The Voices of Morebath

A remote village on the edge of Exmoor, Morebath had from 1520 to 1574 a single parish priest, the dedicated and opinionated Sir Christopher Trychay, who kept detailed parish accounts in which he also recorded the lives and deeds of his flock. The period covered, of course, was that of the English Reformation, from Henry VIII's initial tentative reforms through the harsh Protestantism of Edward VI and the reversion to Catholicism under Mary to Elizabeth's establishment of a more moderate, distinctively Anglican religious settlement. Using Trychay's records as his primary source, Eamon Duffy - author of the much-acclaimed The Stripping of the Altars - examines just how the changes affected the people of Morebath, and how they reacted. Those used to the traditional Protestant account of corrupt, inaccessible Catholic practices being justly overthrown will be astonished by the harshness caused by the imposition of the Reformation and its consequent destruction of a community way of life, its impact on the unwilling and their eagerness to return to the old ways under Mary. The shock was financial as well as spiritual. The local community was faced not only with the obligatory purchase of new prayer books, service books, bibles and record books, but had also to raise the 'Five Dole', so called because it was a minimum #5 - as much as the normal parish income - to provide money towards equipping the army and for sea defences. To pay for this, what was left of the church valuables, after the Commissioners had seized all they could find, had to be sold off, the equivalent of the village hall stripped, closed down and rented out. No wonder the countryside rose up in protest. Morebath financed five young men to join the rebels who surrounded and laid siege to Exeter in 1549. Not trusting Englishmen to deal with the rebels, the Government recruited professional foreign mercenaries to subue them. The peasants were dispersed and 400 were slaughtered. The Vicar of St Thomas, near Exebridge, who was considered one of the ringleaders, was hung in his vestments from a chain to die from exposure and starvation. Duffy's meticulous research enables us to catch a rare glimpse of 16th-century religious life as experienced by the poorest of the poor, whose distress at the constant and inexplicable changes to their familiar rituals - not to mention the devastation wrought on the fabric of the church building itself - comes through clearly in this remarkable account. It is only a shame that Duffy's style is somewhat on the academic style for the general reader; a more 'popular' version of this masterly work would be widely welcomed. (Kirkus UK)