Place and the Reformation: What happened to our sacred saintly places?

Many people in the UK have no idea of the stories of the saints which once would have been celebrated locally, and the sense of sacredness which their veneration lent to the ordinary fields and streets they now inhabit.

Deeply significant figures like St Edith, St Mildred, St Sidwell, St Materiana, and the rest are often no more than names on church noticeboards or hinted at in the names of local features, like St Edith’s Hall in Kemsing.  Unlike the saints of Catholic countries their relics and statues haven’t been carried proudly in procession year after year from the churches dedicated to them, and few feel any sort of personal connection or affection for them. What happened? The short answer is “the Reformation”.

Defaced images of the saints from the rood screen of St Thomas Becket's church in Bridford, Devon. 

There had been criticisms of the abuses of shrines and pilgrimages as long as they had existed. Many people recognised that a local saint was a good marketing opportunity, however – it brought in good business. The Kebab shop on the corner of Church Street in Seal is thought to have been a medieval pilgrims’ hospice originally – a place where pilgrims on their way to Canterbury, perhaps calling in on St Edith’s  shrine on the way, would have stayed. The Church knew that pilgrims would donate to light candles at a shrine, or pay for masses to be said, and that was a good earner too. Indulgences, time off from the suffering of purgatory after death, were also often on offer by going to a shrine, and no doubt some people did sometimes treat them as “holy vending machines” for miracles, rather than contributing to a genuine deepening of faith.  For others a pilgrimage to a holy site was little more than a glorified holiday, a distraction from the issues at home which they should really have been attending to.

This thread of criticism reached its tipping point in the writings of Reformation leaders like Martin Luther and John Calvin, and proved to be the death knell for many of these ancient observances. They eventually discouraged, and even banned pilgrimages and destroyed shrines everywhere that Protestantism took hold. William Lambarde (1536 –  1601) wrote his (highly partisan!) “Perambulations of Kent” shortly after the English Reformation, and was scathing in his condemnation of what he saw, or perhaps was told about, for example, at St Edith’s Shrine in Kemsing. “Some seelie bodie brought a pecke, or two, or a Bushell of Corne to the Church and (after prayers made) offered it to the image of the Saint.” He traced this custom to the Roman worship of a Roman god he called Robigius (despite the fact that no such god has actually ever been found to have existed), and roundly condemned “the whole heap and dunghill of [peoples] filthy and superstitious Idolatries.” In reality, of course, Lambarde was writing at a time when religious polarisation was at its most acute, leading Catholics and Protestants to burn each other at the stake over practices like the veneration of the saints, so we should be careful to read Lambarde’s words for what they are, religious propaganda. It is clear from more measured studies of the period that for many people, the care they took of the shrines they tended bound their communities together. Eamonn Duffy, in his study of one Devonshire village as it went through the Reformation[i], described the way in which, before the Reformation many groups had existed in the village to care for particular shrines within the church building. A group described as the Young Men raised money for the candles that burned before the statue of St George, mostly, it would seem by making and drinking beer. The Maidens, which seem to have included every unmarried woman over about the age of twelve, held an annual celebration of their own to raise the money for the candles for the statue of the Virgin and St Sidwell, Exeter’s patron saint. After the Reformation, there was no need for  these candles to be provided, so the groups disbanded, and parish funds took an immediate hit from which they never really recovered. More significantly, activities which had involved every person in the village in the life of the church were lost. Worshippers had nothing to do now but sit and listen, and many of them, it would seem, did not! The Reformers intention, to empower lay people and free them from what they saw as the power of the priests, can be said to have backfired in this regard. As Duffy comments, “all those tokens of the tenderness and hope which Morebath had invested in its saints were now expressly declared to be unchristian, and placed outside the law.”  Experience over the centuries tells us that matter matters to people, and that , for many people God is often more powerfully experienced through material objects -  the statues, candles and beads -  than through words and ideas. The empty, clean space of a non-Conformist chapel or a Friends Meeting House are, in many ways as “material” as an overstuffed and gilded Baroque Catholic Church. People care about what is in them, how they look and feel.   It is noticeable that in recent decades Protestant churches have begun to embrace material ways of praying, reinventing them to suit themselves, whether that be in a creative “prayer station” or a bowl of water and a pile of glass nuggets. People need “matter” to pray with. As one questioning regular at such a church commented to me, “I can’t quite see why its ok to have banners, but not ok to have icons…”

At the time of the Reformation, however, images and statues, beads and candles became tribal markers, to be thoroughly rejected.  Over the generations which followed the Reformation even the dedications of some churches were lost, as the idea of dedicating a church to a saint fell out of favour. We can’t , therefore, always be sure that the dedications we now know for churches are the same as the original ones. Some definitely changed, like the church at Christow in Devon, originally “Christina’s Town”, where the church was dedicated to Christina of Bolsena, a rather legendary 3rd Century saint. Her name lives on in the name of the village, but the church is now dedicated to St James.

Christow Church, originally dedicated to St Christina of Bolsena, but now St Jame's Church.

Biblical saints like Peter, Paul, Mary, John and so on, were the only saints who survived in the worship of the Protestant churches, and even they were held up simply as examples, rather than the “friends in high places” which the Catholic saints had been. There are official readings and prayers to be used on their feasts in the seventeenth century Book of Common Prayer, but none for the many other saints, like Edith, who would once have been well known and loved. It must have been rather like finding that beloved members of your family had been banished, and it is no wonder that there was some fierce resistance to their removal.

One of the arguments the Reformers used against pilgrimages to shrines was that people shouldn’t feel they needed to travel to special places away from home to find God. They should be finding God in the scriptures and in their own parish church communities; God could be found where they were. Discouraging pilgrimage also had the effect of keeping people where they were, and hard at work – pilgrimages and saints’ feast days were regarded by the Reformers (and many employers) as distractions from the sober working routine, the famous “Protestant Work Ethic”, which was now considered to be the route to godliness. Ironically, however, destroying local shrines and customs associated with them often had the opposite effect to the one the Reformers intended. Local shrines had been an affirmation of God’s work in the local area; destroying them had the effect of “de-sacralising” the landscape. People still had the urge to go to places they felt were special, as they do today, but now had to go further afield – to Jerusalem for example, or to places where they felt nature spoke to them of God, the Lake District, the Alps etc. They lost the sense that their own backyards could be a place where God was at work. The emphasis of faith shifted from an embedded, embodied, material, collective experience to something that was more intellectual, word-based, inward and personal.

It could be argued that it is a short step from de-sacralising the landscape to desecrating it. When the places around us are seen as places where God is at work, holy places, we respect and care for them. When we celebrate communally the stories of “our” places, we affirm and pass on their specialness. If our fields and rivers, our mountains and pastures simply become places of production,  there is a great temptation to feel we can exploit them and use them for their own ends.  Tensions around the world between indigenous cultures which want to preserve the places sacred to them – the Amazon rainforest, Uluru (Ayers Rock) in Australia, for example – and those who see them as opportunities to maximise income from agriculture or tourism, are perhaps a modern reiteration of the old tensions around the veneration of local saints.


[i] Duffy, Eamonn, Voices from Morebath