Communion and Community: Exclusion from Communion in Post-Reformation England

Abstract

On Whit Sunday 1569, after evening service, William and Geoffrey Soden went to see their vicar. They expected a difficult encounter, and took along three of their neighbours of Swalcliffe near Banbury for moral support. The Sodens had been wrangling between themselves and with their mother, and there was also some dispute with the vicar, Richard Crowley. William now told the vicar that they wished to receive communion next day, and asked ‘to know if he would admit them thereunto’. Crowley replied ‘I will not’, and said it was ‘because they came not penitently’. He explained in court later that ‘the said William and Geoffrey Soden did not come to this respondent Anno 1569 penitently or in brotherly reconciliation, but obstinately, with vehement words, as is known to the whole company then present’. Crowley had shown the Sodens the Book of Common Prayer, ‘and exhorted them in the presence of those men according to the rule of the said Book, but the said William and Geoffrey Soden regarded it not but continued still in their obstinacies’. There was more: the vicar declared ‘I have to examine you on your belief, the articles of your faith and the Ten Commandments, and do not know how you could answer.’ The brothers were furious: ‘Yea, Master Vicar, that ye go about to shame us before the whole people’, declared Geoffrey, and they stomped off ‘uncharitably and obstinately, with great threatening words’.

The Swalcliffe rows simmered on.