Sacred Topography and Social Memory: Religious Change and the … · 2020-04-01 · ism. Reformed theology fundamentally undermined traditional assumptions about the presence of the

ALEXANDRA WALSHAM

Sacred Topography and Social Memory:Religious Change and the Landscape in

Early Modern Britain and Ireland1

This article analyses the relationship between the tumultuous religious changes of thesixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the landscape of the British Isles. It examinesthe immediate impact and long-term cultural repercussions of the Protestant andCatholic Reformations on perceptions of and practices associated with the naturalworld and physical environment, as well as the influence exerted by intellectual andcultural trends associated with developments in science, medicine, and antiquarian-ism. Reformed theology fundamentally undermined traditional assumptions aboutthe presence of the sacred in the material universe, but the religious ruptures of theera were tempered and complicated by elements of continuity and movements ofcounter-reaction. Springs, trees, stones, and other notable topographical landmarksretained powerful religious resonances after the Reformation. Potent reminders of thepre-Reformation past, they also provided a stimulus to the making of new myths andlegends and acted as catalysts of the transformation of social memory.jorh_1154 31..51

IntroductionHistorians of the Reformation in the British Isles have devoted much attention toanalysing the impact which the advent of Protestantism had upon the ecclesias-tical structures and artefacts that were the most conspicuous symbols andtangible reminders of medieval Catholicism. They have investigated in consi-derable detail the official and unofficial iconoclastic attacks that reducedancient monasteries to gaunt and skeletal ruins and which permanently scarredcathedrals and parish churches with the visible marks of the reformers’ war

1. I am very grateful to the Religious History Society and the Australian Research CouncilNetwork for Early European Research for inviting me to deliver the keynote lecture at theAustralian Historical Association conference at the University of Melbourne in July 2008 fromwhich this article derives, and to the members of the audience who asked fruitful questions on thatoccasion. This article offers an overview of my The Reformation of the Landscape: Religion,Identity and Memory in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press,2011), in which the arguments outlined here are more fully developed and documented.

Alexandra Walsham is a Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge and a Fellowof Trinity College.

Journal of Religious HistoryVol. 36, No. 1, March 2012doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9809.2011.01154.x

31© 2012 The Author

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against the idols. The chief victims of this ongoing campaign to re-order spacein religious buildings and to eliminate physical objects that were perceived tostimulate superstition and false belief are all too familiar: images, statues, andshrines; rood screens, crucifixes, free-standing crosses, and stained glasswindows; bells, organs, and fonts; roof bosses, altar rails, and brass inscriptions.The holocaust of these hallowed items that accompanied the upheavals ofthe 1530s, 1540s and 1550s failed to satisfy the iconophobic zeal of Protes-tant radicals and the civil wars of the 1640s consequently unleashed a seriesof renewed spasms of godly vandalism.2 Nor have the gradual shifts in theologi-cal and liturgical temperature, which culminated in the 1630s in the Laudiandrive to restore “the beauty of holiness”, been ignored. A growing body ofresearch is illuminating the character and significance of the Caroline pro-gramme to re-clothe ecclesiastical structures in aesthetic reverence and splen-dour, the controversies these policies engendered in all three kingdoms of therealm, and the contentious but influential legacy that they left to the RestorationChurch.3

There has been surprisingly little scrutiny, however, of the imprint that theReformation left upon the wider landscape of the British Isles — upon thenatural but also partly man-made environment beyond the churchyard wallsand outside the inner precincts of priories, cathedrals, and convents. Few havepaused to consider how the movements for religious reform and renewal thattransformed British and Irish life between 1530 and 1700 affected perceptionsand practices associated with the world of trees, woods, springs, caves, moun-tain peaks, rocky outcrops, and other distinctive locations in these north Atlan-tic islands.4 Against the backdrop of the well-studied changes to the Britishcountryside linked with urbanization, enclosure, agricultural innovation, aris-tocratic programmes of building, and later industrialization, the relative schol-arly neglect of this subject seems all the more striking. This article is a partialattempt to fill this historiographical gap.

2. See, among others, J. R. Phillips, The Reformation of Images: Destruction of Art in England1535–1660 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973); D. Knowles, Bare Ruined Choirs: TheDissolution of the English Monasteries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976); R.Whiting, “Abominable Idols: Images and Image Breaking under Henry VIII,” Journal of Ecclesi-astical History 33 (1982): 30–47; M. Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, Volume I: Laws against Images(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); M. Aston, “Iconoclasm in England: Official and Clan-destine,” in Faith and Fire: Popular and Unpopular Religion, 1350–1600 (London: HambledonPress, 1993); J. Spraggon, Puritan Iconoclasm in the English Civil War (Woodbridge: Boydell andBrewer, 2003); D. McRoberts, “Material Destruction Caused by the Scottish Reformation,” InnesReview 9 (1958): 126–72.3. See P. Lake, “The Laudian Style: Order, Uniformity, and the Pursuit of the Beauty of Holinessin the 1630s,” in The Early Stuart Church, 1603–1642, edited by K. Fincham (Basingstoke:Macmillan, 1993), 161–85; G. Parry, The Arts of the Anglican Counter-Reformation: Glory, Laudand Honour (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2006); K. Fincham and N. Tyacke, AltarsRestored: The Changing Face of English Religious Worship, 1547–c.1700 (Oxford: Oxford Uni-versity Press, 2007); A. Spicer, Calvinist Churches in Early Modern Europe (Manchester:Manchester University Press, 2007), ch. 2.4. Partial exceptions are K. Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England,1500–1800 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983); and S. Schama, Landscape and Memory (London:Harper Collins, 1995), which treat some of these themes. See also the important work on Norfolkby N. Whyte, Inhabiting the Landscape: Place, Custom and Memory, 1500–1800 (Oxford: Wind-gather Press, 2009), esp. ch. 2.

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Drawing inspiration from the work of geographers, archaeologists, andanthropologists, it proceeds from the assumption that the landscape that sur-rounds us is a cultural construction and artefact. It is “the autobiography ofsociety,” a “manuscript,” or “palimpsest,” a porous surface upon which eachgeneration inscribes its own attitudes and values without ever being ableentirely to erase those of the preceding one.5 It is also a repository of thecollective memory of the people who inhabit it and a critical forum in whichideas about social identity are forged. Such suggestions have particular reso-nance for the early modern period. As Keith Thomas, Adam Fox, and DanielWoolf have demonstrated, one of the most distinctive features of the popularperception of the past in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was the extentto which it was shaped by the visual evidence of the physical environment.6

This was an era in which historical consciousness arguably revolved lessaround the passage of time than a sense of place: it was more spatial incharacter than it was chronological or linear. It was also an era in which theboundaries between nature and culture were conceptually blurred: contempo-raries chronically confused geological and natural phenomena with prehistoricmonuments and other architectural edifices erected by human agency.

By investigating the relationship between the Reformation and the landscapewe may learn much about both the immediate consequences and the long-termrepercussions of the theological, liturgical, and cultural ruptures inaugurated inthe mid-sixteenth century and reversed, qualified, and intensified at variouspoints before 1700. In particular, this article seeks to illuminate the process bywhich Protestantism redefined how the sacred was present in the materialuniverse and the delicate but decisive mental and cultural adjustments thataccompanied the successive upheavals that marked these centuries. It alsoexamines the manner in which this religious revolution re-orientated attitudestowards the medieval Church and sought to rewrite an inherited historicalnarrative about the conversion of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland frompaganism to the Christian faith. This endeavour was not merely fiercely con-tested by Roman Catholics but also refined and tempered by competing strandsof opinion within the ecclesiastical mainstream. To this extent the landscape ofthe British Isles became a battleground in which wars about memory were

5. See, for example, C. Sauer, The Morphology of Landscape (Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 1938); D. Cosgrove and S. Daniels, eds., The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on theSymbolic Representation, Design and Use of Past Environments (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-sity Press, 1988), esp. 1–10; C. C. Park, Sacred Worlds: An Introduction to Geography and Religion(London, New York: Routledge, 1994), esp. 198; D. L. Carmichael et al., eds., Sacred Sites, SacredPlaces (London, New York: Routledge, 1994), esp. xviii; C. Tilley, The Phenomenology of Land-scape: Places, Paths and Monuments (Oxford and Providence, RI: Berg, 1994), esp. ch. 1; E.Hirsch and M. O’Hanlon, eds., The Anthropology of Landscape: Perspectives on Place and Space(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); P. J. Ucko and R. Layton, eds., The Archaeology andAnthropology of Landscape: ShapingYour Landscape (London, New York: Routledge, 1999); I. D.Whyte, Landscape and History since 1500 (London: Reaktion, 2002); A. R. H. Baker, Geographyand History: Bridging the Divide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), ch. 4.6. K. Thomas, The Perception of the Past in Early Modern England, Creighton Trust Lecture(London: University of London, 1984), esp. 5–6; A. Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England1500–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), ch. 4, esp. 216–19, 238–42, 253–58; D.Woolf, The Social Circulation of the Past: English Historical Culture 1500–1730 (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 2003), ch. 9, esp. 302, 311, 350.

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waged. The story traced here is a somewhat paradoxical one, in which theimpulses towards destruction and preservation and the processes of remem-bering and forgetting are often mutually reinforcing. As we shall see, sixteenth-and seventeenth-century attempts to eradicate the inherited myths and legendsthat were woven around the physical landscape were inseparable from a ten-dency to engender new ones.

ISpace permits only a brief summary of the process by which the pre-Reformation landscape was overlaid with successive sedimentary layers ofreligious association and meaning. Veneration of nature had occupied a centralplace in the pagan religions of the British Isles and many sites of heathenworship were assimilated by the Roman and Saxon invaders and transferred tothe tutelage of their own pantheon of deities.7 The attitude of the early Christianmissionaries to the indigenous magic of the countryside was ambivalent. Onthe one hand, there is evidence of a programme of pragmatic accommodationand ingenious compromise, along the lines recommended by Gregory theGreat in his letter to the abbot Mellitus of 601 CE: instead of demolishingpagan temples Augustine was instructed to re-consecrate them to the service ofGod.8 Knowlton in Dorset is a striking example of this strategy in practice: herea Norman church was built in the middle of a Neolithic henge.9 On the otherhand, there exists a body of legislation and homiletic literature indicative of thecontinuing anxieties about idolatry that surrounded wells, trees, and stones thatwere the focus of dubious ritual and divinatory activity. Canons and decrees ofthe ecclesiastical councils prohibited their worship and the writers of peniten-tials condemned such practices upon pain of excommunication. The eleventh-century Archbishop of Canterbury Ælfric complained, for instance, that “somemen are so blinded that they bring their offerings to an earth fast stone, and alsoto trees and to well-springs, just as witches teach, and will not understand howfoolishly they act, or how the dead stone or the dumb tree can help them, orgive them health, when they themselves never stir from the place.”10

7. See, among others, R. Hutton, The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles: Their Natureand Legacy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); W. H. C. Frend, “The Christianization ofRoman Britain,” in Christianity in Britain, 300–700, edited by M. W. Barley and R. P. C. Hanson(Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1968), 37–49; C. Thomas, Christianity in Roman Britain toAD 500 (London: Batsford Academic and Educational, 1981); J. Blair, The Church in Anglo-SaxonSociety (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), esp. ch. 1; B. Yorke, The Conversion of Britain:Religion, Politics and Society in Britain c. 600–800 (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2006), esp. ch. 2.8. On the creative accommodation of pagan belief and practice by Christianity, see V. I. J. Flint,The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), and the review byR. Bartlett, “Missionaries and Magic in Dark-Age Europe,” Past and Present 136 (1992): 186–205.Gregory the Great’s instructions to Augustine are noted in Bede, A History of the English Churchand People, translated and edited by L. Sherley-Price; Rev. R. E. Latham (Harmondsworth:Penguin, 1968 edn), bk iii, chs 2, 4.9. See L. Grinsell, “The Christianisation of Prehistoric and Other Pagan Sites,” LandscapeHistory 8 (1986): 33–37.10. See W. W. Skeat, ed., Ælfric’s Lives of the Saints Being a Set of Sermons on Saints’ DaysFormerly Observed by the English Church, 2 vols (Early English Text Society 76, 82; 1881, 1885),vol. i, 372–75; A. L. Meaney, “Ælfric and Idolatry,” Journal of Religious History 13 (1984):119–35; Meaney, “Bede and Anglo-Saxon Paganism,” Parergon NS, no. 3 (1985): 1–29. Forecclesiastical decrees and injunctions, see, for example, D. Whitelock, M. Brett, and C. N. L.



Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to underestimate Christianity’s successin appropriating this hallowed landscape. Medieval hagiography providesample testimony to its capacity to create a tissue of topographical legend toexplain its salient features. Holy wells spring up at the spots where the decapi-tated heads of virgin martyrs like Winefride and Sidwell come to rest or whereintrepid servants of the Lord strike a rock to baptize their followers or satisfytheir thirst; the walking sticks of saints such as Ninian and Etheldreda recur-rently burst into flower and grow into trees; others, including Agnes andSamson, leave indelible footprints in hollows and cavities of rock.11 Over timesuch stories attached themselves tenaciously to particular locations. Hence adeep cleft in the Cornish cliffs bore witness to St Minver’s combat with thedevil; fossils found near Whitby in Yorkshire had been snakes transformed intostone by the prayers of St Hilda; a large granite slab on one of the Orkneyislands was the makeshift boat St Magnus had used to convey himself to theScottish mainland; and a hillock in south west Wales was ground that hadmounted up under the feet of St David while he was preaching against thePelagian heresy.12

These sites were not merely signposts to the Christian past; they were alsowidely regarded as locations where supernatural power was especially potent.Many became the destinations of pilgrims anxious to atone for their sins,earn merit in the eyes of God, and secure miraculous relief from cripplingillnesses and painful conditions. A rock on the coast of Kent upon which StMildreth had left the imprint of her foot was the centre of a thaumaturgic cultin the eleventh century and among the many wonder working springs towhich crowds flocked in the later Middle Ages those of St Frideswide atOxford, St Anne at Buxton in Derbyshire, St Catherine’s Well at Libertonin Scotland, and St Winefride at Holywell in North Wales were parti-cularly prominent.13 The discovery (or rediscovery) of these numinous placescontinued until the very eve of the Reformation. Embellished with chapelsand covered with stone structures, some enjoyed royal and episcopal patron-age and attracted formal indulgences, but many more were of marginal status

Brooke, eds., Councils and Synods with Other Documents Relating to the English Church, I, Pt I:AD 871–1204, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), i. 320, 463, 489. For penitentials, see the“Liber Poenitentalis” of Archbishop Theodore, in B. Thorpe, Ancient Laws and Institutes ofEngland, 2 vols (London: G. Ayre and A. Spottiswoode, 1840), ii. 32–34, esp. §8.11. See C. G. Loomis, White Magic: An Introduction to the Folklore of Christian Legend(Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1948), ch. 8; Hippolyte Delehaye, The Legendsof the Saints, translated by D. Attwater (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1998 edn), ch. 6.12. See N. Orme, ed., Nicholas Roscarrock’s Lives of the Saints: Cornwall and Devon, Devonand Cornwall Record Society, NS 35 (1992): 90 (St Minver); William Camden, Britannia, editedand expanded by Edmund Gibson (London, 1695), 751 (St Hilda) and 641 (St David); MartinMartin, A Description of the Western Islands of Scotland (London, 1703), 367 (St Magnus).13. For St Mildreth, see D. W. Rollason, The Mildrith Legend: A Study in Early MedievalHagiography in England (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1982), 66–67. For St Frideswide,see J. Blair, “Saint Frideswide Reconsidered,” Oxoniensia 52 (1987): 71–127. For Liberton, seeJ. M. Mackinlay, Ancient Church Dedications in Scotland: Non Scriptural Dedications (Edin-burgh: D. Douglas, 1914), 424–25. For Holywell, see D. J. Hall, English Mediaeval Pilgrimage(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965), ch. 2; and my “Holywell: Contesting Sacred Space inEarly Modern Wales,” in Sacred Space in Early Modern Europe, edited by W. Coster and A. Spicer(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 211–36. More generally, see R. Finucane,Miracles and Pilgrims: Popular Beliefs in Medieval England (London: Dent, 1977), ch. 11.



and a stimulus to popular practices that sober churchmen dismissed aswicked, “superstitious,” and magical. In 1299, for instance, Oliver Sutton,bishop of Lincoln, prohibited resort to a spring near Linslade in Bucking-hamshire by “many people of inconstant faith, out of a false sense of devo-tion.”14 Displacing attention from cathedrals, monasteries, and parishchurches, such sites helped to perpetuate a pattern of attachment to the widerlandscape that fragmented even as it enriched late medieval piety. Evenwhere they won the seal of official approval, they were symptomatic of thetensions between centre and periphery, local and universal, which markedpre-Reformation religion all over Britain and Ireland, and indeed Europe asa whole. They were the focus for anxieties that were echoed and extended inthe late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries by the lollard followers of JohnWyclif and by humanist writers like Desiderius Erasmus: vehement denun-ciation of “veyn pilgrimagis and offryngis to ded stones and rotun stokkis”became something of a hallmark of heretical opinion in the late-fifteenth andearly-sixteenth centuries.15 The concerns that clustered around such sitespoint to areas of vulnerability that complicate recent emphasis on the coher-ence and vitality of traditional religion.16 The Christianization of the land-scape may have all but displaced memories of ancient paganism by 1500, butthe notion that nature was invested with a sensitivity to the sacred did notcease to test and challenge the Church’s equilibrium.

The advent of the Reformation represented a significant threat to theassumptions that underpinned this religious culture. Protestant theology fun-damentally rejected the notion that certain places possessed intrinsic sanctityand vehemently denied that pilgrimage to them could help one to gain a placein heaven or secure any kind of divine intercession. According to early evan-gelicals like John Bradford and Thomas Becon, they were “stinking traditions”and “trifelyng fantasties invented of the ydle braynes of the Papistes for lucressake.”17 They were also manifestations of the heinous sin of idolatry describedin the first commandment. The Reformation catalyzed a crusade to demolishphysical objects which seduced people to commit the “odious and abominable”crime of “spiritual fornication.”18 Hence the repeated order in visitation articles

14. See J. Shinners, ed., Medieval Popular Religion 1000–1500 (Peterborough, Ontario: Broad-view Press, 1997), 463–65.15. A. Hudson, ed., Selections from English Wycliffite Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-sity Press, 1978), 88.16. In particular, the influential account of E. Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: TraditionalReligion in England c. 1400–1580 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991). Cf. G.Bernard, “Vitality and Vulnerability in the Late Medieval Church: Pilgrimage on the Eve of theBreak with Rome,” in The End of the Middle Ages? England in the Fifteenth and SixteenthCenturies, edited by J. L. Watts (Stroud: Sutton, 1998), 199–233.17. A. Townsend, ed., The Writings of John Bradford, M.A, Fellow of Pembroke Hall, Cambridge,and Prebendary of St Paul’s, Martyr, 1555 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1848),280–81; T. Becon, A Christmas bankette garnyshed with many pleasaunt and deynty dishes (1542),sig. G1r.18. See “An homily against peril of idolatry, and superfluous decking of churches,” in Sermonsand Homilies Appointed to be Read in Churches in the Time of Queen Elizabeth of Famous Memory(London: SPCK, 1842 edn), 247, 268.



and ecclesiastical injunctions to “utterly extinct and destroy” all “monumentsof superstition and idolatry” “so that there remain no memory of the same inwalls, glass windows, or elsewhere.”19

As well as precipitating a purge of parochial churches and providing themandate for Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries, these preoccupationsled to official attacks on hallowed sites connected with the natural environ-ment. Like cultic images and statutes, these were regarded as idols, as “unprof-itable schoolmasters,” “teachers of lies,” and “beast-like instructors.”20 In 1536,for instance, the shrine and tabernacle surrounding the holy well of St Anne atBuxton were defaced and locked up and the votive offerings and replica limbsleft behind by grateful visitors confiscated.21 In Scotland the first GeneralAssembly decreed in December 1560 that a well house dedicated to the CelticSaint Tradwell “be raysit and utterlie cast down and destroyed.”22 This was anongoing process which extended well beyond the initial phases of the Refor-mation. It was only in July 1592, for example, that the chapel covering thesacred fountain of St Meigan in Pembrokeshire was dismantled, the workmenbeing instructed not to leave a single stone still standing.23 In Ireland thefamous subterranean cave on a barren island in Lough Derg in Co. Donegalknown as St Patrick’s Purgatory seems to have escaped relatively unscatheduntil 1632, when the Protestant authorities took steps to level it, this beingadjudged “the best and fittest means to prevent and wholly take away thecontinuance” of superstitious ceremonies and pilgrimages to the same.24 Andin 1643 the Calvinist presbytery of Dumbarton was instructed to “ditt up anddemolish” a spring at Lochlongshead, to the end that “it be no more a stumble-ing block” to unlearned laypeople.25

Yet only a small fraction of the numinous places in the landscape ever cameunder the axe. The Tudor and Stuart state lacked both the bureaucratic capacityand the mechanical resources to flatten all such topographical landmarks.Many sacred spots evaded physical annihilation, reflecting the limits of themagisterial Reformation throughout the British Isles. Pragmatism operated asa brake on radical impulses that sought to obliterate every last trace of theCatholic past. A combination of inertia and indifference left many sites thatsustained legends of the saints virtually undisturbed. This helps to explain

19. Edward Cardwell, ed., Documentary Annals of the Reformed Church of England, 2 vols(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1844), i. 6–7, 17, 50, 212, 221.20. John Ayre, ed., The Catechism of Thomas Becon, Parker Society (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1844), 61.21. Thomas Wright, ed., Three Chapters of Letters Relating to the Suppression of the Monas-teries, Camden Society, 1st series 26 (London, 1843), 143.22. Thomas Thomson, ed., Acts and Proceedings of the General Assemblies of the Kirk ofScotland, from the Year M.D.LX. Collected from the Most Authentic Manuscripts, 3 vols (Edin-burgh: Bannatyne Club, 1839–1845), i. 5; I. MacIvor, “The King’s Chapel at Restalrig and StTriduana’s Aisle: A Hexagonal Two-Storied Chapel of the Fifteenth Century,” Proceedings of theSociety of Antiquaries of Scotland 96 (1965): 253.23. Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, Bronwydd MS 1, no. 3 (Vaidre Book), fo. 85r.24. Henry Jones, Saint Patricks Purgatory: containing the description, originall, progresse, anddemolition of that superstitious place (London, 1647), 126–34.25. D. C. MacTavish, ed., Minutes of the Synod of Argyll 1639–1651 (Edinburgh: ScottishHistory Society, 1943), 67.



why official iconoclasm was complemented by clandestine religious violenceundertaken by private individuals.26 Mimicking the great image-breakers of theOld Testament and acting in lieu of their defective governors, zealous Protes-tants sometimes took proactive steps to remove the idols they believed weredrawing down divine wrath upon the land. During the Elizabethan period,several venerated trees became victims of Protestant fury, including therenowned Christmas-flowering hawthorn on a hillside near the dissolved Bene-dictine Abbey of Glastonbury.27 Churchyard and wayside crosses and wellhouses were also the victims of spontaneous extra-legislative offensives bypuritans, some of them conducted under the cover of night: in Durham, forinstance, a stone crucifix erected in the fifteenth century was toppled bynocturnal iconoclasts in 1589.28 Such attacks reflected John Calvin’s convic-tion that the human mind was “a perpetual forge of idols”.29 The destruction ofsacred sites and signs was a kind of ordeal that revealed that they were merelymaterial things void of numinous power.

The bitter civil wars in which the three kingdoms of England, Scotland, andIreland became engulfed in in the mid-seventeenth century stimulated a newwave of religious violence. Official initiatives were accompanied by moreunruly acts of godly vandalism carried out by Parliamentary soldiers. The“blessed Reformation” that some of these “military saints” set out to accom-plish stretched far beyond churches and cathedrals to a variety of other eye-sores that blighted the horizon and led the unwary astray. The Holy Thorn atGlastonbury suffered further disfigurement,30 and many well houses which hadhitherto evaded ruination were now reduced to rubble. As an eighteenth-century antiquary remarked ruefully, in the 1640s and 1650s “it was reckonedvery good religion to raze all such chapels” to the ground. In the Cornish parishof St Wen, one Lieutenant Best did not stop short at dismantling a walled springconsecrated to Mary Magdalen; following in the footsteps of Kings Josiah andHezekiah in the Bible, he also cut down the grove of large oak trees thatsurrounded it.31 St Catherine’s Well at Liberton in Midlothian was likewisefilled in and defaced by Cromwellian forces during the Interregnum.32 InIreland, St Patrick’s Purgatory was once more crushed and closed up, the papal

26. See Aston, “Iconoclasm in England”; Aston, “Puritans and Iconoclasm, 1560–1660,” in TheCulture of Puritanism 1560–1700, edited by C. Durston and J. Eales (Basingstoke: Macmillan,1996), 92–121.27. For one attack on the Glastonbury Thorn, see Richard Broughton, The ecclesiastical historieof Great Britaine (Douai, 1633), 138.28. J. T. Fowler, ed., Rites of Durham Being a Description or Brief Declaration of all the AncientMonuments, Rites and Customs Belonging or Being within the Monastical Church of Durhambefore the Suppression Written 1593 (Durham: Surtees Society, 1903), 28–9.29. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, edited and translated by H. Beveridge, 2vols in 1 (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm B. Eerdmanns Publishing Company, 1989), i. 97.30. Civil War attacks on the Thorn are mentioned by Edward Symmons, A Vindication of KingCharles: or, A loyal subjects duty (London, 1648 [1647]), 76; and The Weekly Post (London, 26Dec.–2 Jan. 1655) 4045–6; John Taylor, A Short Relation of a Long Journey. . . . Encompassing thePrincipalitie of Wales (London, 1653), 11. See also my “The Holy Thorn of Glastonbury: TheEvolution of a Legend in Post-Reformation England,” Parergon 21 (2004): 1–25.31. London, British Library, MS Egerton 2657 (William Borlase, “Parochial Memoranda ofCornwall”, 1740), fos. 28v, 179r.32. R. Morris and F. Morris, Scottish Healing Wells (Sandy: Alethea Press, 1982), 95.



nuncio reporting that just as the Calvinists had “destroyed every vestige of thespot, so do they seek to cancel every trace of its memory.” A company ofcavalry and foot soldiers profaned the crypt and crammed it full of soil andstones, “so that no insult might be wanting.”33

There are also more than a few references to Parliamentary forces attack-ing prehistoric structures and geological features of mysterious origin,including so-called “rocking stones” — huge boulders so curiously balancedand poised that, though they could be swayed by the touch of a finger, theywere impossible to dislodge from the spot. The “wonder” of Main Amber inCornwall was demolished by the Roundheads; another in Fife in Scotlandwas exploded on the “notion of these works being superstitious matters.”34 In1645, the fiery puritan preacher and army chaplain Hugh Peter is alleged tohave beseeched Lord Fairfax to pause long enough on Salisbury Plain todestroy the “monument of heathenism” that was Stonehenge.35 Members ofradical sects continued to make such sites the target of their iconoclastic irelong after the passions of the civil wars and Interregnum had subsided. In theearly eighteenth century, a Baptist from Avebury boasted that he had “killed”no less than forty of the stones that comprised the town’s famous Neolithiccircle.36

It is not surprising that attacks on the remnants of popish idolatry coincidedwith assaults upon perceived relics of paganism: zealous Protestantism hadalways polemically conflated these two categories of error. But the crusadeagainst prehistoric edifices carried out by an impassioned minority must alsobe seen in the context of the attention being lavished upon them by scholarslike Inigo Jones, John Aubrey, and William Stukeley, who successively sawStonehenge as a sublime architectural masterpiece built by the Romans and atemple erected by the ancient druids.37 The surge of intellectual interest in sitesof heathen worship must have disturbed the ultra-sensitive consciences of thegodly, for whom fascination with this class of archaeological antiquity some-times seemed rather too close to religious reverence for comfort. In his wittycharacter of the antiquary, John Earle commented tellingly that “a brokenStatue would almost make him an Idolater.” Spasms of iconoclasm against

33. Patrick F. Moran, History of the Catholic Archbishops of Dublin, Since the Reformation(Dublin: J. Duffy, 1864), 336.34. Thomas Fuller, The history of the worthies of England (1662), 1st pagination, 197. WilliamStukeley, Stonehenge: a temple restor’d to the British druids (1740), 49.35. See G. N. Godwin, The Civil War in Hampshire (1642–1645) and the Story of Basing House(London: E. Stock, 1882), 216; and R. P. Stearns, The Strenuous Puritan: Hugh Peter 1598–1660(Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1954), 250–51.36. As recorded by William Stukeley: London, Society of Antiquaries, MS 265, fo. 53v (“Noto-rious Destroyers of Antiquitys”).37. See Inigo Jones, The most notable antiquity of Great Britain, vulgarly called Stone-heng onSalisbury Plain, edited by John Webb (London, 1655); John Aubrey, Monumenta Britannica or AMiscellany of British Antiquities illustrated with the Notes of Thomas Gale D. D. and John EvelynEsquier. Compiled between the Years 1665 and 1693, edited by J. Fowles and R. Legg (Sherborne:Dorset Publishing Company, 1980); William Stukeley, Abury. A temple of the British druids, withsome others, described (London, 1743); and Stonehenge. A temple restor’d to the British druids(London, 1740). For a subtle exploration of the relationship between antiquities and relics, seeWoolf, Social Circulation of the Past, 191–97.



ancient landmarks bear witness to an environment in which scholarly enquirycould still not easily or completely be disentangled from piety.38

Behind many of the acts of ritual destruction described in the precedingparagraphs lies a determination to extinguish sacred sites and structures socompletely that nothing betraying their former presence remained. But thiswas always in tension with another impulse: an instinct to preserve mutilatedresidues of the vanquished past as enduring evidence of Protestantism’s glo-rious triumph over the forces of the devil and Antichrist. As Margaret Astonhas observed, many reformers did not want the achievement of their rites ofpurification to pass into oblivion. They regarded broken images, crumblingwell chapels, and the hollow shells of dissolved abbeys and decaying mon-asteries as necessary reminders “of our indignation and detestation againstthem.”39 Such desecrated places were at once a memorial of the Refor-mation’s victory over superstition and a visible warning against the dangersof backsliding to a false religion. Pagan structures that had suffered theravages of time could be seen in a similar light. In the course of satirical tract,the late Stuart rector of Nettlecombe in Somerset, Robert Gay, suggested thatStonehenge might have been reduced to a desolate ruin “by the immediatehand of God, as an intollerable abomination unto him: yet reserving so muchof it standing, as may declare what the whole was . . . that these forlornePillars of Stone are left to be our remembrancers . . . that none of us, or ourposterity, may returne, with Doggs to such Vomit, or Sows to wallowing insuch mire.”40

IIThe problem was that places of this kind could simultaneously operate as afocus for conservative resistance to the Reformation, a mnemonic to the verypast that Protestants were intent upon obliterating or re-modelling in supportof their own claim to be the single true religion. Throughout the sixteenth andseventeenth centuries, people continued to visit locations in the landscape thathad hitherto been venerated and engage in old fashioned practices at andaround them. English and Welsh bishops periodically enquired about suchbackwardness during their visitations and the Parliament of Scotland legis-lated against pilgrimage to chapels and springs in 1581, imposing heavy finesfor the first offence and (technically) death for the second. Yet, as the recordsof the Presbyterian kirk sessions reveal, men and women continued to circu-mambulate these sites, sprinkle water over themselves and their infants, and

38. John Earle, Micro-cosmographie. Or, A peece of the world discovered in essayes and char-acters (London, 1628), sig. C2r.39. M. Aston, “Public Worship and Iconoclasm,” in The Archaeology of Reformation 1480–1580,edited by D. Gaimster and R. Gilchrist (Leeds: Maney, 2003), 16–17. The quotation is an officialcomment made in the course of William Laud’s trial: William Prynne, Canterburies doome. Or thefirst part of a compleat history of the commitment, charge, tryall, condemnation, and execution ofWilliam Laud, late arch-bishop of Canterbury (1646), 462–63.40. R. Gay, “A Fool’s Bold soon shott at Stonage. A Discourse concerning Stone-henge,” inStonehenge Antiquaries, edited by R. Legg (Sherborne: Dorset Publishing Company, 1986), 18.



leave sacrificial scraps of cloth, pins, and coins behind them.41 Within (andbeyond) the Irish Pale attempts were periodically made to suppress similarobservances: a proclamation of 1617 expressly forbade gatherings in woods,at wells, and upon plains and hillsides, on the grounds that such “conven-ticles” not only sustained “superstitious Customes” but also led people “intodangerous disloyalties . . . to the great offence of almightie god” and the“high displeasure” of King James I.42 And in Elizabethan and Jacobean York-shire, people continued to kneel and pray not merely at the stumps of standingcrosses, but also at places where nothing more than a fading memory of themremained.43 Reflecting resentment at the reformers’ ruthless assault upon theold religion, the stubborn persistence of such rituals was often a symptom ofreluctance to embrace Protestant tenets and reactionary nostalgia for thesettled rhythms of traditional piety. It may be seen as evidence of Catholicsurvivalism.

On other occasions, however, it reflects the vigorous resurgence of theChurch of Rome linked with the Counter Reformation on the Continent andthe onset of the missionary movement designed to reclaim England, Scotland,Wales, and Ireland to the Catholic fold. Deprived of access to the ecclesias-tical buildings that had once been their patrimony, Catholic priests and lay-people instinctively gravitated towards hallowed places in the landscape. Theymet for service and the sacraments in the ruins of convents and monasteriesand buried their dead in the consecrated ground surrounding them. In themid-seventeenth century, for instance, people were seen praying for hours atthe weather-beaten Lady Chapel on a hill above the former Carthusian houseof Mount Grace Priory in Yorkshire, despite the fact that the building wasroofless and exposed to high winds.44 Such places retained their sacred ambi-ence long after the architectural structures that had once dignified them hadall but disintegrated. The familiar rituals performed in and around them bythose loyal to the Church of Rome helped to keep memories of the cult ofsaints alive. Ancient holy wells also became points of congregation. Morethan a thousand people were confirmed at a spring dedicated to the VirginMary at Fernyhaulgh in Lancashire on a single day in 1687.45 In Ireland,hawthorn trees became habitual assembly points at which the holy sacrament

41. For English visitation articles, see K. Fincham, ed., Visitation Articles and Injunctions of theEarly Stuart Church, vol. I (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1994), 59, 63, 66. For the Scottishact, see T. Thompson and C. Innes, eds., The Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland 1124–1707, 12vols (London: Record Commission, 1814–1875), iii. 212–13. On presentments to kirk sessions forthese offences, see M. Todd, The Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland (New Havenand London: Yale University Press, 2002), esp. 221–26.42. London, British Library, MS Harley 697, fo. 198v.43. York, Borthwick Institute of Historical Research, Visitation Court Book 1615, fo. 31r.44. See H. Aveling, Northern Catholics: The Catholic Recusants of the North Riding of Yorkshire1558–1790 (London and Dublin: Chapman, 1966), 23, 275–77; Mary Catherine Elizabeth Cham-bers, The Life of Mary Ward (1585–1645), 2 vols, edited by H. J. Coleridge (London: Burns andOates, 1882–1885), ii. 477–79; and A. J. Storey, Mount Grace Lady Chapel: An Historical Enquiry(Beverley: Highgate, 2001).45. Richard L. Smith, ed., Lancashire Registers V: Fernyhalgh, Goosnargh and Alston Lane,Catholic Record Society 31 (1932), 1–2; F. O. Blundell, Old Catholic Lancashire, 3 vols (London:Burns, Oates and Co, 1925–1941), i. 167–74.



was administered during periods of intense persecution, earning them theenduring nickname “mass bushes.” The large boulders they employed asmakeshift, open air altars became revered as symbols of the sufferings of theirCatholic forebears by later generations.46

Pilgrimage to traditional sites such as Holywell and St Patrick’s Purgatorythat had been battered by Protestant iconoclasts acquired an increasingly mili-tant and confessional edge. Regarded as victims of a kind of martyrdom, theywere a focus for feelings of anger and outrage about heretical barbarity.Stories circulated about the divine judgements that had befallen those whoscoffed at their thaumaturgic powers or violently attacked them, and miraclesassociated with the indigenous saints whose heroic exploits they commemo-rated were widely celebrated. Among them was the edifying tale of WilliamShone, a Protestant serving man who “out of scorne and contempt did irre-ligiously lepp” into the water of St Winefride’s spring saying he would washhis boots in it and was immediately struck with “lameness and benumbed.”He later returned to ask pardon from God and pray for the virgin martyr’sintercession, and after recovering his health converted to the Church ofRome.47

Furthermore, the cauterizing scars that the Reformation left upon theselandmarks simply made Catholics cling more resolutely to them. Some wereendorsed by new papal indulgences, including the ruined chapel dedicated to StMichael the Archangel on the summit of Skirrid Fawr near Abergavenny inmid-Wales, which was said to have been cleft by an earthquake at the time ofChrist’s crucifixion. In 1676 Clement X granted complete remission of sin toall who resorted there at Michaelmas and prayed for “the extirpation of her-esies and the exaltation of Holy Mother Church.”48 Such initiatives must beassessed against the backdrop of the revitalization of sacred geography that itis now clear characterized the process of Catholic renewal across continentalEurope as a whole. They are manifestations of a wider impulse to harnessnuminous locations in the natural world and use them to channel populardevotion in line with Tridentine priorities.49 They also reflected Catholicism’senergetic attempt to resurrect the very past that Protestantism sought to severfrom collective memory: to revive and celebrate the native missionaries whohad first planted the Christian faith in the British Isles and to reclaim them as

46. See D. McCarthy, “List of Mass-rocks and Altar Sites in County Cork,” Times Past 6(1989–1990): 28–37; McCarthy, “Mass Rocks and Altar Sites in Duhallow,” Seanchas Duthalla 8(1991): 83–97; F. P. Carey, “The Mass-rocks of Ireland,” Vexilla Regis (1957): 99–116.47. C. de Smedt, ed., “Documenta de S. Wenefreda,” Analecta Bollandiana, 6 (1887): 311.48. See J. H. Canning, ed., “Catholic Registers of Abergavenny, Monmouthshire 1740–1838,” inCatholic Record Society Miscellanea, 27 (London, 1927), 102, 108–9; M. R. Lewis, “The Pil-grimage to St Michael’s Mount: Catholic Continuity in Wales,” Journal of Welsh EcclesiasticalHistory 8 (1991): 51–54.49. See, for example, M. R. Forster, Catholic Revival in the Age of the Baroque: ReligiousIdentity in Southwest-Germany 1550–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), ch. 2;E. Tingle, “The Sacred Space of Julien Maunoir: The Re-Christianising of the Landscape inSeventeenth-Century Brittany,” in Sacred Space in Early Modern Europe, 237–58; H. Louthan,Converting Bohemia: Force and Persuasion in the Catholic Reformation (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2009), chs 5, 8; T. Johnson, Magistrates, Madonnas, and Miracles: The CounterReformation in the Upper Palatinate (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), ch. 10.



envoys of Rome rather than defenders of a primitive proto-reformed brand ofpiety.50

The programme for Catholic renewal in Britain and Ireland also fosteredthe creation of new sacred places and the engendering of fresh legendsabout the landscape. Most of these sites were linked with the deaths ofpriests and laypeople executed for their loyalty to the church of Rome.Tyburn, the site of the gallows on which many were hung, drawn, andquartered for treason in London, was publicly visited by Charles I’sFrench Catholic Queen Henrietta Maria in the 1630s, who knelt in reverencethere to the scandal of the capital’s Protestants.51 In a curious echo of earlierpatterns of shrine formation and hagiographical myth-making, a spring wassaid to have appeared beneath the spot where one of the mangled limbs ofthe missionary George Napper was displayed in Oxford in 1611, attractingcrowds of miracle-seeking visitors, until it was stopped up by order of thevice chancellor of the university and the dean of Christ Church.52 In manycases, post-Reformation narratives displaced earlier stories linked with theseplaces, transforming them into emblems of defiance against a persecutingregime.

The spirited Catholic reaction against the iconoclastic excesses of the six-teenth and seventeenth century was accompanied by a parallel movement ofrecoil with the Protestant camp itself. By the early seventeenth century, thereare clear signs that some clergy and laypeople began to feel a sense of intenseregret, embarrassment and guilt about the ecclesiastical atrocities perpetratedby their predecessors in the name of spiritual purification. This was linked withreligious trends on the ascendant within the established churches of England,Scotland, Wales and Ireland especially but not solely associated with Arch-bishop William Laud. These encouraged a revival of the notion of the beauty ofholiness and a mellowing of opinion towards the medieval Church, whichceased to be seen as a limb of Antichrist and came to be recognized as havingredeeming features. The physical vestiges of the Old Faith left behind in thelandscape — decaying abbeys, disintegrating chapels, decapitated crosses, andthe stumps of hallowed trees — began to seem like a standing indictment of thegreed of Henry VIII and the excessive zeal of early reformers like the Scottishfirebrand John Knox and sectarian radicals such as the Elizabethan separatistsHenry Barrow and John Penry, who had called for the wholesale destruction ofparish churches themselves, “so that all memory of the Apostaticall romish

50. For Protestant views of British church history, see G. Williams, “Some Protestant Views ofEarly British Church History,” in his Welsh Reformation Essays (Cardiff: University of WalesPress, 1967), 207–19; C. Kidd, British Identities before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood inthe Atlantic World 1600–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), ch. 5. On theCatholic attempt to reclaim the past, see most recently C. Highley, Catholics Writing the Nation inEarly Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), ch. 4.51. London, British Library, Additional MS 39,288, fo. 6r; Thomas Birch, The Court and Timesof Charles I, 2 vols (London: Henry Colburn, 1848), i. 121.52. Michael C. Questier, ed., Newsletters from the Archpresbyterate of George Birkhead (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 99; London, Bodleian Library, Rawlinson MS D 399,fo. 216v.



religion may bee buryed.”53 The vicious rape and spoliation of ecclesiasticalbuildings and structures came to be seen as “the chief blemish of the Refor-mation.”54 They were ghastly examples of sacrilege for which the nation atlarge was suffering divine punishment — not merely in the form of themisfortunes that befell individuals who had converted sacred spaces and placesto profane and secular use, but also the consuming collective calamity of theCivil War itself.

Such sentiments were accompanied by an antiquarian fascination with thephysical remains and relics of the Catholic past, and a determination to protect,preserve, and record these for the sake of posterity. William Dugdale and othersdedicated themselves to documenting the disappearing traces of the nation’sancient piety in both writing and image — to fixing on paper what was rapidlydisappearing from the countryside around them.55 Another symptom of theshifting climate of opinion was the re-edification of medieval well houses andwayside crosses, together with the revival of rites of consecration for churchesand churchyards.56 We may see these developments as a paradoxical byproductof the Reformation — the heady cocktail of fervour and ideology that fired thebellies of the first generation of evangelical Protestants and their puritanicalheirs produced its own curious backlash. In a cyclical process, holy placesand spaces were resacralized by the violent acts of iconoclasm committedagainst them. The post-Reformation landscape was still in some sense a sacredone.

IIIYet this was not solely a function of Catholic survivalism or revivalism and ofthe rearguard reaction within ecclesiastical circles that brought some Protes-tants into closer proximity with the Church of Rome. It is necessary to empha-size the degree to which reformed theology itself accommodated an attenuatedsense of divine presence in the material world. In the guise of divine provi-dence, Protestants upheld the notion that the physical environment was acanvas on which the Lord etched His intentions. The cult of saints may havebeen severely shaken and pruned, but God retained His capacity to change andmanipulate nature and to use it to communicate moral and spiritual lessons to

53. Henry Barrow, A brief discoverie of the false church (Dort, 1590), in The Writings of HenryBarrow 1587–1590, Elizabethan Nonconformist Texts III, edited by L. H. Carlson (London: Allenand Unwin, 1962), 468, 469, 478, 540; A. Peel, ed., The Notebook of John Penry 1593 (London:Royal Historical Society, 1944), 89–92.54. See Browne Willis, An history of the mitred parliamentary abbies, and conventual cathedralchurches, 2 vols (London: printed by W. Bowyer, for R. Gosling, 1718), i. 2. For these trends, seethe items referenced in n. 3, above.55. See esp. Roger Dodsworth and William Dugdale, Monasticon Anglicanum sive PandectæCœnobiorum, Benedictinorum Cluniacensium, Cisterciensium, Carthusianorum; a primordiis adeorum usque dissolutionem, 3 vols. (1655–1673). For the connections between the Reformationand ecclesiastical antiquarianism, see M. Aston, “English Ruins and English History: The Disso-lution and the Sense of the Past,” repr. in her Lollards and Reformers: Images and Literacy in LateMedieval Religion (London: Hambledon Press, 1984), 313–37.56. For rites of consecration, see J. Wickham Legg, ed., English Orders for ConsecratingChurches in the Seventeenth Century (London: Harrison and Sons, 1911). For a Laudian defenceof them, see Fulke Robartes, Gods holy house and service, according to the primitive and mostChristian form thereof (London, 1639), chs 3–5.



human beings. Stones, trees, caverns, rivers, and springs could still be sourcesof heavenly instruction, blessing, and warning. They could still preach visiblesermons.57

The Protestant clergy and laity speculated feverishly about the significanceof prodigies, wonders, and portents including plants that sprouted and floweredout of season. An ash tree at Brampton in Lincolnshire that groaned like onetroubled and tormented in his sleep in 1606 led local preachers to fear that theAlmighty was angry with the community; an ancient oak near Brentwood inEssex that moaned for three days “most grevously” was likewise seen as “a justensample of god to call us all to repentance to leave our excessive pride andhumble oure wicked and stony hearts.”58 Prognosticating ponds and wells likethose at Oundle in Northamptonshire and North Tawton in Devon that omi-nously “drummed,” dried up or overflowed prior to political upheavals, royaldeaths, wars, plagues, and other strange accidents were regarded with equalawe and anxiety.59 In Co. Armagh in Ireland, a river and lake at Loughall turnedbloody in 1641, only “a little before that horrid Rebellion” in which so manythousands of English Protestant settlers had been “most barbarously and inhu-manely murdered” by Catholic insurgents.60

The discovery or rediscovery of healing springs in this period was alsowidely seen as evidence of the Lord’s finger at work. Suppressed at theReformation, within a generation a number of former holy wells re-emerged asspas. Protestants denied that their remedial virtues derived from the saints towhich they had hitherto been dedicated and insisted that they came from themetals and minerals with which they were impregnated. By the late sixteenthcentury, for instance, St Catherine’s Well at Liberton, a notable destination ofpre-Reformation pilgrims, was celebrated as a natural balm with a remarkableability by “a sudden operation to heale all salt scabs and humours.”61 Yet itwould be wrong to speak in terms of a simple secularization of this religio-medical tradition. Such springs continued to be viewed through a lens of piousassumptions. Physicians and ministers alike celebrated them as “preciousgifts” and “blessings” bestowed by a benevolent deity and the notion that theywere a kind of divine NHS for the benefit of those unable to pay the highfees charged by contemporary doctors became a commonplace. The cures forwhich spas like Bath, Buxton, Knaresborough, and Tunbridge Wells becamerenowned continued to be assessed in similar terms. Much reference was made

57. See my Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Forthe argument that the Reformation upheld the notion of a “moralised universe,” see R. W. Scribner,“The Reformation, Popular Magic and the ‘Disenchantment of the World’, ” Journal of Interdis-ciplinary History 23 (1993): 475–94.58. For the Brampton ash, see R. B. [Nathaniel Crouch], Admirable curiosities rarities andwonders (2nd edn, 1684), 137–38, and illustration facing p. 188. For the Brentwood oak, seeShrewsbury, Shrewsbury School, MS Mus X 31, fo. 206r–v.59. For Oundle, see Richard Baxter, The certainty of the world of spirits (1691), 157; Cambridge,Trinity College, MS O. 7.3, fo. 5v. For North Tawton, see Thomas Fuller, The history of theworthies of England (1662), 1st pagination, 247; London, British Library, MS Sloane 3890, fo. 60r.60. Mirabilis annus secundus: or, the second part of the second years prodigies ([London],1662), 26.61. John Monipennie, The abridgement or summarie of the Scots chronicles . . . With a truedescription and division of the whole realme of Scotland . . . (London, 1614), sig. C2v.



to the magnanimous dispensations of the Almighty and some even spoke of therecovery of patients forsaken by the medical establishment as hopeless cases asnothing less than “miraculous.”62 The notion that the landscape was a conduitof thaumaturgic power had been refined and qualified, but it had not entirelyevaporated.

Contemporaries interpreted events that dramatically altered the shape of thephysical world around them through the same set of spectacles. Floods thatdevastated large tracts of land in South Wales and the West Country in 1607were seen as Gods warning to his people of England. The “miraculous”displacement and sinking of a field at Westerham in Kent in December 1596was described in a news pamphlet as a “heedeful document” written by theLord about the manifest dangers of sin and “damnable impietie,” while theseries of earth tremors which overthrew Much Marcle in Herefordshire inFebruary 1572, uprooting hedges, trees, and highways, crushing a chapel, andmoving some twenty acres of ground from its original location, was similarlyseen as an admirable work wrought by the omnipotent hand of God.63

Unquestioning acceptance of the accounts of the creation and deluge con-tained in Genesis was still the order of the day and scholars continued to clingto the notion that current landforms were the consequence of one of thesemythical processes. The Elizabethan cartographer John Norden thought thatthe curious tower of stones in Cornwall known as the Cheese-Wring was “nootherwyse pyled up then they were lefte at the universall inundation” andsubterraneous stumps of trees uncovered by the ebbing tide off various parts ofthe British coast were believed to have been drowned during the same momen-tous event.64 Sometimes contemporaries mistook man-made structures andneolithic monuments for geological landmarks sculpted by the deity. JoshuaChildrey, for instance, supposed that the Avebury stones “were ab initio, placedhere by the God of nature.”65

Nor were such notions necessarily arrested by the rise of Baconian scienceand natural philosophy, though both developments did help to curtail assump-tions about the localization of the holy and reshape the theological andepistemological lens through which the landscape was interpreted. Close,

62. See my “Reforming the Waters: Holy Wells and Healing Springs in Protestant England,” inLife and Thought in the Northern Church c. 1100–1700: Essays in Honour of Claire Cross, editedby D. Wood (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1999), 227–55; and “Sacred Spas? Healing Springsand Religion in Post-Reformation Britain,’ in The Impact of the European Reformation, edited byO. Grell and B. Heal (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 209–38. For claims that spas were providentialblessings, see J. Jones, The bathes of Baths ayde: wonderfull amd most excellent against very manysicknesses (London, 1572), sig. ‡2r-v; Edmund Deane, Spadacrene Anglica. Or, the Englishspaw-fountaine (London, 1626), 16–17.63. Gods warning to his people of England. By the great overflowing of the waters or floudeslately hapned in South-Wales, and many other places (London, 1607); John Chapman, A most truereport of the miraculous moving and sinking of a plot of ground, about nine Acres, at Westram inKent (London, 1597), sigs A4r, B3v and passim. For Much Marcle, see Stephen Batman, Thedoome warning all men to the judgemente (London, 1581), 396.64. John Norden, Speculi Britanniae pars. A topographical and historical description of Corn-wall (London, 1728 edn), 35, 62. For stumps of trees off the coast, see William Camden, Britain(London, 1610), 607, 747.65. Joshua Childrey, Britannia Baconica: or, the natural rarities of England, Scotland, and Wales(London, 1661), 48–49.



empirical scrutiny of nature was quite compatible with a biblical and spiritualview of it. The precept that the earth was an arena for the operations of divinewill survived the profound intellectual challenges that characterized the firststirrings of the Enlightenment. The mechanical universe that Newton, Boyle,and others brought into being remained in essence a providential one. In 1684,Thomas Burnet argued in his The Sacred Theory of the Earth that God hadoriginally created it as a perfectly smooth sphere and that irregularities andruptures had appeared on its surface as a result of the flood. He described it as“a great Ruin,” “a broken and confus’d Heap,” and “a rude Lump,” which borewitness to the consuming wrath that God had visited upon the human race inthe age of Noah.66 Not until much later would the philosophical assumptionsthat buttressed orthodox Christian cosmology lose their power to shape per-ception of the physical realm. Tales of the miraculous exploits of the saints mayhave been dismissed as “monkish fictions” but this did not mean that topo-graphical features ceased to carry any kind of religious connotation.

Here the landscape legends recorded by early topographers and historiansand collected by later folklorists provide a rich vein of evidence. Protestantantiquaries were often torn between their instinct to document stories associ-ated with local landmarks and their conviction that these were silly supersti-tions that deserved nothing but contempt.67 Some, especially those with overtlypopish overtones, were deliberately smothered in a blanket of silence. But othertopographical myths survived because they were compatible with the theologi-cal priorities of the reformers. Protestantism was not inherently hostile to thenotion that ugly and unproductive features of the landscape might be the workof Satan and his band of demons. The longstanding tendency to see ravines,craggy outcrops, and awkward boulders that intruded upon arable land asevidence of the malevolence of the devil was hardly inconsistent with thethemes rehearsed by the demonological writers of the period, who creditedGod’s enemy with vast powers to perform preternatural feats. Stories explain-ing topographical features as a consequence of the petrification of sinnerspersisted for a similar reason.68 Attached to both natural rock formations andprehistoric monuments, tales of sinners miraculously turned into stone invokedthe scriptural precedent of the transformation of Lot’s wife into a pillar of saltand taught moral lessons that the reformed clergy were happy to endorse. Theso-called Merry Maidens were said to have been petrified for dancing on aSunday; the circle at Stanton Drew in Somerset was a wedding party punishedfor celebrations that spilled over into the sabbath; while the Hownham Shearers

66. Thomas Burnet, The sacred theory of the earth: containing and account of the original of theearth, and of all the general changes which it hath already undergone, or is to undergo, till theconsummation of all things, 2 vols (London, 1719 edn; first publ. 1684), see esp. i. 88–91, 150,208, 190–99, and p. xxiii.67. See Woolf, Social Circulation of the Past, 187. For a discussion of some of these tensions, seemy “Recording Superstition in Early Modern Britain: The Origins of Folklore,” in The Religion ofFools? Superstition Past and Present, edited by S. A. Smith and A. Knight (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 2008), 178–206.68. As observed by J. Simpson, “God’s Visible Judgements: The Christian Dimension of Land-scape Legends,” Landscape History 8 (1986): 53–58; J. Simpson, “The Local Legend: A Productof Popular Culture,” Rural History 2 (1991): 25–35.



in Scotland were reputedly country people frozen after working in the fields onthe Lord’s day.69 Such legends had medieval roots, but the forms in which theyhave come down to us reflect a definably Calvinist anxiety about the properobservance of the fourth commandment. Learned Protestant writers may havetaken them with a pinch of salt, but they were not averse to repeating them.According to the distinguished Elizabethan historian, William Camden, forinstance, the tradition that the Hurlers in East Cornwall were men petrified forplaying football on the Sabbath was “a devout and godly error” — improbablebut nevertheless edifying.70 The long-term resilience of these myths may beevidence less of resistance to the Reformation than of its ultimate success.

These examples of subtle modification must be set alongside the emergenceof new landscape legends that clearly postdate the advent of Protestantism.Notable here is the case of Wyclif’s Well at Lutterworth in Leicestershire. Thisspring was said to have arisen where one of the bones of the Oxford scholar fellafter his corpse was exhumed and posthumously burnt as a heretic in 1428.Traceable back to an allegation made in the course of a heresy trial in 1531,over time this story took firm root and engendered new shoots. It appears tohighlight a syncretism with Catholic belief which is not only ostensibly at oddswith Reformed theology but also more fundamentally with that of the lollardsthemselves. But it would be wrong to read it as evidence of the long-termfailure of Protestantism to make more than a superficial impression upon thepopulace. It may rather reveal the way in which fresh associations becamemuddled with pre-existing memories of particular landmarks: since at least thetwelfth century the spring had been consecrated to either St John the Baptist orSt John the Evangelist. What we see happening here is the superimposition ofa fresh layer of legend on a location that already had numinous resonances andthe unconscious reassertion of a medieval hagiographical trope to commemo-rate a man Protestants revered as a shining forerunner and “morning star” ofthe Reformation itself.71

We see the same processes of cultural transposition at work in relation toother topographical features. Trees continued to be a stimulus to myth-makingwell into the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. In the early1630s, local people were attributing the stunted growth of a walnut in Totten-ham Highcross “for that there was one burnt upon that place, for the professionof the Gospell.”72 Here too it is possible that recollections of the Marianpersecution of the 1550s had simply displaced a tradition associated withan earlier Christian missionary martyr. The “miraculous oak” at Boscobelin Shropshire in which the future Charles II had hidden after the battle of

69. See L. V. Grinsell, Folklore of Prehistoric sites in Britain (Newton Abbot: David and Charles,1976), 54–56; S. P. Menefee, “The ‘Merry Maidens’ and the ‘Noce de Pierre’,” Folklore 85 (1974):23–42; M. Williams, “Folklore and Place Names,” Folklore 74 (1963): 366–68.70. Camden, Britain (1610), 192.71. See my “Wyclif ’s Well: Lollardy, Landscape and Memory in Post-Reformation England,” inThe Extraordinary and the Everyday in Early Modern England, edited by A. McShane and G.Walker (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010), 142–60.72. Wilhelm Bedwell, A Brief Description of the Towne of Tottenham Highcrosse in Middlesex(London, 1631), sig. E1v.



Worcester in 1651 became the subject of an enduring royalist legend and thedestination of souvenir-seeking visitors after the Restoration, who nearly killedit in their eagerness to carry off bark and branches of the tree which hadserved “for the shelter of our Earthly Angel . . . from the heat and fury ofthe rebellion.”73 A hawthorn in Northumberland near which John Wesleyhad preached in the 1780s also in time became something of a monumentto the founder of Methodism.74 Nor did the hagiographical tradition of thefootprints of the saints disappear after the Reformation: in the nineteenthcentury it can be found connected to the strange iron-coloured impressions onthe tombstone of Wesley’s father at Epworth in Lincolnshire, supposed to bethe marks miraculously left there when his son stood on it to preach, havingbeen refused access to the pulpit.75 Such places came to be regarded as shrinesto men and women who claimed a key place in national memory. Despitethe undercurrents of continuity latent within them, such legends cannot bedescribed as anything other than distinctively post-Reformation.

Even the scars left by earlier episodes of iconoclasm became the subject ofpopular Protestant folklore. The physical legacies left by the Henrician disso-lution and the wars of religion of the 1640s and 1650s became entangled witheach other, as well as with earlier dramatic episodes of destruction involvingthe Saxons, Danes, and the Norman invaders. Supplanting the memory ofconflicts lost in the mists of time, many ancient barrows came to be remem-bered as the burial places and battlegrounds of civil war soldiers. Three Hills atMildenhall in Suffolk was where Cromwell hid his treasure chests, while therise above Eye in the same county was the place from whence he had bom-barded Peterborough Cathedral with cannons.76 These stories bear out sugges-tions that the disruptions of the mid-seventeenth century were “less the reaperof tradition than the midwife.”77 The same insight may be applied to the longReformation itself: as we have seen, it too served as much to stimulate themaking of landscape legends as it did to extinguish them.

And yet the early antiquaries and folklorists who recorded these tales con-sistently described them as “popish,” “pagan,” and “primitive” survivals —remnants of ancient heathenism and Romish superstition that had stubbornlypersisted into modern times. The lingering influence of their obsessive search

73. H[enry] S[avage], The dew of Hermon which fell upon the hill of Sion, or, An answer to abook entituled, Sions groans for her distressed (London, 1663), 16. See also Thomas Blount,Boscobel: or the compleat history of his sacred majesties most miraculous preservation after thebattle of Worcester, 3 Sept 1651 (London, 1662), 43, 67. For visits to the tree, see also John Evelyn,Silva: A Discourse of Forest Trees, and the Propagation of Timber in his Majesty’s Dominions,2 vols (London: Henry Colburn, 1825), i. 73–74.74. V. Cornish, Historic Thorn Trees in the British Isles (London: Country Life, 1941), 33.75. Mrs Gutch and M. Peacock, County Folklore vol. V. Printed Extracts no. 7. Examples ofPrinted Folk-Lore Concerning Lincolnshire (London: David Nutt, 1908), 3–4. See also my “Foot-prints and Faith: Religion and the Landscape in Early Modern Britain and Ireland,” in God’sBounty: The Church and the Natural World, edited by P. Clarke and T. Claydon (Woodbridge:Boydell and Brewer, 2010), 169–83.76. For these and other landscape legends linked with Cromwell, see Grinsell, Folklore ofPrehistoric Sites, 100, 111, 118, 134, 137, 151, 160. See also A. Smith, “The Image of Cromwellin Folklore and Tradition,” Folklore 79 (1968): 17–39.77. Fox, Oral and Literate Culture, 255.



for archaic origins blinded them to the role that the Reformation played inreconstituting social memory. We cannot ignore the traces of earlier Catholicand possibly pre-Christian belief that are present in landscape legends. Despitethe methodological difficulties which surround these sources, however, theystill have something important to tell us about processes of cultural modifica-tion, albeit indirectly. They reveal both how Protestantism assimilated itself tothe structures of the indigenous culture and how that culture in turn accom-modated, but also simultaneously transfigured, the Reformation. Sometimesthis was quite deliberate: Protestant ministers actively sought to appropriatepre-existing layers of meaning to serve their own purposes. On other occasions,it was probably unconscious, a consequence of the spontaneous and biologicaltendency of cultures, genres, and species to evolve in accordance with theconditions by which they are confronted, accruing new characteristics untilthe original framework has been completely forgotten. The legendary lore ofthe landscape was not a fossil, but rather a living organism that adapted itselfto survive in a new theological and ecclesiastical climate.

ConclusionIn conclusion, the processes that comprised the “Reformation of the land-scape” were complex and contradictory. The profound fear and abhorrence ofidolatry that lay at the heart of Protestant theology precipitated a drive toeradicate its physical manifestations that left a lasting mark on the built andnatural environment of the British Isles. The official and clandestine icono-clastic assaults launched against sacred places by the Tudor and Stuart state andits subjects reflected a set of tenets that was deeply corrosive of older assump-tions about the immanence of the holy in the material world; however, theserites of violence had other, more unexpected, effects. They not only intensifiedthe attachment of Roman Catholics to hallowed landmarks that radical Prot-estants targeted as stumbling blocks to the weaker brethren; they also fosteredtrends with the established churches of England, Scotland, and Ireland thatstimulated a resurgence of the idea that certain places and spaces were in somesense sanctified and a renewed respect and reverence for sites and structuresthat bore witness to the sincere, if somewhat misguided, piety of previousgenerations.

Alongside this we must recognize that there remained significant elementsof convergence and overlap between traditional and reformed belief and prac-tice linked with the landscape. Protestants did not reject the notion that naturewas a revelatory text through which God communicated with human beings:they continued to read prodigious geological, botanical, and meteorologicalphenomena as messages of blessing and warning sent from heaven. Moreover,although reformed orthodoxy stressed that the Lord now worked for the mostpart mediately, through secondary causes, the idea that supernatural powercould be accessed at particular locations such as healing springs persisted inpopular Protestant thinking. The scriptural account of creation and the doctrineof divine providence remained critical in shaping perception of the landscapethroughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, displaying resilience and



adaptability in the face of the considerable challenges associated with the riseof scientific empiricism and the Cartesian universe.

The effects of the Reformation were no less ambivalent in the realms ofhistory and memory. Protestantism involved a concerted attempt to eradicatepalpable traces of the popish and heathen past and to recast the medievalcenturies as a time of darkness and sinful declension from which the Gospelhad liberated the populace. But this was tempered by a countervailing tendencyto preserve the remnants of medieval Catholicism that continued to litter theBritish and Irish countryside, either as a reminder of the victory of the Refor-mation over idolatry or as monuments of an era of exemplary religious zeal andfervour. If some hagiographical traditions linked with particular locationswithered in the aftermath of the religious changes, others subtly transmuted inresponse to them. The corpus of folklore that clustered around the physicalenvironment was also augmented by a cluster of enduring new legends aboutthe origin of dramatic and puzzling topographical features. The Reformation ofthe landscape is thus not merely a story of the destruction, suppression, andobliteration of tradition; it also a tale of creative evolution and consciousinvention.

