‘Hid Diuinite’: The Spirituality of the English Syon Brethren

Summary

IN THE YEARS LEADING up to the suppression of Syon Abbey in 1539, Thomas Bedyll, a Commissioner of the King, monitored the activities and attitudes of the house. He regularly reported back on the progress of the campaign against it to his master Thomas Cromwell, chief architect of the dissolution of the monasteries. At this time Syon was one of the wealthiest and most influential monasteries in England and therefore a notable target in the developing war against monasticism. In 1534, early on in the campaign of harassment, Bedyll closely observed sermons given in the abbey church by the Brethren of Syon. Their subject was Henry VIII's claim to supremacy over the Church. Bedyll noted that ‘the Confessor there hath preched twice, sythens my Lord of London and I wer at Sion, and dyd his dutie, concernyng the said title accordingly’. The Confessor-General of Syon in 1534 would have been John Fewterer. A scholarly soul who possessed a copy of the first printed Hebrew concordance, Fewterer was also the author of The Mirror or Glass of Christ's Passion, printed the very same year that Bedyll's letter was written, which draws in an antiquarian way on the affective contemplative piety of the Stimulus Amoris, Ludolph of Saxony and Simon of Cassia. With his interest in the scriptural scholarship of the New Learning and his affinity with the devotional traditions of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Fewterer exemplifies the cautious and conservative scholarship typical of the Brethren of Syon.