The Lord's Supper In Early Modern England - )

Past & Present, Nov, 1998 by Arnold Hunt

`Every consistent doctrine of predestined grace', wrote Max Weber of Reformation Protestantism, `inevitably implied a radical and ultimate devaluation of all magical, sacramental and institutional distributions of grace'. Weber's distinction between predestination and the sacraments is so simple, so elegant and so convenient that most historians of early modern England have been ready to accept this gift horse without looking too closely into its mouth. Nicholas Tyacke has quoted Weber's words with approval, remarking that `the grace of predestination and the grace of the sacraments were to become rivals for the religious allegiance of English men and women during the early seventeenth century'. The two were fundamentally different, because the doctrine of predestination, communicated through preaching, required an individual response, whereas the sacraments involved `communal and ritualized' forms of religious worship.(1) Debora Shuger has argued that `Reformed spirituality stressed inner regeneration and moral duty and therefore found both ritual magic and the sacrificial economy hollow, albeit dangerously seductive, consolations'.(2)

In the struggle between these two opposing systems of belief, predestination is generally assumed to have triumphed over the sacraments. John Bossy, another historian who takes his bearings from Weber, comments that `among those of the Reformed tradition ... the usual fate of communion was to become a quarterly appendage to the preaching of the word'. Shuger agrees that `in most Reformed churches, the Lord's Supper became an occasional and fairly peripheral affair' and, David Hempton, looking back on the early modern Church of England from the perspective of the eighteenth century, has also concluded that `apathy and Puritan anti-sacramentalism' led to widespread neglect of the communion service.(3) As a result, the secondary literature on the sacraments in early modern England leaves much to be desired. Until recently, Protestant sacramental theology has tended to be characterized in negative terms, `defined first and most importantly', as Charles and Katherine George put it, `by its decisive and unqualified repudiation of the doctrine of transubstantiation', and with little positive content of its own.(4) Sacramental practice has also been treated negatively: opposition to various sacramental ceremonies such as kneeling at communion has received more attention than participation in the sacraments, while popular attitudes to the sacraments have received hardly any investigation at all, perhaps on the assumption that there is nothing to investigate.

But the sacraments had a positive as well as a negative function. Because transubstantiation was widely regarded as the key doctrinal error of the Church of Rome, the adoption of a reformed doctrine of the sacraments was crucial in establishing the Church of England's Protestant identity. Receiving the sacrament of the Lord's Supper became the signifier of orthodoxy, the test of conformity; and, as historians have realized, levels of attendance at communion can thus be used as a rough-and-ready guide to the success of the Reformation. To do so, however, it is necessary to look not just at the statistics of attendance, where these can be reconstructed, but at the whole complex of beliefs and practices surrounding the sacrament. This article will consider some of the evidence concerning popular attitudes to the Lord's Supper in early modern England (principally, though not exclusively, in the period 1590-1640) and will argue that the sacraments need to be placed at the centre of historical debate on the English Reformation.

I

For most people in early modern England, receiving communion was a rare event. If the requirements of the 1559 Prayer Book and the 1603 Canons had been strictly observed, all adult members of the Church of England would have received communion at least three times a year, including Easter. In practice, however, few people received communion more than once a year, and attempts to enforce the letter of the Prayer Book proved unsuccessful. In 1580, all gentlemen of the Middle Temple were ordered to receive communion three times a year. In 1614 this was replaced by a rule that all were to receive twice a year, followed almost immediately by another, more realistic rule, that all were to receive once a year.(5) The churchwardens of King's Sutton (Oxon.) reported in 1619: `For communicants thrise a yeare we think halfe our parishe is faulty if they shall be presented, we crave advice'. The churchwardens of Cropredy, another Oxfordshire parish, stated that `our minister gyveth the communion thryce in the yere but whether all such persons so often receveth as are above xvj yeres of age we know not'.(6) Few parish officials were as scrupulous as this. The thrice-a-year rule was regularly reiterated in visitation articles, but rarely gave rise to presentments and seems to have been widely disregarded.(7)

Easter was the one occasion in the year when all adults were expected to receive communion: `few, or none, absteine at this time', wrote John Panke in 1604, `which is the least that may be, once in the yeare'.(8) Larger parishes held a series of communion services during Eastertide. The churchwardens' accounts of St Alphage, London Wall, record payments for bread and wine on Palm Sunday, `on mondaie & thursdaie followinge', and on Easter Day 1583. The sprawling suburban parish of St Botolph without Aldgate held no less than sixteen Easter communion services in 1598, beginning three weeks before Easter Day and ending four weeks after, with four separate services on Easter Day itself.(9) Rural parishes were more likely to preserve the older custom of a single communion on Easter Day at which every parishioner was expected to be present. In the Northumberland parish of Allerton, `the Holy Communion is administred but once in the yeare ... which is commonly Easter day', despite the fact that as many as six hundred people received communion at that time and `in regard of there great number doe make such a confusion and noise and thronging that oftentimes the young and old people are carried downe with there crouding'.(10)