Tag Archives: Church of England

Dissolving the monasteries

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If people know anything about Henry VIII, it’s that (in descending order): he had six wives (divorced, beheaded, died; divorced, beheaded, survived), he left the Catholic Church in a huff, and (sharp descent here) he dissolved the monasteries. 

Let’s talk about the monasteries.

Dissolving religious houses wasn’t new. For centuries, smaller monasteries either had blinked out of existence on their own or were dissolved so their endowments (their revenue-generating lands and churches) could be redistributed to other religious houses or used to fund colleges. Beyond pissing off some manageable number of people, that wasn’t controversial. What was  new under Henry was the scale. And the purpose. 

Oh, and where the money went.

 

Irrelevant photo: sunset

The why? of it all

First off, we’re using monasteries here as shorthand for not just monasteries but also abbeys, convents, and any religious houses that I’ve forgotten. It’s inaccurate and sexist but it’s simpler. Forgive me. 

If you roll all those religious houses together, you’ll have the wealthiest institution in Tudor England, owning a quarter of the country’s cultivated land and a lot of expensive bling, because devotion to god worked better when it was surrounded by gold and silver and jewels. 

All that bling was not only expensive, it was important. How would anyone know you had wealth if you didn’t show it off? It was what people and institutions did with it.

This being a time when wealth was measured not in bitcoins but in land and expensive objects, it was almost inevitable that Henry would cast his eye in the direction of those monasteries. His government was permanently short of money (blame wars–they’re expensive–and, um, lifestyle issues), and the monasteries not only had all those riches, they were aligned with the pope, who was now Henry’s enemy, what with Henry jumping into that huff and leaving the church, so they were a base of power capable of opposing him.

 

The mechanics of dissolution

In 1536, Henry’s government went after monasteries that had an income of less than £200 a year and fewer than 12 “inmates.” Sorry–not my word. They were probably counting nuns, monks, or friars but not their servants. They were closed down and their buildings, land, and money went to the crown. 

To give a sense of what £200 was worth, you could’ve bought 42 horses or 160 cows with it. It was the daily wage of 6,666 skilled artisans–or of one working for a long damn time. 

Then in 1539, the government moved against the larger monasteries, and by the next year they were being closed at the rate of 50 a month. The land and buildings of both large and small houses were sold and the bling–the movable assets–auctioned off.

In the first stage of dissolution, the confiscated buildings weren’t badly damaged, although lead was stripped from the roofs (it was valuable stuff), glazing was removed, and bells melted down. The plan was to sell or use the buildings themselves, and some of the buildings were repurposed for grand homes. You’ll still find stately homes called SomethingOrOther Abbey, and yes, they were once abbeys. 

In the later stages of the dissolution, orders went out to pull down the buildings: “Pull down to the ground all the walls of the churches, steeples, cloisters, fraters [refectories], dorters [dormitories], chapter houses.” This wasn’t cheap. The cost of tearing down Furness Abbey was 10% of the money raised by selling its property. 

Many of the buildings were partially pulled down and left to decay. Today, they make scenic ruins and people pay admission to wander through, take selfies, brush up against a bit of history, and then buy tea and sandwiches. 

 

The courts

All this confiscating and selling created a major administrative headache, and in 1535 the Court of Augmentation was set up to sort through the monasteries’ assets and income. Then in 1540, the Court of First Fruits and Tenths took charge of money the monasteries had once sent to Rome, because the end of the monasteries didn’t mean the end of the payments people owed them. 

What were first fruits, though? The first year’s profits that the new holder of a benefice owed the church. (A benefice was a church office that brought revenue to the person who held it.)  And the tenths? The 10% of each year’s income that the benefice’s holder owed the church each year until forever. All that had to be assessed, catalogued, dealt with.

The courts were part of Thomas Cromwell’s work of replacing the king’s medieval household administration with something we’d recognize today as a civil service. 

The treasury came out of the dissolution some £1.5 million richer. That would’ve been lifetimes of work by those skilled artisans we were talking about.

 

The monks, nuns, and servants

That accounts for the income, the bling, and the land and buildings, but it leaves the people who made their lives in the monasteries unaccounted for. So let’s do numbers. Some people love numbers. 

Roughly 14,000 monks, nuns, and friars were de-monked, de-nunned, and de-friared when the monasteries closed. If they cooperated, they received pensions. If they didn’t–well, some 200 people were executed for opposing the dissolution. 

I haven’t found a number for the servants who were now out of jobs and I don’t know if they were counted.

Monks and canons typically received a pension of around £5 or £6 a year, which was roughly what a chaplain was paid.

What’s a canon? I had to look it up. “A member of the chapter of (for the most part) priests, headed by a dean, which is responsible for administering a cathedral or certain other churches.”

Did you really need to know that?

The heads of religious houses did better, and as in everything else at this time, connections mattered. Family mattered. One abbot who was close to Cromwell received £100 a year–roughly the income of a rich country gentleman. Cooperation also mattered. Those who played along might be allowed to wander out into the secular world in possession of some of the house’s bling or cattle.  

Nuns–you won’t be surprised to learn–got less, sometimes no more than £1 a year. Even after the convents closed, they weren’t allowed to marry, although some did anyway. But many found no choice but to return to their families. Convents had long been refuges both for women who didn’t want to marry and dumping grounds for the unmarriageable daughters of the gentry and middle-ranking families. Both groups of women were likely to be seen as  burdens if they returned home. 

As for the servants, there would’ve been more of them than of monks or nuns. Sawley Abbey’s 18 monks had 42 servants–farmhands, plumbers, cooks, kitchen boys, carpenters, grooms, masons, laborers, and washerwomen.  

A monastery would also have had a steward–far higher up the scale than a washerwoman but still a servant–who managed legal relationships and relations with the outside world. 

With the closing of the monasteries, the servants who lived there, as many did, would have been homeless in addition to unemployed. Some dissolution commissioners made provision for them–which implies that some didn’t. At Furness Abbey, the servants were owed a good bit of back pay, and the commissioner made sure this was paid, although they got nothing, as far as I’ve read, beyond that. 

Almsmen living at the abbey received a cash settlement. 

 

Gain and Losses

Although the politically well connected and the backers of Henry’s reforms were in the best position to profit from the sales of land and buildings, traditional Catholics also bought up property. This created a group of wealthy families whose interests now lay with keeping the Church of England in place. Even when Mary took the throne and restored the Catholic Church, she couldn’t re-establish the monasteries. Whether you count that as a gain, a loss, or simply clever politics depends on your point of view.

The closing of the monasteries created some concrete problems that no one seems to have planned for. The monasteries had been home to massive libraries–collections of illuminated manuscripts. But the printed book was replacing the hand-copied one, so who needed those old things? Some were saved but many were destroyed.

Monastic and convent schools had educated boys and girls (separately of course, you barbarian), and the church had offered one of the very few ways a bright boy could climb out of poverty. With the closing of the monasteries, the schools closed.

The church also ran hospitals, and many of these were attached to monasteries. Those were lost. 

Let’s not let the word hospital fool us, though. It shares a root with hospitality, and not all hospitals dealt with illness. In England and Wales, 47% housed the poor and elderly. Another 12% housed poor travelers and pilgrims and 10% cared for the non-contagious sick. The rest housed lepers.

Monasteries also gave alms in the form of money or food to the poor. Not enough to keep them from being poor, mind you, and not enough to make a dent in their own riches, but when people are hungry–and this was a society full of people living on the edge–food is food.

No one made plans to replace any of this.

 

Nursery rhymes

According to legend, the nursery rhyme about Little Jack Horner come from this time. 

Little Jack Horner
Sat in the corner,
Eating a Christmas pie;
He put in his thumb,
And pulled out a plum,
And said ‘What a good boy am I!

Thomas Horner was (allegedly) steward to Richard Whiting, the last abbot of Glastonbury, and before the abbey was destroyed Whiting was supposed to have sent Horner to London with a huge Christmas pie with the deeds to a dozen manors hidden inside. Because if the Court of Augmentations couldn’t find them, they couldn’t claim them. Possession is nine-tenths and all that.

Again supposedly, Horner opened the pie somewhere along the way and stole the deeds to the manor of Mells, in Somerset, which had lead mines, making the plum in the rhyme a play on the Latin plumbum, meaning lead. 

A Thomas Horner did become the owner of the manor, but that doesn’t prove he found it in a pie and doesn’t explain why he’s called Jack.

England’s church ales

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If you’ve brushed shoulders with medieval history, you’ll know the Catholic Church wasn’t shy about raising money, but you may have to brush a bit more than your shoulder to learn about church ales. 

They were a way for local churches to raise money and for local people to throw a party, because an ale could involve not just the obvious–ale–but also food, sports, games, music, dancing, and whatever else local tradition dictated. Some were linked to the church calendar–Whitsun ales were common, as were ales to celebrate the church’s patron saint–and others were held to raise money for specific thing. A bride’s ale, for example, would raise money for a poor couple who were getting married, or an ale might also be help to pay the parish clerk.

But they were more than a way to raise money. They were massive social occasions–the kind of events that hold small communities together. 

Irrelevant photo: toadflax

A couple of examples

Woodstock, in Oxfordshire, had a Whitsun ale every seven years. The years without a Whitsun ale were dedicated to sleeping off the hangover, because on the seventh year, look out: the ale began on Holy Thursday and roared on all week. 

Since Whitsun’s related to Easter, following it by a fair few weeks, and since Easter’s related to Passover, which is calculated on a lunar calendar, Whitsun’s a restless holiday that moves around the calendar, usually between May and June. But don’t look at the calendar: whatever the month was, Woodstock set up a maypole, and decked it out with ribbons and flowers. The Duke of Marlborough paid for it. 

Next to the maypole was the drinking booth, and opposite that a shed–okay, a shed some 50 feet long–decorated with evergreens. That was called the Bowery. Not Bowery as in New York’s old skid row. A bowery was a shady, leafy place. Or a dwelling. Or a lady’s bedroom. Or several vaguely related other things.  

Never mind. We’ll come back to this particular Bowery.

A lord and lady were chosen to preside over the ale, along with a waiting-man and a waiting maid and two men who carried a painted wooden horse. We’ll come back to the horse as well.

They’d go around the town in a procession, with the lord and lady offering a Whit cake for people to taste in return for a small payment. Whole cakes were also for sale.

The lady’s parrot and the lady’s nutcrackers were hung up in front of the bowery. These were an owl and a hawk in cages and a pair of threshing flails. Anyone who called them flails, owls, or hawks was fined a shilling. If they didn’t cough up, they were carried around the maypole on the wooden horse. If they still wouldn’t pay up, someone confiscated their hat.

Students from Oxford came over to ride the horse for the sheer hell of it and they frequently ended up fighting with the morris dancers when they wouldn’t pay the shilling.

Did we mention the morris dancers? Morris dancers show up everywhere.

*

In Reading, Berkshire, parishioners also elected a king to preside over Whitsun, and there was ale, morris dancing, and feasting in the churchyard.

If you’re not a fan of morris dancing, I’m sure it looks better after some ale.

At Hock Tide (also linked to Easter but not a religious festival), the women of the parish kidnapped the men on the first day of the festival and held them for ransom, with the money going into the parish funds. On the second day, the men kidnapped the women. 

According to a source on the festival, “In St Laurence’s, there may have been a division of the sexes for the feasting, with the accounts recording separately the ‘wyvis soper [supper]’ and the ‘bachelers soper.’ ”

In some parishes, the women were responsible for organizing the activities for an ale, and at least one set of parish records lists the expense of a supper to thank them for their work. For what it’s worth, in the village where I live, it tends to be women who organize local events, and the organizing itself, although not formally a way to socialize, still brings people together. 

*

In Crowcombe, Somerset, parish ales were held in a two-story house that had been built in 1515, in response to church authorities frowning on ales being held in the church nave. (Naves are where the congregation stood during church services; they didn’t have pews yet, so they were generally the largest open, indoor space in a village, and they were separated from the sanctuary by a screen, which–I’m speculating here–may have made them feel less like a religious space and more like a secular one.)

The house was given by the lords of two manors and the church was to pay rent for it. The goal was to meet the village’s needs for a community space.

Brewing and baking were done downstairs until the mid-1600s, and feasting and dancing were upstairs. Food and drink were carried up an outdoor staircase, in procession.

 

And then it all changed 

While we were paying attention to ales, the Church of England snuck in and replaced the Catholic Church. Some traditions continued seamlessly and others didn’t. Church ales were one of the things that carried over. 

But English Protestantism was made of multiple, conflicting strands, and church leaders gradually turned against ales–first against clerical involvement and later against the ales themselves. 

When the Commonwealth came along in 1649, it brought in an austere form of Protestantism. The monarchy was overthrown, the Church of England ceased to be the state church, and church ales were out.

Then the Commonwealth collapsed and the kings came back, bringing the Church of England with them, but not the ales. The church was happy enough not to revive them. Church rates were a more reliable way to raise money–and an easier one. 

Church rates? They were a tax that went to maintain the parish church, usually collected by churchwardens. The earliest known use of the phrase is from the mid-1600s. They were abolished in 1868–at least in England.    

Some ales were resurrected, both to raise money and to bring the community together. They never became as widespread as they had been, though. They were usually supported by local government or landowners. I’ve found a couple of contemporary ones. In July, Weymouth held a church ale and (yes indeed) teddy bear zipwire. And the parish church in St. Ives, Cambridgeshire, is holding (or just held–they’re less than forthcoming about the dates) a Booze in the Pews festival.

English Protestantism and the King’s Book of Sports

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Like so much of human history, England’s conflict between Protestants and Catholics (and between Protestants and Protestants) was played out against a backdrop of absurdity. That’s not to say it didn’t turn deadly with grim regularity, and at the time I’m sure it all would’ve looked perfectly sensible. Looking back, though–

Yeah, there’s nothing like hindsight. Let’s drop in on one small, strange moment.

The year is 1603. Elizabeth I has died and King James is riding from Scotland–where he’s already king–to London to have all the hocus-pocus of becoming the English king performed over and around him. Along the way he stops in Lancashire, and while he’s there, proto-king that he is, he’s handed a petition complaining that the local clergy and magistrates are keeping people from playing traditional games on Sunday. 

This, my friends, is important. So important that we’ll shift to the past tense.

Irrelevant photo: geranium

Enter the Puritans

The Puritans got their start inside the Church of England, and their goal was to cleanse the church of all traces of Catholicism–the ceremony, the fancy clothes, the incense, the stained glass, the bishops, and pretty much anything else that wasn’t mentioned in the Bible. And since dancing and Maypoles and archery hadn’t been mentioned–

Okay, I have no idea what was mentioned in the Bible. I’d feel safe betting on Maypoles. Dancing and archery? Those look like shakier ground and I won’t be placing any bets. 

But you know how a movement can start out with one clear argument–being or not being in the Bible is surely as simple as a baloney sandwich–and before it’s even lunchtime people are arguing about ketchup and mustard and pickles? And somebody in a fancy suit wants sliced tomatoes and sourdough bread and swears it’s spelled bologna? 

It was like that. Forget that business about the Bible, the rumor was going around that Catholics encouraged games on Sunday in order to keep people away from Protestant church services. Clearly, the only sensible response was to ban the games. Basically, the idea was to close off all other activities so people would come to church out of sheer boredom, although I don’t suppose they’d have made the argument in quite that way.

 

And now, enter James

James was a good audience for this particular petition. (Remember the petition? If not, return to Go and start over.) Several Puritans writers argued that kings who didn’t support the true religion could legitimately be deposed, which isn’t an argument calculated to win the heart of either king or proto-king. Kings were used to deciding which religion was the true one and watching their subjects fall into line.  

So that didn’t go down well. What’s more, there was a good argument to be made that banning sports on Sunday would drive people not to Protestant services but into the arms of–gasp, wheeze–Catholicism, which didn’t object to a bit of fun on a Sunday.

Sunday, remember, was most people’s only regular day off, so why not allow them a little fun. Catholics would positively come flocking to the Protestant cause.

Once James got to the other side of the checkerboard–or, more accurately, to London–and got himself kinged, he issued the Book of Sports, now known as the King’s Book of Sports, since any idiot can write a book but it takes a certain kind of idiot to be king, and people pay more attention to the second kind of idiot than the first. 

I wish I knew the secret of getting as much press as he did.

 

The book

The book wasn’t actually a book. It was a proclamation allowing (after Sunday afternoon services) dancing, archery, “leaping, vaulting, or any other such harmless recreation . . . having of May games, Whitsun ales and morris dances, and the setting up of May-poles and other sports therewith used, so as the same may be had in due and convenient time without impediment or neglect of divine service, and that women shall have leave to carry rushes to church for the decorating of it, according to their old custom.” 

Women, as ever, got to have all the fun. They were specifically left out of archery but were at least allowed to take part in the dancing. And no doubt the ales.

But not everything was allowed on a Sunday. There would be no “bear and bull-baiting, interludes, and (at all times in the meane [or in some versions, “meaner”] sort of people by law prohibited) bowling.” 

If you’re having trouble untangling that list, so am I, but it’s not law anymore so we don’t have to lose sleep over it. Tangled or not, though, it calls our attention to the class aspect of the conflict. The original petitioners were from the gentry–the “well-born” people below the level of the aristocracy but very much above, as James had it, people of the “meane [or meaner] sort.” 

Why was bowling on the list of no-no’s? It had become such a craze that working people were thought to be neglecting the work they should be doing. So it was banned for them. But the nation wouldn’t suffer if their betters neglected their duties to roll balls across the ground, because let’s face it, they weren’t producing anything anyway.

 

And so . . .

. . . merriness was restored to merrie England. (Scotland was still a separate country, which just happened to have the same king, so we’ll leave it out of the discussion.) But let’s not get too merrie, because in justifying his decree James mentions not only the likelihood of attracting Catholics to the Church of England, but the importance of healthy exercise in making men “more able for war, when We, or Our successors, shall have occasion to use them.”

Drink, dance, and be merrie, folks, for tomorrow the king may lead you to slaughter. 

Sorry, I always did know how to spoil a party.

In 1618, James ordered that his proclamation was to be read from every pulpit in the country, but in the face of an uproar from the Puritans, and on the advice of the Archbishop of Canterbury, he withdrew the order. 

His son, Charles I, wasn’t as wise. In 1633 he reissued the decree, with a few additions, and insisted that it be read, tossing matches into an already combustible situation and leading eventually to the Civil War. 

Turning the Devil’s Stone: One of Those Strange English Traditions

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Every November 5, when the rest of England is lighting bonfires and pretending to burn a long-dead Catholic rebel, at 8 p.m. the bellringers of Shebbear, in Devon, go to the village green and turn the Devil’s Stone. 

Because that’s what you do in Shebbear on November 5 if you’re a bellringer.

But first they ring a discordant peal of bells and listen to the minister either tell the tale of the Devil’s Stone or say a short prayer, depending on who you want to believe (or possibly who the minister is that year). 

Then they turn the stone. 

Some time before all that, someone lets the morris dancers loose, although they’re not part of the ceremony. They’re–oh, think of them as the frosting instead of the cake. They’re decorative but not essential.

Irrelevant photo: We’ve forgotten what these are, but they have berries at this time of year. I’m running low of flowers.

Actually, only one website mentions morris dancers. That could be because they’ve gone invisible to everybody else. Hold a festival and the odds of morris dancers showing up are high. Hold an odd one and the odds rise to 106-odd %. After a while, people just stop seeing them.

But that’s fine. You can tell you’re deep into folklore when every source contradicts some other source. In fact, in The English Year Steve Roud says that local people also call the stone the Shebbear Stone. He could be right, but the village website calls it the Devil’s Stone and says it’s also called the Devil’s Boulder. It doesn’t mention the Shebbear Stone.

Be happy with this. Everything is as it should be in this best of all possible worlds. 

And I am the queen of Romania. **

Why do they do it?

Because if they don’t, bad things will happen. During World War I and again during World War II, when people had other things on their minds and the village’s hefty young guys were running around in other countries carrying guns, the village let the date pass without turning the stone and bad things happened.

What bad things? No one I’ve found is specific about World War I, but during World War II one source says the war news got so bad that after a few days of bad news some people flipped the stone anyway. They were late, but at least they got the job done, the Allies won the war, and the world has continued on its erratic and weary course. Thank you, Shebbear, for saving us all.

According to another explanation of the ritual, they do it to keep the devil away. Maybe that’s the same thing as keeping bad things from happening. A biblical scholar I’m not. On the Calendar Customs website, someone named Sam left a comment to say, “Your all blooming mad none of this is in the bible….. your all off your trolley.”

Sam is probably not the ritual’s target audience. 

Methodists, alcohol, and folk traditions

As far as I can tell–and remember, I’m an immigrant here, so I’m bound to (almost obliged to) get a lot of this stuff wrong–this is the only ancient festival in Britain that doesn’t involve heavy drinking, although I did find a comment involving rain diluting a spectator’s pint, so you can be assured that (a) it rains a fair percentage of the time, as it should, and (b) drinking is accepted as a peripheral activity. Still, even though the stone is between the church and the pub, and even though the pub is called the Devil’s Stone, nothing I’ve read about the event mentions it either starting or ending at the pub. The closest I’ve found is a mention of the pub selling refreshments, but it does that every day of the year, unless a pandemic gets in the way.

Carrying on like that could get a festival kicked out of the Folkloric Society.

It might be relevant that John Wesley–the founder of Methodism–came through Shebbear and that Methodists don’t drink. Or it might not be relevant. The church the bellringers belong to isn’t Methodist, it’s Church of England. 

For whatever it’s worth, though, the village had the second oldest Methodist school in the country, founded in 1829 to train boys as ministers. It’s possible that before John Wesley showed up, turning the stone involved getting pie-eyed, but that’s pure speculation. It doesn’t seem to now. 

Roud mentions a website that called this the “oldest folk custom in Europe” but he says there’s no evidence of it earlier than the twentieth century. That’s not proof that it doesn’t go back many centuries, it just says there’s no record of it. But he does speculate that it could have started as a prank by bellringers, “or even that it was the result of a drunken conversation in the pub.”

If he’s right, Shebbear can hold its head up at the next meeting of the nonexistent Folkloric Society. The pub will have elbowed its way into the tale.

If you ask Lord Google, he’ll tell you that a Folklore Society does exist, and that it’s a learned society. But since I made up the Folkloric Society, I can assure you that it’s not learned. It involves heavy drinking, some morris dancing, obscure traditions, and disagreements about almost everything.

 

Why this particular stone?

The stone is notable because it doesn’t match the local stone. Depending on who you want to believe:

  • The devil dropped it out of his pocket when he fell from Heaven to Hell.
  • The devil dropped it when he was fighting with god and it fell on him and flattened him. 
  • The devil’s imprisoned underneath it. If you actually believe in the devil, that might make you think twice about turning it, but what do I know? 
  • St. Michael dropped the stone on the devil.
  • The stone was an altar stone belonging to a pre-Christian religion.
  • The stone was quarried for the foundation stone of Hanscott Church, which is nearby, and the Devil moved it to Shebbear. Every time someone moved it back to the church, it turned up at Shebbear again.
  • The devil threw the stone and the church and missed.
  • The stone’s a glacial erratic–something the glaciers picked up in one place and dropped in another. Glaciers were known for their sense of humor. The one carrying the stone said to another glacier, “Watch this. I’m going to set this thing down right here, then we’ll check back in thousands of years. I bet those annoying little hairless creatures will be worshiping it.”

According to various edges of the internet run by people who I suspect know as much about stones  as I do, the stone is granite, the stone is quartz, and the stone is “of a composition unknown anywhere in Europe.” 

No one claims that it’s of a composition unknown anywhere on this planet and everyone agrees that it weighs about a ton. 

 

Important information

Shebbear is pronounced SHEBBeer. I mention that because with English place names you can’t take anything for granted. They’re all glacial erratics–they got picked up in one place and dropped someplace else, and there’s no explaining why they’re either pronounced or spelled the way they are.

My thanks to Bear Humphries for reminding me of the Devil’s Stone, which is more or less local to us both.

 

** Adapted–or stolen–from a poem by Dorothy Parker:

Comment

Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,
A medley of extemporanea;
And love is a thing that can never go wrong;
And I am Marie of Roumania.

Annie Besant does Cristianity, secularism, socialism, and Theosophy

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Annie Besant was, in more or less this order, an intensely religious child, a minister’s wife, a campaigning secularist, a brilliant public speaker, a writer, a socialist, a champion of everything from trade unions to birth control to feminism, a Theosophist, a Briton in colonial India, and a campaigner for Indian home rule. She adopted (sort of) an Indian son who she promoted as a new messiah and the incarnation of Buddha.

Along the way, she won exactly zero awards for consistency, so maybe we’ll want to slow that down a bit.

Irrelevant photo: a day lily.

She was born in 1847 (her birth name was Annie Wood) and she got, for a woman of her time, a good education. She married a clergyman, Frank Besant, who’s described by the only article I found that bothered to describe him at all as stiff-necked and charmless. He’s basically a prelude to her story and most articles drop his name in and move on. She married him because he proposed and she didn’t want to hurt his feelings. She wouldn’t be the first woman who married someone because she couldn’t think of anything else to do that afternoon. We can inch out on a thin limb and say that the relationship didn’t get off to a good start.  

They had two kids, and both were difficult births. When she suggested doing the limited things that were possible then to keep from having a third, he beat her. Which was perfectly acceptable at the time, at least to the world at large if not to her. Whether that was the first time I don’t know, but it wasn’t the only one.

At some point, she began to question her religious beliefs and in 1872 she heard  Charles Voysey preach. He was a dissenter who challenged the authority of the Bible and the perfection of Jesus. Through him, she met Thomas Scott, whose beliefs were even more radical and who encouraged her to write a pamphlet on what she believed, which he then published as On the Deity of Jesus of Nazareth: An Inquiry into the Nature of Jesus.

All hell broke loose at home and Frank presented her with two choices: Take communion publicly and regularly at his church or leave home.

She chose, as she put it, expulsion over hypocrisy. 

She moved to London with one of their kids, a girl, and continued to write pamphlets for Scott. Frank stayed in Wherever with their other child, a boy. 

In the 1870s, Besant joined the National Secular Society, and here we need to stop and make sense of why secularism was a thing:

The Church of England, as the established church, had the power of the state behind it. It didn’t rule as many aspects of life as it once had, but it still ruled plenty of them. Divorce had only been taken away from church courts in 1857. Paying church rates–basically a tax you owed to the church–had been made voluntary in 1868. It wasn’t until 1871 that religion stopped being a requirement for university admittance. A non-believer still couldn’t be an MP unless he–and he had to be a he at this point–was willing to put his beliefs in his back pocket and swear a religious oath. In 1888, atheists and people whose religions didn’t allow them to take oaths were first allowed to solemnly affirm instead of swearing a religious oath. But church doctrine still influenced a wide assortment of laws, including one forbidding cremation, which didn’t become legal until 1902. And, of course, it influenced people’s thoughts and assumptions. Didn’t the Bible say the man was the head of the household? Didn’t it give him permission to beat his wife? 

All this meant that being a campaigning secularist wasn’t just for those pains-in-the-ass who couldn’t pass up the chance for a philosophical fight over dinner. It was for people who wanted to change society. Until you uncoupled religion from law and everyday life, any change you proposed could be challenged on religious grounds. Cremation? Birth control? Women’s right to own property and keep their own wages? It wasn’t enough that a change was harmless or life saving or entirely sugar free. If you could throw it out on religious grounds, it wasn’t valid. 

Being a campaigning secularist was also for people who couldn’t make themselves pretend to hold beliefs that didn’t come in their size or style. And it was for scientists, who couldn’t use the Bible was the one and only authority. They had to explore the world on its own terms. This was an intellectually fertile time, and secularism was a necessary ingredient.

Besant began to write for the Secular Society’s paper and to speak in public, and forget what she had to say, a woman speaking in public was in itself shocking. She was by all accounts a brilliant speaker, and it didn’t hurt that she was small and pretty. Yeah, you can speak as a feminist and call for equality, but a certain number of people will go right on judging you by the old standards. 

What number? Something along the lines of 99.7% back then. In today’s enlightened world, we’ve gotten it down to 99.4%. 

You could argue that she was using the patriarchy’s weapons against it: You think I look like a woman should look? Good. Now listen while I set your brain on fire.  

Of course, you can make an argument for just about anything. I haven’t a clue what her attitude toward her looks was, but they didn’t give her a free pass in any case. Beatrice Webb–who broke a few taboos herself–said that to “see her speaking made me shudder, it is not womanly to thrust yourself before the world.”

Besant quickly became a key figure in the Secular Society, denouncing religion as a force that kept women down and writing on the contentious issue of birth control. One of her arguments in its defense was, “We think it more moral to prevent the conception of children than, after they are born, to murder them by want of food, air, and clothing. . . . The wage which would support the parents and two or three children in comfort and decency is utterly insufficient to maintain a family of twelve or fourteen, and we consider it a crime to bring into the world human beings doomed to misery or to premature death.”

After she had a hand in publishing a pamphlet on birth control, her husband went to court, challenging her right to have custody of their daughter, and won. 

In 1887, she joined the Fabian Society, a socialist group, where again she quickly became a powerful force, co-founding a weekly newspaper, the Link. At a Fabian Society event, she learned about the working conditions of the women who made Bryant & May matches. They worked fourteen hour days, faced fines that could cost them as much as half a day’s pay (and their pay was already miserable), and worked with phosphorus, which caused bone cancer and killed them by horrible stages. Sweden and the U.S. had banned its use, but the British–holding out, nobly, for free trade–declined to.

I do so admire politicians with principles.

Besant wrote about their conditions in the Link, and the company demanded that workers sign a statement saying they were happy with their working conditions. When one group refused, they were fired and 1,400 women went out on strike. The Link campaigned in their support, calling their conditions white slavery.

Have you ever noticed how white slavery shocks polite (and, yea, even impolite) society in an entirely different way than black slavery? That can even be true of people who you’d expect to know better. But let’s acknowledge Besant’s limits and remember that she was a person of her time and place. Being an idiot in one way (or several ways, come to think of it) doesn’t take away the wisdom she showed in others.

Crucially, the Link also raised money to support the strikers.

After three weeks, the company agreed to end the system of fines and met several of the strikers’ other demands. The women went back to work, forming the Union of Women Match Makers and electing Besant as its first secretary. The union soon opened to men as well and continued until 1903, inspiring the unions to organize the lowest paid workers, not just skilled craftsmen.

In 1889, Besant was elected to the Tower Hamlets school board with 15,000 votes more than the next highest candidate. She initiated reforms that included free meals for undernourished students and free medical exams for all students.

In the 1890s, atheism be damned, she started to be influenced by Theosophy, a religious movement based on the Hindu ideas of karma and reincarnation, and again became prominent, serving as its international president from 1907 until her death in 1933.

She moved to India and from 1913 on she became active in the struggle for independence, running a campaigning newspaper, New India, and starting the Home Rule League and the Women’s Indian Association. She drew back from Gandhi’s passive resistance campaign, though–he was  breaking the law and she couldn’t go that far–and her popularity waned.

And here we drop into the seedier side of her life. 

A Theosophist, C.W. Leadbeater, spotted two young boys in Chennai and announced that one of them had an aura that would make him the World Teacher–the person who would bring enlightenment to the world–and he convinced Besant to take the boys in. She eventually gained custody from their father. (Yes, they had a father. She didn’t rescue them off the streets.)

It ‘s not irrelevant that the Theosophical Society had expelled Leadbeater over a sexual scandal involving adolescent boys and had only just reinstated him. More than that I can’t tell you. People didn’t talk about those things then. 

Yeah, I think so too, but we don’t actually know.

Whatever did or didn’t happen behind the scenes, the Theosophists raised one of the boys, Jiddu Krishnamurti, to be the World Teacher, and the money rolled in. And Hindu-influenced as Theosophy may have been and supportive of home rule as Besant may have been, they raised the boys to dress and behave in the European style. 

Krishnamurti and his brother, NItya, remained close to each other. They both studied law in England, where Nitya passed with honors and Jiddu didn’t pass at all. Nitya died of tuberculosis in 1925.

In some of his early talks, Krishnamurti claimed to be the reincarnation of the Buddha, in others, the vehicle for the messiah, and in others still the messiah himself. But in 1929 he broke with Besant, the Theosophical Society, and the idea of being a World Leader. He returned the gifts he had control over to the people who’d given them. There’d been plenty of them, but the Society had control of the majority. 

He did become a teacher as well as a writer and lecturer and he promoted, among other things, the need for spiritual freedom, including freedom from teachers–something he knew a bit about.

Besant went on to promote Rukmini Arundale, a dancer and the daughter of a Theosophist, who took a style of traditional dance, bharata natyam, that was practiced by lower-class temple servants whose role included prostitution, and turned it into something to perform on stage, making it a respectable form for upper-class women.

Whether that satisfied Besant I can’t tell you. One article about Kristnamurti and Besant says she died heartbroken. Others just say she died. 

We all do, sooner or later.

*

My thanks to Bee Halton, of The Bee Writes, for bringing Besant to my attention. 

Funding the Church of England

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England has an official state church, called, imaginatively enough, the Church of England. Once upon a time, having an official church was serious business, and not belonging to it was even more serious. England has a history of trying to stamp out religious dissent, and that weighed heavily with the folks who wrote the U.S. constitution, which forbids the establishment of any state religion.

These days, it’s easy to float through English life and forget that there’s an established religion. Most people consider religion (or the lack of it) a private matter—not something to get passionate about in public and not something that should set public policy. Dissent isn’t so much tolerated as assumed. Or it looks that way to me, although you have to remember that I’m an outsider here.

But who funds the church? A while back, someone asked me if it’s funded by the taxpayer, but I’ve lost track of who that was. Apologies. My organizational skills are just a shade less than perfect. Let me know who you are, will you?

Semi-relevant photo (see below): What happens to a religious building the isn’t kept up. This was once a convent on Iona, in Scotland.

The C. of E., as it’s known, does have a few bucks to its name. Or a few quid, really, quid being British for buck, although the quid involves pounds, not dollars. According to the Daily Mail (sorry, I tried for a more reputable-sounding source but couldn’t find one), in 2013 its income was £1.37 billion, which sounds like enough to keep it in communion wafers for a week or three, although I’ve never bought communion wafers and for all I know they’re outrageously expensive.

The Mail doesn’t say a word about communion wafers. What it says instead is that £1.37 billion would pay for every Big Mac, McChicken Sandwich, and McFlurry sold in Britain that year. Which strikes me as a pretty strange point of comparison, but it does tell us that we’re spending a shocking amount of money on fast food. The paper didn’t say if anything would be left over for a cup of tea, although in England you’d have the right to expect tea with your McProcessed Chickfood.

But what about spending? According to Wikipedia, “In 2005 the Church of England had estimated total outgoings of around £900 million.”

Now, I’m terrible with numbers, but even I can see that the gap between those two leaves enough money for tea. I tried to find a comparable number for 2013—the year the Mail’s using—and I failed. However, I failed in an interesting way, so let’s spend a minute following my trail: Since WikiP calls that money outgoings, I thought, clever beast that I thought I was, I’d just google “Church of England outgoings 2013.”

What did I learn? That bishops were exhorting their members to be outgoing, gracious, and cooperative. And to drink tea. I’m sure it was all very effective and that the church is now full of better, more outgoing, and more cooperative tea-sodden worshipers.

Me, though? I had a cup of tea and gave up. If you want figures for matching years, go find them yourself. I never really expected the numbers to match up. They never do for me. 

But let’s go back to income. We were doing fairly well with that. Almost half of it was donated by churchgoers.

How many people are we talking about? It’s hard to say. The C. of E. does keep a church electoral roll, and adding your name to it allows you to vote on church matters, but not everyone who goes to C. of E. churches bothers, so the statistics I found also track things like how many people show up at least once a year, or at Easter, or on most Sundays.

By any of those measures, attendance is down and still sinking.  The Wikipedia entry puts C. of E. attendance at 1.4% of the population of England and Wales in 2014. It’s inconvenient that Wales is in there when we were talking about England, but we’ll add that our list of mis-matched figures and wobble onward.

Another source–and I’ve lost track of which one–says that U.K. (as opposed to English) church membership has declined from 10.6 million in 1930 to 5.5 million in 2010, “or as a percentage of the population; from about 30% to 11.2%. By 2013, this had declined further to 5.4 million (10.3%).”

That’s a major difference. It could be accounted for by the difference between church membership and attendance or by one of both organizations allowing someone like me to do the counting. I checked a few more sources without clarifying the picture at all. What’s clear is that membership and church attendance are shrinking.

On average, each church member contributed £700 per year in—oh, I think that was 2014. Close enough. In other words, per person donations are high. But an average is a deceptive measure. One gazillionaire making a huge donation will, when you average things out, make everyone look rich and generous. Still, the average donation is all we’re going to get.

Where did the other half of the church’s income wander if from? Historic endowments are a major source of income. These are gifts that were given to the church at some point in the past. (You don’t make a lot of money on gifts given in the future.) Way back when, if someone rich gave the church a gift, it was likely to be land, and the church once owned a lot of it, but it’s converted most of it, unromantically and unsentimentally, into stocks and bonds. These are managed by church commissioners and pay for “a range of non-parish expenses, including clergy pensions and the expenses of cathedrals and bishops’ houses. These funds amount to around £8 billion . . . around a fifth of the church’s overall income.” (We’re quoting WikiP here.)

The C. of E. has its own investment fund and in 2016 it generated an income of £230.7 million.

Does all this add up to 100%? It doesn’t look like it. Donations? Half. Stocks and bonds? A fifth. The investment fund? Sorry–that’s not a percentage and we’d be smart if we don’t trust me to turn it into one. Whatever the rest may be? I’m not sure. Parishes raise money in various ways. I have no idea how much that adds up to. Plus the church gets grants from English Heritage, and possibly other groups, to maintain buildings, and it also gets government money for the upkeep of the buildings.That’s where the taxpayer comes into it.

Those old buildings can absorb any amount of money you care to throw at them and still need more.

The National Secular Society argues that the church is sitting on a £4 billion surplus and should fix its own leaky roofs.

“In this week’s budget [sorry—I can’t tell you which week that was] the Government allocated a further £40 million funding to support “vital” roof repairs in Listed Places of Worship over the next two years.

“The lion’s share of this money will go to the Church of England as it is  responsible for maintaining 45% of the grade I listed buildings in the country and the majority of all parish churches are grade II or higher. [The grades refer to historic buildings that should be preserved.]

“Few would feel that our finest architectural heritage should fall into terminal disrepair. An inevitable consequence of the continuing decline in church attendance is that there are far fewer in the congregations to shoulder the repair burden. When they are unable to do so, who else should pay and under what circumstances?”  

So yes, taxpayer money goes to the church–not exactly to fund church activities but to maintain its historic buildings. Still, it is taxpayer money, it still flows to the church, and that does allow the church to use its own money for other purposes. Or to sit on it and let it accumulate.