Belief in and reassessment of origin stories in the sixteenth-century

“Once, in the days of time immemorial, there was a king of Greece who had thirty-three daughters.  Each of these daughters rose up in revolt and murdered her husband.  Perplexed as to how he had bred such rebels, but not wanting to kill his own flesh and blood, their princely father exiled them and set them adrift in a rudderless ship.  Their ship was provisioned for six months.  By the end of this period, the winds and tides had carried them to the edge of the known earth.  They landed on an island shrouded in mist.  As it had no name, the eldest of the killers gave it hers: Albina.  When they hit shore, they were hungry and avid for male flesh.  But there were no men to be found.  The island was home only to demons.  The thirty-three princesses mated with the demons and gave birth to a race of giants, who in turn mated with their mothers and produced more of their own kind.  These giants spread over the whole landmass of Britain.  There were no priests, no churches and no laws.  There was also no way of telling the time.  After eight centuries of rule, they were overthrown by Trojan Brutus.”

-          Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall (2009), p. 65.

The fictional representation of Thomas Cromwell’s rise to power as narrated by Hilary Mantel in her Wolf Hall shows us, at the very least, that she has done her homework.  The myth quoted above – which opens the second chapter of the book - is told not too dissimilar to how it would have been told in the sixteenth-century.  If Mantel is to be believed (and she is, it is to be remembered, telling a fictional story albeit about real history) then Thomas Wosley did not put much stock in such stories.  Whether or not that is true, there is certainly plenty of evidence to suggest that not all took the origin stories about Britain seriously.  It is true that the Tudor monarchy chose the stories of King Arthur and Merlin as the basis for their power.  Henry VII even named his eldest son Arthur as a means to link his power with the rebirth of Britain’s most famous king of legend.  It is also true that the stories were repeated often not only in poetry but also in Chronicles claiming to be fonts of fact and truth.  Yet, as T. D. Kendrick has noted many of these chroniclers added the caveat that they were repeating the tales sent down to them and not necessarily claiming their authorial expertise in this portion of their text.  The origin stories, for many, were traditions that might have some element of truth and which were to be repeated unless totally disproven.       

Cardinal Wolsey (wikipedia)

     

In his Anglica Historia, Polydore Vergil exclaimed that the chief source for these origin stories – Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae had created ‘many silly fictions’ by trying to place British origins above those of the Macedonians and the Romans.  Others followed suit.  In 1530 John Rastell argued that the story of Diocletian (the Greek king repeated in Mantel’s Wolf Hall) and his murderous daughters was a story that ‘semeth more mervaylous than trewe’ and that:

 ‘though it has continued here in England and taken for truth among us Englishmen yet other people do therefore laugh us to scorn’ (Rastell, prologue)

John Twyne claimed the story as nothing more than a laughable yarn and the poet, John Hardyng claimed it ‘not trew ne autenticke’.  In his Chronicle of John Hardyng in metre published by Richard Grafton in 1543, Hardyng extrapolated that Diocletian’s daughters who were described originally in the Brut chronicle (which itself derived from Geoffrey of Monmouth) was a very similar tale to one he had heard regarding the fifty daughters of Danaus, King of the Greeks who had married his daughters to the sons of Aegyptus, King of Egypt.  It was the same myth, just different setting.  Hardyng explained:

But I dare say, this chronicle is not true,

For in that like time, in Syria was no king

Nay afterward, to time that Saul grew

Nay no king was in Syria ever living

That had that name, for Saul was the first king

Of Syria realm, at the end of the third age

In Samuels time, the prophet wise and sage.

During the sixteenth-century origin stories were reassessed and examined.  They were not necessarily exercised out of all histories, nor removed from the popular beliefs concerning England’s past, but they were certainly not believed by all, or used simply as morality tales, no different than those of the fabled Robin Hood.  This was a time when truth and fiction were increasingly becoming important terms used to split ‘real’ history from fables and legends.  If the changes in understanding over origins are anything to go by, then the sixteenth-century was the point when historians really were beginning to reassess their role and purpose.  They were not necessarily becoming ‘modern’, in our sense, but they were certainly not the same at the end of the century as they were at the beginning.        

Further Reading

Thomas D. Kendrick, British Antiquity (Methuen: London, 1950).

John Rastell, The Pastime of People: The Chronicles of divers realms and most specially of the realm of England (London, 1530).

John Hardyng, The Chronicle of John Hardyng in Metre, from the first beginning of England, unto the reign of Edward IV where he made an end of his chronicle (London, 1543), p. vii.

John Foxe and the overload of books

John Foxe must have been asked why his Book of Martyrs was necessary or needed when he was writing it in the early 1560s.  He seems to have feared that another book of History lacked readers as his audience was already overwhelmed by books.  In his final preface to the first edition he reflects on those concerns.  Foxe makes a declaration intended to prove the utility and profit of yet another history book, especially one so large.  He notes that there are an infinite multitude of books ‘daily put forth everywhere’, many of which were to be regarded as superfluous and only made to pester the circumspect reader. 

Part of the problem lay in Foxe’s own doubts about his ability (although these were often rhetorical words and should, perhaps, not be taken literally).  Foxe described how difficult it was to write something ‘singular’ that could join ‘thinges’ together (i.e. various histories and events) and provide something of use to the reader (‘increase the industry of the learners, the utility of the studious, and the delight of the learned’).  Foxe’s defense was the one that he purported throughout his prefaces and the book itself:        

“I thought it not to be neglected, that the precious monuments of so many matters, and men most meet to be recorded and registered in books, should lie buried by my fault in the pit of oblivion” (A&M, 1563,A declaration concerning the ultility and profit of this history)

The concern was a simple one.  Although they would not have admitted it, the reformers were partly to blame for the scattering of England’s manuscript heritage upon the purging of monasteries in the 1530s.  Little had been done since to recover those texts – many of which were unique and irreplaceable.  

Furthermore, the story of History told from generation to generation did not any longer fit the needs and requirements of a Protestant Church of England.  That story claimed conversion to Christianity by the Pope’s hand.  It argued for allegiance to Rome and the denouncement of any and all attempts to criticise that relationship. 

Protestants, like Foxe, needed to retell the past in their own image.  But, crucially, that retelling had thus far been piecemeal.  Foxe mentions that ‘the number of trifling pamphlets may grow out of remembrance’.  It was certainly a concern.  Campaigns to bring over opinions can be won through bombardment of pamphlets and other writings, but these are a weak bridge, with little concrete foundation, stability or persistence.  What was needed was a central resource from which those other works could be divulged.  Foxe wanted to provide that foundation; a large work, containing all that was necessary: in essence the Acts and Monuments or Book of Martyrs that he was producing. 

Foxe called it his duty and considering the interest and patronage given to him by the likes of Sir William Cecil, Archbishop Matthew Parker, and Edmund Grindal, then Archbishop of York; it most probably wasn’t an exaggeration, even if that was not quite what he meant.  Previous to Foxe’s publication there were indeed a multitude of shorter texts published regarding the martyrs so recently burnt at the stake. 

In 1559 Thomas Brice had published a poem which listed the Marian martyrs in order of the dates of their executions.  The same year John Day printed The complaynt of veritie, made by Iohn Bradford, a short treatise that transcribed the martyrs writings.  It was the first of many.  In 1560 William Powell printed A frutefull treatise and full of heauenly consolation against the feare of death. Whereunto are annexed certaine sweete meditations of the kingdom of Christ ... Gathered by that holy marter of God, John Bradford.  Bradford’s writings and examinations were also printed by William Griffith and William Copeland in 1561 as well as by Rowland Hall in 1562. 

For other martyrs, Thomas Marsh published Arthur Golding’s A briefe treatise concerning the burnynge of Bucer and Phagius, at Cambrydge, in the tyme of Quene Mary.  Also in 1559, Henry Sutton had printed The examination of the constante martir of Christ, Iohn Philpot.  In 1562 Henry Bull had published An apologye made by the reuerende father and constante Martyr of Christe John Hooper (1562).  In this text Bull noted that ‘manye frutefull workes did they [the Marian martyrs] write in prison…but fewe are come to lighte’.  A year after the Acts and Monuments had seen print, Bull published the writings of Miles Coverdale as yet another example.  Foxe also added to this growing collection with his Friendly Farewell, a collection of the writings of Nicholas Ridley.

It is probably these tracts that Foxe was referring to when he stated that he didn’t want to overload people with yet another book on the subject.  His argument was that his book would be the last word on the subject; a synthesis of the other tracts in one big volume.  In this, at least Foxe succeeded.  Other than subsequent editions of his own book, there were relatively few other publications focused on martyrs after 1563.  The Acts and Monuments had smothered all competition, and it had done so extremely well.