The fifteenth century is generally believed to have been especially religiously dead. There are two ways of looking at it; we may talk, not without some reason, of the stagnation of the fag end of mediævalism, of the wealth and worldliness and neglect of the prelates, of the superstition of the people, and so forth; but one fact, which still exists all over the country, is enough by itself to work instant conviction that there is another side to the question—the church building of the century. Our forefathers in the fifteenth century had enough of life and originality to develop here in England a new variety of Gothic art distinctly different from the development of the art on the Continent of Europe; a reaction against the luxuriant beauty of the Decorated; with a masculine strength in its lines, and a practical modification of plan and elevation so as to obtain spacious, lofty interiors. Take its grand towers as a measure of its artistic power; call to mind the use of painted windows as the great means of coloured decoration; study the elaboration and richness of the roofs and chancel screens of Norfolk and Devon. Calculate the immense quantity of church architecture and art executed in the fifteenth century, not only in monasteries and cathedrals, but in parish churches; think of the magnificent parish churches of Norfolk, Suffolk, Lincolnshire, and Somerset, and of the rising towns in Yorkshire and Lancashire. Remember that they were not commissioned and paid for by the parochial clergy, for we have shown that they had nothing to spare; not by the nobility, for they were half ruined by the Wars of the Roses; but by the large minds of the rising middle class, and out of the wealth which trade and commerce brought them.
Magdalen College, Oxford,
15th century.
St. Michael’s, Coventry, 15th century.
This one piece of evidence is enough to prove the existence of vigorous religious faith among the people. At the same time, kings and prelates were founding colleges and schools, e.g. Winchester and Eton, New and King’s. Country gentlemen were founding chantries and supplying themselves with domestic chaplains, and the traders of the towns were founding gilds and services in order to obtain for themselves and those belonging to them additional means of grace and closer pastoral care. It is not possible to believe in the face of such facts that there was not a great deal of very earnest religion in the fifteenth century. Abuses and false doctrines and superstitions there were in abundance, but the religious spirit of the fifteenth century was already striving earnestly for reform, and accumulating that force of public opinion which broke out in the Reformation of the sixteenth century, and compelled Rome itself, after frustrating the Councils of Constance and Basle, to make the reforms of the Council of Trent.
Contrast this with the three centuries which followed; with the cessation of all building of new churches and the neglect of the old ones, and the shameful condition of the services in many of them; with the absence of the extension of Church machinery to meet the needs of the increasing population; and it will be hard to believe that there was not much more of religious earnestness in the fifteenth century than in those which followed it. The Italian relation of England[640] says of the people of the later part of this century: “They all attend mass every day, and say many paternosters in public, the women carrying long rosaries in their hands, and any who can read taking the office of Our Lady with them, and, with some companion, reciting it in the church verse by verse in a low voice, after the manner of the religious. They always hear mass on Sunday in their parish church, and give liberal alms because they may not offer less than a piece of money whereof fourteen are equal to a gold ducat, nor do they omit any form incumbent upon good Christians.”