The Voices of Morebath: Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village (review)

The Voices of Morebath: Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village. By Eamon Duffy. (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press. 2001. Pp. xxiv, 232. $22.50.)

This is an immensely appealing book, both for its physical appearance and its contents. The color plates, wood cuts, charming end papers, reminiscent of E.H.Shepard's map of the "Hundred Acre Wood," that greets readers of Winnie the Pooh, and a vivid dust jacket that reproduces a portion of Pieter Bruegel's Netherlandish Sayings all invoke a sense of community and nostalgia for 'bygone' England that enhance the compelling story of the tiny North Devon parish of Morebath and its experiences in the Reformation. This history, which starts in 1520 and ends in 1574, Duffy interprets as the rise, decline, and readjustment of community and community identity. For Duffy, the state building that accompanied the Reformation meant the end of a local religious community defined by local initiative and spiritual creativity. In its place was a group of people whose parish involvement came to revolve around responses to external demands.

Duffy based his study on the half-century of churchwardens' accounts that Morebath's vicar, Christopher Trychay, kept for his parish. Churchwardens' accounts record how the laity raised and spent money to maintain the nave and its contents as per canon law. Morebath's accounts are unusual in that while accounting for the financial activity of his parish, Trychay created a chronicle that more often than not included his own opinions on the behavior of his parishioners or the changing nature of religious policy in the 1530's, '40's, and '50's. Thus the resulting book is not only a study of these unusual records and the parish from which they came, but also a study of the concerns of the man who created them.

The accounts reflect a complex financial and administrative organization that involved Trychay and nearly all of Morebath's thirty-three households. Involvement included a variety of fundraising strategies and building projects which bound the community together, encouraging decision making by consensus, and participation by young and old and men and women. Duffy argues that this sense of community was lost when the Reformation stripped the parish of its furnishings, saints, and raison d'être for its elaborate parochial organization. However, the heretofore unknown participation of several Morebath parishioners in the Prayer Book Rebellion and their financial support by the parish at large challenges the portrait of English parishioners passively accepting religious reforms.

Unlike his book Stripping of the Altars, where regional variation played no role, this book continually seeks to place Morebath's responses to religious reform in a local context. Indeed, this work is richer for the many subsequent local studies of parish life that have nuanced Duffy's original work. In effect this book allows Duffy a second visit to this topic. While he draws upon a wide range of other parishes' sources to fill in gaps in the Morebath records, he does not present Morebath as typical. Rather in the finest tradition of micro-history Duffy looks at individuals and small events to understand the impact of larger issues and pressures.

This work is firmly placed in one historiographical camp, and it is Duffy's vision of the top-down Reformation that shapes his reading of Christopher Trychay's churchwardens' accounts. To be sure, some will dispute his account of the Reformation and his interpretation of Trychay's comments and silences. Duffy sees Trychay as mourning the loss of community that happened with the implementation of Edwardian reforms, and celebrating its return with the accession of Mary. Some may question who is nostalgic, Duffy or Trychay; nonetheless, he offers a plausible reading, that makes good use of these wonderful records.