges of St. Martin's.

Preaching During the English Reformation

Preaching During the English Reformation

The English Reformation: Obedience, Destruction and Cultural Adaptation

Religious life and English culture in the Reformation. By Marjo Kaartinen. Pp. vii+210. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002. £45. ISBN 0 333 96924 3Preaching during the English Reformation. By Susan Wabuda. Pp. xx+203 incl. 15 figs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. £40. ISBN 0 521 45395 XAuthority and consent in Tudor England. Essays presented to C. S. L. Davies. Edited by G. W. Bernard and S. J. Gunn. Pp. x+301. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Ltd, 2002. £47.50. ISBN 0 7546 0665 1Keywords and concepts provide important organising principles when historians attempt to make sense of the past. Some keywords are virtual constants of historical discourse, such as ‘continuity’ and ‘change’, although the relative emphasis that historians place on them can fluctuate with circumstances and fashion. Other terms come and go. The study of the English Reformation is no exception to the ebb and flow of historical keywords. For much of the 1960s, 1970s and the early 1980s, ‘popular reformation’ was a central concept of interpretation and research. But no more. Thanks to the historical fashion which has been styled ‘revisionism’, ‘popular reformation’ in early sixteenth-century England at least is widely considered to be an oxymoron. Consequent on the work of A. G. Dickens, ‘official’ or ‘state-sponsored reformation’ went into an eclipse but with the advent of revisionism it has been both revived as well as revised.

Social stratification and patterns of code-switching in Early English letters

The study deals with multilingualism in a historical perspective, focusing on code-switching between English and other languages in letters written in fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century England. The data is drawn from the Corpus of Early English Correspondence, a large electronic tool designed for historical sociolinguistic research. A related database containing background information on the writers makes it possible to apply the framework of correlational sociolinguistics. While testing the relationship of code-switching with many social variables, the study concentrates on social stratification. The analysis shows clear correlation between the writers' social rank and their code-switching behaviour both in terms of quantity and quality. Other interlinked variables such as gender and education are also significant. The study also confirms that for a full understanding of the phenomenon, microlevel analyses of idiolects and interpersonal relations are needed.