The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year 1400-1700

Hutton, [is], taking a longer view from 1400 onwards. For him, culturally at least, the reformation was enforced, imposed, or made uniform by an increasingly centralising government and a small number of ideological fellow travellers: ‘What all these cases show is pressure to remove the old

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customs exerted from above, through or from members of an urban elite and against the wishes of at least some of the populace’. This is a simplification of Hutton’s position of course, since there were many areas of the country where protestantism, even puritanism, were as strong, if not stronger, among the people as it was within the church. But in essence his story is one of the extirpation of a highly evolved community of culture and traditions; it is a narrative of defeat. Having always seen myself as sympathetic to both the agents of change and to the people and popular culture, I found it a shock – and discomforting – to have those two positions in conflict with one another... However, having read Hutton I now find it very hard to view the Reformation – or more particularly its scorched earth policy to the existing anglo-catholic culture (as opposed to the institutions of the Catholic church), its destructiveness, its iconoclasm, and its approval of what was often little more than wholesale looting – with much enthusiasm.

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