It
would be easy to forget the context in which Thomas Cranmer began to prepare
his new liturgies for the English people. The Edwardian program for the
Protestantization of the English church was very much in full swing; and it
included a very significant piece of legislation: the 1547 ‘Act Dissolving the
Chantries’. The chantry houses had been until this moment a prominent feature
of English religious life, representing as they did an extensive industry in
prayer. Since about 1000 AD, notable and wealthy persons had founded
monasteries whose chief task was the saying of masses for the souls of the
dead, based on the belief that the saying of a mass for a deceased person would
mitigate their punishment in purgatory and speed them towards the beatific
vision. The Cluniac order had in particular developed a liturgy for the dead,
and received huge financial endowments for this purpose.
At
first, the endowing of chantries was the province of Kings alone, since they
alone were able to afford to fund a mass to be said for their souls in
perpetuity. By the later middle ages, however, it was common practice for people
of all kinds to leave some level of funds for the saying of a mass for their
souls – even if it was just for a year. As Eamon Duffy writes:
Bequests
for short-term chantries of this sort, usually for periods from one to seven
years, formed an important element in the religious economy of many
communities…[1]
That
not much had changed by 1547 was indicated by Henry VIII’s own will. In his
last will and testament made on 30th December, 1546 asked that ‘an
altar shall be furnished for the saying of daily masses while the world shall
endure’.
The monasteries had been dissolved by
Henry VIII in 1538, a move which was arguably as much about seizing their
substantial assets for the royal coffers as it was about theological
conviction. The wording of the 1547 Act, if taken at face value, reveals that a
similar mix of financial expediency and a different theological outlook were at
work in the demise of the chantries:
The king’s most loving subjects,
the Lords spiritual and temporal, and the Commons, in this present Parliament
assembled, considering that a great part of superstition and errors in the
Christian religion has been brought into the minds and estimations of men, by
reason of the ignorance of their very true and perfect salvation through the
death of Jesus Christ, and by devising and phantasing vain opinions of
purgatory and masses satisfactory, to be done for them which be departed, the
which doctrine and vain opinion by nothing more is maintained and upholden,
than by the abuse of trentals, chantries, and other provisions made for the continuance
of the said blindness and ignorance…[2]
The
Act plainly states that the enormous funds by now tied up in the chantries was
to be diverted to the public good – to schools, universities and to the poor.
It is doubtful if that ever occurred. However, the theological rationale for
the dissolution was also plainly stated in the Act: namely, that the ‘very true
and perfect salvation through the death of Jesus Christ’ was now no longer to
be obscured by the religion of purgatory and the saying of masses. The entire
economic structure propped up by the theology of purgatory and the notion that
the saying of masses could make satisfaction for the sins of the dead was now
to be undone, because an alternative proposition was now in view that made
redundant the old way. The death of Christ obviated all other means of
satisfaction for sin. The prayers of the living could not alter the status of
the souls of the departed, since they could not of themselves be held to be
meritorious in any way.
It
is worth starting our consideration of the worship of Reformation Anglicanism
with the observation that it was clear what it was standing against. It was a strong ‘no’ - an
absolutely adamant ‘no’ - to the piety of medieval Catholic England with its
veneration of saints, its saying of masses for the dead, its sacred objects and
its ornate worship. The polemic against the practices of worship that adhered
to the old theology is as notable as the construction of a new form of worship
to replace it. While it is customary these days to note the continuity between
the English church of the medieval period and its sixteenth century
counterpart, rehearsing at great length the use Cranmer made of the Sarum
missal and so on, and to in so doing resist the Reformation propaganda which would
over-state the difference, the obvious fact is that here was a very major break
in the theory and practice of corporate worship. The Edwardian policy for
change allowed for continuity as a strategy for change-management, if at all.
What
exactly was being rejected in the dissolution of the chantries? It was a
wholesale rejection of the theological system that underpinned them. The
doctrine of purgatory and its associated practices were only a symptom, in the
minds of reformers, of a deeper malaise. That malady, as they saw it, had been
diagnosed brilliantly by Martin Luther and the other continental reformers from
1517 onwards, and it was this: that the soteriology of the medieval church
rested on faulty, unscriptural premises and involved at once an over-optimistic
assessment of the human condition, a misunderstanding of the role and nature of
the death of Jesus in our salvation, and ultimately a problematic doctrine of
God. It was no surprise that the worship which resulted from such grave errors
was full of superstition and corruption. Luther’s famous tirades against
Johannes Tetzel, the well-known seller of indulgences, frothed over from his
new conviction not simply that Tetzel was a greedy charlatan, but that the
theological error he was promulgating was endangering people’s very souls.
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