What does the Voices of Morebath tell us about the impact of religious change in the 16th Century?

The problem with Duffy’s interpretation is that it has a tendency to describe the experience of Reformation in terms of triumph and tragedy, when there appears to also be so much that was mundane. His vision of the Reformation  is seen as an assault upon a whole way of life, or as the author describes it in the preface, ‘the most decisive revolution in English history.’ This vision can certainly be inspirational, but it can also fail to take account of some of the complications of the process, and some of the obvious stability in parish religion despite the Reformation. It can also assign questionable representative importance to inanimate objects. The sources are all about material objects and their monetary value; the question of what those objects symbolized is interesting but not speculated into too much detail. When royal injunctions stripped the churches of their ornamentation, for Duffy this appears to be an assault upon the belief structures underlying the church decoration, yet we cannot be sure that the statues and vestments had this much symbolic value for all the inhabitants of Morebath, any more than we can be sure that the new English Bible was not equally precious to them. The one thing we can be sure of is that the monetary value of all these different items was carefully recorded.

There are strong suggestions that reactions to religious change were more complicated than straightforward Catholic loyalism. Reformation may have seemed like revolution to some, but clearly not to all. The closure of the monasteries, we are told, was a terrible shock to the general population, yet although some religious houses, like the priory of St. Nicholas in Exeter-- noted for its charity-- were defended by the public, the closing of Morebath’s more tight-fisted local monastery seems to have gone unnoticed. The 1549 rebellion may have had strong religious overtones, but the Morebath records indicate how much it was also a protest at the financial exactions of the regime. The book gives a vivid impression of the economic problems of the time, without which the new Book of Common Prayer might not have been single-handedly capable of sparking rebellion. Rebellions cannot be reduced to single causes, as the author is keen to point out with reference to the traditionally more ‘Protestant’ disturbances in East Anglia. Duffy argues, the Protestantism of the East Anglian rebels may have been only superficial, adopted for political purposes and at the request of rebel leaders, then the same may be true of the Catholic loyalism of the western rebels.

Duffy shows how gradually, after limited destruction under Henry VIII and massive destruction under Edward VI, restoration under Mary, and further destruction under Elizabeth, the Old Religion in Morebath gave way. Their parish priest stayed with them, no longer using the requiem vestments for which in his early days so much parish money had been saved and obediently adopting the new ways. He "eased them into a slow and settled conformity to the new order of things" Under Mary he probably had looked back on the Reformation as being "arrogant, destructive, and un-English, a disastrous rebellion against God and the faith of our fathers" but when it triumphed again he adapted to the change. He saw his duty as being to God and Morebath.