Religious Diversity and Early Modern English Texts: Catholic, Judaic, Feminist, and Secular Dimensions

2. Religious Identity and the En glish Landscape: William Blundell and the Harkirk Coins

55 As recent scholarship has shown, the dissolution of the monasteries during the reign of Henry VIII radically changed both the English countryside and the representation of that landscape in polemical, chorographical, and imaginative texts. Margaret Aston has argued that the physical devastation of churches, abbeys, and monasteries created a “spectacle of physical loss” that affected even “those whose Protestant convictions made them wholly endorse the process at large,” spurring “nostalgia and poetry” as well as increased antiquarian interest in the medieval period.1 These physical destructions provoked textual reimaginings of the English landscape that provided new interpretations of England’s past and contributed to discourses of England as an emerging Protestant nation.2 For example, as Jennifer Summit has recently shown, whereas for late medieval chorographers such as William of Worcester the lives of the medieval English saints provided the primary geographic coordinates by which England’s topography was defined and navigated, the sixteenth-century chorographies of John Leland, John Speed, and William Camden “translated” or erased those saints, progressively also obscuring the monastic and abbey ruins that disturbingly recalled the violence of the Reformation. In such ways early modern Protestant writers participated in a larger project through which the English landscape was “forcibly remade, its formerly sacred spaces actively converted, like its inhabitants, to support new structures of belief and government.”3 In this context the antiquarian activities of William Blundell, a Catholic recusant landowner who lived in Little Crosby, Chester, from 1560 to 1638, can provide a way of exploring alternative, Catholic ideas about Phebe Jensen Religious Identity and the English Landscape William Blundell and the Harkirk Coins 2 56 Phebe Jensen landscape and nationhood that resisted (and perhaps informed) mainstream Protestant discourse. Blundell’s manuscript writings, preserved in a family miscellany known as the Great Hodge Podge and in other papers, include translations of the work of Luis de Granada, original songs and ballads, and detailed narratives of the persecutions suffered by Blundell’s family, his servants, and his tenants at the hands of both local and national authorities.4 Blundell wrote one antiquarian tract: an account of the cache of primarily Anglo-Saxon coins discovered on his estate in 1611. The coins were found in a makeshift graveyard that Blundell had created for Catholics after the sexton in nearby Sefton had barred Catholic corpses from the parish churchyard. Modern scholarship has determined that the treasure was deposited by Danes in the early tenth century. It includes coins from the reigns of the Anglo-Saxon kings Alfred the Great and Edward the Elder; the Dane, Cnut of Northumbria; the ninth- and early-tenth-century Italian kings Berengarius and Hludovicus; and the ninth-century French king Charles-le-Simple. The cache also holds ecclesiastical coins of Northumberland and East Anglia, and one coin was apparently minted by Plegmund, archbishop of Canterbury from 891 to 923. Blundell recorded this spectacular find with pen and ink sketches of the coins; he turned the sketches into copperplate impressions, which circulated among his neighbors in the north of England. Blundell also described the events surrounding the discovery of the coins, and he used his extensive learning and library to write a historical narrative that describes their medieval origins.5 D. R. Woolf’s invaluable account of this event shows that the circumstances surrounding the find, coupled with Blundell’s narrative effort to assess it, reveal the lineaments of a broader “historical culture” of seventeenth-century England, a culture Blundell shared with amateur and professional antiquarians across the confessional divide. As Woolf demonstrates , Blundell’s explication of the coins is in most ways unpolemical.6 But although Blundell’s narrative illuminates broad habits of historical thinking that transcend religious controversy, it also expresses an understanding of the relationship between sacred land and English nation that reflects the writer’s personal experience as an early modern recusant property owner. It reflects a Catholic, Anglocentric vision of English nationhood then being constructed, as Christopher Highley has recently shown, in the expatriate writings of Elizabethan and Jacobean Catholic exiles.7 In addition, the incidental representation of Anglo-Saxon saints in this tract reveals an identifiably Counter-Reformation sense of the English landscape as a matrix of sacred sites associated with divine and saintly miracles. Identity and the English Landscape 57 Recent scholarship has demonstrated that the priests of the continental Counter-Reformation, in Alexandra Walsham’s...