By Anne Heminger, author of Reforming Community: Music, Religious Change, and English Identity in Mid-Tudor London (Clemson University Press, 2025).
In his capacity as churchwarden of the London parish St. Mary at Hill in 1559, a man named Thomas Draper dutifully recorded the purchases he had made in the preceding year. In addition to procuring new Psalters, copies of the English procession, and plainsong books, Draper noted a payment of twelve pence “for the changing agayne of the sayd bookes.”(1) Churchwardens’ account books provide a wealth of information about church communities in mid-Tudor England, yet it is rare that these books offer insight into how those keeping the accounts felt about their purchases. What is remarkable about Draper’s seemingly mundane statement is the emphasis his entry places on the act’s repetition: Draper expresses not a preference for the Latin mass over the English, nor a desire for a return to the vernacular, but instead a feeling of resignation and, perhaps, even frustration that his parish must once again overhaul their customs, requiring a considerable outlay of time and money.
One of the most striking questions about the English Reformations, and one that is difficult to answer, is how English men and women actually felt about the religious changes imposed on them over the course of the sixteenth century—what historian Christopher Marsh has called “the view from the pew.”(2) Strong proponents for and critics of specific religious tenets are relatively easy to document, but harder to see is how people felt about all the smaller alterations that touched daily life. The loss of devotional books in Latin, for example, or the forbidding of masses devoted to the Virgin Mary, might have fundamentally altered how any given individual understood his or her relationship to God and place in the world—seemingly fixed positions that were now called into question. Complicating these changes was the knowledge that these often conflicting religious policies were the will of the Crown, to whom English men and women owed loyalty regardless of religious preference.
In the middle of the sixteenth century, public discourse in England was increasingly dominated by these questions about royal power, religious doctrine, and liturgical change. In the past two decades, literary scholars have made a compelling case that these debates about religious reform played an important role in the rise of an explicitly English identity in sixteenth-century English literature.(3) While it is more difficult to identify how expressive art forms like visual art and music might have affected the relationship between religion and identity at this time, it is also true that the arts can hold immense power for individuals and communities. What, then, might we learn about religion and identity in mid-Tudor England by examining this relationship with respect to music and its performance?
Reforming Community posits that religious music—in the broadest sense—played two distinct but related parts in the larger process of nation-building that unfolded during the mid-Tudor period: one that was explicit and likely intentional on the part of those driving it, and another that occurred only as a byproduct of choices individuals and communities made with other concerns in mind. The book centers on London, the nation’s capital and by far its most populous city, and takes as its focus primarily the reigns of Edward VI (1547–1553) and Mary I (1553–1558). While Henry VIII rejected some traditional theology, approved a new English litany, and abrogated a number of minor holy days, he left the Latin liturgy and most devotional practices largely intact.(4) The regency government of Edward VI and the Marian regime, meanwhile, each imposed policies that had direct effects on the rituals and sounds of religious life.
For evidence of the intentional intertwining of religious music and English identity, Reforming Community examines government and ecclesiastical policies on music, authorized printed musical repertoires, and officially sanctioned public performances of religious music. With their respective embraces of reformist and Catholic religious policies, the governments of Edward VI and Mary I each sought to forge a distinctive vision for the future England; but they often did so by relying on similar embraces of a shared English past. Although both monarchs issued few edicts on liturgical music, they and their governments used a number of different forms of religious music making—from the printed vernacular scriptural song of Edward’s reign to liturgical music in public processions under Mary I—to garner support for official policy and remind their subjects of their divine right to the throne. Likewise, both reformers and conservatives employed cheap broadside ballads to reach a public with diverse religious beliefs, invoking the authority of the crown and participation in the English commonwealth to remind listeners of their duty to both the church and their monarch.
Not every type of religious music in the Edwardian and Marian periods was so clearly political, however; nor did every genre of religious music lend itself to direct political commentary. For evidence of the unintentional (but nevertheless significant) connection between religious music and a growing sense of English identity, Reforming Community examines music-making in London’s parish churches. Indeed, substantial gaps in official policy on religious music allowed Londoners to make their own choices about how to use music as they navigated the religious changes imposed on them. Whether their aim was to convince fellow parishioners who held differing religious views or merely to hold on to some measure of the past for comfort, those who wrote, commissioned, and performed new liturgical music during the reigns of both Edward VI and Mary I created repertoires that used musical styles of the earlier English church—from vernacular polyphony built on Sarum plainchant to votive antiphons with an anachronistic nod to earlier repertoire—that resulted in communal practices tying them to a shared religious past. Though their choices reflect first and foremost other considerations, through the use of specific musical techniques and repertoire types they nevertheless crafted liturgies that built a distinctly English future.
Music is, admittedly, a difficult lens through which to study identity formation in sixteenth-century England. Even in a large city like London, the survival of records of musical practices is limited. But religious music was also ubiquitous in the mid-Tudor period, and it is possible to see that its use often required individuals to confront how they identified personally and communally, leading them to make choices that in turn helped to define what it meant to be English in a time of religious transformation.
1. LMA P69/MRY4/B/005/MS01239/001/003, fol. 817r.
2. Christopher Marsh, “‘Common Prayer’ in England 1560–1640: The View from the Pew” Past and Present 171 (2001): 66–94.
3. For example, Cathy Shrank, Writing the Nation in Reformation England, 1530–1580 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) and Stewart James Mottram, Empire and Nation in Early English Renaissance Literature (Rochester, NY: D.S. Brewer, 2008).
4. For an overview of changes under Henry VIII, see G. W. Bernard, The King’s Reformation: Henry VIII and the Remaking of the English Church (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005).
