TURBULENT TIMES IN BARNOLDSWICK (1)
Posted: 18 Aug 2024, 03:32
TURBULENT TIMES IN BARLICK
As you may have noticed, my research reading of late has been mostly religious history. I have become more and more aware that the beautiful but simplistic Bible based teaching I got in my youth, mainly at the Wycliffe Sunday School in Stockport, left many large gaps in my knowledge. Incidentally, a question I never got round to asking my mother was why she attended the Church of England services at our local Parish Church, St Martins, and made me enrol in the choir there even though her upbringing was Primitive Methodist. I suspect it was because it was nearer than the Chapel and sending me to the definitely non-conformist Sunday School was her way of making sure I got some balance. In a way it worked because I got a very good grounding in Bible Studies and won a first prize as best scholar one year. In later life I worked for a very religious man and annoyed him many a time by quoting the Bible to him even though he regarded me as a rough diamond! A useful skill....
Over the years, as I have dug into the history of Barlick I have had to take some dangerous leaps of faith when trying to describe what was happening in times when I had very little evidence to go on. For a long time this was a serious gap in both my knowledge and what I wrote about the town but if you dig long enough you eventually start to find evidence and sometimes it can appear when you least expect it. In modern Barlick, if the spirit moves you, you can find a place of worship that caters for whatever part of the spectrum attracts you most from straight Roman Catholic to the modern Evangelists taking in such esoteric branches as Jehovah's Witnesses and Christian Science. Of course it wasn't always so, until the middle of the 16th century it was dangerous to publicly espouse any belief other than the Catholic message. Attendance at Gill and participating in the Mass at frequent intervals was compulsory and dire punishments could fall on transgressors. We have no evidence for public execution by burning as a heretic in Barlick but this was a constant threat in the background. Organised religion was an essential element of social control starting at the top with the monarch and permeating the whole of society. Even the monarch was subject to control as the head of the Western Catholic church in Rome was his or her superior because he was the Vicar of Christ and any instruction from him carried the authority of God.
What interested me was how this draconian system of rule was broken, how did we get from there to today where we have perfect religious freedom including total abstention? In other words, what we have to enquire into is the history of thought and social control. Until the middle of the 14th century what dissent existed was carefully hidden from the authorities, the Feudal System reigned supreme, everyone knew their place in the hierarchy and there was even an official name for it, 'The Chain of Being'. Never written into law but perfectly understood by all, if you were born a landless serf you were in effect possessed by the Lord of the Manor and he could do with you as he willed for as long as you lived. In this respect we were perhaps lucky in Barlick because for much of the time till the 16th century our Lord was the Abbot at Kirkstall. But even under this benevolent rule there were cracks appearing in the structure.
When the Black Death struck in 1348 and a minimum of a third of the population died, the first question that was asked by the people was “Why is this happening?” The Catholic Church had a ready answer, it was a judgement of God for the punishment of sins. The priesthood didn't specify exactly which sins, they left that to the imagination of the victims. However, it soon became apparent that the pestilence was killing the priests as well and the natural question that arose was that if the plague was a punishment for sins this must mean that the priests were as guilty as anyone else. A bit of a puzzle! I don't want to dig too far into this but the upshot was that the commoners weren't as ignorant as the church thought and they started to come to their own conclusions. Perhaps the priesthood were neither infallible or free from sin, perhaps people weren't locked into the Chain of Being, perhaps they weren't natural serfs to the Lordship. They had one thing going for them, the mortality was mainly amongst those of working age and the first consequence of it was a severe shortage of labour to work the land. We begin to see the concept of wage labour, legal tenancy of land and relaxation of the Feudal System as the Lords struggled to preserve the economy on which they depended by making concessions. True, there was a reaction and laws were passed which tried to restrain the new freedoms but in the end they failed. This was the start of our modern economic systems whereby workers gradually gained autonomy and indeed some became very wealthy and joined the landed magnates.
However, this wasn't the only consequence. One thing that is surprising from research done in other places is the number of common people who had a degree of literacy, many could read and some could write. They could certainly sit round the fire at night and discuss the changes they were seeing in the world. Gradually this undercurrent, never documented but undoubtedly there, gave birth to new beliefs about how the world could work. The first national consequence was the Peasant's Revolt of 1381 which, although it happened mainly in the South and eventually failed, is concrete evidence that radical thought was abroad. This was definitely the end of the Feudal System and the beginning of modern Britain.
We have no direct evidence of what actually happened in Barlick but from what we know about how the town developed just over a century later we can have a good idea. I've done it again, run out of space. I'll give you some hard evidence next week about how we developed and in many ways were at the forefront of the new society.
SCG/01/03/13
One of the consequences, a field system at Bracewell with individual plots.
As you may have noticed, my research reading of late has been mostly religious history. I have become more and more aware that the beautiful but simplistic Bible based teaching I got in my youth, mainly at the Wycliffe Sunday School in Stockport, left many large gaps in my knowledge. Incidentally, a question I never got round to asking my mother was why she attended the Church of England services at our local Parish Church, St Martins, and made me enrol in the choir there even though her upbringing was Primitive Methodist. I suspect it was because it was nearer than the Chapel and sending me to the definitely non-conformist Sunday School was her way of making sure I got some balance. In a way it worked because I got a very good grounding in Bible Studies and won a first prize as best scholar one year. In later life I worked for a very religious man and annoyed him many a time by quoting the Bible to him even though he regarded me as a rough diamond! A useful skill....
Over the years, as I have dug into the history of Barlick I have had to take some dangerous leaps of faith when trying to describe what was happening in times when I had very little evidence to go on. For a long time this was a serious gap in both my knowledge and what I wrote about the town but if you dig long enough you eventually start to find evidence and sometimes it can appear when you least expect it. In modern Barlick, if the spirit moves you, you can find a place of worship that caters for whatever part of the spectrum attracts you most from straight Roman Catholic to the modern Evangelists taking in such esoteric branches as Jehovah's Witnesses and Christian Science. Of course it wasn't always so, until the middle of the 16th century it was dangerous to publicly espouse any belief other than the Catholic message. Attendance at Gill and participating in the Mass at frequent intervals was compulsory and dire punishments could fall on transgressors. We have no evidence for public execution by burning as a heretic in Barlick but this was a constant threat in the background. Organised religion was an essential element of social control starting at the top with the monarch and permeating the whole of society. Even the monarch was subject to control as the head of the Western Catholic church in Rome was his or her superior because he was the Vicar of Christ and any instruction from him carried the authority of God.
What interested me was how this draconian system of rule was broken, how did we get from there to today where we have perfect religious freedom including total abstention? In other words, what we have to enquire into is the history of thought and social control. Until the middle of the 14th century what dissent existed was carefully hidden from the authorities, the Feudal System reigned supreme, everyone knew their place in the hierarchy and there was even an official name for it, 'The Chain of Being'. Never written into law but perfectly understood by all, if you were born a landless serf you were in effect possessed by the Lord of the Manor and he could do with you as he willed for as long as you lived. In this respect we were perhaps lucky in Barlick because for much of the time till the 16th century our Lord was the Abbot at Kirkstall. But even under this benevolent rule there were cracks appearing in the structure.
When the Black Death struck in 1348 and a minimum of a third of the population died, the first question that was asked by the people was “Why is this happening?” The Catholic Church had a ready answer, it was a judgement of God for the punishment of sins. The priesthood didn't specify exactly which sins, they left that to the imagination of the victims. However, it soon became apparent that the pestilence was killing the priests as well and the natural question that arose was that if the plague was a punishment for sins this must mean that the priests were as guilty as anyone else. A bit of a puzzle! I don't want to dig too far into this but the upshot was that the commoners weren't as ignorant as the church thought and they started to come to their own conclusions. Perhaps the priesthood were neither infallible or free from sin, perhaps people weren't locked into the Chain of Being, perhaps they weren't natural serfs to the Lordship. They had one thing going for them, the mortality was mainly amongst those of working age and the first consequence of it was a severe shortage of labour to work the land. We begin to see the concept of wage labour, legal tenancy of land and relaxation of the Feudal System as the Lords struggled to preserve the economy on which they depended by making concessions. True, there was a reaction and laws were passed which tried to restrain the new freedoms but in the end they failed. This was the start of our modern economic systems whereby workers gradually gained autonomy and indeed some became very wealthy and joined the landed magnates.
However, this wasn't the only consequence. One thing that is surprising from research done in other places is the number of common people who had a degree of literacy, many could read and some could write. They could certainly sit round the fire at night and discuss the changes they were seeing in the world. Gradually this undercurrent, never documented but undoubtedly there, gave birth to new beliefs about how the world could work. The first national consequence was the Peasant's Revolt of 1381 which, although it happened mainly in the South and eventually failed, is concrete evidence that radical thought was abroad. This was definitely the end of the Feudal System and the beginning of modern Britain.
We have no direct evidence of what actually happened in Barlick but from what we know about how the town developed just over a century later we can have a good idea. I've done it again, run out of space. I'll give you some hard evidence next week about how we developed and in many ways were at the forefront of the new society.
SCG/01/03/13
One of the consequences, a field system at Bracewell with individual plots.