The Reception of the Elizabethan Religious Settlement in Three Yorkshire Parishes, 1559–72

Abstract

IN 1571 THE THREE YORKSHIRE PARISHES of Masham, Sheffield, and St Martin's, Coney Street, York, dismantled their rood lofts in accordance with Elizabethan religious legislation. In Masham there were violent confrontations over the symbolic burning of the rood loft, in Sheffield the wood from the loft was sold in lots, while in York the rood was carefully dismantled and the space repaired. 1 These very different scenes reflected the experience of reform in each parish and the divergent religious directions that were beginning to take shape. Reform had been sudden in Masham and a recusant group was forming outside parochial control. Sheffield and York had experienced a more gradual reform, but were developing Puritan and ceremonial styles of Protestantism respectively. The factors which led to these different paths are the subject of this essay. Prior practices, the pace and sequence of events and how authority was realised locally, all impacted upon the way this stage of the Elizabethan Reformation was brought about.Although the title uses the term 'reception', this is not meant to imply that authority always moved down through a fixed hierarchy, hitting a floor at parish level, below which the people were recipients rather than shapers. A political historian, Michael Braddick, considers that power was contested, so that outcomes were more the result of negotiation and relationships than absolute, 'top-down' control. 2 The

York Bakers and Their Play of the Last Supper

“…20 Still more contentious, the 1552 and 1559 editions of the Book of Common Prayer proscribed the use of eucharistic wafers in the celebration of the mass, calling instead for loaves of bread: 'And to take awaye the superstition, whiche any person hath, or myghte have in the breade and wyne, it shall suffice that the breade be suche as is usual to be eaten at the table, with other meates, but the beste and purest wheate breade, that conveniently may be gotten'. 21 As though to confuse the issue, royal injunctions in 1559 subsequently contradicted the Book of Prayer, requiring wafers for communion. 22 This inconsistency resulted in controversy and mixed practice in English parishes at the time and through the 1560s and 1570s, partly because of initial uncertainty about which directive was legally binding.…”