The meaning of the Reformation in England was formed first and foremost in the mind's eye. From the supremacy to the prayer book, the Tudor state set visions before its subjects: an ‘increase of virtue in Christ's religion … annexed and united to the Imperial crown’ (1534), a clergy and a people ‘stirred up to godliness [and] inflamed with the love of true religion’ (1549). The vivid drama of these images heightened as policies and the generations passed, so far that those born decades after the break with Rome stood transfixed by its hyperreality: no less than a ‘kingdom's vindication’ from a usurper's reign of tyranny was the inherited memory of Bishop Francis Godwin (b. 1562), whose Annals (1630) taught church history to those who fought the Civil War.
Only latterly, and after years labouring in the opposite direction, searching and sifting empirical data, have historians of Reformation given due attention to its representation and to those images and words, people, places and particular objects that acted as its mnemonics. The Luther quincentenary offered a platform (and a funder's ‘justification for resources’) for remembering the Reformation, and from the same Cambridge context as the successful AHRC-sponsored programme 2016–19 comes this doctoral study of a mnemonic that was the most resilient and resonant of them all, the broken arches and tumbled towers of the medieval monasteries which still captured the English imagination even after there was no visible trace of them above ground. The long, longue durée of these lieux de memoires may be the most valuable insight of Harriet Lyon's book. While the fascination of Camden and his followers (Godwin among them) for the scattered, shattered shells of the monastic tradition will be familiar, it is less well-remembered that the traces of these foundations, not only their collateral but also their lordship, remained charged and contested even after the Hanoverian succession.
Lyon considers that the dissolution of religious houses in England and Wales between 1536 and 1540 was made the ‘dissolution of the monasteries’ only at a distance from the events themselves. As Thomas Cromwell's biographers have now established beyond doubt, the testimony of the surviving state papers is far from reliable although it does preserve early expressions of an official narrative. A copy of Lucas van Leyden's Triumph of Mordecai sketched as the pictorial cover to a valor of Colchester Abbey (BL, ms Egerton 2164) carries on the horizon a thumbnail scene of execution: justice was done, and was seen to be done, to the honour of the king. Of course, Lyon is right to note that dissolutions first seen as a sequence of episodes by both public (Holinshed) and private (Wriothesley) chroniclers were not presented as a fully-formed performance until staged in the annals of England that commanded a popular, print audience after 1603. But her conviction that the ‘d-word’ itself was adopted only in retrospect is misplaced, and risks misleading the reader: in fact dissolution was one of the few objects of Reformation policy whose design had been well described and understood by the state and its subjects long before it was begun. Lyon's primary vantage point, however, is a hundred years on from the febrile 1530s and hinges on quite different questions of the condition of the kingdom as much in the present as in the Tudor past. She largely sidesteps the seam of first-hand histories of suppression from Catholic sources which reached a readership a generation before Godwin and Speed. Chauncey, Harpsfield and Sander are given a fleeting glance; the Observant Franciscan, Thomas Bourchier, not even that. Rather Lyon retails the rueful reflections of those who, to all expressed intents and outward purposes, identified with the winning side. Their concern, sometimes escalating into condemnation for the destruction of fabric of undoubted aesthetic and cultural value, she counsels to read cautiously and with an acceptance of contradiction. Nostalgia did not smother other, counter-impulses. As much as they mourned the precincts of the past, they marvelled at the mansion houses and parkland that now stood in their place. Contempt for a prodigal monarchy and criticism of provincial landlordship did not displace an instinct to celebrate the forging of a family lineage on this frontier with the medieval past. Lyon makes good use of printed topographies and the expanding corpus of engravings that accompanied them to demonstrate that the discussion of monastic scars in the skyline was sustained to the very moment that they were overlaid by a Romantic sensibility. She argues that it was under the immediate horizons of home, estate, farmstead, village and township that the complex associations of dissolution persisted the longest and were most closely wound. Here the benefits and costs of change remained mutable in communal memory: at Hatfield (East Yorkshire) a Huguenot divine inherited a general sense of guilt over the legacy of disendowment; on the same Somerset levels which rose for Monmouth in 1685, the sacred legend of the Tor lived on.
Lyon hopes to persuade her reader that there was a sharper – more critically engaged, more often overtly conflicted – edge to these perennial tales than what Margaret Aston, writing half a century ago, perceived as an emerging sense of the medieval past. Yet too often she only repeats stories as she finds them, with only a hazy view of how they came to be told. Her idea of historical topography in the century between Camden and Dugdale is disarmingly Romantic. Her practitioners are travellers who collect ‘oral tradition’ more often than manuscripts. A surprisingly gregarious Anthony Wood is seen gossiping his way to an understanding of the dissolution in Gloucestershire. This is a distortion not only of their antiquarian culture but also of the particular dynamics of this formative age of Reformation historiography. These narrations of the dissolution and its consequences were drawn from an archival record already anchored at Westminster before 1642 and reaching right across provincial England. It was not ‘echoes of an oral culture’ (p. 205) that filled John Hooker's chronicle of Exeter's Reformation but the registers of the city's Guildhall.
Lyon's commitment to a communal history sometimes leads her astray. The 1539 statute did not enact a ‘wholesale policy of dissolution’ (p. 85); there was no monastery at Exeter Cathedral (p. 151); England's former monks did not ‘all lose their livelihoods’ (p. 197): as many as two-thirds received lifetime pensions, the last of which was still being claimed in the reign of King James. None the less, she has succeeded in assembling a rich and regionally widespread menu of readings in the legend of England's monasteries which, as Aston first signalled as far back as 1973, was every bit as vigorous as their living tradition.
