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‘Out of the Mouths of Babes and Sucklings’: Prophecy, Puritanism, and Childhood in Elizabethan Suffolk
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016
Extract
In January 1581 a short black-letter tract in the tiny octavo format favoured by many Elizabethan publishers of sensational news appeared from the press of a London printing house based just outside the City in the Strand. Like other ‘three-halfpenny’ pamphlets of its ilk, this particular piece of ephemera was a pious tale of the prodigious and strange, but true. It described the ‘wonderfull worke of God shewed upon a chylde’ by the name of William Withers in the small Suffolk town of Walsham-le-Willows. On the previous Christmas Eve, the eleven-year-old boy had fallen into a deep trance for the space often days, ‘to the great admiration of the beholders, and the greefe of his parentes’. At the end of this time he regained consciousness and proceeded to deliver a series of vehement prophetic denunciations of contemporary sin and immorality, calling the people to ‘spedie repentance’—without which, he announced, the day of destruction was surely at hand. If amendment of life was not quickly forthcoming, the Lord would presently shake their houses on their heads and cause the earth to open up and swallow them alive.
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References
1 Phillip, John, The Wonderfull Worke of God shewed upon a Chylde, whose Name is William Withers, being in the Towne of Walsam, within the Countie of Suffolke (London, 1581), title page, sigs A8r–v Google Scholar, B1v.
2 For Phillip’s eclectic literary output, which ranges from doggerel verse and broadside epitaphs to small devotional works and a play, see A. W. Pollard and Redgrave, G. R., A Short Title Catalogue of Books printed in England, Scotland and Ireland and of English Books printed abroad 1475-1640, 2nd Google Scholar edn, rev. and enlarged by W. A. Jackson, F. S. Ferguson, and Pantzer, Katherine F., 2 vols (London, 1976-86), entries 19, 863–77 Google Scholar; DNB, ‘John Phillips’ and ‘John Philip’. W. W. Greg establishes that these two separate authors are the same individual, in ‘John Phillip—Notes for a Bibliography’, The Library, ser. 3, I (1910), pp. 302-28, 396-423.
3 See Arber, Edward, ed., A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London 1554-1640 AD, 5 vols (London, 1875-94), 2, pp. 386 Google Scholar (13 Jan., Robert Waldegrave assigns his rights to ‘the thinge of the childe’ to Edward White) and 387 (16 Jan., ‘master Watkins’ tolerates to Edward White a ballad on the same subject). The original pamphlet was entered to Waldegrave on 9 Jan.
4 Shrewsbury, Shrewsbury School, MS X. 31 [hereafter ‘Dr Taylor’s Book’], fol. 138r. The ‘Strange speeches’ of this child were also noted in several printed chronicles, including Raphael Holinshed, The First and Second Volumes of Chronicles …, continued by John Hooker, alias Vowell (London, 1587), P. 1315; John Stow, The Summarye of the Chronicles of Englande … abridged and continued, unto 1587 (London, (1587)), p. 397.
5 William Withers’s baptism on 4 April 1568 is recorded in the parish register of Walsham-le-Willows: Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk Record Office [hereafter SRO(B)], FL 646/4/1. Wills of a number of members of the family survive, dating from 1477, 1528, and 1552: SRO(B), Hervye 46V; Norwich, Norfolk Record Office [hereafter NRO], Attmere 20; SRO(B), IC 500/2/31 (John Wyther, William’s grandfather). Fourteenth-century manor court rolls reveal that one ‘William Wyther’ died in the Black Death of 1349: Ray Lock, ‘The Black Death in Walsham-le-Willows’, Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology and History [hereafter PSIAH], 37 (1992), p. 336. Manorial surveys compiled in 1577 and 1581 record William’s father’s tenements: see Dodd, Kenneth Melton, ed., The Field Book of Walsham-le-Willows 1577 = Suffolk Records Society 17, pt 2 (1974), pp. 40, 52, 104, 108, 115, 156–7 Google Scholar. I am extremely grateful to Mrs Jean Lock for generously sharing with me her unparalleled knowledge of the records relating to Walsham-le-Willows in this period.
6 Phillip, The Wonderfull Worke of Cod, sig. A8r.
7 Ibid., sig. A8v; ‘Dr Taylor’s Book’, fol. 138r.
8 Phillip, The Wonderful Worke of God, sigs Blr-2v. The earthquake of 6 April 1580 seems to have made considerable impact in this area. In Bardwell, the adjoining parish to Walsham, the townwardens purchased the official order of prayer issued after the event to avert God’s wrath; possibly the glass window in the church replaced that year had been broken during the tremor: SRO(B), FL 522/11/22. The earthquake also generated a large number of topical tracts and providential pamphlets, including one entitled Quaedam de terre motu written by John Phillip himself, and now lost: sec Charles Henry Cooper and Cooper, Thompson, Athenae Cantabrigienses, 2 vols (Cambridge, 1858-1913), 2, p. 99 Google Scholar.
9 For discussions of the ‘Bury Stirs’, see Collinson, Patrick, ‘The Puritan classical movement in the reign of Elizabeth I’ (London Ph.D. thesis, 1957), pp. 860–930 Google Scholar; MacCulloch, Diarmaid, ‘Catholic and Puritan in Elizabethan Suffolk: a county community polarizes’, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, 72 (1981), pp. 269–78 Google Scholar, and Suffolk and the Tudors (Oxford, 1986), pp. 199-211; Craig, J. S., ‘Reformation, politics and polemics in sixteenth-century East Anglian market towns’ (Cambridge Ph.D. thesis, 1992), ch. 3 Google Scholar, and, ‘The Bury Stirs revisited: an analysis of the townsmen’, PSIAH, 37 (1991), pp. 208-24.
10 BL, MS Lansdowne 27, no. 70.
11 See Edmund Freke’s articles against Jermyn, Ashfield, Sir John Higham and Thomas Badby, BL, MS Egerton 1693, fols 89r-90r, at 80r. In February 1582, Jermyn answered the charges in full in letters sent to Robert Beale and William Burghley: ibid., fols 87r-v, 91r-100r; BL, MS Lansdowne 37, fols 59r-62v. For allegations about Gayton and Handson’s activities, sec BL, MS Egerton 1693, fol. 89r; BL, MS Lansdowne 33, no. 13, fols 26r-v; no. 21, fols 41r-v. Three petitions on their behalf signed by inhabitants of Bury were sent to the Privy Council and Burghley between 1578 and 1582. The petition of 6 August 1582 declared that their departure from the town had caused ‘greate daunger and unspeakable griefe’ to those ‘well affected’ in the town and ‘in the whole countrey aboute’: London, Public Record Office, State Papers [hereafter PRO, SP], 12/155/5.
12 BL, MS Lansdowne 33, no. 13, fols 26r-v (19 April); no. 20, fol. 40r (2 Aug.).
13 Morley’s account of his ‘troubles’ can be found in London, Dr Williams’s Library, MS Morrice A (‘Old Loose Papers’), fols 166r-v; calendared in Peel, Albert, ed., The Seconde Parte of a Register, 2 vols (Cambridge, 1915), 1, p. 164 Google Scholar. Morley had similar difficulties at the hands of the Bishop of London in the Essex parish of Ridgwell, being charged in 1584 with refusal to subscribe and comply with the liturgical regulations, and with unlicensed preaching. He claimed to have been arrested and committed to the Clink in 1582, where he lay for seven weeks for an unknown cause. See London, Dr Williams’s Library, MS Morrice B(z), fol. oiv, calendared in Peel, ed., The Seconde Parte of a Register, 2, p. 165. See also Collinson, , ‘The Puritan classical movement’, pp. 685, 895–6 Google Scholar. It is not possible to establish conclusively whether Morley was already ensconced as preacher at Walsham by Christmas 1580. The parish was a perpetual curacy, and seems to have been something of a stop-gap for ministers seeking a rectorship or a better living; most stayed only a few years.
14 Phillip, The Wonderful Worke of God, sig. B2r.
15 The ‘Game Place’, described in detail in the manorial survey of 1577, was obviously still in much use at that date: Dodd, ed., The Field Book of Walsham-le-Willows 1577, p. 92. See also Dodd, Kenneth M., ‘Another Elizabethan theatre in the round’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 21 (1970), pp. 125–56 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dymond, David, ‘A lost social institution: the camping close’, Rural History, 1 (1990), pp. 165–92 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
16 ‘Dr Taylor’s Book’, fol. 138r.
17 Phillip, , The Wonderful Worke of God, sigs A8r Google Scholar, B1v, B6v, and passim.
18 Ps. 8. 2, echoed by Christ in Matt. 21.16.
19 According to Phillip, The Wonderfull Worke of Cod, title page and sig. A8r, William Withers took no sustenance for the ten days in which he lay in his trance. On the Puritan practice of public and private fasting, which took on special significance in the early 1580s, see Collinson, , ‘The Puritan classical movement’, pp. 323–45 Google Scholar.
20 On Puritan pedagogy, see Green, Ian, ‘“For children in yeeres and children in understanding”: the emergence of the English catechism under Elizabeth and the early Stuarts’, JEH, 37 (1986), PP. 397–425 Google Scholar; Morgan, John, Godly Learning: Puritan Attitudes towards Reason, Learning, and Education, 1560-1640 (Cambridge, 1986), ch. 8 passim, esp. pp. 144–50 Google Scholar; Wright, S.J., ‘Confirmation, catechism and communion: the role of the young in the post-Reformation Church’, in Wright, S. J., cd., Parish, Church and People: Local Studies in Lay Religion 1350–1750 (London, 1988), pp. 203–27 Google Scholar. Strauss, Cf. Gerald, Luther’s House of Learning: Indoctrination of the Young in the German Reformation (Baltimore, 1978 Google Scholar).
21 It is interesting that petitioners to the Privy Council on behalf of Gayton and Handson on 6 Aug. 1582 alleged that the conservative faction in Bury had brought the preachers into question by ‘wicked devices’, including ‘pervertinge the sence and true meaninge of… [their teaching] … usinge the notes taken by children at their sermons …’: PRO, SP, 12/155/5.
22 Schlichtenberger, Eyriak, A Prophesie uttered by the Daughter of an Honest Countrey Man, called Adam Krause (London, 1580 Google Scholar). Jflrgen Beyer of Clare College, Cambridge, has discovered numerous other cases in the course of his research on the subject of Lutheran popular prophets in post-Reformation Germany and Scandinavia.
23 See McKerrow, R. B., ed., A Dictionary of Printers and Booksellers in England, Scotland and Ireland, and of Foreign Printers of English Books 1557-1640 (London, 1910), pp. 277–9 Google Scholar; DNB.
24 Early modern child-rearing, discipline and attitudes towards the young are controversial topics: the debate can be charted in Ariès, Phillipe, Centuries of Childhood (Harmondworth, 1962), esp. pp. 24–34 Google Scholar; Stone, Laurence, The Family, Sex and Marriage 1500-1800 (London, 1977), pp. 161–79 Google Scholar, 194-5; Tucker, M. J., ‘The child as beginning and end: fifteenth and sixteenth century English childhood’, in Mause, Lloyd de, ed., The History of Childhood (New York, 1974), pp. 229–57 Google Scholar; Pollock, Linda A., Forgotten Children: Parent-Child Relations from 1500-1900 (Cambridge, 1983 Google Scholar). Balanced overviews are to be found in Wrightson, Keith, English Society 1580-1680 (London, 1982), pp. 106–18 Google Scholar, and Houlbrooke, Ralph, The English Family 1450-1700 (Harlow, 1984 Google Scholar), ch. 6. Sec also Robert V. Schnucker, ‘Puritan attitudes toward childhood discipline, 1560-1634’, in Hides, Valerie, ed., Women as Mothers in Pre-lndustrial England: Essays in Memory of Dorothy McLaren (London and New York, 1990), pp. 108–21 Google Scholar; Sather, Kathryn, ‘Sixteenth and seventeenth century child rearing: a matter of discipline’, Journal of Social History, 22 (1989), pp. 735–43 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Morgan, , Godly Learning, esp. pp. 144–50 Google Scholar.
25 See Thomas, Keith, ‘Children in early modern England’, in Avery, Gillian and Briggs, Julia, eds, Children and their Books: A Celebration of the Work of lona and Peter Opie (Oxford, 1989), pp. 45–77, esp. p. 63 Google Scholar.
26 Thomas, Cf. Keith, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England (Harmondsworth, 1971), pp. 163–4, 177 Google Scholar; Mack, Phyllis, ‘Women as prophets during the English Civil War’, Feminist Studies, 8 (1982), passim, esp. pp. 27–8 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 32, 35, 38.
27 The classic account is Chambers, E. K., The Medieval Stage, 2 vols (Oxford, 1903), 1, ch. 15 Google Scholar, and 2, appendix M, but see also Wright, A. R., British Calendar Customs (London and Glasgow, 1940), pp. 194–8 Google Scholar; Molen, Richard L. De, ‘Pueri Christi Imitatio: the festival of the Boy-Bishop in Tudor England’, Moreana, 12 (1975), pp. 17–28 Google Scholar; Wooden, W. W., ‘The topos of childhood in Marian England’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 12 (1982), pp. 187—94 Google Scholar.
28 Matt. 18.3, 1 Sam. 3, and Tilley, Morris Palmer, A Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Ann Arbor, 1950 Google Scholar), entry C328.
29 Anderson, R. C., ed., The Book of Examinations and Depositions, 1622-1644. Vol. II. 1627-1634, Publications of the Southampton Record Society (1931), pp. 104–5 Google Scholar; Thomas, , Religion and the Decline of Magic, pp. 255–6, 319–20 Google Scholar.
30 The Horrible Murther of a Young Boy of Three Yeres of Age, whose Sister had her Tongue cut out: and how it pleased God to reveale the Offendors, by giving Speech to the Tongueles Childe (London, 1606), pp. 5-7; and The most Cruell and Bloody Murther committed by an Inkeepers Wife, called Annis Dell, and her Sonne Ceorge Dell (London, 1606), esp. sigs B3v-C2r. See also A most Horrible and Detestable Murther committed by a Bloudie Minded Man upon his owne Wife: and most Strangely revealed by his Childe that was under Five Yeares of Age (London, 1595).
31 A Strange and Miraculous Accident happened in the Cittie of Purmerent, on New-yeeres Even last past 1599. Of a Yong Child which was heard to cry in the Mothers Wombe before it was borne, and about Fourteene Dayes of Age, spake certaine Sencible Words, to the Wonder of Every body (London, 1599).
32 For just a few examples, see , H. B., The True Discripcion of a Childe with Ruffes, borne in the Parish of Micheham, in the Countie of Surrey (London, 1566 Google Scholar); , John D., A Discription of a Monstrous Chylde, borne at Chychester in Sussex, the xxiiii Daye of May (London, 1562 Google Scholar); , G. B., Of a Monstrous Childe borne at Chichester… With a Short and Sharpe Discourse, for the Punishment of Whoredome (London, [1581 Google Scholar]).
33 On possession, see Thomas, , Religion and the Decline of Magic, pp. 569–88 Google Scholar; Walker, D. P., Unclean Spirits: Possession and Exorcism in France and England in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries (London, 1981 CrossRefGoogle Scholar); MacDonald, Michael, ed., Witchcraft and Hysteria in Elizabethan London: Edward Jorden and the Mary Glover Case (London and New York, 1991 Google Scholar), Introduction; Midelfort, H. C. Erik, ‘The devil and the German people: reflections on the popularity of demon possession in sixteenth-century Germany’, in Ozment, Stephen, ed., Religion and Culture in the Renaissance and Reformation = Sixteenth-Century Essays and Studies 11 (Kirksville, Miss., 1989), pp. 98–119 Google Scholar. A particularly illuminating parallel to the William Withers affair is the celebrated and controversial case of the apprentice musician, William Sommers of Nottingham, exorcised by the Puritan John Darrell in the late 1590s. For a detailed discussion, with references to the rash of contemporary publications on the subject, see Walker, , Unclean Spirits, ch. 4 Google Scholar.
34 Houlbrooke, R. A., ed., The Letter Book of John Parkhurst Bishop of Norwich Compiled during the Years 1571-5, Norfolk Record Society (1974-5), pp. 86–7 Google Scholar.
35 For striking examples of prophetic and demoniac Catholic children, see More’s, Thomas account of the ‘Ipswich miracle’ in 1516 in his Dialogue concerning Heresies (1529 Google Scholar), repr. Lawlcr, Thomas L. C. et al., eds, The Complete Works of St Thomas More, 6, pt 1 (New Haven and London, 1981), pp. 92–4 Google Scholar; Rich, Barnaby, The True Report of a Late Practise enlerprised by a Papist, with a Young Maiden in Wales, accompted amongst our Catholiques in those Partes for a Greater Prophetise, then ever was the Holie Maide of Kent … (London, 1582 Google Scholar); and Baddeley, Richard, The Boy of Bilson: Or, A True Discovery of the late Notorious Impostures of certaine Romish Priests in their Pretended Exorcisme, or Expulsion of the Divell out of a Young Boy, named Wittiam Perry (London, 1622 Google Scholar).
36 Axon, William E. A., The Wonderfull Child. Tracts issued in 1679 relating to Charles Bennett of Manchester, alleged to speak Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, when three years old without having been taught = Chetham Miscellanies ns 1, Chetham Society ns 47 (1902 Google Scholar). See also Smith, Nigel, ‘A child prophet: Martha Hatfield as The Wise Virgin’, in Avery, and Briggs, , eds. Children and their Books, pp. 79–93 Google Scholar.
37 The will itself is not extant; however, a covenant relating to this bequest, dated 23 July 1632, does survive: SRO(B), FL 646/11/92. His sons William and Edmond were appointed to pay this sum to certain parish overseers.
38 John, and Venn, J. A., Alumni Cantabrigiensis, pt 1 (Cambridge, 1927 Google Scholar), ‘William Withers’. He was rector of lckworth from 1595 until at least 1613, rector of Wetheringsett from 1616 until his death in 1647. He may also have been rector of Fersfield, Norfolk, 1613-47. His will survives: NRO, 127. Barker (MF 93).