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The Voices of Morebath: Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village
by Duffy, Eamon
- Used
- very good
- Paperback
- Condition
- Very good
- ISBN 10
- 0300098251
- ISBN 13
- 9780300098259
- Seller
-
Carrollton, Georgia, United States
Payment Methods Accepted
About This Item
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. Paperback. Very good. Paperback. 9 1/4" X 6 1/4". xv, 232pp. Very mild shelf wear to covers, corners, and edges of paper wraps. Pages are clean and unmarked. Binding is sound.
ABOUT THIS BOOK:
In the fifty years between 1530 and 1580, England moved from being one of the most lavishly Catholic countries in Europe to being a Protestant nation, a land of whitewashed churches and antipapal preaching. What was the impact of this religious change in the countryside? And how did country people feel about the revolutionary upheavals that transformed their mental and material worlds under Henry VIII and his three children?
In this book a reformation historian takes us inside the mind and heart of Morebath, a remote and tiny sheep farming village on the southern edge of Exmoor. The bulk of Morebath's conventional archives have long since vanished. But from 1520 to 1574, through nearly all the drama of the English Reformation, Morebath's only priest, Sir Christopher Trychay, kept the parish accounts on behalf of the churchwardens. Opinionated, eccentric, and talkative, Sir Christopher filled these vivid scripts for parish meetings with the names and doings of his parishioners. Through his eyes we catch a rare glimpse of the life and pre-Reformation piety of a sixteenth-century English village.
The book also offers a unique window into a rural world in crisis as the Reformation progressed. Sir Christopher Trychay's accounts provide direct evidence of the motives which drove the hitherto law-abiding West-Country communities to participate in the doomed Prayer-Book Rebellion of 1549 culminating in the siege of Exeter that ended in bloody defeat and a wave of executions. Its church bells confiscated and silenced, Morebath shared in the punishment imposed on all the towns and villages of Devon and Cornwall. Sir Christopher documents the changes in the community, reluctantly Protestant and increasingly preoccupied with the secular demands of the Elizabethan state, the equipping of armies, and the payment of taxes. Morebath's priest, garrulous to the end of his days, describes a rural world irrevocably altered and enables us to hear the voices of his villagers after four hundred years of silence.(Publisher).
ABOUT THIS BOOK:
In the fifty years between 1530 and 1580, England moved from being one of the most lavishly Catholic countries in Europe to being a Protestant nation, a land of whitewashed churches and antipapal preaching. What was the impact of this religious change in the countryside? And how did country people feel about the revolutionary upheavals that transformed their mental and material worlds under Henry VIII and his three children?
In this book a reformation historian takes us inside the mind and heart of Morebath, a remote and tiny sheep farming village on the southern edge of Exmoor. The bulk of Morebath's conventional archives have long since vanished. But from 1520 to 1574, through nearly all the drama of the English Reformation, Morebath's only priest, Sir Christopher Trychay, kept the parish accounts on behalf of the churchwardens. Opinionated, eccentric, and talkative, Sir Christopher filled these vivid scripts for parish meetings with the names and doings of his parishioners. Through his eyes we catch a rare glimpse of the life and pre-Reformation piety of a sixteenth-century English village.
The book also offers a unique window into a rural world in crisis as the Reformation progressed. Sir Christopher Trychay's accounts provide direct evidence of the motives which drove the hitherto law-abiding West-Country communities to participate in the doomed Prayer-Book Rebellion of 1549 culminating in the siege of Exeter that ended in bloody defeat and a wave of executions. Its church bells confiscated and silenced, Morebath shared in the punishment imposed on all the towns and villages of Devon and Cornwall. Sir Christopher documents the changes in the community, reluctantly Protestant and increasingly preoccupied with the secular demands of the Elizabethan state, the equipping of armies, and the payment of taxes. Morebath's priest, garrulous to the end of his days, describes a rural world irrevocably altered and enables us to hear the voices of his villagers after four hundred years of silence.(Publisher).
Reviews
On Jan 13 2011, Feeney said:
Eamon Duffy in his 2001 THE VOICES OF MOREBATH: REFORMATION AND REBELLION IN AN ENGLISH VILLAGE has written another valuable Tudor history but one nodtably difficult and knotty for non-specialists to read. Would that some kind soul might condense, reorganize it and reissue it as MOREBATH FOR DUMMIES. Were I that editor, I would retain unchanged (1) its two maps on one page of the maps of southwestern-most 16th Century England; (2) its 12 pages of colored photos; (3) the reproduced woodcuts adorning each of its seven chapters; (4) its list of all parish wardens of Morebath 1520 - 1575; (5) its ample bibliography and finally (6) the book's end notes. *** I would retain (while drastically shortening text) the substance of the following elements: (1) biography of MOREBATH's hero, its parish priest for 54 years (1520 - 1574) Sir (instead of today's "Father") Christopher Trychay (1490? - 1574); (2) highlights of the religious innovations of any and all five Tudor monarchs; (3) the author's conclusions (without detailed appeal to scholarly underpinnings) of how Tudor religious innovations impacted the parish of Saint George in Morebath; and finally (4) Eamon Duffy's general conclusions on the mechanics through which Christianity in England survived and adapted itself to the demands of the increasingly centralized, always at war secularizing, moderninzing Tudor state. ***In THE VOICES OF MOREBATH we meet the Vicar of Saint George's Church and year after year those more active lay parishioners who divided themselves into custodians and collectors of various funds aimed at parish projects. Surprisingly, there were elected representatives of both woman and "maidens" as well as young men and others. We see sheep as the basis of parish revenues and prosperity. We also see lay people with minds of their own knuckling under for five decades to pressure and/or advice from pastor, bishops and King in Parliament. *** Duffy's argument is that the Reformation in England was top-down, imposed on a lay population overwhelmingly content with inherited Latin-language, Saints venerating worship. (Scotland was just the opposite, a popular anti-Catholic movement opposing the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots). *** Read THE VOICES OF MOREBATH for its maps, illustrations and sweeping, insightful generalizations. The price you pay is the effort of cutting though a thick kernel of scholarship. -OOO-
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Details
- Bookseller
- Underground Books, ABAA
(US)
- Bookseller's Inventory #
- 14758
- Title
- The Voices of Morebath: Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village
- Author
- Duffy, Eamon
- Format/Binding
- Paperback
- Book Condition
- Used - Very good
- Quantity Available
- 1
- ISBN 10
- 0300098251
- ISBN 13
- 9780300098259
- Publisher
- Yale University Press
- Place of Publication
- New Haven
- Date Published
- 2001
Terms of Sale
Underground Books, ABAA
30 day return guarantee, with full refund including shipping costs for up to 30 days after delivery if an item arrives misdescribed or damaged.
About the Seller
Underground Books, ABAA
Biblio member since 2009
Carrollton, Georgia
About Underground Books, ABAA
Underground Books is an online rare and antiquarian bookshop as well as a brick and mortar general bookstore of the same name in downtown Carrollton, Georgia. Sister store Hills & Hamlets Bookshop is located in the nearby planned eco-community of Serenbe.
Co-owners Josh Niesse and Megan Bell met in 2011, just 10 days or so after Josh opened the doors of Underground Books, literally underground, several steps below street level in a 100-year-old basement in our historic downtown. Megan, an English student at the University of West Georgia, walked in, fell down the rabbit hole, and never left! Reader, we married in May of 2014, under the book arch that now resides at the bookshop. We are both proud alumni of the Colorado Antiquarian Book Seminar (CABS), and Megan additionally of Rare Book School at the University of Virginia and of the ABAA Women's Initiative Mentorship Program.
We have two open bookshops that carry new, used, bargain, rare, and antiquarian books, as well as our online office, impossible without our incredible team of booksellers, including two fellow CABS graduates, Miranda McMillan and Suzanne Carnes.
Like many booksellers with open brick-and-mortar stores, we are passionate generalists, but our specialties are in decorative publisher's cloth bindings; fairy tales, folklore, and mythology; popular science and natural history; the occult; and fine press books.
Co-owners Josh Niesse and Megan Bell met in 2011, just 10 days or so after Josh opened the doors of Underground Books, literally underground, several steps below street level in a 100-year-old basement in our historic downtown. Megan, an English student at the University of West Georgia, walked in, fell down the rabbit hole, and never left! Reader, we married in May of 2014, under the book arch that now resides at the bookshop. We are both proud alumni of the Colorado Antiquarian Book Seminar (CABS), and Megan additionally of Rare Book School at the University of Virginia and of the ABAA Women's Initiative Mentorship Program.
We have two open bookshops that carry new, used, bargain, rare, and antiquarian books, as well as our online office, impossible without our incredible team of booksellers, including two fellow CABS graduates, Miranda McMillan and Suzanne Carnes.
Like many booksellers with open brick-and-mortar stores, we are passionate generalists, but our specialties are in decorative publisher's cloth bindings; fairy tales, folklore, and mythology; popular science and natural history; the occult; and fine press books.
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