The Rule of the Tudors 1485 - 1603

In England, the Observant Fransiscans revitalized the religious life of their order by reinstating the
Rule from which it had fallen. There were six houses for Observants in the early sixteenth century.
In Ireland, the spirit of reform touched three of the four mendicant orders and the friars' fervour
and moral authority gave them a powerful influence among the laity. True, the reform movement in
Irish religious orders was partly an assertion of their freedom from being controlled from the English
province, and a protest of Gaelic communities against Anglo-Irish ownership, but the spiritual inspiration was plain. That many of the religious orders were exempt from the hierarchial jurisdiction
of the Church, and directly under papal authority, came to threaten them.

The Lay Folks' Mass Book urged each attender at Mass to pray:

My heart to be in peace and rest,
And ready to love all manner of men:
My sib men namely, then
Neighbours, servants and subjects,
Friends and foes and foryectes [outcasts].

Loving enemies and outcasts was hardest of all. All the communities of household, religious fraternity,
craft fellowship, neighbourhood and parish still left some, perhaps many, excluded. Brotherhood,
it has been well said, implies otherhood. Personal disasters and social stresses left many stranded and
outcast. For some, the rejection was of choice. Christendom might be spurned not only by infidels,
but by those who doubted the faith of their 'even christen' and thought their own faith invalidated
theirs. These were the heretics. The poor are with us always, but at some times more evidently than
at others. The Tudor century saw a terrible growth of impoverishment. A huge population rise from
the early century; agricultural transformations; and the operation of the land market in favour of
the aggrandizing, left many homeless, landless, destitute. Even in what passed for good times there
was never enough work to go around; what work there was was seasonal and increasingly badly paid,
and the poor were often driven on to the road to look for it. In bad times those who lived on the edge
of subsistence were especially vulnerable. Failing harvests drove up prices beyond the ability of the
poor to buy, and destitution followed. At times the desperation of the poor cried out. At a dole of
bread in Southwark in 1533 there was such a press of people that four men, two women and a boy
were crushed to death. Some in their terrible poverty abandoned their children in the doorways of
the rich. In the 1550s Londoners remembered foundlings in their wills, and sometimes bequeathed
them in turn: 'My little child William, whom I keep of alms, I give as freely as he was given me.'
Time was when the poor had been seen as somehow blessed, as Christ's own image. But when the
poor became so many that they confronted the rich on every street corner, covered with sores and
begging with menaces, it became harder to see them as beatified. The destitute in towns, especially
in London, did not keep a decent distance in ghettoes and out-parishes: rich and poor lived side by
side, the rich in great houses on main thoroughfares, the poor in side alleys and lanes behind.
A harsher doctrine began to prevail towards charity and the poor, and some recalled St Paul's warning
to the Thessalonians: 'If there were any that would not work, that the same should not eat.'
There was increasing discrimination, in law and popular attitude, between the 'deserving' and 'undeserving' poor, the 'able-bodied' and the 'impotent'; between those who wished to work but
could not, and those who could work but would not. It was a long time before the authorities acknowledged that there was insufficient work to go around. The 'sturdy [and] mighty vagabond'
was increasingly seen as a threat to the commonwealth rather than part of it.
A society which sought stability and order, which believed that every man must have a master, found
a danger in the increasing number of utterly transient, rootless human flotsam; a danger which
lay in their mutability and masterless. Parliament had first made masterlessness a crime in the fourteenth century, and by the sixteenth century the vagrant poor could be arrested not because of
any action, not because they had committed any crime, but simply for being masterless and adrift
from their family, members of no settled household, nor likely to be. Very many of the vagrant poor
were young, not only because most of the population was young, but because this time of life was
most insecure. Orphans and abandoned children were often left to wander the streets, unmarried
servants who became pregnant (often enough by their masters) were cast out of the household, and
passed from one parish to the next which did not wish to shelter them. Derelicts gave their last
trouble to society by dying in streets. The authorities feared that there were 'fraternities' of vagabonds,
conspiring to cause trouble. No so; a few vagrants might band together for safety and mutual support,
but companies of travellers were rare.
The worst desolation was not poverty or the recourses it led to - begging, prostitution, and crime -
but the mental desolation of despair. Suicide was a kind of murder, a felony in criminal law and a
desperate sin in the eyes of the Church. Suicides were tried posthumously by a coroner's jury and,
if convicted of self-murder their goods were forfeit and they were denied Christian burial, instead
being buried with macabre and profane ceremonies. For these reasons, evidence of suicide must
often have been covered up. Yet in May 1532 there were fourteen suicides in London, by hanging
or drowning, at the time that a traumatic assault on the liberties of the Church caused Thomas More
to resign his office. Thomas More thought often upon suicide, and wrote in one of his last works
of the 'very special holy man' tempted by the Devil to imagine that it was God's will that he should
destroy himself, and thereby go straight to heaven. But suicide was the ultimate act of religious
defiance, a sin for which there could be no penitence, for the sinner would be dead. Those who committed terrible sins and were impertinent were excommunicated, cast out from the Church and
the communion of the faithful. 'First we accurse all them that break the peace of Holy Church';
so went the curse of major excommunication pronounced quarterly by the parish priest. People who were cursed were denied sacramental grace, and the solemnity of the anathema was marked by the ringing of the bells and the extinction of candles. In 1535 a curse was pronounced against Thomas Fitzgerald and his adherents for a terrible sin: the murder of John Alen, Archbishop of Dublin. It called on God to strike them with fire and sulphur, hunger, thirst, leprosy, madness.

As ye see candles lit and the light quenched, so be the said cursed murderers . . . excluded and separated from the light of heaven, the fellowship of angels, and all Christian people, and shall be sent to the low darkness of fiends and damned creatures, among whom everlasting pains doth endure.

And yet, divine forgiveness and salvation at last awaited even the worst sinners, if penitent. The curse
ended with the hope that 'Jesu Christ, of His infinite mercy, may call them to the grace of repentance.'