A priest's tale

The Morebath whose voices are chronicled in Eamon Duffy's narrative is a remote and tiny sheep farming community in England's West Country. An unexceptional village, its very ordinariness seems to be chief among the charms that drew the author's attention--that and the fact that a remarkable priest served the community for a long time, in interesting times, and took good notes. The priest, Sir Christopher Trychay, maintained the church account book from his arrival in 1520 until his death in 1574, providing for posterity detailed information on the parish's activities, along with his distinctive commentary, as the community lived through the tumult of reformation unleashed by Henry VIII and his heirs.

These records are the principal basis for the story this book tells. Since Sir Christopher's personality profoundly shapes the documentary trail, the Morebath we meet in Duffy's reconstruction is very much the parish of the priest's own experience and imagination. It is his voice, rather than the voices of his parishioners, that comes through most clearly in this lively telling of Morebath's 16th-century history.

Duffy, president of Magdalene College, Cambridge, and a self-described cradle Catholic, may have a penchant for slightly misleading book titles. His highly regarded The Stripping of the Altars (1992) was more centrally concerned with the shape of traditional Catholicism in 15th-century England than with the iconoclasm of the 16th century implied by the title. But though his study of Morebath focuses on a single voice, Duffy does a marvelous job of allowing his readers to hear through this medium a community constituting itself in its religious practices. He shows us that the church activities so carefully recorded by the priest--the pious bequests, mostly in service of the cult of saints, and the unusual means of caring for and reporting on the church's sheep (a significant source of income for the parish)--were exercises in religious devotion that knit the community together as a sacral body. The example of Morebath tends to support the thesis of Duffy's earlier writing: far from a degenerate faith that called for radical reforming measures, the popular Catholicism of medieval Britain was a vital religion whose practitioners were loathe to see it taken apart.