A moveable feast: Saint George's day celebrations and religious change in early modern England

Journal of British Studies

Volumn 38, Issue 1, 1999, Pages 1-27

  McClendon, Muriel C ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84949115731     PISSN: 00219371     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/386179     Document Type: Article

References (203)

1. J. J. Scarisbrick, The Reformation and the English People (Oxford, 1984), p. 1.
2. Also see Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c. 1400-1580 (New Haven, Conn., and London, 1992)
3. Christopher Haigh, ed., The English Reformation Revised (Cambridge, 1987)
4. Christopher Haigh, English Reformations: Religion, Politics and Society under the Tudors (Oxford, 1993)
5. Robert Whiting, The Blind Devotion of the People: Popular Religion and the English Reformation (Cambridge, 1989).
6. A. G. Dickens, The English Reformation (London, 1964)
7. "The Early Expansion of Protestantism, 1520-1558," Archiv fur Reformationgeschichte 78 (1987): 187-221
8. Claire Cross, Church and People, 1540-1660: The Triumph of the Laity (London, 1976).
9. See Patrick Collinson's review of Haigh's English Reformations in the Times Literary Supplement (22 October 1993), p. 15.
10. Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550-1640 (Cambridge, 1991)
11. Peter Lake, "Deeds against Nature: Cheap Print, Protestantism and Murder in Early Seventeenth-Century England," in Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England, ed. Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake (Stanford, Calif., 1993), pp. 257-85. The quotation appears on p. 277.
12. See also Patrick Collinson, The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Basingstoke, 1988)
13. Susan Brigden, London and the Reformation (Oxford, 1989)
14. Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Later Reformation in England, 1547-1603 (London, 1990).
15. Among the most important studies of ritual in early modern England are Charles V. Phythian-Adams, "Ceremony and the Citizen: The Communal Year at Coventry, 1450-1550," in Crisis and Order in English Towns, 1500-1700: Essays in Urban History, ed. Peter Clark and Paul Slack (London, 1972), pp. 86-116
16. Mervyn James, "Ritual, Drama and Social Body in the Late Medieval English Town," in Society, Politics and Culture: Studies in Early Modern England, ed. Peter Clark and Paul Slack (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 16-48
17. David Harris Sacks, "The Demise of the Martyrs: The Feasts of St. Clement and St. Katherine in Bristol, 1400-1600," Social History 11 (1986): 141-69
18. "Celebrating Authority in Bristol, 1475-1640," in Urban Life in the Renaissance, ed. Susan Zimmerman and Ronald F. E. Weissman (Newark, Del., 1987), pp. 187-223.
19. Phythian-Adams, "Ceremony and the Citizen"
20. Michael Berlin, "Civic Ceremony in Early Modern London," Urban History Yearbook (1986), pp. 15-27
21. Sacks, "Celebrating Authority."
22. Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, p. 452.
23. IbidJames, "Ritual, Drama"
24. MM Rubin's critical comments on James in her Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge, 1991), esp. pp. 261-71.
25. Sacks, "Demise of the Martyrs," pp. 143-46
26. Rubin, Corpus Christi, pp. 265-67, 273-74.
27. Ronald Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England (Oxford, 1994), p. 27, notes that many communities did not celebrate the feast, London among them. But he still identifies the day as "one of the national festivals of early sixteenth-century England."
28. P. J. Hogarth summarizes the various accounts of the life of Saint George in "St. George: The Evolution of a Saint and His Dragon," History Today 30 (April 1980): 17-22.
29. Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend
30. Or, Lives of the Saints as Englished by William Caxton, ed. F. S. Ellis (London, 1900), 3: 125-43 (the quotation appears on p. 128).
31. Christina Hole, English Folk-Heroes (London, 1948), pp. 114-15
32. Hogarth, "St. George," p. 19
33. Gabor Klaniczay, The Uses of Supernatural Power: The Transformation of Popular Religion in Medieval and Early-Modern Europe, trans. Susan Singerman and ed. Karen Margolis (Cambridge, 1990), p. 116
34. David Scott Fox, Saint George: The Saint with Three Faces (Shooter's Lodge, Windsor Forest, 1983), pp. 59-63, 98-123.
35. Jean Froissart, Chronicles, trans, and ed. Geoffrey Brereton (London, 1968), pp. 62, 66-67, 80, 136-37.
36. Hole, English Folk-Heroes, p. 115
37. Fox, Saint George, p. 66
38. Jacqueline Simpson, British Dragons (London, 1980), p. 95.
39. John M. Wasson, ed., Records of Early English Drama (hereafter REED): Devon (Toronto, 1986), p. xxxiii
40. Christopher Haigh, Reformation and Resistance in Tudor Lancashire (Cambridge, 1975), p. 67
41. Simpson, British Dragons, plate 13
42. Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, p. 155.
43. Also see Whiting, Blind Devotion, pp. 49-51, 54, 203-4, 218.
44. Brigden, London and the Reformation, pp. 24-25
45. Norman P. Tanner, The Church in Late Medieval Norwich, 1370-1532 (Toronto, 1984), pp. xii-xiii
46. Martha C. Skeeters, Community and Clergy: Bristol and the Reformation, c. 1530-c. 1570 (Oxford, 1993), pp. 31, 208, n. 14
47. Charles Phythian-Adams, Desolation of a City: Coventry and the Urban Crisis of the Late Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1979), pp. 160, 168, 173, 176, 275
48. Collinson, Birthpangs, p. 50.
49. For guilds dedicated to Saint George, see Mary Grace, ed., The Records of St. George's Gild in Norwich, 1389-1547: A Transcript with an Introduction, Norfolk Record Society, vol. 9 (1937)
50. Mary Bateson, ed., Records of the Borough of Leicester (Cambridge, 1905), 3:24, 50
51. Hole, English Folk-Heroes, pp. 116-17
52. Eileen White, The St. Christopher and St. George Guild of York, Borthwick Papers no. 72 (York, 1987)
53. Wasson, ed., REED: Devon, pp. xlvii, lii
54. H. F. Westlake, The Parish Gilds of Mediaeval England (London, 1919), pp. 137-238
55. Hutton, Rise and Fall, p. 55.
56. Hole, English Folk-Heroes, p. 115
57. Fox, Saint George, pp. 63-64.
58. Caxton also noted that Saint George was also "the cry of men of war" in Voragine, Golden Legend, 3:133.
59. For a similar development concerning the expansion of the cult of Saint Landislaus in Hungary, see Klaniczay, Supernatural Power, pp. 112-20.
60. Fox, Saint George, pp. 15-16.
61. Voragine, Golden Legend, 3:129-32.
62. E. K. Chambers, The Medieval Stage (Oxford, 1903), 1:224, 2:132
63. Wasson, ed., REED: Devon, pp. xvii, xxiv-xxv, 208-10, 231, 442, 449
64. Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (London, 1978), p. 194.
65. Most of what is known about these plays comes from later texts. See Chambers's discussion in Medieval Stage, 1:210-27, in which the themes of death and resurrection are more clearly delineated.
66. Collinson, Birthpangs, p. 50.
67. David Cressy, Bonfires and Bells: National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1989), p. 4.
68. Ronald C. Finucane, Miracles and Pilgrims: Popular Beliefs in Medieval England (London, 1977), pp. 118-27, 152-72, 210-11
69. Tanner, Late Medieval Norwich, pp. 86-87
70. Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, pp. 165-66
71. Enid Porter, The Folklore of East Anglia (London, 1974), pp. 116-17.
72. David Cressy notes, in Bonfires and Bells, p. 5, that Saint Thomas remained quite popular in England even after his feast was officially struck from the calendar in the sixteenth century.
73. 26Hutton, Merry England, p. 55.
74. Phythian-Adams, in Desolation, pp. 172-73, has noted that one legend claimed Coventry as Saint George's birth and death place, but it does not appear to have been much observed outside that city for the period covered in this essay.
75. On relics of Saint George in England, see Grace, ed., Records of St. George's Gild, p. 30
76. Hogarth, "St. George," p. 19.
77. For examples of saints who had such connections, see Ethel L. Urlin, Festivals, Holy Days, and Saints Days: A Study in Origins and Survivals in Church Ceremonies and Secular Customs (n.d.; reprint, Detroit, 1979), pp. 32-34, 186-90
78. William Hudson and John C. Tingey, eds., The Records of the City of Norwich (London, 1906-10), 2:liii, 311
79. Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London, 1971), pp. 27-28
80. Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, p. 162
81. Phythian-Adams, Desolation, p. 118
82. Burke, Popular Culture, p. 177.
83. Voragine, Golden Legend, 3:133.
84. Chambers, Medieval Stage, 1:222
85. Hole, English Folk-Heroes, p. 116
86. Fox, Saint George, p. 74
87. Cressy, Bonfires and Bells, pp. 20-21
88. Hutton, Rise and Fall, p. 27
89. Froissart, Chronicles, pp. 66-67.
90. Wasson, ed., REED: Devon, pp. 209,442
91. Whiting, Blind Devotion, p. 106
92. Hutton, Rise and Fall, p. 27
93. Haigh, English Reformations, p. 30.
94. J. R. Lander, Government and Community: England, 1450-1509 (Cambridge, Mass., 1980), p. 165
95. Haigh, English Reformations, p. 32
96. Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, p. 149
97. Rubin, Corpus Christi, pp. 278-79
98. Watt, Cheap Print, p. 22.
99. Mary Bateson, ed., Records of the Borough of Leicester (Cambridge, 1905), 3:24-25, 33, 42, 49-50
100. White, St. Christopher and St. George Guild, p. 16. The last riding of Saint George at Leicester appears to have been in 1542.
101. Skeeters, Community and Clergy, pp. 31-32
102. Phythian-Adams, Desolation, p. 173
103. R. W. Ingram, ed., REED: Coventry (Toronto, 1981), pp. 113, 151.
104. J. J. Anderson, ed., REED: Newcastle upon Tyne (Toronto, 1982), pp. xv, 13-14, 16
105. Wasson, ed., REED: Devon, pp. 125, 130.
106. Grace, ed., Records of St. George's Gild, esp. pp. 6-14
107. Ben R. McRee, "Charity and Gild Solidarity in Late Medieval England," Journal of British Studies 32 (1993): 219
108. "Unity or Division? The Social Meaning of Guild Ceremony in Urban Communities," in City and Spectacle in Medieval Europe, ed. Barbara A. Hanawalt and Kathryn L. Reyerson (Minneapolis, 1994), pp. 189-207.
109. Ben R. McRee, "Religious Gilds and Civic Order: The Case of Norwich in the Late Middle Ages," Speculum 67 (1992): 90.
110. See also Peter Clark and Paul Slack, English Towns in Transition, 1500-1700 (London, 1976), p. 129, who have also observed that many urban guilds "were social clubs for the elite."
111. Grace, ed., Records of St. George's Gild, pp. 16-17
112. McRee, "Unity or Division," pp. 196-97.
113. McRee, "Unity or Division," pp. 200-201.
114. Frederick W. Hackwood, Dragons and Dragon Slayers (London, n.d.), p. 110
115. Simpson, British Dragons, p. 96
116. McRee, "Unity or Division," pp. 195-96, describes the procession's route
117. Simpson, British Dragons, p. 96
118. Porter, Folklore, p. 60.
119. Grace, ed., Records of St. George's Gild, p. 20.
120. This and the following two paragraphs are based on McRee, "Unity or Division," pp. 198-201.
121. Basil Cozens-Hardy and Ernest A. Kent, The Mayors of Norwich, 1404-1835: Being Biographical Notes on the Mayors of the Old Corporation (Norwich, 1938), pp. 20-22, outlines Wetherby's political career.
122. The Earl of Suffolk was one of the most powerful aristocrats in East Anglia and also wielded considerable political influence at the court of Henry VI. J. R. Lander, The Wars of the Roses (New York, 1967), p. 65
123. Government and Community, pp. 180-88
124. R. L. Storey, The End of the House of Lancaster, 2d ed. (Gloucester, 1986), pp. 54-57, 40-62, 218-25.
125. For a more extensive treatment of this period of Norwich's history, see Hudson and Tingey, eds., Records of Norwich, 2:xliv-ci, 328-38
126. Storey, House of Lancaster, pp. 218-25
127. McRee, "Religious Gilds," pp. 83-90
128. Norman Tanner, "The Cathedral and the City," in Norwich Cathedral: Church, City and Diocese, 1096-1996, ed. Ian Atherton, Eric Fernie, Christopher Harper-Bill, and Hassell Smith (London, 1996), pp. 263-66.
129. McRee, "Unity or Division," p. 198.
130. "According to P. J. Hogarth, the slaying of a dragon in medieval lore was "an allegory of the triumph of good over evil; of the true faith over paganism," although sometimes dragons represented "simply evil." "St. George," p. 20.
131. McRee, "Unity or Division," p. 199.
132. Wetherby had died in 1444 or 1445.
133. Robert Toppes had served as mayor of Norwich four times between 1435 and 1458; Cozens-Hardy and Kent, Mayors of Norwich, p. 23.
134. Lewis W. Spitz, ed., The Protestant Reformation (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1966), p. 15
135. Brigden, London and the Reformation, pp. 266-67
136. Sacks, "Demise of the Martyrs," p. 168-69
137. Cressy, Bonfires and Bells, pp. 4-5.
138. Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, pp. 394-97
139. Whiting, Blind Devotion, pp. 71-72.
140. Only the feasts of the Apostles, the Blessed Virgin, Saint George's Day, Ascension Day, the nativity of Saint John the Baptist, All Saints' Day, and Candlemas remained officially recognized; Cressy, Bonfires and Bells, p. 5
141. A. J. Slavin, ed., Humanism, Reform and Reformation in England (New York, 1969), p. 152.
142. Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, pp. 450-53
143. Haigh, English Reformations, pp. 168-70.
144. Alan Kreider, English Chantries: The Road to Dissolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), chap. 8
145. Dickens, English Reformation, pp. 205-17
146. Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, pp. 454-56
147. Haigh, English Reformations, pp. 171-78.
148. Cressy, Bonfires and Bells, pp. 6-7.
149. Wasson, ed., REED: Devon, pp. 63, 211
150. Whiting, Blind Devotion, pp. 72, 102, 106, 259, and also pp. 110-11 on resistance to the Chantries Act.
151. Ingram, ed., REED: Coventry, pp. 113, 151
152. Phythian-Adams, "Ceremony and the Citizen," p. 79
153. Desolation, pp. 172-73.
154. D. M. Palliser, The Reformation in York, 1534-1553, Borthwick Papers no. 40 (York, 1971), p. 22
155. White, St. Christopher and St. George, pp. 16, 19-22.
156. "Grace, ed., Records of St. George's Gild, pp. 28-29.
157. These changes were not sufficient for some of the guild's members, who balked at participating in the 1548 celebration; see Muriel C. McClendon, " 'Against God's Word': Government, Religion, and the Crisis of Authority in Early Reformation Norwich," Sixteenth Century Journal 25 (1994): 353-69.
158. Haigh, English Reformations, p. 214.
159. In some places such as Coventry, the celebration was clearly not revived: Ingram, ed., REED: Coventry, pp. 198-210.
160. Images of Saint George were, according to Hutton, Rise and Fall, pp. 98-99, set up again in a number of parishes and may have been taken in procession.
161. Lawrence M. Clopper, ed., REED: Chester (Toronto, 1979), pp. liii, 55, 57-62.
162. On the reestablishment of guilds under Mary, see Scarisbrick, Reformation and the English People, pp. 37-39, 131-33.
163. However, Whiting, Blind Devotion, pp. 111-12, notes that in the southwest, those guilds "were invariably shorn of their intercessory and image-supportive functions."
164. Also see Alexandra F. Johnston and Margaret Rogerson, eds., REED: York (Toronto, 1979), 1:310 and 318-19 for a list of expenditures for the 1554 observance
165. White, St. Christopher and St. George, p. 16
166. Haigh, English Reformations, pp. 214-15, on the restoration of other festivities.
167. Norfolk Record Office (hereafter NRO) Minutes of Saint George's Guild, 1452-1602, pp. 210, 203
168. NRO Assembly Minute Book, 1551-1568, fol. 64r.
169. Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, pp. 530-33.
170. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983).
171. See esp. Hobsbawm's introduction, pp. 1-14.
172. RO Minutes of Saint George's, pp. 186-87.
173. Cressy, Bonfires and Bells, p. 7
174. Johnston and Rogerson, eds., REED: York, 1:327.
175. NRO Minutes of Saint George's, p. 214
176. reprinted in David Galloway, ed., REED: Norwich, 1540-1642 (Toronto, 1984), p. 47.
177. On Midsummer celebrations, see Cressy, Bonfires and Bells, pp. 25-28
178. Hutton, Rise and Fall, 37-44.
179. NRO Minutes of Saint George's, p. 316.
180. Cressy, Bonfires and Bells, pp. 25-28
181. Urlin, Festivals, pp. 140-50
182. Timothy Hawes, ed., An Index to Norwich City Officers, 1453-1835, Norfolk Record Society, vol. 52 (1986), p. x.
183. Galloway, ed., REED: Norwich, pp. 166, 169, 178, 183, 184, 195, 208, on payments for equipment for the maintenance of the George figure and of the dragon.
184. As suggested by Hutton, Rise and Fall, p. 115.
185. "An Account of the Company of St. George in Norwich: From Mackerell's Manuscript History," Norfolk Archaeology 3 (1852): 363-64
186. Galloway, ed., REED: Norwich, pp. 184, 208, 231.
187. In 1645, the company had banned the dragon, fools, and whifflers from the procession, along with the customary decorations of the procession route. "An Account of the Company of St. George in Norwich," p. 354
188. David Underdown, Revel, Riot and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England, 1603-1660 (Oxford, 1985), p. 259, n. 64.
189. Galloway, ed., REED: Norwich, pp. xxviii-xxix
190. "An Account of the Company of St. George in Norwich," esp. pp. 364-74
191. Simpson, British Dragons, pp. 101-2.
192. In 1430-31, a Saint George play was performed in Chester. Clopper, ed., REED: Chester, p. 8.
193. Peter Borsay, The English Urban Renaissance: Culture and Society in the Provincial Town, 1660-1770 (Oxford, 1989), p. 181.
194. Clopper, ed., REED: Chester, pp. 258-60
195. David M. Bergeron, English Civic Pageantry, 1558-1642 (Columbia, S.C., 1971), pp. 92-94.
196. Collinson, Birthpangs, p. 50
197. Haigh, English Reformations, p. 157.
198. For similar developments concerning the celebration of the feast of Saint Antonin by the London Grocers' Company, see Joseph P. Ward, Metropolitan Communities: Trade Guilds, Identity and Change in Early Modern London (Stanford, Calif., 1997), pp. 112-15.
199. On Martyn, see Haigh, English Reformations, pp. 1-3.
200. Cressy, Bonfires and Bells, p. 21.
201. Fox, Saint George, pp. 7, 72, 93-96.
202. Hobsbawm and Ranger, Invention of Tradition.
203. On the use of symbols to knit together nations as anonymous communities and assert their ancient traditions, see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, 2d ed. (London, 1991).