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The Rood of Boxley, the Blood of Hailes and the Defence of the Henrician Church

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 January 2016

Peter Marshall
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Extract

Recent research has rendered untenable the glib characterisation of the Henrician Reformation as ‘Catholicism without the Pope’, but the essential nature of the motives and achievements of Henry vra and his ministers in the 1530s and 1540s remains a controversial issue. To J. K. McConica, the polity created in the 1530s was an ‘Erasmian’ one, with the views of the great humanist on such matters as vernacular Scripture, superstitious pilgrimage and religious instruction providing a consensual nexus to bind together all but the most extreme shades of religious opinion. More recently, Glyn Redworth has similarly argued that the Henrician Reform was from the first ‘an intellectually coherent and satisfying movement’, and that it had positive and distinctive religious aspirations, seeking to use the techniques of ‘Protestant’ evangelism to transmit a purged but none the less essentially Catholic doctrine. G. W. Bernard has, by contrast, characterised the direction of religious policy after the break with Rome as ‘deliberately ambiguous’, and sees Henry as a ruler who held together an unwieldy coalition of interests by employing the rhetoric of continental Protestantism while inhibiting the implementation of any fundamental change.

Type
Notes And Documents
Information
The Journal of Ecclesiastical History , Volume 46 , Issue 4 , October 1995 , pp. 689 - 696
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995

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References

1 McConica, J. K., English humanists and Reformation politics. Oxford 1965, ch. vi.Google ScholarScarisbrick, J.J. concurs in regarding the government's policy in the 1530s as ‘what may loosely be described as an Erasmian reform programme’: Henry VIII, London 1968, 398.Google Scholar

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11 PRO, SP 1/129, fo. 12.

12 LP xiii (I), 348.

13 Clearly, the mechanisms in the Rood had at some time served a purpose, quite possibly in connection with the liturgical celebrations at Easter. It was common in English churches for a crucifix to be placed in the Easter sepulchre on Good Friday, and to be carried in procession on Easter Sunday. The movements of eyes and jaw to which Chamber and Wriothesley refer could simply and effectively simulate death and life restored. On these rites see A.Heales, , ‘Easter sepulchres: their object, nature and history’, Archaeologia xlii (1869), 263–308Google Scholar; Scheingorn, P., ‘“No sepulchre on Good Friday”: the impact of the Reformation on the Easter rites in England’, in Davidson, C. and Nichols, A. E. (eds), Iconoclasm vs. art and drama, Kalamazoo, Mich. 1989, 145-53Google Scholar; Duffy, , Stripping of the altars, 30-1Google Scholar. A jointed image of the resurrected Christ is known to have been employed in St Paul’s: Gairdner, J., Lollardy and the Reformation, London 1908-13, ii. 133.Google Scholar

14 LP xiii (1), 348.

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18 Wriothesley, Chronicle, i. 90. The relic seems subsequently to have been disposed of quietly.

19 Thomas, , The pilgrim, 39Google Scholar. Predictably, the more memorable story that the relic was duck's blood seems to have stuck, and was confidently repeated by later commentators: ibid. 38-9; Four supplications, 75; Foxe, , Acts and monuments, v. 397.Google Scholar

20 The suggestion can be advanced very tentatively that the substance originally placed inside the reliquary may have been consecrated wine. Though the container could not have been hermetically sealed, its rate of oxidisation and evaporation could have been slow, and a stable, sugary wine such as Malmsey or Madeira might have reduced to the colour and tacky consistency described by Latimer. Use of such a substance would have had an obvious theological rationale, and might have eased the consciences of the monks if the relic had been tampered with at any time. I am grateful to Dom Cuthbert Madden and Dom Jeremy Sierla for suggestions and references on these points.

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