Voices of Morebath

Author: Eamon Duffy

2001 Religion 208 pp. 26 b/w + 16 color illus., 6 1/8 x 9 1/4 Cloth ISBN 0-300-09185-0 $22.50

Primary documents provide us the opportunity to hear the voices of people from the times in which they lived. By his meticulous deciphering of the parish accounts written by their vicar during a period stretching over fifty years, Eamon Duffy's The Voices of Morebath affords us a fascinating glimpse into the lives of the inhabitants of a Tudor village - men and women living during the Henrician Reformation, the all or nothing Reformation of Edward, the about- face times of Catholic Mary and, finally, the adapted, made to measure Reformation of Elizabeth.

Duffy's skilful examination of Morebath enables us step back into the communal fabric of this remote, sheep farming Tudor village. We see how, in their pre-reformation world, each adult person- male and female- had a role and that most were prepared to do their duties by the community - a community held together by religious rituals.

This book provides evidence how the Reformation, especially that of the Tudors Edward and his sister Elizabeth, cut away some of the threads holding together the communal fabric of the village. In the first years of change, the villagers, supported by their priest, did what they could to keep the old ways alive - even to the extent of putting their futures on the line in the unsuccessful Prayer Book rebellion of 1549, but the passing of years brings acceptance and with it the thickening fog of apathy. Providing a lesson on how little human nature changes over time, Duffy tells how in 1560 a son asked his father:

whether he thought well of religious persons and the religion that was then used. When he replied that he had indeed thought well of the monks, having had no occasion to think otherwise, his son asked 'then how came it to pass you was so ready to destroy and spoil the thing you thought well of? What could I do, said He: might I not as well as others have some profit of the the Spoil of the Abbey? For I did see all would away, and therefore I did as others did.' (1)

Duffy describes how Morebath eventually comes to see the Elizabeth Reformation as being like 'quite literally, part of the furniture." (2) Even the Saint Sidwell loving Trychan eventually slides comfortably into the England of Elizabeth, when his 'conformity was more than a grudging minimalism.' (3)

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