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Judgement and Repentance in Tudor Manchester: The Celestial Journey of Ellis Hall

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Peter Marshall
Peter Marshall*
Affiliation:
University of Warwick
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Extract

Among the diversions for Londoners in the early summer of 1562 was the sight of a man confined in the pillory at Cheapside, bizarrely dressed in grey animal skins, and accompanied with the caption: ‘For seducinge the people by publyshynge ffallce Revelations’. Ellis Hall had come to London from his home in Manchester with the intention of presenting to the Queen a ‘greate booke’ containing secret revelations written in verse. He went to the palace at Greenwich, but was denied his interview with Elizabeth. Instead, Hall was interrogated by the bishop of London, Edmund Grindal, on 12 June, and castigated in a sermon by the bishop of Durham, James Pilkington, two days later. On 18 June he was questioned by five members of the Privy Council, and on 26 June, after his spell in the pillory, he was sent on Grindal’s orders to Bridewell, where he died three years later.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 40: Retribution, Repentance, and Reconciliation , 2004 , pp. 128 - 137
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2004

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References

1 The Diary of Henry Machyn; citizen and merchant-taylor of London, from A.D. 1550 to A.D. 1563, ed. John Gough Nichols, Camden Society ser. 1, 42 (London, 1848), 284; John Strype, Annals of the Reformation and Establishment of Religion, and other various occurrences in the Church of England, during Queen Elizabeth’s happy reign: together with an appendix of original papers of state, records, and letters, 4 vols in 7 tomes (Oxford, 1824) I.i: 433–5; I.2: 196; London, BL, Lansdowne MS 24, no. 81; London Guildhall MS 33011/1, fol. 222r.

2 Public Record Office, SP 12/23/39; Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Tanner 50, fols 16r-17r. The latter was edited by W. P. M. Kennedy, ‘A Declaration before the Ecclesiastical Commission, 1562’, EHR 37 (1922), 256–7, though it seems more likely to have been an ad hoc grouping of available councillors: cf. Acts of the Privy Council of England, 44 vols (London, 1890–1958), 7:105.

3 Thomas, Keith, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London/New York, 1971), 157 Google Scholar; Bauckham, Richard, Tudor Apocalypse (Appleford, 1978), 187–8 Google Scholar; Walsham, Alexandra, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1999), 204 Google Scholar; Jones, Norman, The Birth of the Elizabethan Age: England in the 1560s (Oxford, 1993), 41–2 Google Scholar; Haigh, Christopher, Reformation and Resistance in Tudor Lancashire (Cambridge, 1975), 144–5 Google Scholar.

4 Haigh, , Reformation and Resistance, 168–9, 209, 219–20 Google Scholar; Hollingworth, R., Mancuniensis; or, An history of the towne of Manchester, and what is most memorable concerning it (Manchester, 1839). 75–6 Google Scholar.

5 Patch, Howard Rollin, The Other World according to Descriptions in Medieval Literature (Cambridge, MA, 1950, repr. New York, 1970)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Goff, J. Le, ‘The Learned and Popular Dimensions of Journeys in the Otherworld in the Middle Ages’, in Kaplan, Steven Laurence, ed., Understanding Popular Culture: Europe from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century (Berlin and New York, 1984), 19–37 Google Scholar; Morgan, A., Dante and the Medieval Other World (Cambridge, 1990)Google Scholar; Gurevich, Aron, Medieval Popular Culture: Problems of Belief and Perception, transl. Bak, János M. and Hollingsworth, Paul A. (Cambridge, 1988)Google Scholar, ch. 4; The Divine Comedy before Dante’, 104–52; Walters, Gwenfair M., ‘Visitacyons, Preuytes, and Deceytys: The Vision in Late Medieval English Popular Piety’, unpublished PhD. thesis, University of Cambridge, 1992 Google Scholar.

6 Walters, ‘The Vision in Late Medieval English Popular Piety’, 21.

7 Marshall, Peter, Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England (Oxford, 2002), 8 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Thompson, E. M., ‘The Vision of Edmund Leversedge’, Notes and Queries for Somerset and Devon 9 (1904–5), 19–35 Google Scholar.

9 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Lat. Misc. c. 66, fols 21r-23v. See Marsh, D., ‘Humphrey Newton of Newton and Pownall (1466–15 36)’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Keele, 1995, 311–17 Google Scholar.

10 MS Lat Misc. c 66, fols 155r-176r. For further examples, see my ‘“The Map of God’s Word”: Geographies of the Afterlife in Tudor and Early Stuart England’, in Bruce Gordon and Peter Marshall, eds, The Place of the Dead: Death and Remembrance in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2000), 110–30.

11 SP 12/23/39.

12 Pace the view of Alexandra Walsham in her entry on Hall for the new DAB that he ‘showed little knowledge of the Bible’, though I am immensely grateful to Dr Walsham for allowing me to see this in advance of publication.

13 The most frequently-printed version in the period before 1552 was the ‘Great Bible’, a 1541 edition of which (STC 2075) has been used for explicating Hall’s statements, employing modern chapter and verse divisions.

14 Tanner MS 50, fol. 16r has the alternative ‘faste and pray’ – conceivably a mistranscription, though this linkage too has scriptural resonances: Matt 17: 21; Mark 9: 29; Luke 2: 37; Acts 10: 30; 13: 3; 14: 23; I Cor. 7: 5.

15 Metzger, Bruce M. and Coogan, Michael D., eds, The Oxford Companion to the Bible (New York and Oxford, 1993), 193 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; The Jerusalem Bible: New Testament (London, 1967), 69.

16 Haigh, Reformation and Resistance, 114 argues that ‘it is very unlikely that vernacular Bibles reached the county in any number’. The one surviving set of churchwardens’ accounts (Prescot) gives no sign of a purchase until after the 1547 royal visitation (ibid., 115).

17 Smith-Bannister, Scott, Names and Naming Patterns in England 1538–1700 (Oxford, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wilson, Stephen, The Means of Naming: a Social and Cultural History of Personal Naming in Western Europe (London, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Withycombe, E. G., The Oxford Dictionary of English Christian Names (3rd edn, Oxford, 1977)Google Scholar; Hanks, Patrick and Hodges, Flavia, A Dictionary of First Names (Oxford, 1990)Google Scholar. ‘Elys Hall’ was junior constable of Manchester in 15 57: A Volume of Court Leet Records of the Manor of Manchester in the Sixteenth Century, ed. John Harland, Chetham Society os 63 (Manchester, 1864), 170.

19 I Kgs 3: 1–18 = I Sam. in AV.

20 IV Kgs 2: 11 = II Kgs in AV.

21 Tanner MS 50, fol. 16v. Strype, Annals, I.2:196, suggested that the gown of skins worn in the pillory was ‘perhaps in mockery to him, calling himself Elias, and going in camel’s hair, in imitation of that prophet’ For later examples of soi-disant prophets claiming to be Elijah, see Bauckham, Tudor Apocalypse, 187; Walsham, Providence, 204.

22 Cressy, David, Bonfires and Bells: National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England (London, 1989)Google Scholar; Jones, Norman L., The English Reformation: Religion and Cultural Adaptation (Oxford, 2002)Google Scholar; Walsham, , Providence; Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety 1550–1640 (Cambridge, 1991; 2nd edn, 1993)Google Scholar.