Visions of British Culture From The Reformation To Romanticism The Protestant Discovery of Tradition Celestina Savonius Wroth Full Chapter PDF

Visions of British Culture from the
Reformation to Romanticism: The

Protestant Discovery of Tradition
Celestina Savonius-Wroth
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HISTORIES OF THE SACRED AND SECULAR, 1700 –2000
Visions of British Culture

from the Reformation
to Romanticism
The Protestant Discovery of Tradition
Histories of the Sacred and Secular, 1700–2000
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Department of History
Oxford Brookes University
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Visions of British
Culture from the
Reformation to
Romanticism
The Protestant Discovery of Tradition
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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Histories of the Sacred and Secular, 1700–2000

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In loving memory of my father
Dr. William Henry Wroth
Acknowledgements
Of the many debts of gratitude I have incurred in the writing of this book,
the first to be mentioned is to Dror Wahrman. When I enrolled in a gradu-
ate course with Dror a long while ago, I had no intention of becoming a
historian, but Dror’s irrepressible delight in the study of the past and mag-
ical ability to engage students drew me in. Jonathan Sheehan was also a
formative influence on my development as a historian, opening my eyes to
the fascinating world of early modern religious erudition. Sarah Knott and
Konstantin Dierks welcomed me into the guild.
During my time at Indiana University, the Libraries, the Department of
History, and the Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies provided a stimu-
lating and supportive intellectual context. I am grateful to former and
current members of those interconnected circles, including Mary Favret,
Chris Ferguson, Constance Furey, Stephanie Koscak, Moira Marsh,
Catherine Minter, Ioana Patuleanu, Leah Shopkow, Joel Silver, Rebecca
Spang, and Joseph Stubenrauch. It is no doubt thanks to the interdisci-
plinary collegiality of the Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies that I
was most of the way through writing this book before it dawned upon me
that historians rarely write books about Romanticism.
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has also proved to be
a welcoming, exciting, and supportive intellectual home. This book owes
much to the good advice and support of Antoinette Burton, Clare
Crowston, Maria Gillombardo, Verena Höfig, Elizabeth Hoiem, Craig
Koslofsky, Harry Liebersohn, Dana Rabin, and Carol Symes, and my col-
leagues at the University Library.
vii
viii Acknowledgements
Of the many scholars at other institutions with whom I have had the
good fortune to discuss various aspects of this project, I am particularly
grateful to Lori Branch, William Bulman, Arthur Burns, Jeffrey Collins,
David Hopkin, Robert Ingram, Matthew Kadane, Markku Peltonen,
Richard Serjeantson, Richard Sher, Brent Sirota, Andrew Starkie,
Alexandra Walsham, Irene Whelan, and Andre Willis. I am grateful to the
organizers and attendees of conferences at which I presented work in
progress, including those of the American Folklore Society, American
Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Anglo-American Conference of
Historians, International Society for Cultural History, North American
Conference on British Studies, and specialist conferences “The Early
Modern Parish Church,” “European Clerics and Vernacular Culture in
the Long Nineteenth Century,” and “Religion in the Scottish
Enlightenment.”
The dedicated staff of many libraries and archives have helped make the
research for this book possible, including the British Library, the Bodleian
Library, Dundee City Archive and Record Centre (Sarah Aitken), Helsinki
University Library, Lambeth Palace Library, Lancashire Archives (David
Tilsley and John Rogan), and the Manx National Heritage Library and
Archives (Wendy Thirkettle, and researcher Phil Craine). My greatest debt
is to my former and current colleagues at the Indiana University
Bloomington Libraries and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Library.
Many thanks also to Molly Beck, Emily Russell, and Ruby Panigrahi at
Palgrave Macmillan and to the two anonymous readers, both for their
constructive criticism and for their generous encouragement.
Last but by no means least, I am grateful to those nearest and dearest
to me without whose love and support this book would never have been
written. They all bore with me with kindness and patience even when “the
book” impinged upon other life plans. Sami has been my anchor and a
generous and perceptive reader of drafts in various stages. I take it as a true
compliment that he has also been a demanding reader, resolutely holding
my work to the highest standards. It goes without saying that neither Sami
nor anyone else who has advised me is to blame for any of the book’s
shortcomings, for which I am solely responsible.
I am indebted to my parents, William and Deborah Wroth, for so much.
Dedicating this book to my father’s memory is one small tribute I can
offer, and I do so with deep gratitude to them both.
Contents
1 Introduction 1
2 Ritual, Ceremony, and Custom in the Aftermath of the

British Reformations 19
3 “Remaines of Gentilisme and Judaism”: Erudition,

Polemic, and Apologetics in the Study of British Customs 53
4 The Antiquities of the Common People 89
5 Embodied Religion in Eighteenth-Century Britain: “All

Mankind Are the Vulgar in This Respect”123
6 Religion in the Bardic Revival161
7 Against the Cold Calculus of Modernity203
8 Conclusion239
Bibliography255
Index295
ix
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
British Romanticism idealized the “common people,” especially those

dwelling in rural and remote parts of the Atlantic archipelago, as exem-
plars of sincerity and communal solidarity, and as sources of authentic
utterance. Their “lore” was seen as a font of ancient traditions and inspira-
tion for sublime poetry. Unspoiled by false education, living close to the
natural world, their responses to the impulses of emotion and sense per-
ception innocent and unmediated, they seemed to have virtues and insights
which their oversophisticated urban and elite contemporaries lacked. This
familiar constellation of ideas—what might be thought of as the “roman-
ticization of the folk”—did not appear suddenly from the blue sky to be
manifested in the preface to William Wordsworth’s and Samuel Coleridge’s
Lyrical Ballads (1798), nor was it imported ready-made from contempo-
rary continental European thought.
As is well known to literary scholars, but perhaps less obvious to histo-
rians, a prominent feature typically associated with Romanticism—the
deliberate turn away from norms drawn from Classical models towards
“native,” “primitive,” “Gothic,” and “exotic” sources of inspiration—
began well before the period usually thought of as the Romantic era.
Influential literary historians such as Marilyn Butler have demonstrated
the shortcomings of conventional periodization that draws a sharp line
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2022
C. Savonius-Wroth, Visions of British Culture from the Reformation
to Romanticism, Histories of the Sacred and Secular, 1700–2000,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82855-4_1
2 C. SAVONIUS-WROTH
between “Enlightenment” and “Romanticism.”1 It is clear that eighteenth-

century British poets and literary critics who are sometimes categorized as
“pre-Romantics”—including James Thomson, Thomas Percy, Joseph and
Thomas Warton, Thomas Gray, Robert Lowth, and Hugh Blair—engaged
enthusiastically in contemporary pan-European theorizing about the ori-
gins of civilization and the relative merits of antiquity and modernity.
Along with a host of antiquaries and philologists across Britain and Ireland,
they made formative contributions to new ideas about literature and cul-
ture, ideas from which the now “canonical” Romantic poets drew much of
their inspiration.
This book takes aim at another artificial boundary often imposed on the
history of Romanticism, the assumption that it replaced, or displaced, reli-
gion. In the discussion that follows, my aim is to anchor the emergence of
Romanticism firmly in the context of British religious discourse. This is a
book about the longue durée of attitudes and ideas that British Romanticism
inherited from the religious controversies of the early modern period, and
bequeathed, in turn, to modernity.
The term “Romanticism” has been defined in many ways since it was
first used in reference to contemporary literary fashions in the early nine-
teenth century. Proposals have been made to abolish the term altogether,
or at least to divest it of its initial capital letter, or to use it only in the
plural.2 If one wishes to speak about “British” Romanticism(s), the diffi-
culties are multiplied, not least because of the central role played by
“Romanticism” in defining concepts of “Britishness.”3 Although I will
illustrate some of my points with examples from “high Romantic” English
poets such as Wordsworth and Coleridge, I am using “British Romanticism”
here in a broad and loose sense to refer to the major shifts in cultural sen-
sibilities between the mid-eighteenth and early nineteenth century that are
evident not only in literature and the arts but also in ideas about the past,
the structure of society, and the concept of nationhood or nationalism.
1
Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries: English Literature and Its
Background, 1760–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981); David Fairer, English
Poetry of the Eighteenth Century, 1700–1789 (London: Longman, 2003).
2
Summarized in David M. Craig, Robert Southey and Romantic Apostasy: Political
Argument in Britain, 1780–1840 (Woodridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2007), 4–6.
3
For an introduction to these issues, see Gerard Carruthers and Alan Rawes, English
Romanticism and the Celtic World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), and
Murray Pittock, Scottish and Irish Romanticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
1 INTRODUCTION 3
British Romanticism, thus broadly conceived, was, I argue, both rooted

in religious culture and a major influence on subsequent religious develop-
ments. The second half of this claim has long been acknowledged, at least
as it relates to the Church of England.4 Its broader application is graphi-
cally illustrated by the fruits of the Gothic revival in Britain, Ireland, and
North America, thanks to which, by the end of the nineteenth century,
many staunch Calvinists, whose forebearers had toppled saints’ images and
smashed church windows, worshipped in spaces embellished with Gothic
tracery and pictured stained glass. (This transformation cannot be consid-
ered “merely” aesthetic, if only because the initial iconoclastic impulse did
not arise from “merely” aesthetic concerns.)5 The interplay between reli-
gion and Romanticism described in this book was not always as visible as
a new crop of Gothic churches, but it was central to the formation of
modern “British” cultural identities. It played an important role in the
preservation of the oral-literary heritage of all of the Four Nations of the
Atlantic archipelago, and of a wide array of regional vernacular cultural
practices (“folklore”), including communal memory of sacred geography
and life-affirming seasonal ritual.6
The religious upheavals in Western Europe in the sixteenth century
revolutionized the established understanding of the fundamental teach-
ings and rituals of Christianity. In so doing, they also destabilized the
long-accepted relationships between the ceremonies and symbols of offi-
cially sanctioned religious practice and the great body of vernacular cus-
toms that made up the fabric of everyday life. Polemicized by the Protestant
Reformation, what had once been largely unproblematic aspects of
European culture, such as seasonal festivities, wedding and funeral cus-
toms, and beliefs about the natural world, became the focus of intense
4
Stephen Prickett, Romanticism and Religion: The Tradition of Coleridge and Wordsworth
in the Victorian Church (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976); Sheridan Gilley,
“John Keble and the Victorian Churching of Romanticism,” in An Infinite Complexity:
Essays in Romanticism, ed. J. R. Watson (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
1983), 226–39.
5
Keith Thomas, “Art and Iconoclasm in Early Modern England,” in Religious Politics in
Post-Reformation England, ed. Kenneth Fincham and Peter Lake (Woodbridge: Boydell &
Brewer, 2006), 16–40, defends the artistic sensibilities of the Reformation.
6
On transformations of the sacred geography of Britain and Ireland, see Alexandra
Walsham, The Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Identity, and Memory in Early Modern
Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
4 C. SAVONIUS-WROTH
religious conflict.7 This destabilization led to closer scrutiny not only of

religious ceremony and its ontological and psychological bases, but also of
all kinds of customs. A nuanced discourse about vernacular cultures and
religious psychology developed out of the turmoil, grounded in humanist
biblical scholarship and informed by the theological and pastoral problems
of the religious instability that followed the Reformation. In Britain, over
a long period stretching from the Protestant Reformation to the end of
the eighteenth century, conflict over religious concerns steered the edu-
cated elite towards an interest in the vernacular cultures of their own land
and, hence, towards a Protestant rediscovery of tradition.
Among those who devoted most careful thought to customs were the
mainstream, conformist upholders of the Church of England. A sympa-
thetic view of vernacular culture was consistent with the ideas they held
about what is now called psychology of religion—the need for external,
embodied practices, the importance of ritual language, the centrality of
sacramental symbols. It was also consistent with their interpretation of the
Bible and with the theories they favored about the origins of civilization.
They arrived at a more approving understanding of the customary behav-
ior of their less-educated fellow Britons, however, primarily in reaction to
the all-out attack on symbols, ceremonies, and customs launched by those
who sought a more thoroughgoing reformation of religion in Britain, the
“puritans” within and outside the Church of England, and their sometime
allies, the Scottish presbyterians. These ultra-reformists held the view that
no ritual acts were permitted to Christians unless literally documented in
the New Testament. To refute such an extreme position, apologists for
moderate reformation turned to the authority of custom. The appeal to
human tradition committed them to an understanding of cultural trans-
mission that legitimized aspects of vernacular culture.
It is perhaps not surprising that the initial impulse to do away with all
sorts of vernacular practices would have modulated into this more nuanced
view. For although the Protestant reformers attacked vernacular culture,
7
Key scholarship on these themes includes Philippe Buc, The Dangers of Ritual: Between
Early Medieval Texts and Social Scientific Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2001); Carlos M. N. Eire, War against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to
Calvin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Ronald Hutton, The Rise and Fall
of Merry England: The Ritual Year, 1400–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994);
Hutton, Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1996); David Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the
Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
1 INTRODUCTION 5
they also elevated both the use of vernacular languages and the cultural
autonomy of national churches, through their insistence on the right of all
Christians to worship God and read the Bible in their native languages,
and on the right of nations to decide independently about non-essential
matters of religion. England’s hegemony in Britain and Ireland gave rise
to a conflict between religious ideals and political expediency. From the
point of view of religion, what justification could there be for forcing non-
anglophone Protestants to use English? While political considerations
encouraged anglicization, the imposition of a foreign language in matters
of religion was contrary to Protestant principles. As I argue in Chap. 6, the
religious necessity of translating the Bible into the Celtic languages helped
to preserve not only the languages but their literary and oral traditions
as well.
In post-Reformation Scotland, the urgent necessity of ministering to a
large Gaelic-speaking population drew the Protestant clergy’s attention to
oral culture and to ordinary people as bearers of valuable cultural capital,
long before Gaelic heritage was co-opted by Scottish nationalism. In the
early seventeenth century, Scotland appeared to be a thoroughly and “suc-
cessfully” reformed Protestant nation, its people sober, iconoclastic,
Sabbath-observing Calvinists, averse to ceremonies and restrained by
effective presbyterian church discipline. In fact, the state of religion in
Scotland was complicated by political and cultural tensions, between the
Stuart monarchs’ preference for bishops and the Scottish Reformation’s
strong traditions of presbyterian governance, between the official aboli-
tion of the church calendar and the deeply entrenched popular attachment
to seasonal celebrations and vernacular customs, and above all, between
the cultural norms of Scots-speaking Lowlanders and those of the Gaelic
inhabitants of the highlands and islands.8
The establishment, after 1688, of official presbyterianism in the high-
lands and islands was hampered by widespread attachment to the Stuart
monarchy and the near-impossibility of finding enough Gaelic-speaking
ministers who were not Jacobites. Many parishes continued to be served
8
John McCallum, “Introduction,” in Scotland’s Long Reformation: New Perspectives on
Scottish Religion, c. 1500–c. 1660, ed. John McCallum (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 1–26; Margo
Todd, The Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2002); Jane E. A. Dawson, “The Gaidhealtachd and the Emergence of the Scottish
Highlands,” in British Consciousness and Identity: The Making of Britain, 1533–1707, ed.
Peter Roberts and Brendan Bradshaw (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998),
259–300.
6 C. SAVONIUS-WROTH
by episcopalians, both legally and illegally, well into the eighteenth centu-
ry.9 The large size of parishes, sparse population, rugged geography, and
language barrier prevented the Church from exercising close control over
highland and island parishes. Under these circumstances, Protestantism in
Gaelic-speaking Scotland developed its own unique vernacular variations,
in which Gaelic oral cultures of poetry and storytelling played a central
role.10 When Gaelic poetry suddenly burst onto the anglophone literary
scene in the mid-eighteenth century, its “discovery” was the result of a
long history of interaction between religion and vernacular culture; the
Gaelic-speaking Scottish presbyterian clergy were the greatest champions
in Britain of the poems attributed to the ancient pagan bard, Ossian.
The conventional story of the formation of British cultural identities in
the Romantic era tends to ignore or downplay these foundational religious
contexts. For the most part, the birth of British Romanticism has been
told as a secular story, or a story of religious heterodoxy and individualism
more easily relatable to an ultimately secular endpoint. This has been the
case even in the work of some of the most historically minded literary
scholars. Marilyn Butler’s vision of Romanticism, for example, was so
determinedly secular that she even managed to include the deeply pious
William Stukeley (discussed in Chap. 6) in the same category as Voltaire
and Hume, as “secular intellectuals…advancing the secular case to the
public.”11
The vast body of scholarship on British Romanticism is curiously reti-
cent on the topic of mainstream Anglican and presbyterian religious belief
and practice.12 For many scholars of Romanticism, under the influence of
9
John MacInnes, The Evangelical Movement in the Highlands of Scotland, 1688 to 1800
(Aberdeen: University Press, 1951), 16–41.
10
Donald E. Meek, “The Pulpit and the Pen: Clergy, Literacy and Oral Tradition in the
Scottish Highlands,” in The Spoken Word: Oral Culture in Britain, 1500–1850, ed. Adam
Fox and Daniel R Woolf (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 84–118.
11
Marilyn Butler, Mapping Mythologies: Countercurrents in Eighteenth-Century British
Poetry and Cultural History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 19; her other-
wise remarkably perceptive essay “Antiquarianism (Popular),” in An Oxford Companion to
the Romantic Age: British Culture, 1776–1832, ed. Iain McCalman, Jon Mee, and et al.
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 328–38 also presents a completely secular
trajectory.
12
Important exceptions include Murray Roston, Prophet and Poet: The Bible and the
Growth of Romanticism (London: Faber and Faber, 1965); E. S. Shaffer, “Kubla Khan” and
The Fall of Jerusalem: The Mythological School in Biblical Criticism and Secular Literature,
1770–1880 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975); Stephen Prickett, Romanticism
1 INTRODUCTION 7
such giants of the field as M. H. Abrams and Geoffrey Hartman, the rela-
tionship between Romanticism and religion is pre-judged because of an
assumption that “literature has essentially superseded religion’s provision
of profound thought and deep feeling.”13 While the recent “religious
turn” in the humanities has meant that cultural and historical intersections
between religion and Romanticism now attract significant scholarly inter-
est, the emphasis has been primarily on the unconventionality of Romantic
authors’ religious views.14 Little attempt has been made to anchor the
cultural movement as a whole in the omnipresent Anglican and presbyte-
rian piety and erudition which dominated British society into the nine-
teenth century. This is perhaps in part because literary scholarship, in
particular, has been slow to reap the insights of revisionist accounts of the
relationship between Enlightenment and religion, and of the recovery of
the eighteenth-century Church of England as a vital force in society, rather
than the moribund husk it had long been considered.15
My aim is to show that the cultural phenomenon that we think of as
Romanticism was rooted in religious concerns and clerical erudition—
deep learning in the service of pastoral care, religious polemic, and apolo-
getics. As William McKelvy points out, British literary Romanticism
emerged out of a milieu that was “more priest-ridden than a gothic
novel.”16 He is referring, not to Roman Catholic priests, but to the
Anglican clergy, and if his colorful image is extended to include the epis-
copalian and presbyterian clergy of Scotland (although the latter would
and Religion: The Tradition of Coleridge and Wordsworth in the Victorian Church (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1976); William R. McKelvy, The English Cult of Literature:
Devoted Readers, 1774–1880 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007) and Sarah
Houghton-Walker, John Clare’s Religion (Burlington: Ashgate, 2009).
13
For discussion of the prevalence of secularization narratives in studies of Romanticism,
see for example, Michael Tomko, “Religion,” in Joel Faflak and Julia M. Wright, eds., A
Handbook of Romanticism Studies (Chichester: Wiley, 2012), 339–356, quotation at 341;
Introduction to William Andrew Ulmer, The Christian Wordsworth, 1798–1805 (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 2001).
14
For example, Daniel E. White, Early Romanticism and Religious Dissent (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006); Jasper Albert Cragwall, Lake Methodism: Polite Literature
and Popular Religion in England, 1780–1830 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press,
2013); Helen Boyles, Romanticism and Methodism: The Problem of Religious Enthusiasm
(New York: Routledge, 2017).
15
For a thorough introduction to the historiography of the eighteenth-century Church of
England through the twentieth century, see William Gibson, The Church of England,
1688–1832: Unity and Accord (New York: Routledge, 2001), 4–27.
16
McKelvy, English Cult of Literature, 37.
8 C. SAVONIUS-WROTH
not, of course, have referred to themselves as priests), it can serve as an

evocation of the story to be told in this book as well. My argument goes
beyond the important and usually disregarded fact that the early (or “pre-
”) Romantics were mostly clergymen by profession, and the obvious point
that Wordsworth, Blake, and Coleridge were deeply religious individuals;
one of my primary ambitions is a reappraisal of the intellectual and cultural
sources of Romanticism that recognizes the pervasiveness of religious dis-
course in the culture of eighteenth-century Britain.
Intertwined with this is another goal, a new interpretation of the emer-
gence of elite interest in vernacular culture. The idea that “the common
people,” the “lower orders,” “the vulgar” have “rites,” “ceremonies,” and
“antiquities” of their own implies a quasi-anthropological understanding
of human society. It suggests that “the people” have an internal socio-
cultural organization that is distinct from that imposed upon them by
their social “superiors.” This idea, however, was already widely accepted
when anthropology or ethnography as distinct fields of study existed only
in the embryonic form of local histories and travel accounts of exotic peo-
ples. From at least as early as the sixteenth century, British antiquaries and
religious polemicists alike conceived of their less-educated contemporaries
as possessing a complex system of “opinions,” “traditions,” “rites,” and
“ceremonies,” for the most part inherited from an ancient pagan past, but
with an admixture of “monkish superstition.”
This book uncovers ideas about British vernacular cultures expressed in
the apologetic, pastoral, and devotional literature of the overlapping peri-
ods of the “long Reformation” and the long eighteenth century, as well as
the relationship between those genres and the methodical documentation
of the cultural expressions that eventually came to be called folklore. I am
particularly interested in the tendency within this discussion that suggests
the assignment of a positive value to certain forms of vernacular culture, a
way of thinking about “the common people” that influenced the Romantic
idea of the “folk” as a source of ancient wisdom and cultural values. This
perspective was often closely tied to a more sacramental and “performa-
tive” religious perspective which, I argue, is one of the most significant but
widely ignored formative influences on Romanticism: a vision of “culture”
(to use today’s word) emanating from religious principles.
In British religious polemic throughout the period discussed here, both
friends and enemies of vernacular culture assumed that there was a close
affinity between ritual and custom. One striking indication of this is the
way that the everyday terminology of familiar customs could be applied
1 INTRODUCTION 9
indiscriminately to both. Consider, for example, the word “mummery.”

Even from the handful of examples given in the Oxford English Dictionary,
the polyvalence of the word is evident: it appears just as much at home in
the context of elves and fairies or of actual “mumming” (traditional
English masked performances at Christmas-time) as in the context of criti-
cisms of Roman Catholicism or “pagan” religion. Among the wide range
of meanings of the word “mummery,” the polemical meaning seems to be
the most common, usually directed against Roman Catholicism, but
sometimes also against Anglican ritual. For the most part, the usage of
such linguistically flexible words was derogatory: calling something by the
name of a plebeian activity was a way of mocking it. Roman Catholic ritual
was routinely derided as “conjuring” or “fooling,” in the specific senses of
acting like a jester, or tricking or cheating someone.17
But the perceived fluidity between the world of “customs” and that of
“rituals” also suggests a deep-rooted sense of ontological similarity, a sense
that both customs and rituals take their force and efficacy from an inherent
correspondence between the human psyche and the external forms it
encounters. For generations of twentieth-century historians, this belief
was evidence of a worldview characterized by “enchantment,” or more
pejoratively, by “magical thinking.” Earl Wasserman, writing in 1953,
could describe a shift from a pre-Baconian world imbued with implicit
meaning to a post-Baconian world in which “these interpretive premises
had lost almost all validity” as an “obvious generalization.”18 The assump-
tion that such a shift occurred has been challenged, and it is perhaps no
longer so obvious that Western culture is characterized by an inexorable
trend towards a “disenchanted” worldview.19 Yet some kind of
17
For example, in a hostile description of the Catholic baptismal rite, the priest’s ritual acts,
such as blowing on the child’s face, exorcising devils, and anointing with oil, are described as
“fooling,” Edward Fowler, The Resolution of This Case of Conscience Whether the Church of
England’s Symbolizing so Far as It Doth with the Church of Rome, Makes It Unlawful to Hold
Communion with the Church of England? (London, 1683), 13–14. See further discussion of
this general point in Chap. 2. On the relationship between “games” and ritual, see C. L. Barber,
Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy; a Study of Dramatic Form and Its Relation to Social Custom
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959); Naomi Conn Liebler, Shakespeare’s Festive
Tragedy: The Ritual Foundations of Genre (London: Routledge, 1995).
18
Earl R. Wasserman, “Nature Moralized: The Divine Analogy in the Eighteenth Century,”
ELH 20, no. 1 (March 1953): 39–76 (39–40). See also Keith Thomas, Religion and the
Decline of Magic (New York: Scribner, 1971).
19
Alexandra Walsham, “The Reformation and ‘the Disenchantment of the World’
Reassessed,” Historical Journal 51, no. 2 (2008): 497–528; Jonathan Sheehan, “When Was
10 C. SAVONIUS-WROTH
“disenchantment” was what late seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and

nineteenth-century thinkers either feared or hoped for, fought to prevent,
or promoted.
The idea of a radical shift in the fundamental bases of significance, a
“disenchantment of the world,” whether as a unique historical phenome-
non that took place in Western Europe and North America between the
Renaissance and the French Revolution or as a constantly recurring con-
flict whenever any people possessing a “pre-modern” worldview have
come into contact with the disenchanted dominant culture, has survived
in the field of anthropology. It is found preeminently in the work of British
anthropologist Mary Douglas, in the notion that “sensitivity to symbols”
varies from culture to culture. In her Natural Symbols (1970), Douglas
illustrated this idea of “symbolist sensitivity” by comparing the beliefs of
twentieth-century English Catholics to those of their Irish immigrant con-
temporaries. The English Catholics, especially the clergy, were “insensitive
to non-verbal signals and dull to their meaning,” while the Irish, like all
other groups defined by Douglas as “ritualists,” lived according to a rich
fabric of “cosmic orientations and moral directives [expressed] in con-
densed symbols.”20 The legitimacy of symbols (in much the sense meant
by Douglas) was vehemently and explicitly contested in British religious
debate from the Reformation through the long eighteenth century. Thus,
in order to understand these debates as seen through the eyes of contem-
poraries, “symbolist sensitivity” is a useful concept, whether or not “disen-
chantment” is accepted as our central explanatory model today.
Disenchantment? History and the Secular Age,” in Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 217–42; Penelope J. Corfield, “‘An Age of
Infidelity’: Secularization in Eighteenth-Century England,” Social History 39, no. 2 (May
2014): 229–47. In contrast, see Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2007) and Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious
Revolution Secularized Society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012). Robert
A. Yelle, The Language of Disenchantment: Protestant Literalism and Colonial Discourse in
British India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 14–16, is a nuanced discussion that
recognizes “some social reality to the phenomenon of disenchantment.”
20
“Condensed symbols” are symbols that “condense an immensely wide range of refer-
ence” into a concretely graspable form or act. Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols: Explorations
in Cosmology, 3rd ed. (London; New York: Routledge, 2003) quotations at 10, 37, 44. I
have taken the expression “symbolist sensitivity” from the summary of Douglas’s arguments
in Howard J. Happ, “Calendary Conflicts: the Religious Structuring of Time in Renaissance
England” (PhD dissertation, Princeton, 1974), 17.
1 INTRODUCTION 11
Perhaps it is not surprising that British Protestants who upheld this

kind of symbolist understanding of the world, who valued ceremonies,
and who tolerated customs, were accused of being “papists” by their
reformist opponents, but their defense, namely that they were following
the most venerable traditions of Christianity, cannot be dismissed out of
hand, pace Keith Thomas. Thomas saw a “magical” character in late medi-
eval religion as the result of “the notorious readiness of the early Christian
leaders to assimilate elements of the old paganism into their own religious
practice, rather than pose too direct a conflict of loyalties in the minds of
the new converts,” noting that the “consolations afforded by such prac-
tices were too considerable for the Church to ignore; if the people were
going to resort to magic anyway it was far better that it should be magic
over which the Church maintained some control…The Reformation…is
justly commemorated for having robbed the priest of most of his magical
functions.” In drawing this particular line between “magic” and “reli-
gion,” Thomas revealed the characteristically Protestant assumptions of
much “secular” history in the twentieth century.21
For the early Church, some of the practices of pre-Christian religions
had to be rejected entirely but others could be transformed into vehicles
of Christian symbolic meaning. The propriety of such transformations was
not accepted unanimously or consistently in the early Church, as countless
examples of censure and of legislation forbidding certain kinds of eclecti-
cism (later to be carefully gleaned by Protestants as evidence) amply docu-
ment. But although it was a controversial view from the earliest days of
organized Christianity, it was also a fundamentally formative one that per-
mitted a long and fruitful history of adaptation and borrowing.22
Once the Protestant Reformation was fully underway, those who held
this perspective were usually on the defensive since Reformation scholars
and polemicists had identified such “accommodation” to the needs of the
human psyche as one of the central causes of the supposed corruption of
the Roman Church. The concept of “pagano-papism”—in other words,
the accusation that the practices of the Roman Catholic Church were a
21
Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 47–48, 275. See Valerie I. J. Flint, The Rise
of Magic in Early Medieval Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 393–394.
22
On this topic generally, see John Bossy, Christianity in the West, 1400–1700 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1985); Ronald Hutton, “How Pagan Were Medieval English
Peasants?,” Folklore, no. 3 (2011): 235–49; Walsham, Reformation of the Landscape, 18–79;
Flint, The Rise of Magic. The concept of “inculturation” in twentieth-century Christian mis-
siology seems to conform to this pattern.
morass of pagan customs—was a powerful polemical tool in the religious

conflicts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In Britain, the notion
of a “conformity between modern and ancient ceremonies” (to use an
expression found in titles of books which were still on British clergy’s
reading lists at the end of the eighteenth century) had a long life in polemic
against Roman Catholicism, and at times, against the Church of England
and Scottish episcopalianism.23
In spite of strident calls to do so, the Church of England, even when its
theology was more strictly Calvinist, never completely abandoned the pre-
Reformation “accommodationist” perspective. After 1660, a variant of
that perspective was codified as the official liturgical form of Anglicanism
in the Book of Common Prayer and its rubrics. In addition to episcopacy,
the most distinctive and divisive characteristic of the praxis of the Church
of England was its retention of the liturgical calendar and other ceremo-
nial aspects of public worship—practices considered by critics to be too
“papist,” and by defenders to be crucial to the spiritual well-being of ordi-
nary believers.24
How did apologists defend this vision of Anglican orthopraxis, and by
extension, of British culture? They drew support from ideas about the
earliest form of Christianity practiced by the peoples of Britain, who had
been evangelized, it was claimed, long before the “corruptions” of Rome
crept in. In crafting arguments to answer not only the scruples of fellow
Protestants, but also Roman Catholic accusations of novelty and schism,
they turned the Reformation polemic of pagan borrowings on its head,
presenting traces of any such cultural transfer as evidence of antiquity
rather than of corruption. The religious behavior of the “common peo-
ple”—the very customs and practices most abhorred by puritans and
23
Pierre Mussard, The Conformity Between Modern and Ancient Ceremonies: Wherein Is
Proved, by Incontestable Authorities, That the Ceremonies of the Church of Rome Are Entirely
Derived from the Heathen… (London, 1745); Thomas Seward, The Conformity between
Popery and Paganism… (London, 1746).
24
See Peter Lake and Michael C. Questier, eds., Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English
Church, c. 1560–1660 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2000), esp. Nicholas Tyacke, “Lancelot
Andrewes and the myth of Anglicanism,” 5–33; Julian Davies, The Caroline Captivity of the
Church: Charles I and the Remoulding of Anglicanism, 1625–1641 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1992); Kenneth Fincham, ed., The Early Stuart Church, 1603–1642
(Hampshire: Macmillan, 1993); Fincham and Tyacke, Altars Restored: The Changing Face of
English Religious Worship, 1547–C.1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Peter
Marshall, “(Re)defining the English Reformation,” The Journal of British Studies 48, no. 3
(July 2009): 564–86.
1 INTRODUCTION 13
presbyterians, such as seasonal festivities, processions, lighting candles in

churches, kneeling, bowing towards the altar, ringing church bells, and
various funeral customs—could be pressed into service as evidence of an
unbroken continuity of praxis from early Christianity to their own times.
The appeal to “native” British Christianity also served Scottish presbyteri-
ans, although to a different end: they argued that, from its earliest found-
ing, their church had been free of episcopal control.25 Later, Gaelic-speaking
presbyterians used a similar logic to present pre-Christian religion in
Scotland in a positive light, arguing on the basis of contemporary vernacu-
lar customs that the ancient Gaels had not practiced human sacrifice.26
The story I am telling does not ignore the more conventional account
of a gradual withdrawal of the elite from participation in a shared cul-
ture.27 The existence of relatively tolerant or approving attitudes towards
vernacular culture coexisted with the general distaste on the part of the
educated elite for gross and undisciplined behavior in which they assumed
their poorer contemporaries were ever prone to indulge. Even for those
who were sympathetic to vernacular culture, from Elizabethan conform-
ists to eighteenth-century high churchmen and Gaelic-speaking highland
ministers to clerical folklorists of the nineteenth century, many aspects of
vernacular culture seemed embarrassingly rowdy, and hardly amenable to
being restored to a meaningful place in the life of Christian communities.
Moreover, much of what could be considered vernacular culture was com-
pletely beyond the pale to even the most sympathetic clergyman-
observer—telling fortunes, witchcraft (even of the “white” variety),
and many games and stories.
But what I do wish to insist upon is the less-noticed and more surpris-
ing existence of encouragement of vernacular culture for genuinely theo-
logical or pastoral, rather than crudely self-interested, reasons. The
contrary assumption, or the suspicion, that any encouragement of ver-
nacular cultural expressions by secular and religious authorities could only
be self-interested, figures quite prominently in early modern and
25
Colin Kidd, British Identities before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the
Atlantic World, 1600–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 99–122.
26
For example, John Smith, Galic Antiquities Consisting of a History of the Druids,
Particularly of Those of Caledonia; a Dissertation on the Authenticity of the Poems of Ossian;
and a Collection of Ancient Poems (Edinburgh, 1780), 33.
27
As told, for example, by Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (New
York: Harper & Row, 1978) and E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common (New York:
W.W. Norton, 1991).
eighteenth-century polemic. Indeed, the notion that a corrupt, self-

interested (Roman Catholic) Church hierarchy had allowed the “common
people” to carry on “pagan” practices, all the better to keep them enslaved
to “superstition” (and thus in the control of that hierarchy) was not
invented by Enlightenment thinkers, but goes back to the first generation
of Protestant polemic. This Protestant claim to have freed believers from
tyrannical superstition has left a deep imprint on modern secular historical
narratives, which discount genuine deeply held religious sentiments and
epistemological assumptions of both laity and clergy.
The religious geography of early modern and eighteenth-century
Britain and Ireland was more complex than the physical geography and
even the cultural and political geographies. This book traces the evolution
of Protestant religious discourses dominated by debates over ceremonies
and customs, throughout the Atlantic archipelago. Special attention is
paid to the interconnections between English and Scottish developments,
as well as the impact of their divergences and convergences upon develop-
ments in Ireland and Wales.
Debates over the role of religious ceremonies and the status of popular
celebrations of seasonal and life-cycle events engaged the attention of
everyone from ordinary believers and the lower clergy to archbishops and
monarchs, as well as such canonical figures of British thought as Hobbes,
Locke, and Hume. The book begins with a fresh look at the evolution of
these debates over a long period from the mid-sixteenth century to the
early eighteenth century (Chap. 2). A bird’s-eye view of the whole period
reveals the sheer longevity of the key arguments advanced by both sides.
Two mutually incompatible but internally consistent visions of Reformation
had already been explicitly articulated during the Elizabethan crises of
conformity. A radically reformist movement which attacked symbols, cer-
emonies, and customs collided violently with a more conservative project
of “pruning” or “shearing” that defended the necessity of ritual and tradi-
tion.28 These debates were to reverberate through British self-understanding
into the late nineteenth century: the puritans were a particular bugbear of
the Romantics, while the defense of tradition offered by opponents of
puritanism formed the core of ideas that I will refer to as “high church”
throughout this book.
28
Richard Hooker castigated those who “think it always imperfect reformation that doth
but shear and not flay,” Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (London: J. M. Dent, 1925),
2:291 (V:lxv.1).
1 INTRODUCTION 15
This is an appropriate place to note that I have elected to use both

“high church” and “Anglican” in a somewhat anachronistic fashion, to
avoid frequent awkward circumlocutions in a discussion that spans four
centuries. I am using “Anglican” as the adjectival form of “Church of
England” (and its extensions in Wales and Ireland) regardless of contem-
porary usage in the period under discussion, and “high church” in roughly
its current sense, as the strand of Anglicanism which “emphasizes ritual,
priestly authority, the Sacraments, and historical continuity with
Catholicism” (Oxford English Dictionary) even though this definition is
best adapted to the latest period I discuss, the 1830s and 1840s. “High
church” in this sense functions here, however, as shorthand for the posi-
tion of those who, albeit in different periods and for changing reasons,
defended the importance of tradition, custom, and to a greater or lesser
degree, “embodied” or “performative” modes of worship.29
Chapter 3 brings into focus the intellectual resources (biblical scholar-
ship, philology, and the fruits of humanist erudition) available to early
modern British antiquaries writing about customs. Of particular signifi-
cance were the Renaissance humanist and Christian neo-Platonist concep-
tions of an original universal revelation as the ultimate origin of all human
cultural practices. I argue that antiquaries and religious writers used the
same tools and that when contemporary vernacular culture seen through
the lens of antiquarianism first began to attract the interest of learned
Britons at the end of the seventeenth century, this interest was shaped
primarily by religious concerns. Although seventeenth-century British
antiquarianism is sometimes seen as having more in common with the
apparently secular domain of “natural philosophy” than with religious
debate, the dichotomy loses its force when the fundamentally religious
orientation of many early modern “scientists” is taken into account.
Among the goals of this chapter is to situate John Aubrey in the religious
context of his Oxford associates. Aubrey’s manuscript compilation, “The
Remaines of Gentilisme and Judaisme”, is one of the first major collec-
tions of British vernacular customs, and Aubrey’s theories about Britain’s
29
For the history of the term “high church,” and related nomenclature, see Peter
B. Nockles, The Oxford Movement in Context: Anglican High Churchmanship, 1760–1857
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 25–43; discussion of the concept of a sin-
gle coherent tradition of “High Churchmanship” from the Reformation to the nineteenth
century, Kenneth Hylson-Smith, High Churchmanship in the Church of England: From the
Sixteenth Century to the Late Twentieth Century (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1993), ix–xvi.
prehistoric stone circles helped to lay the foundations of the specifically

British contributions to Enlightenment and Romantic theories of
primitivism.
Another of the earliest anglophone works claimed by the discipline later
to be known as folklore, Henry Bourne’s Antiquitates Vulgares (1725), is
the focus of Chap. 4. Bourne, a provincial Anglican curate of humble
social origins, coined the phrase “popular antiquities,” which was in use
until the 1840s when the term “folklore” was invented. In his pastoral
role, he sought points of connection between the everyday lives of his
parishioners and the teachings of the Church, chiefly through devotional
practices organized around the liturgical calendar. His high church piety
and symbolist vision of the history of Christianity, which I argue were at
the heart of his interest in vernacular culture, left a lasting imprint on
British identity. Bourne and other northern English provincial clergymen
promoted a sympathetic approach to vernacular culture, the imprint of
which was evident in the regional Anglicanism of William Wordsworth’s
childhood. In drawing special attention to Bourne’s provincial identity, I
am building on the insights of the many scholars of Romanticism who
have pointed to the importance of writers from the geographic “margins”
in the literary innovations of eighteenth-century Britain: my original con-
tribution is to show how integral religion was to these writers’ identities.
In Chap. 5, I examine how the debate over the proper role of perfor-
mative religious practices, or what contemporaries called “outward obser-
vances,” evolved in the middle and later decades of the eighteenth century.
As Robert Ingram has recently demonstrated, the debates and polemics of
the Reformation were alive and well throughout the period that is usually
thought of as the Enlightenment.30 My discussion focuses on defense of
the “embodied” practices that continued to be a point of contention
within the Church of England as well as in controversy with deists, dis-
senters, and “enthusiasts” (as contemporaries would have called
Methodists, Evangelicals, and mystics). I argue that the perceived need to
find firmer grounding for the religious views that were in the mainstream
of the Church of England led to the emergence of a curious hybrid of
traditional (Patristic-Scholastic) views of religious psychology, and new,
distinctly Humean formulations. Unexpected as such an alliance may
seem, it proved to be a powerful influence, not only within the Church of
30
Robert G. Ingram, Reformation without End: Religion, Politics and the Past in Post-
Revolutionary England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018).
1 INTRODUCTION 17
England, but eventually on British and anglophone Protestant culture

more broadly. The Romantic poets’ insistence on the importance of the
senses was grounded in these controversies.
In Chap. 6 I turn to what is now often called the Bardic Revival, the
sudden surge of interest, in the British world of letters, in Celtic-language
literary and oral-literary traditions. My discussion focuses on the impor-
tance of religious polemics, biblical scholarship, and pastoral concerns in
drawing attention to this heritage. In mid-eighteenth-century Britain,
ancient culture was so exclusively the preserve of the clergy that many
readers of James Macpherson’s controversial and influential Ossian poems
simply assumed them to be the work of a clergyman. The creation of the
eighteenth-century Ossian opus, including not only Macpherson’s works
but also the great body of supporting material drawn from contemporary
Gaelic oral sources, compiled almost entirely by Scottish presbyterian
clergy, can only be fully understood in its religious context. The role
played by the clergy grew out of their championship of religious instruc-
tion and worship in Celtic languages, a concern they shared with Welsh,
Manx, and Irish clergy, poets, and antiquaries seeking to defend and pre-
serve the other non-anglophone vernacular cultures of Britain and Ireland.
These Celtic-language-literate writers also responded and contributed to
the articulation of conjectural or “stadial” history that informed the
Romantic understanding of poetic genius.
Today, among the more common connotations of the word “roman-
tic” are “fanciful, sentimental, idealistic” (Oxford English Dictionary),
while “folklore” can suggest something either quaint or factually incor-
rect. But, as I argue in Chap. 7, in the early nineteenth century, the British
Romantic poets, in company with many other thoughtful commentators,
both conservative and radical, looked to disappearing folkways for a pos-
sible solution to social and economic ills. They found inspiration in a
holistic vision of human society and humanity’s place in the natural world,
drawn from the seasonal and life-cycle traditions of vernacular Anglicanism.
This Romantic vision, perhaps surprisingly, contributed to radical thought
as well as to conservative high church Anglican revival.
British Romanticism inherited a nuanced understanding of vernacular
cultures from the polemical erudition of the long Reformation and the
pastoral efforts of Protestant clergy. Like many high church Anglican
priests and Gaelic-speaking Scottish presbyterian ministers, the Romantics
glimpsed in British vernacular cultures something of an older, better,
understanding of social relations and of the relationship of humanity to
nature and its Creator. They saw potential solutions for the grievous social
ills of modern commercial society in the vestiges of communalism and
benign paternalism preserved in seasonal customs. They drew inspiration
from the presumed ability of those at the margins of modernity to read
profound truths in the “Book of Nature,” for the Romantics revered the
beauty of the natural world as the most direct and irresistible manifesta-
tion of the divine Presence, even when they doubted the more conven-
tional teachings about that Presence. The Romantic vision carried on a
long tradition in post-Reformation theology of attempting to mitigate the
extreme Protestant rejection of ritual and symbolism, to reverse the per-
ceived disenchantment of the world.
CHAPTER 2
Ritual, Ceremony, and Custom

in the Aftermath of the British Reformations
In his Ecclesiastical Sketches of 1822, William Wordsworth invoked the

spirits of the Elizabethan apologist Richard Hooker and the Caroline
Archbishop William Laud, in praise of an “innocent Procession” held at
the annual “rural ceremony” of carrying rushes and garlands into the par-
ish church. He regretted that “our scrupulous Sires” had not allowed
more than a “scanty measure of those graceful rites/And usages” to sur-
vive.1 Pitting the “fiery blights” of the “scrupulous” against Laud’s plea-
sure and Hooker’s approval (emanating from “heaven’s pure climes”),
Wordsworth’s defense of vernacular religious practices and his reproof of
the English Reformers reflected a long trajectory of religious controversy.
Its contours had emerged very early in the history of Protestantism in
Britain, the result of ambivalence, at the heart of Protestant thought,
towards human traditions. On the one hand, Protestant theologians
upheld the right of every Christian people to determine the external form
of religious practice in accordance with their own customs. On the other
hand, they believed that the customs of most Christian societies had been
corrupted by Roman Catholicism and were contrary to the teachings of
the Gospels.
1
Wordsworth, “Rural Ceremonies” and “Regrets,” The Ecclesiastical Sonnets of William
Wordsworth: A Critical Edition, ed. Abbie Findlay Potts (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1922), 78. First published in Wordsworth’s Ecclesiastical Sketches (London, 1822).
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 19

Switzerland AG 2022
C. Savonius-Wroth, Visions of British Culture from the Reformation
to Romanticism, Histories of the Sacred and Secular, 1700–2000,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82855-4_2
The Protestant Reformation has been described as a “revolution in rit-

ual theory.”2 It could also, I suggest, be described as a seismic shift in
“symbolist sensitivity.”3 The rituals that had served as “living books,” con-
veying the doctrines of Christianity in a richly performative mode to
unlearned believers, were now branded idolatrous and blasphemous. To
many Protestant reformers, the long-accepted Christian neo-Platonic idea
that religious ritual “made human what was divine…put material on what
was immaterial” was abhorrent.4 The reformers acknowledged that two
rituals, and only two, the sacraments of communion and baptism, were
divinely instituted and incumbent upon all Christians, but they rejected
the strong symbolist understanding of ritual that had prevailed through
centuries of Western Christianity. Instead, they formulated weaker defini-
tions emphasizing the commemorative function of the sacraments.
Such a revolution necessarily had significant implications for a much
broader range of cultural practices beyond the strictly liturgical—in a
sense, it had implications for all aspects of life, since medieval Christianity
had achieved a high level of integration of vernacular culture and religious
practice.5 Without a strong form of symbolist understanding, the transfor-
mation of pre-Christian (and non-Christian) practices into vehicles of
2
Edward Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe, 2nd ed (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2005). The phrase comes from the title of Muir, Chap. 5.
3
On the concept of “symbolist sensitivity,” see Introduction. On the Reformation debate
over the nature and status of symbols and “embodied” religious practices, see, for example,
Carlos M. N. Eire, War Against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Philippe Buc, The Dangers of Ritual:
Between Early Medieval Texts and Social Scientific Theory (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2001), 164–202.
4
Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite, Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, I.5 (376D), in Colm
Luibheid, trans., Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works (New York: Paulist Press, 1987),
199. See Buc, The Dangers of Ritual, 170n for counter-Reformation reaffirmations of this
concept.
5
Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe, 164–65; John Bossy, Christianity in the West,
1400–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985); Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the
Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c.1400–c.1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1992). For discussion of Christianity’s absorption of non-Christian practices, see Valerie
I. J. Flint, The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1991); James C. Russell, The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity: A Sociohistorical
Approach to Religious Transformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). For the
Christianization of pre-Christian sacred geography in Britain and Ireland, see Alexandra
Walsham, The Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Identity, and Memory in Early Modern
Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 19–65.
2 RITUAL, CEREMONY, AND CUSTOM IN THE AFTERMATH… 21
Christian meaning was no longer readily conceivable. The conceptual flu-

idity between performative religious practices and vernacular culture that
had been typical of pre-Reformation Christianity could now appear as an
indication of corruption and diabolical interference, rather than of wis-
dom and inspiration.
Christianity’s long history of accommodation of vernacular religious
customs was thus one of the chief targets of the Reformation: the
Reformation entailed a rejection not only of the complex official ritual of
the Roman Catholic Church but also, with at least equal vehemence, of
the unofficial practices surrounding it. One of the central goals of the
Reformation, in other words, was to sweep away the effects of centuries of
assimilation and adaptation. Or at least it was a central concern of
Reformation polemic, but the actual process of reforming religion was
much more complex and messier in deed than in thought. When trans-
lated into practice, the ideal of returning to the original purity of the early
Church gave rise to a variety of mutually incompatible approaches.
In Britain, a relatively moderate kind of reformation, retaining an
appreciation of the spiritual significance of religious ceremonies, a respect
for tradition, or custom, and an acknowledgement of the necessity of sen-
sory supports for religious worship, ultimately triumphed.6 This was the
reformation that prevailed in the Church of England, the established
church of the dominant nation of the Atlantic archipelago. Yet a diametri-
cally opposed position, a radical reformist agenda, was a powerful force in
British religious life from the inception of the Reformation. British
Protestants of rigorous views, the “puritans” in England and the presbyte-
rians in Scotland, were perhaps the most uncompromising anti-
ceremonialists and iconoclasts aspiring to be an established church in early
modern Protestant Christendom.7 They were always a minority, especially
in England, and they rarely had the support of the Tudor and Stuart mon-
archs, who upheld, on the whole, a conservative notion of reformation.
The explosive nature of the Reformation in Britain, and its
6
“Moderate” here does not, of course, mean “tolerant”: on the coercive dimension of
early modern “moderation,” see Ethan H. Shagan, The Rule of Moderation: Violence, Religion
and the Politics of Restraint in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2011).
7
On the shortcomings of the term “puritan,” see Patrick Collinson, “The Puritan
Character: Polemics and Polarities in Early Seventeenth-Century English Culture,” in From
Cranmer to Sancroft (London: Hambledon Continuum, 2006). I am using it here in a broad
sense to mean those who sought more thoroughgoing reformation along Calvinist lines.
seventeenth-century reverberations in the civil wars and the Revolution of

1688, came from the tension between this cautious approach of the mon-
archy (shared by a significant proportion of the clergy and laity) and the
particularly zealous kind of reformation sought by many of the Scottish
clergy and laity and a smaller but very active minority in England, Wales,
and Protestant Ireland.8
These two very different visions of how to reform religion resulted in
diametrically opposed attitudes towards vernacular culture. To the zeal-
ous, almost all aspects of vernacular culture were either sinful or supersti-
tious, the “monuments and dregs of bygone idolatry,” in the words of the
Scottish Covenant of 1638. To defenders of a less severe form of reforma-
tion, the “people’s” customs were generally innocent and harmless, even
beneficial because they promoted neighborliness and “amity.”
Here the importance of the widely accepted Reformation principle that
each Christian nation had the right and responsibility to institute such
ceremonies as were appropriate for its own people becomes evident. Jean
Calvin had stated the matter unequivocally in his Institutio Christianae
Religionis (1536). The external forms of Christian worship were not the
essence of religion—Roman Catholicism had erred grievously in placing
so much importance in them—but a sober minimum of form was neces-
sary to ensure that “in the sacred assembly of the faithful, all things may
be done decently, and with becoming dignity, and that human society may
be maintained in order by certain bonds, as it were, of moderation and
humanity.” The external forms of Christianity were not inalterably fixed
by divine command: rather, they were established by human authority,
“accommodated to the varying circumstances [or manners] of each age
and nation [or people],” in conformity with “the custom and institutions
of the country [or region].”9 This acknowledgement of a legitimate role
8
For this synthesis of several decades of revisionist and “post-revisionist” scholarship on
the Reformation in England and Scotland, see Peter Marshall, “(Re)Defining the English
Reformation,” The Journal of British Studies 48, no. 3 (July 1, 2009): 564–86. On popular
resistance to radical reform in Scotland, see Gordon Donaldson, “Reformation to Covenant,”
in Studies in the History of Worship in Scotland, ed. Duncan B Forrester and Douglas M
Murray, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1996), 44–45, 49.
9
Jean Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge, reprint ed., 2
vols. in 1 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989), 2:435–436 (4:10.30–31). Parenthetical glosses
added: Calvin’s Latin text uses the terms institutum, mores, gens, regio, saeculum, to express
these ideas. Lutherans held very similar ideas, explained, for example, in Philip Melanchthon’s
discussion of “Human Traditions in the Church” in his “Apology for the Augsburg
Confession” (1530), included in the Lutheran confessions of faith, the Concordia
(1580–1584).
for custom pointed the way toward a defense of a more modest kind of
reformation. At the same time, the view that each people (or even region)
might have different institutions would be particularly controversial in
Britain and Ireland, where four nations coexisted in varying relations of
political power.
Historians who have investigated the emergence of ethnographic disci-
plines have long recognized that the Reformation’s intense focus on cus-
toms set the stage for later, more recognizably “social-scientific” ways of
thinking about culture. However, they have usually interpreted the impor-
tance of the background of religious controversy in too limited a manner.
They have tended to assume that religious interest in vernacular customs
was always, or primarily, an admonishing and regulating kind of interest,
an attempt to suppress or at least to control. Thus, they have contrasted it
with a more neutral, “curious” gaze which they have also then understood
as more secular.10
To insist on this binary, however, according to which religious interest
in vernacular culture is equated with intolerance, and more tolerant
approaches are presumed to be more secular, is to undervalue the religious
dimensions of the defense of vernacular culture in early modern thought,
and to risk losing sight of an extremely important dimension of the early
modern understanding of “custom.” Here I am taking a lead from
Alexandra Walsham’s discussion of the origins of folklore studies. Although
she has stressed “censure” and “curiosity” as the two dominant modes of
relating to vernacular culture from the early modern period into the nine-
teenth century, she has also drawn attention to the importance of a third
mode, a religious outlook that recognized “the utility and even virtue of
some customs and rituals inherited from the Catholic and pre-
Christian past.”11
10
This is the general drift of the early chapters of Giuseppe Cocchiara, The History of
Folklore in Europe (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1980). See also
Richard M. Dorson, The British Folklorists: A History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1968), 11–12; Kelsey Jackson Williams, The Antiquary: John Aubrey’s Historical Scholarship
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 120.
11
Alexandra Walsham, “Recording Superstition in Early Modern Britain: The Origins of
Folklore,” Past & Present Supplement 3 (August 2, 2008), 191–195 (quotation at 194), and
more extensive discussion in Walsham’s Reformation of the Landscape, 231–326.
In this chapter, I seek to add an additional dimension to this discussion

by focusing on the overlap between the status of customs and that of ritual
or ceremony, in the polemical discourse of the Reformation and its after-
math in Britain. Both kinds of cultural practices were attacked together by
more radical reformers and defended together by their more conservative
opponents. The reason for this conceptual closeness between custom, or
customs, and ritual, I suggest, has much to do with “symbolist sensitivity.”
The participative, mimetic, experiential nature of religious ceremonies
made them similar to customary practices, for good or for ill. As Philippe
Buc has explained, for the Reformers, the troubling similarity between
true sacraments and idolatrous rites was the “intense impact on the
senses.”12 Moreover, it was clear that ceremonies could be drawn from
customs, and customs could be the remnants of ancient ceremonies. Those
who vehemently rejected the earlier understanding of Christian sacra-
ments and rituals as vessels of symbolic meaning also saw the vernacular
culture surrounding them as manifestations of superstition and idolatry.
From the Elizabethan controversies until well into the eighteenth cen-
tury, critics (both internal and external) of the Church of England’s Book
of Common Prayer and its rubrics unfailingly drew attention to the close
ties between ritual and custom, using the derogatory language of “idola-
try” and “superstition,” and even “conjuring” and “fooling,” for both.
Mirroring these condemnations were the justifications of both ceremony
and custom advanced by apologists for England’s modest reformation. In
defending the Church of England’s practices, they also defended a closely
related body of customary practices, alleging both the example of the early
Church and ancient “civil” custom as justification.13 Practices such as the
payment of a bride-gift during the marriage ceremony, wearing black at
funerals, and keeping hospitable open-house on holy days were among the
customs defended by moderate reformers. They cited St. Augustine’s dic-
tum, “In his…rebus, de quibus nihil certi statuit scriptura divina, mos
populi Dei, vel instituta majorum, pro lege tenenda sunt,” translated by
John Whitgift, Elizabethan Archbishop of Canterbury, as “In those things
wherein the holy scripture hath determined no certainty, the custom of
the people of God, and the traditions or decrees of our forefathers, are to
Buc, The Dangers of Ritual, 169–70.

12
Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (London: J.M. Dent, 1925), 2:353,
13
393, 402–402 (V:lxx.3, lxxv.2–5).

be holden for a law.”14 This double appeal to the past, to the “people of
God” (presumably the early church), and to the “traditions…of our fore-
fathers” (perhaps, in this context, native British customs, since “our” is
Whitgift’s gloss) suggested a conservative approach to reformation, an
intention to restore the primitive purity of the church without casting off
the characteristic practices of British Christianity. As Whitgift’s reference
to Augustine suggests, the defense of ceremonies entailed, in some sense,
a defense of custom and sometimes even of specific customs.
Attacking and Defending Customs in Britain’s

Long Reformations
In 1555, the Scottish Reformer John Knox was in Frankfurt, at the invita-
tion of the English Protestant community there, exiles from Marian
England. They assumed that he would share their wish to use the Book of
Common Prayer of Edward VI, but he did not. He sent a description of
the English liturgy to Calvin, a description purporting to be neutral but
revealing throughout Knox’s disapproval of its retention of all practices
that we might now call performative, from kneeling to receive commu-
nion, to making the sign of the cross in baptism and exchanging rings in
marriage, to the celebration of holy days.15 Calvin agreed with Knox that,
although a step in the right direction, the Edwardian liturgy was very far
from being truly reformed; Calvin wondered that the English Protestants
who compiled it should “take such delight in the scum and dregs of
Papistry,” but assumed it was because they were “attached to those things
to which they had been accustomed.” He encouraged the British Protestant
exiles to “aim at something purer.” Calvin later advised Knox to take a
more moderate and accommodating position (and other continental
Calvinists gave similar advice to English advocates for stricter reformation).16
But for British Protestants of Knox’s ilk, there was “na middis” (no middle
14
Augustine, Ep. 36.1.2; John Whitgift, The Works of John Whitgift, ed. John Ayre
(Cambridge, 1851), 1:222. The passage quoted is from Whitgift’s Defence of the Answer to
the Admonition (1572–1574).
15
John Knox, The Works of John Knox, ed. David Laing (Edinburgh, 1846), 4:23–27. For
a thorough discussion of this episode, see Jane E. A. Dawson, John Knox (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2015), 90–108.
16
Jean Calvin, Letters of John Calvin: Compiled from the Original Manuscripts and Edited
with Historical Notes, trans. Marcus Robert Gilchrist, David Constable, and Jules Bonnet
(Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1858), 3:118, 4:184.
ground) in religion—whatever was not expressly commanded by God was

the work of the devil. Even the strictest continental Protestants agreed to
differ on adiaphora, matters indifferent, and they accepted the idea that
religious worship “must be diversely accommodated to the manners of
each Nation,” but British Protestants were to remain locked in deadly
conflict, unable to reach any stable compromise over ceremonies and cus-
toms, throughout most of the next two centuries.17 The eventual victory
of the “pro-ceremony” side in the Church of England and their entrench-
ment in the mainstream of that Church, from which they were to exert a
powerful influence on British culture, was by no means a given in the
earlier phases of Britain’s long Reformations.
Religious controversy in Britain did not relate only to macrocosmic
issues such as the relationship of church and state, but also closely touched
the microcosmic details of ordinary people’s daily lives. As historians such
as Ronald Hutton, David Cressy, and Alexandra Walsham have compel-
lingly shown, it had an impact on how the basic “rites of passage” such as
marriage, baptism, confirmation, and burial should be celebrated, what
kinds of behavior were acceptable on Sundays, how human beings situated
themselves in their natural and man-made surroundings, what holy days
should be acknowledged, and what kinds of communal festivities were
acceptable.18 The puritan and presbyterian insistence on a sober, icono-
clastic, scripture-centered piety entailed a rejection of everything consid-
ered a vestige of “popery,” including the ceremonies established by law in
17
Calvin, Institutes, 4:10.30, as translated by and quoted in John Durel, A View of the
Government and Publick Worship of God in the Reformed Churches beyond the Seas Wherein Is
Shewed Their Conformity and Agreement with the Church of England… (London, 1662),
106. The Works of John Knox, 4:232. Jacqueline Rose, “The Debate over Authority:
Adiaphora, the Civil Magistrate, and the Settlement of Religion,” in “Settling the Peace of the
Church”: 1662 Revisited, ed. Neil Howard Keeble (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2014), 35–37.
18
Ronald Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year, 1400–1700
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); Hutton, Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual
Year in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); Walsham, Reformation of the
Landscape; David Cressy, Bonfires and Bells: National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in
Elizabethan and Stuart England, 1st American ed (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1989); David Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in
Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). In Birth, Marriage,
and Death and in Travesties and Transgressions in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford
University Press, 1998), 186–212, Cressy argues that the Laudian attempt to impose a uni-
form way of celebrating family-focused rites of passage destroyed a delicate state of balance
and compromise that had existed since the Reformation.
the Book of Common Prayer and all of their reverberations in vernacular

culture. Those who upheld “Prayer Book Anglicanism,” in contrast,
defended the necessity of religious ceremony and took a lenient approach
to a wide range of “customs.”19
At bottom, the irreconcilable difference between the two poles of reli-
gious opinion in Britain arose from fundamentally incompatible beliefs
about the relationship between the world and God (or from different
degrees of “symbolist sensitivity”). These beliefs centered on two major
issues: how God manifested Himself through His creation and how He
communicated with humanity.
All British Protestants acknowledged God’s omnipresence, but those
who approached reform more cautiously, too cautiously according to their
opponents, also taught that the divine presence inhered in a special way in
places, objects, and even people dedicated to God’s worship. The practical
applications of this principle entailed a special concern about what its pro-
ponents came to call the “beauty of holiness”: care for the church as physi-
cal space, for the ceremonial and liturgical aspects of religion, emphasis on
worship as something that involved both body and soul, insistence on
conformity in worship and on the importance of public prayer, emphasis
on the centrality of communion, belief in the intercessory role of priests.
Most importantly for my discussion, it also entailed emphasis on the
church calendar, on a series of holy days throughout the year, only mod-
estly reformed from the old Roman Catholic festal year, and on the
Church’s role in life-cycle celebrations, from baptism to burial. It was, in
the words of Peter Lake, whose description of the “Laudian style” I have
been summarizing, a “rounded vision of a Church able to define and
demarcate holy places, objects and times” and “centred on the capacity of
the clergy to show forth and distribute throughout the social order the
divine presence encapsulated within and conjured up through those places
and times.”20
19
On broad-based support for Book of Common Prayer, see Judith D. Maltby, Prayer Book
and People in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1998).
20
Peter Lake, “The Laudian Style: Order, Uniformity and the Pursuit of the Beauty of
Holiness in the 1630s,” in The Early Stuart Church, 1603–1642, ed. Kenneth Fincham
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 161–85, quotation at 172. (Note Lake’s use of
the word “conjure”!) On the effect of the rise of “Laudianism” on British vernacular cul-
tures, see Walsham, Reformation of the Landscape, 252–273. On diversity of views within
“Laudianism,” Anthony Milton, “The Creation of Laudianism: A New Approach,” in
Closely related was the question of how God communicated His will
and guidance to humanity. Both sides in these debates agreed that human
beings were incapable of grasping divine Truth directly. Limited by
embodiment, space, and time, the human intellect required intermediate
signs and “figures,” which God mercifully provided in the form of ritual,
and in the figurative language in which He spoke to the Jewish patriarchs
and prophets. However, human beings were perpetually prone to mistake
the shadow for the reality and to slide from the pure and simple worship
of the true God into idolatrous worship of the signs and figures vouch-
safed to them as supports and guides. Two responses to this fundamental
human failing were possible: to insist on the need for constant return to
original purity of worship and doctrine or instead to emphasize God’s
“condescension.” According to the latter view, the Law of Moses was a
merciful adaptation to the frailty of human nature, and the early Church’s
transformation of pre-Christian customs was a legitimate application of
the same principle. Apologists who defended this accommodating
approach drew a parallel between God’s providential and merciful “accom-
modation” of human weakness, and the Church’s judicious concessions to
the people’s fondness for their innocent customs.
The concept of “accommodation” had deep roots in Patristic thought.
Some early Christian writers (and later, the medieval Jewish philosopher
Maimonides) argued that God had established the Mosaic Law as a pre-
scriptive against idolatry. The Jews, through their contact with the
Egyptians, had become “addicted” to idol worship. To prevent them from
falling back into their bad old ways, Moses instituted, by divine command,
a complex ritual that took the place of idolatrous rites. In the Patristic
tradition, this “accommodation” was seen both in a negative light—as
punitive, because of the “hardness of your hearts” (Matthew, 19.8)—and
in a positive light, as an indication of God’s patient, loving kindness, by
which He led human beings step by step out of their sinful darkness.
Jewish law, although abrogated by the coming of Christ, nonetheless also
prefigured the full revelation of (Christian) truth. The various elements of
Jewish ritual were “types” or “foreshadowings” of the Christian
revelation.21
Politics, Religion and Popularity in Early Stuart Britain: Essays in Honour of Conrad Russell,
ed. Peter Lake, Richard Cust, and Thomas Cogswell (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2002), 162–84.
21
See Stephen D. Benin, The Footprints of God: Divine Accommodation in Jewish and
Christian Thought (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993); David Rylaarsdam,
The early Church’s gradual transformation of pagan festivals into

Christian holy days could be seen in the same light. In both cases, “the
people” were accustomed to, and fond of, rituals and festivities. In both
cases, it could be argued, God, whether directly through His revelations
to Moses, or indirectly through inspiring the Fathers of the Church, gen-
tly “accommodated” the inclinations of His people, permitting them to
dedicate to His worship certain types of ritual or festal activities, to satisfy
their need for rituals without falling back into practices that had become
idolatrous.
This perspective had been openly embraced in the early medieval church
as an intentional strategy in the conversion of Western Europe to
Christianity. Its relevance to the conversion of Britain was depicted in
Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica, in which Pope Gregory I (ca. 540–604)
applied what was then an acknowledged pastoral practice of condescensio in
recommending that pagan Anglo-Saxon shrines be purified and rededi-
cated to Christian worship rather than destroyed.22
The conservative form of reformation in Britain that sought to honor
these traditions was not, despite contemporary claims to the contrary,
invented by William Laud and his cohort in the early decades of the sev-
enteenth century, nor was it upheld by them alone; it was already a major
strand within the Tudor Reformation.23 In response to two waves of anti-
ceremonialist agitation within the Church of England, the “vestments”
controversy of the 1560s that centered on clerical dress, and the
“Admonition” controversy of the 1570s that addressed ceremonies more
generally, the leaders of the Tudor Reformation closed ranks against the
more radical forms of Protestantism. The great Elizabethan apologist
Richard Hooker articulated clearly and unambiguously the idea that “the
very law of nature itself which all men confess to be God’s law requireth…the
sanctification of times…of places, persons, and things unto God’s
John Chrysostom on Divine Pedagogy: The Coherence of His Theology and Preaching (Oxford:
University Press, 2014).
22
On condescensio, see George E. Demacopoulos, Five Models of Spiritual Direction in the
Early Church (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007); as applied to
English context, Demacopoulos, “Gregory the Great and the Pagan Shrines of Kent,”
Journal of Late Antiquity 1, no. 2 (Fall 2008): 353–69.
23
However, for a twentieth-century account that emphasizes novelty, see Julian Davies,
The Caroline Captivity of the Church: Charles I and the Remoulding of Anglicanism,
1625–1641 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).
honour.”24 At least a moderate degree of ceremonial practice was deemed

natural and necessary.
In spite of bitter controversies over these matters, an uneasy peace was
maintained in England and Wales for a time, thanks to Elizabethan com-
promises and James VI and I’s skillful balancing acts.25 In Scotland, reli-
gious conflict was accelerated by James’s own “conversion” to Anglicanism
and subsequent impetus for convergence between the two Churches on an
Anglican model.26 But it was the “Laudian” campaign to enforce confor-
mity to particular forms of ritual practices that finally upset any kind of
equilibrium in Britain. As the more ceremonial vision of Christian wor-
ship, with the powerful backing of Charles I, and at least the passive sup-
port of some significant proportion of the clergy and laity, began to have
a major impact on religious life in Britain, it galvanized the opposition,
eventually leading to the explosive events of the mid-seventeenth century.27
Britain’s Culture Wars

Early modern British Protestants did not see vernacular culture and reli-
gious debates as separate issues. The great “puritan manifesto,” the 1572
Admonition to Parliament, complained of both the Book of Common
Prayer and the many “heathnish” and superstitious practices associated
with the approved rituals. Although the authors claimed to distinguish
between what was commanded in the Book of Common Prayer and what
was merely “vsed of custome and superstition,” they seem rather to con-
flate the two kinds of practices, using the same dismissive language to
24
Hooker, Laws, 2:357 (V:lxx.9), in the context of more extensive discussion 2:349–358
(V:lxx–lxxi).
25
Kenneth Fincham and Peter Lake, “The Ecclesiastical Policies of James I and Charles I,”
in Early Stuart Church, 23–49.
26
Alan R. MacDonald, “James VI and I, the Church of Scotland, and British Ecclesiastical
Convergence,” The Historical Journal 48, no. 4 (2005): 885–903. In his earlier years, James
held such strict views that he thought even the Genevans had too many ceremonies, 886. On
the concerted effort of English churchmen to “convert” James, see Paul McGinnis and
Arthur Williamson, “Radical Menace, Reforming Hope: Scotland and English Religious
Politics, 1586–1596,” Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme 36, no. 2
(2013): 105–30.
27
Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death, 479; Davies, Caroline Captivity. On popular sup-
port for religious conformity, see Alexandra Walsham, “The Parochial Roots of Laudianism
Revisited: Catholics, Anti-Calvinists and ‘Parish Anglicans’ in Early Stuart England,” Journal
of Ecclesiastical History 49, no. 4 (1998): 620–51; Maltby, Prayer Book and People.
describe both. The rite of baptism, as prescribed in the Book of Common

Prayer, was, they stated, “full of childishe & superstitious toyes.”
Matrimony involved not only a prescribed “ceremony” of which they dis-
approved (exchange of rings) but also numerous customs, “such heath-
nish toys…as carying of wheate sheaffes on theyr heads” and brides
coming “bare headed, with bagpipes and idlers before them,” into
church—“they make rather a Maie game of marryage, then a holy
Institution of God.” The authors of the Admonition also disliked various
funeral customs such as giving bread to the poor, and “cakes sent abrode
to frendes,” as well as all of the “rytes and customes” associated with
childbirth and with the “churching” of new mothers, and, of course, holy
days “superstitiously kept,” not to mention games and “heathnish daunc-
ing” on Sundays.28
Just as those hostile to the Book of Common Prayer and its rubrics
thought that such “superstitious” customs were inseparable from the offi-
cial practices of the church,29 so too did its defenders consider festivity and
recreation (although preferably within sober and rational bounds) to have
a close link to religious ritual, as a natural and fitting expression of joy and
gratitude to God. They considered “customary” hospitality a necessary
dimension of holy days. Richard Hooker provided the basic arguments
that were used for centuries afterwards, explaining that on the great festi-
vals of the Church when Christians rejoice in the commemoration of
God’s mercy, “Plentiful and liberal expense is required in them that
abound, partly as a sign of their own joy in the goodness of God towards
them, and partly as a mean whereby to refresh th[e] poor and needy.”30
As this suggests, defenders of ceremony and custom also considered
some degree of indulgence in popular recreations beneficial to society.
Already in his Basilikon Dōron (first published 1599, before he became
king of England), James VI had recommended traditional holy day
28
“First Article” in An Admonition to the Parliament ([Hemel Hempstead], 1572)
(unpag.). Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death, 352, points out that the Admonition deliber-
ately linked the Book of Common Prayer with “rustic superstition.”
29
Samuel Mather, The Figures or Types of the Old Testament by Which Christ and the
Heavenly Things of the Gospel Were Preached and Shadowed to the People of God of Old…
(Dublin, 1683), 590–91, for the idea that “feasting and sporting is an appendix to
the…superstition [i.e., celebration of holy days].”
30
Hooker, Laws, 2:353 (V:lxx.3).
festivities as a means of promoting “amitie” among the common people.31

His controversial 1617 “Declaration of Sports” proclaimed the right of his
loyal subjects, once they had dutifully attended Sunday worship in the
established Church, to enjoy various customs, primarily outdoor games
and recreations deemed appropriate for Sundays by those of the mon-
arch’s party but hated by stricter Protestants. The integration of religion
and recreation is made explicit in a provision specifically permitting rush-
bearing, a cheerful seasonal custom that combined outdoor fun with com-
munal care of the physical space of the parish church.32
In the years preceding the civil wars, Charles I and Archbishop Laud
famously led an attempt to enforce a high degree of ceremonial practice,
with special emphasis on the proper celebration of the church calendar.
Those who shared their views also concurred with them in overtly defend-
ing a lenient attitude towards vernacular culture.33 For example, Francis
White, Bishop of Ely, defended “sober and honest” Sunday recreations on
the grounds that most ordinary Christians were simply unable to spend an
entire day in devotional practices, even with the best of intentions. White
felt that God would not ask of His children more than they could accom-
plish; all divine commands that are “necessary to the salvation of every
Christian, are possible with ordinary diligence, and likewise with comfort
to be observed,” and therefore, he concluded, the strict Sabbatarians were
clearly wrong in claiming that Sunday recreations are forbidden by God.34
Giles Widdowes, an Oxfordshire clergyman who engaged in a published
debate about church ceremonies with puritan polemicist William Prynne
in the 1630s, urged the rightness of celebrating holy days and was
31
Basilikon Do ̄ron Devided into Three Bookes (Edinburgh, 1599). For courtly and literary
defenses of vernacular culture in this period, see Hutton, Rise and Fall, 158–73 and Leah
S. Marcus, The Politics of Mirth: Jonson, Herrick, Milton, Marvell, and the Defense of Old
Holiday Pastimes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), esp. 1–23 and 106–139.
32
James VI and I, The Kings Maiesties Declaration to His Subjects Concerning Lawful Sports
to Be Used (London, 1618). For an example of suppression of rush-bearing during this
period, see Hutton, Rise and Fall, 160.
33
Hutton, Rise and Fall, 197.
34
Francis White, A Treatise of the Sabbath-Day Containing, a Defence of the Orthodoxall
Doctrine of the Church of England, Against Sabbatarian-Novelty (London, 1635), 256–58.
See Christopher Haigh, English Reformations Religion, Politics, and Society Under the Tudors
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 294–95, for discussion of an “unintensive religious
regime” that met widespread need.
described (in a hostile source, but perhaps accurately) as “put[ting] off his
gown” to dance with his parishioners on Sundays.35
Both aspects of Caroline religious policy, the enforcement of liturgical
ceremony and the toleration of vernacular customs, were hateful to strict
reformists. In England, the trigger of one of the first major confrontations
leading to the civil wars, the re-issue of the Book of Sports in 1633, was a
controversy over “church ales” in Somerset. Church ales were traditional
fund-raising events held annually in many rural parishes, usually on the
anniversary of the founding of the parish church. The festivities were
accompanied by large quantities of ale (often brewed by the minister him-
self), the sale of which helped bring in money for much-needed repairs to
the church building and furniture. Puritans considered church ales com-
pletely corrupt, a diabolic pretext for drunkenness and disorder—“do they
think that the Lord will haue his house builded with Drunkennesse, glut-
tonie, and such like abhomination?” lamented puritan pamphleteer Philip
Stubbes—and they made concerted efforts to repress them.36
In response to Laud’s inquiry following a Somerset judge’s prohibition
of church ales, Charles reissued the Book of Sports, with an addendum
about church ales, and a royal decree that it be read from pulpits through-
out the realm.37 The measure of the anger and outrage that this provoked
can be seen in the judicial “execution” (by burning) by the public hang-
man of the Book of Sports ordered by the puritan-dominated Parliament
ten years later.38 The same indignant sentiment appears in puritan diarist
Nehemiah Wallington’s view of a destructive fire that broke out on a
Sunday in Oxford in 1644. Wallington had no doubt that it was a judg-
ment upon Sabbath-breakers, chief among them Giles Widdowes, whose
35
Charles William Boase, Oxford (London, 1893), 157. See also W. H. Hutton and
A. J. Hegarty, “Widdowes, Giles (1588/9–1645),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography,
online edn. The debate between Widdowes and Prynne is also discussed in Charles
W. A. Prior, A Confusion of Tongues: Britain’s Wars of Reformation, 1625–1642 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2012), 57–60.
36
Philip Stubbes, the Anatomie of Abuses, ed. Margaret Jane Kidnie (Tempe, Ariz.:
Renaissance English Text Society, 2002), 212. Note that Stubbes considers church wakes
(annual feasts celebrating the anniversary of the dedication of the church, in some cases syn-
onymous with church ales) to be of pagan origin, 215.
37
Thomas G. Barnes, “County Politics and a Puritan Cause Célèbre: Somerset Church-
ales, 1633: The Alexander Prize Essay,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 9 (1959):
103–22. Hutton, Rise and Fall, 189–193. Davies, Caroline Captivity, 172–204.
38
Described in Michael Braddick, God’s Fury, England’s Fire: A New History of the English
Civil Wars (London: Allen Lane, 2008), 278–81.
church was the only one damaged in the fire and who (Wallington claimed)
had preached that “dancing and playing was as necessary as preaching” on
Sundays.39
In Scotland, the influential presbyterian faction responded to Charles’s
unilateral move to enforce conformity to a liturgy based on the Book of
Common Prayer by binding themselves to a National Covenant (1638)
that explicitly rejected, as evidence of “papistery,” all aspects of performa-
tive religious practice. These included the “dedicating of kirks, altars,
days,” processions, making the sign of the cross, and “vain allegories, rites,
signs, and traditions, brought in the Kirk without or against the Word of
God.” The text of the Covenant also included an Act of James VI, con-
demning “the monuments and dregs of bygone idolatry, as going to
crosses, observing the festival days of saints, and such other superstitious
and papistical rites,” and ordaining that “the users of them to be pun-
ished…as idolaters.”40 Similarly, the “Root and Branch” petition, pre-
sented to Parliament in 1640 by English reformists, while it identified
episcopacy as the root of all ills in religion, singled out among its especially
malevolent branches the retention or re-establishment of performative
practices, or as they put it, “human inventions in God’s worship.” Among
these, the petitioners numbered “vestures, postures, ceremonies and
administrations” such as “standing up at Gloria Patri and at the reading of
the Gospel, praying towards the East, the bowing at the name of Jesus, the
bowing to the altar towards the East, the cross in baptism, the kneeling at
the Communion,” as well as consecrating churches and churchyards,
“strict observation of the saints’ days,” and tolerating “sports” on
Sunday.41
Once in power, zealous reformists tried to eradicate all such supposed
vestiges of popery and idolatry. To this end, in a marked departure from
the practice of almost all other Protestant churches, they proscribed the
Church’s liturgical calendar.42 (Even in Scotland, in spite of official
39
Boase, Oxford, 157–58.
40
“The Scottish National Covenant, February 27, 1638,” in The Constitutional Documents
of the Puritan Revolution, 1625–1660, ed. Samuel Rawson Gardiner, 3rd, rev. ed. (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1906), 125, 126, 128.
41
Gardiner, 140–42.
42
On puritan suppression of holy days, see Christopher Durston, “Puritan Rule and the
Failure of a Cultural Revolution, 1645–1660,” in Culture of English Puritanism, 1560–1700
(New York: St Martin’s Press, 1996), 210–33; Thomas Mocket, Christmas, the Christians
Grand Feast: Its Original, Growth, and Observation, Also of Easter, Whitsontide, and Other
isapprobation of holy days, most editions of the Book of Common

d
Order, “Knox’s liturgy,” the de facto liturgy of sixteenth-century and early
seventeenth- century Scottish Protestantism, had included the Church
Calendar, and attempts to repress popular seasonal festivities had not been
entirely successful.43) The Westminster Assembly’s Directory for the
Public Worship of God, to which an unwillingly Charles I was forced to
assent in 1645, stated unequivocally that “There is no day commanded in
scripture to be kept holy under the gospel but the Lord’s day, which is the
Christian Sabbath,” and that “Festival days, vulgarly called Holy-days,
having no warrant in the word of God, are not to be continued.”44 In
1647, the worst-case scenario feared by Elizabethan apologists came to
pass: not only Christmas, notorious for its Twelve Days of merriment, but
all holy days, even Easter, the most solemn day of commemoration of the
central drama of Christianity, were abolished by act of Parliament, as being
the inventions of man rather than the commandment of God.45 The Book
of Common Prayer was officially replaced with the Directory of Public
Worship, which drastically simplified the form of rites of passage such as
baptism, marriage, and burial, and forbade most of the customary prac-
tices that had accompanied them, as being “superstitious” and having
been “greatly abused.”46
The attempted suppression of vernacular religious culture was a move
in the larger conflict about the nature of religious worship that revolved
around the fundamental issues of “symbolist sensitivity,” the role of the
Holydayes Modestly Discussed and Determined…(London, 1651) (a representative contempo-

rary text); Cressy, Bonfires and Bells; Hutton, Rise and Fall, 200–226; Carl Philipp Emanuel
Nothaft, “From Sukkot to Saturnalia: The Attack on Christmas in Sixteenth-Century
Chronological Scholarship,” Journal of the History of Ideas 72, no. 4 (October 2011):
503–22. John Alfred Ralph Pimlott, “Christmas under the Puritans,” History Today 10
(December 1960): 832–39, points out the importance of the influence of Scottish
presbyterianism.
43
Donaldson, “Reformation to Covenant,” 44–45; Margo Todd, “Profane Pastimes and
the Reformed Community: The Persistence of Popular Festivities in Early Modern Scotland,”
Journal of British Studies 39, no. 2 (April 2000): 123.
44
A Directory for the Publique Worship of God, throughout the Three Kingdoms of England,
Scotland, and Ireland… (London, 1645), 40.
45
In his Defence of the Answer to the Admonition (1572–1574), Whitgift expressed concern
that his puritan opponents wanted to abrogate Easter, Works of John Whitgift, 2:567–568.
For the unpopularity of proscribing holy days, and puritan attempts to replace religious holy
days with leisure holidays, see Hutton, Rise and Fall, 210–12.
46
For example, Directory for the Publique Worship, 35.
senses in religious experience (discussed in Chap. 5), and the nature and
importance of custom. Radical reformists had, presumably, two targets,
one doctrinal (purifying Christian worship of “idolatrous” ceremonies)
and the other disciplinary (suppressing the rowdiness associated with pop-
ular seasonal and rite of passage festivities), but they saw them as one and
the same.47 As noted above, they perceived an intrinsic unity between
mainstream Anglicanism with its “superstitious” celebration of Christian
holy days and rites of passage, and the “profane” and “immoral” commu-
nal festivities that accompanied it.
According to self-professed puritans like William Ames, both kinds of
behavior were examples of “human ceremonies” that had entered Christian
society through the same original error, the “Ceremonious praesumtions”
of the Church Fathers, who unwisely accommodated the “infirmities” of
new converts, and permitted “customes like unto those in use amonge
Iews and Gentils” to become part of Christian practice. The difference
between making the sign of the cross in baptism and dancing around a
maypole was one of degree only—both were, in a sense, ritual acts not
commanded by God and therefore illegitimate and harmful.48
The thought that the early Church had transformed pagan customs
into Christian practices in order to attract converts was particularly dis-
tasteful to radical reformists. They could not conceive of a continuity of
spiritual signification that extended from the sacraments properly so called,
to “decent” and “orderly” ceremonies that served as a support for wor-
ship, to innocent and natural customs of rejoicing and hospitality. Thus,
the adoption or even toleration of non-Christian cultural practices could
appear to them in no other light than as one of the gravest evils of “pop-
ery” and the source of moral and spiritual corruption in Christendom. It
was the ill-judged policy of “the ungrounded professors of former times,
[that] made formal [i.e., insincere] Christians by external Ceremonies, &
47
However, as Alexandra Walsham, “Godly Recreation: The Problem of Leisure in Late
Elizabethan and Early Stuart Society,” in Grounds of Controversy: Three Studies in Late 16th
and Early 17th Century English Polemics, 9 (Parkville: University of Melbourne, 1989),
points out, both attackers and defenders of popular festivities and games wanted to regulate
potentially unruly behavior.
48
William Ames, A Fresh Suit against Human Ceremonies in God’s Worship. Or a
Triplication unto D. Burgesse His Rejoinder for D. Morton ([Amsterdam], 1633), 17–18,
81–85. Ames mocks the very concept of symbolism, comparing making the sign of the cross
to bringing a maypole into church and letting children climb up it in order to signify higher
spiritual striving.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
asszony már előbb mondott némelyeket, bevallák egymásnak, hogy
a mit láttak, elegendő arra, hogy tudomásul vegyék.
Néhány nap múlva szétment a vendégsereg, csak a meghittebb
barátok maradtak hátra, hogy a jövőről beszélgessenek, s
ugyanekkor megállapíták, hogy a heliconi ünnepélyt minden évben
megtartják.
– Sokra jó ez ünnepély! – mondja Dunay.
– Még leánynézőnek is! – nevet a házigazda, megsimogatván a
piruló kis leányt, ki utiköntösben állt s az elindulást várta.
*
Ha való dolog nem lett volna ez ünnepély, melynek még élő tanúi
is vannak, ma már könnyen azt hinnék széles nagy
Magyarországon, hogy az egész dolog mese: a heliconi ünnepély
csak képzelet s Festetics György nem élt.
Élt… még pedig úgy élt, hogy halhatatlanná lett.
VIII.
(Felnőtt gyermekek.)
A virágnak megtiltani nem lehet,

Hogy ne nyiljék, mikor jő a kikelet.
Félre azokkal a nagyon okos emberekkel. Előttük hiú boldogság

a szerelem: pedig ők tudhatnák legjobban, hogy a mely fának virága
nincs, gyümölcsöt sem terem. Ki átkozná meg a tavaszt azért, hogy
sokat igér, – míg az ősz az érett gyümölcsöt hullatja le? – és hány
okos ember kivánkozott vissza érett korának bölcseségéből oda, hol
a gondtalan fiatal ember ostobaságait űzi? Ne bántsátok tehát azt a
világrendet, mely úgy akarta, hogy egy kis búzakalásznak oly hosszú
szalma-szála legyen, mely üres ugyan, de a kalász onnét szedett
erőt.
Hisz, ha olyan emberek vagytok, kisértsétek meg, tömjetek meg
egy gyermekfőt minden tudománynyal, s ti lesztek legelsők, kik ez
elaggott bölcs gyermeket megszánjátok éppen úgy, mint azt a vén
embert, kinek eszébe jutna ősz fejjel belekeveredni azon tolongásba,
hol a hevesebb vér bolondjait járja.
De ti bölcsek vagytok, véretek meghiggadt, s míg az ifjú szíve
verésében érzelmeket ápol, ti előveszitek a bonczkést,
szétvagdaljátok azt s megmutatjátok a világnak, hogy nem hús, nem
porczogó, nem csont, – tudjátok, hol tolul bele és hol omlik ki belőle
a vér, – két kamrája van, és szerintetek csak véredény, mely ha
szétreped, tudománytok össze nem eszkábálja többé.
Mi érezünk ezzel, örömeink, fájdalmaink tanyájának tartjuk, és
megelégszünk annak tudásával, hogy a mint annak verése
megszünik, vége az életnek, testünk elkéredzik a földről, hol annyi
bolondság közt ti tudósok hordjátok körül a lámpát, s ezredek óta
mondjátok, hogy minden múlandó és hiú bolondság a világon,
daróczba öltöztök és szánjátok azokat az ostobákat, kik az almafáról
a gyümölcsöt leszedik, megeszik és azt mondják, hogy jó – s igen
nagy meggyőződéssel mondják, hogy az ananász még jobb.
Ti ennek nem tudtok örülni, nektek a virág megszárogatva kell, s
nagyobb becse van előttetek azon szénának, melytől egy csontos
ökör tizenhat mázsányira hízik, s így elhiszem, nem leltek gyönyört a
furulyahangban, mely holdvilágos éjszakán oly panaszos hangon
szólal meg, mintha csakugyan szívünkben járna már az a bonczkés,
mely sem csontot, sem porczogót nem talál, s a tudós odaüt
magának, hova a mészáros (szinte boncztudós) az ökörnek méri a
taglót, s aztán diadallal mondja: megvan az eszme; a szív egy
véredény.
Mily szívesen összeméregeti a csillagász a csillagok járását, s
egész éjszakán át az égen csavarog, míg a földön alant, néhány
ölnyire tőle, egy pár szerelmes cseléd nyugodtan hagyja sétálni a
holdat, nekik két csillagukkal több van, ha egymás szemébe néznek.
A csillagász összefirkált számainak örül, – a szerelmes pár pedig a
mondott szónak, s ezeket éppen úgy boldogítja a hit, mint a
csillagászt a tudat.
Menjünk, menjünk vissza, keressük meg azt a két gyermeket,
kiket a heliconi ünnepélyen összehoztunk, lássuk, mit mívelnek?
*
A fiú levedlette már a gyermekarczot, bátyja öneszére kezdé
ereszteni, s órákig elhallgatta, midőn egy tárgyat részletezni kezdett,
mikor pedig egy-egy vendég megbámulta a fiúnak eszét,
tudományát, szívesen hallgatta, ha bizalmasan megsúgták neki,
hogy ebből ugyan derék embert nevelt.
Ne nyúljunk az öreg úrnak öröméhez, – jól tudta ő maga is, hogy
nem sokat rakott ő az egészhez! de nagy erőszakot tett ő magán,
midőn el nem vett belőle; hanem elszenvedte, mikor látta, hogy az
idő belekapaszkodik az emberbe s magával viszi az embert.
Midőn Baltay észrevette, hogy mennél többször kivánják az
emberek, hogy az isten minél tovább éltesse, annál tovább
nyújtózkodik az árnyék, – számtalanszor gondolt már valamit, hogy a
fiúnak megmondja – de az öreg nagyon megröstelte volna, ha a
fiúnak ellenkező véleménye lenne.
– András! – szólítja be ezt a régi jó barátot – mondjon kend
valamit.
– Jó idő van, hála istennek – felelt amaz – esőnk volt elegendő,
ma meg napos idő van; azt tartom, alig győzünk majd helyet adni a
temérdek gabonának.
– Ezt már hallottam, András; hanem most már mondjon kend
mást is.
– A kis borjuk is!…
– Sántuljon meg valamennyi! – pattant föl Baltay – kérdeztem én
azokat?
– Hát mit mondjak a nagyságos úrnak, ha ez nem tetszik?
– Máskor annyit beszél kend, hogy elúnom hallgatni: most
beszéljen kend hát! – zörgölődik amaz.
– Beszélnék ám, ha mindjárt torkon nem fogná nagyságos uram
az embert.
– Egy szót sem szólok, csak kezdjen kend el akármit; mert már
megúntam az életet!
– Hát mért nem örül a nagyságos úr? – kérdi András – most már
itthon lakik az ifjú uraság is, biz azt pedig elhallgathatja a nagyságos
úr.
Baltay nyugodtabb lőn, András jó helyen tapogat, nem is zavarta,
hogy hadd menjen az öreg lépést, talán majd csak hozzá
dülleszkedik ő is más eszéhez; mert a mit gondolt, nem meri
magától elsütni. Zsebében ma ismét sokat kotorászott, s a herczeg
levele mellett egy kis vékony fadarab van, azt pedig ok nélkül nem
tette oda.
András jól ismerte az öreget, észrevette, hogy valamit akar, de
már az öreg úr olyan volt, mint a nedves fa, sokáig kellett szárogatni,
nehogy ha előbb a tűzhelyre rakják, kirúgja a szakácsné szemét;
azért hagyta magára, nem kérdezkedett, s íme, már maga szólal
meg:
– Bizony, András, hallja kend, több esze van a fiúnak, mint az
egész vármegyének!
– Meghiszem azt! – mondja András olyan jóízűen, mintha egy
falat pörkölthúst nyelt volna le – aztán pedig hozzáteszi: de ezt más
okos ember is mondta ám.
Nem merte megkérdezni az uraság, hogy András kit gondolt,
mert tudta, hogy András átjár néha a szomszédba, a mit ugyan nem
bánt, de ő legalább nem küldte.
– Nem dobtuk ki hiába a pénzt, András – okoskodik az úr –
hanem már most azt szeretném, ha annak a sok észnek hasznát is
venné.
– Majd veszi.
– De nem akarom ám, hogy úgy tegyen, mint én, vagy kend,
hogy fölmagzottunk, mint a saláta, aztán sem magunknak nem
tetszünk, sem másnak.
– Ne búsuljon a nagyságos úr, majd tetszik az ifjú nagyságos úr
jobban mint mink.
– Szólt már valamit?
– Majd nekem beszélgeti el az ilyen dolgot! – véli András, az
ablakon kinézvén az épületnek azon szárnyára, mely a
szomszédház felé sarkallott, s András észrevette, hogy a fiú az
ablakredőny mellé húzódott s a külső kertbe néz le.
Nagyhamar meggyőződött, hogy az úrfi nem hiában feledte el a
kezében levő könyvet, s minthogy az öreg úrnak nem akart fájdalmat
csinálni, a mint Baltay ő nagysága föl s alá járt, az ablakot mindig
úgy állta el, hogy az öreg meg ne lássa azt, a mit ő lát.
András már maga is megsokalta, hogy az ablaknál álldogáljon,
utóbb ugyanott dolgot keresett, az üvegeken talált valami ledörgölni
valót, vagy az ablakkereteken, de utóbb ez is elfogyott. Imre pedig
még mindig ott méláz; mert Jolán a virágágyak közelében ült, s így
Baltay is megúnta a sétát s változatosság okáért az ablakhoz akart
lépni.
– Hová menne a nagyságos úr, – mondja András, az öregnek
útját állva – már meg hol porosodott el? – kérdi a mentét tisztogatva,
pedig egy porszemet sem látott, hanem az öreg úr báránymódra
állta ezt a dolgot egy darabig, de bármennyiszer mondja is az öreg
úr, hogy «jó lesz már no», csak nem tágít, nehogy észrevegye a
titkot.
Végre addig huzakodott, hogy mégis kiszabadult, az ablakhoz
állt, de András szokása ellenére az öreg úr mellett maradt, abban a
jó hitben, hogy az ő fejétől majd mégsem lát oda, ürügyül pedig
minden meglátott dologra mondott valamit, csakhogy elfoglalja a
figyelmét.
– Ott van ni! – egy csibe már megint a kertben sétál.
– Hadd szaladjon szegény pára, úgy is nemsokára nyársba
húzzák – mondja Baltay.
– Azután azon a szilvafán is mennyi a hernyó! – beszél tovább
András az ablakban, kivált midőn észrevette, hogy a nagyságos úr
másfelé akar nézni; de valahányszor jobbra akart nézni, ő is arra
kapta fejét, s mikor balra tekintett, András feje mindig útban volt.
Akármennyit igyekezett is András, Baltay nagyon hamar
észrevette Imrét s éppen oda akart nézni, de András még mindig
útjában állt.
– Addig kapkodja kend a fejét, András, hogy az ablakfához üti,
aztán küldhetek javasasszonyért.
– Én majd csak kiállom nyögés nélkül – felel András – hanem ha
majd a nagyságos urat itt az ablaknál megcsípi a dér, aztán
melegíthetünk korpát, zabot – teszi még hozzá – miért is áll ide a
nagyságos úr, mikor úgy is tudja, hogy nem jó? Erre egy nyomást
adott a nagyságos úrnak, ki most az egyszer rászedette magát
Andrással, maga tette be az ablakot, de sőt még füllentésre is
rávetette a fejét, s azt mondá, hogy lenyugszik, úgy tudta Andrást
elkomendérozni.
Kiment András, hanem hallgatódzott, hogy csakugyan
elcsöndesedett-e? mit a másik is bizton tudott, azért lehúzódott a
nyugágyra s csak akkor kelt föl, mikor a külső ajtó nagy későn
behúzódott, kétségtelen jeléül, hogy András máshol talált dolgot.
Fölkelt és óvatosan az ablakhoz ment, honnét hosszú időig
kémlelte, hogy Imre véletlenségből feledkezett-e el az ablaknál, vagy
a szomszédházban van a meglátni való? s ezen szokatlan
munkában igen sokáig gyönyörködött, mert Jolánt is meglátta, midőn
egy-egy kerülő után azon oldalon jött, melyről Imrét ő is megláthatta.
– Tehát Galiba mégis jó helyen tapogatott – szóla magában s
midőn eleget látott, ő is elment, ott hagyván Imrét az ablaknál,
honnét valamivel később András szólította el.
– Én vagyok, nagyságos úrfi – szólt be András minden
kopogtatás nélkül – csak azt akarom mondani, hogy a nagyságos úr
majd ide lát.
Imre megdöbbent.
– De még nem látott meg? – kérdi némi izgatottsággal.
– Alig tudtam eltenni láb alól, nagyságos úrfi, mért nem is vigyáz
jobban?
– Hát mire vigyázzak, édes András bácsi? – kérdi Imre,
összeszedve magát, mintha helyre akarná hozni legelső zavarát;
mert András előtt is titkolódzni akart.
– Ejnye már, hogy engem is el akar bolondítani az úrfi; hát én ma
látom az úrfit legelőször az ablaknál? bizony még rám fogja, hogy
nem vagyok ébren.
– Bárcsak én álmodnám ezt inkább, András – mondja Imre
bizalommal – legalább reggel tudnám, hogy álom volt, s azzal vége
lenne mindennek.
– Hallja az úrfi, engem meg ne ríkasson ilyen keserves képpel,
hanem hadd örüljek, mondja meg igazán, szereti a kisasszonyt?
– Mi tagadás benne, András? – régóta szeretem.
– Ezt hát már tudom, azaz, hogy tudtam én előbb is, hanem hát
azt is mondja meg kedves úrfi, hogy a kisasszony szivelheti-e az
úrfit?
– Na… ha már azt is nekem kell megmondanom, az is jó
szemmel néz rám.
– Talán már kérdezte is az úrfi?
– Felelt ís rá, András bácsi.
– Ugyan mit felelt, galambom, nagyságos úrfi?
– Jól tudja azt, András bácsi, mit szoktak a leányok felelni,
magáról tudhatja.
– Nagy filkó voltam én ahhoz a mesterséghez, úrfi – mondja
András némi búval – azt gondoltam, hogy majd a leányok
könyörögnek, pedig biz azok a faképnél hagytak maig, s minthogy
később bánni kezdém a dolgot, magamnak maradtam; mert később
a szépnek én nem kellettem, a csúnya meg nekem.
Míg Imre Andrással beszélgetett, az öreg úr addig magában
tünődött, mert már nem birta végigvárni a hosszú haragot, melyből
sem ő nem akart kimozdulni, sem pedig a szomszédok, s ime most
már kétségtelenűl látja, hogy Imrének olyan viszonya van, melyet
eltagadni alig lehetne már.
Kínjában mindenütt kereste Andrást, ki csakugyan meghallotta a
külső neszt, s kiment az öreghez.
– Tessék parancsolni! – mondja András, lépésről-lépésre
kisérvén az öreget; de az még mindig némán járkál, s nem birja
lefogni a nagy indulatot, mely lelkében csatát vív, mert az jutott
eszébe az öregnek, hogy ha már Imre szereti is a lányt, ezt nem
bánná; de hogy a lány kikosarazza a fiút, ezt már nem birná túlélni.
Már a szobában volt, s András még mindig hiába várja a feleletet,
s bámulva látja, hogy Imre megint az ablaknál van, Jolán pedig most
lép ki a virágágyak közül s egy rózsabimbót eresztett le a patakra,
mely a szomszédkertből az innenső részbe kanyarodott.
Imre rögtön elment az ablakból s néhány gondolat alatt már a
kertnek azon szárnyán állt, hol a víz újra visszakanyarodik s
meghozta a küldött rózsát, mit Imre kivesz s mellére tűz fel.
A lány várni látszik s midőn Imrét a rózsával meglátta, nyugodtan
távozék, a nélkül, hogy gyaníthatá, miként az öreg is végig szemlélte
a jelenetet, s midőn előbbi nyugtalansága egy csöndes boldogságba
ment át, utóbb egész jó kedélylyel mondja fönhangon: «Ezeket aztán
jól megőriztük.» Persze, az öreg úr még messze volt azon időtől,
mikor a költő megírta:
A virágnak megtiltani nem lehet,

Hogy ne nyíljék, mikor jő a kikelet.
IX.
(Amica.)
A szeptemvir úr gyűlésre készült s éppen most eresztette el

Galibát, kinek még volt némi mondanivalója, hogy a pört okvetlenül
megnyerje, minthogy azt ma végkép befejezik s nincs már egyéb
hátra, mint a végitélet.
– Csak menjen, Galiba uram, mindent tudok már! – mondja a
szeptemvir, mentéje után nyúlván, de midőn az egyik ujjába már
bedugá a kezét, az oldalajtón jő be a méltóságos asszony s az öreg
úrról lehúzza a mentét, mi annyit tett, hogy az asszonyság beszélni
akar.
– Nem érek ám rá! – szabadkozék a szeptemvir,
megkapaszkodván a mentében, melynek egyik ujját az asszony
fogta.
– De rá kell érni – mondja az asszony egész hangon – mit akart
ez a Galiba?
– Egyebet semmit! – mondja mosolyogva az öreg, szeliden
húzván a lefoglalt mentét.
– Édes gazdám, – esenkedik az asszony – szóltam-e én valaha a
te dolgaidba?
– Hát engem láttál-e fazekaid, lábasaid között?
– Majd elvárnálak – mondja az asszony, jogainak védelmére
kelvén – illenék is a cselédek között bujkálni?
– Ez a szoba pedig az én konyhám, édes feleségem, – vitatkozik
a férj, – nekem sem kell kukta.
– No hiszen kimegyek mindjárt, édes öregem, – szól az asszony
engeszteltebb hangon, – hanem édes öregem, mi már ma-holnap itt
hagyjuk ezt az árnyékvilágot.
– De én bizony még nem kivánkozom ki belőle, anyjuk, – azért
csak hadd el a búcsúztatót, azt más is elvégzi.
– Te szívtelen ember vagy.
– Ejnye, de nagy feneket kerítesz, anyjuk, – talán módi-fejkötőt
kivántál meg nagyon, hogy úgy apróra válogatsz?
– Mintha én azt tőled kérdezném, – szól az asszony egész
felsőbbséggel, – másról van itt a szó.
– Mondtam már, hogy nem érek rá, – pattog az úr, – ma jön itélet
alá a Baltay-pör s nekem ott kell lennem.
– Láttam, hogy az az istentelen Galiba itt volt, tudom már, mi lesz
a vége.
– Majd megmondom holnap.
– Elveszti az özvegy a pört, úgy-e?
– Bizony, nem venném meg öt garasért az egész jussát, annyit
mondhatok.
– Aztán te is annak a keményfejű Baltaynak fogod pártját?
– A kinek igaza van!
– Nem az igazságról van itten szó, hanem ha ez a pör el lesz
itélve, annyi, mintha ezt a két gyermeket ölnétek meg, erre persze
nem gondoltak a méltóságos urak?
– De hát mit csináljunk?
– Nem lehetne még húzni a pört vagy tíz esztendeig?
– Két óráig sem, anyjukom, mert két óra alatt meg lesz az itélet.
– Hát mondják, hogy egyiknek sincsen igaza, vagy hogy
mindkettőnek igaza van.
– Anyjuk, Verbőczyt ilyenképen még nem magyarázta senki.
– Hát nincsen valami módja annak, hogy a pört egyik se nyerje
meg?
– Volna egy, de mit használ az az egy mód, példáúl, ha
egyezségre utasítjuk őket, – ha valamelyik meg nem egyez, mégis
csak itéletet kell hozni.
– Kedves öregem, – kiált föl az asszony, megcsókolván a
szeptemvirnek piros képét, mit már tíz esztendeje nem cselekedett,
– hát minek is mondjátok azt diákul?
– Amicá-nak mondjuk.
– Na, ez legalább nem hasonlít az executióhoz, – azért, kedves
öregem, most az egyszer tegyen meg nekem is annyit, mennyit egy
pörvesztőnek megtesz.
– Ennyit könnyen megtehetek! – mondja a szeptemvir, az
eleresztett mentét felöltve, s miután irományait egy nagy szíjjal
összecsatolá, megindul a kuria felé, hogy még ülés előtt megcsinálja
a többséget, mely az öreg úrnak úgyis szívesen engedelmeskedett,
kivált ez ügyben, hol sem egyik, sem másik felet nem akarta egyik is
megkeseríteni.
Galiba már ismét útra készült, hogy a nagyságos úrnak megvigye
a jó hírt, s előlegesen annyit megírt már neki, hogy huszonnégy óra
mulva a levél vétele után személyesen ott lesz.
Baltay megkapván a levelet, jobban megijedt, mint a diák, kit a
csúszkálásért akarnak lehúzni; de most már minden késő, hisz
lehetetlen megakadályozni az itéletet, melyet inkább ijesztgetőnek
tartott, mint igazságkeresőnek, s éppen azért már kétszer is
megindult, hogy maga béküljön ki velük.
Andrásnak nem mert szólni, félt azon embertől, ki e tettét úgyis
oly gyakran korholta, s e gyámoltalanságában az önérzet is
fölserkent benne s nem akarta mutatni, mintha az utolsó órában tán
a kétséges kimeneteltől való félelem indítná útnak, valamint azt is
elgondolta, hogy ő a legöregebb s egy-két jó szót azok is
adhatnának neki.
Meggyúlt körülötte a föld, s mindinkább kisebb körbe szorult,
honnét a menekülés lehetetlen, csak az órákat számíthatja még,
tudniillik a mennyi idő alatt Galiba megérkezik azon itélettel, melynek
végét voltaképen sohasem kivánta, s ha megnyeri, újabb zavar, s ha
meg nem nyeri, még nagyobb szégyen.
Imrére gondolt, tán jó volna a fiú eszének hasznát venni: de nem
azon világ volt még akkor, hogy az öregebb a fiatalabbtól kérjen
tanácsot; tehát ha meggyúlt a ház, égjen le.
Volt az öreg úrnak ökölnyi órája, mely minden nyomásra
megszólalt; azzal beszélget most, mert a huszonnégy órából mindig
fogy és még könnyebben esik neki, ha tudja, hány óra még az élet,
de annál kevesebb reménye van, hogy a szomszédházból békélni
jőjjenek.
Most már minduntalan kinéz, mert ha kocsizörejt hallott,
mindannyiszor azt várta, hogy Galiba lép be.
Be is lépett, és az öreg úr az ablakfalhoz támaszkodék, hogy ha
dűl, hát jó helyre dűljön. Ilyen helyzetben találta Galiba Baltay ő
nagyságát.
– Hic sum, magnifice, – egy secundum minutummal sem késtem.
– Miattam elkéshetett volna egy álló esztendővel.
– Talán már tud mindent, magnifice domine?
– Ha mindent tudnék, nem tartanék még Pesten is prókátort.
– Magnifice, tudja-e, mi az a fátum?
– Egy ostoba diák szó, Galiba uram, a mit csakugyan nem
érdemes magyarra fordítani.
– De azt nem tudja magnifice, hogy ez engem continue
persequál.
– Jaj, csak utólérné, domine, bizony magam is tolnám hátulról.
– Magnifice domine, én egy szerencsétlen flótás vagyok, –
panaszkodik Galiba, – miseratur mei, üssön agyon, mert látom, hogy
nem érdemlek egyebet.
– Elvesztettük a pört? – mondja az öreg olyan arczczal, mintha
tán ennek mégis jobban örülne, mint a megnyerésnek.
– El nem vesztettük, instálom alássan, de nem is nyertük még
meg, – mondja Galiba félájultan, – kérem, magnifice domine, csak
fogjon nekem egy puskát.
– Beszéljen, okosan, Galiba uram, – sietteti Baltay, ki nem
okoskodván e zagyvalékból, – talán a hóna alól vesztette el a pört?
– Nihil horum, magnifice domine, hanem gondolja csak per
amorem Dei…
– Semmit sem gondolok, hanem vegyen lélekzetet, mert látom,
hogy megfullad, s ha kinyugodta magát, a lehető legrövidebben
mondjon el mindent magyarán.
– Egyetlenegy szó, magnifice, hanem salva venia, az az
egyetlenegy is diák szó.
– Várjon egy kissé… mondja Baltay, sülve és főlve, s miután
nagy lélekzetet vett, intett a fejével a remegő embernek, – no hát
mondja ki azt a diák szót…
– Amicára eresztették a dolgot.
– András!… kiáltott egy nagyot az öreg úr, mire Galiba térdei
megreszkettek s már a keze után nyúlt a nagyságos úrnak, mert
tökéletesen hitte, hogy Baltay szonika kidobatja nemcsak a házból,
hanem a faluból is.
– Itt vagyok! – felel András, a lármára benyitva a másik szobából.
– A tekintetes úr szobáját készítsék el kendtek szaporán, –
mondja Baltay Andrásnak, aztán pedig Galibához szól: – evett-e már
spektábilis? mit parancsol? hideget, meleget?
– Volt már részem benne, – höbög Galiba, még mindig remegve
és valóban igazat mondott, hogy volt benne része, mert a keze
reszket, a fejéről pedig csak úgy csörgedezik le a veríték.
– Süssenek, főzzenek szaporán, – mondja Baltay, – el kell hívni
vacsorára a papot is, mikor ilyen érdemes úri vendégünk van, –
menjen kend szaporán, András, ne várakoztassa a tekintetes urat.
Üljön le a tekintetes úr, – szól Galibához, – bizony még itt álldogál,
mint valami diákgyerek, – foglaljon helyet, a hol jobban tetszik,
széken, nyugágyon, vagy a hol jobb lesz!
– Ad animam, azt hittem, hogy rossz hírt hoztam, – véli Galiba.
– A lehető legjobbat, – eszem ágában sem volt ilyent várni, – hát
hogy van, fiskális úr?
– Mediocriter! – válaszol a másik megszokott módon, hogy a
kliensek valahogy azt ne gyanítsák, hogy a honoráriumra nincsen
szüksége.
– Gyújtson pipára, addig a tisztelendő úr is megjön, aztán
beszélhetnek diákul, a mennyit tetszik, bizvást, ma még azt is
megszenvedem.
– Quid dicit magnifice?
– Azt, hogy ma még diákul is beszélhet; ha elmegy, úgy is
kifüstöltetem a házat.
A nagyságos úr lement a kertbe, Galiba pedig el nem tudta
gondolni, mit gyanítson az egészből, hanem azért, ha már így is jó, –
ő örül neki legjobban.
– András!… mondja Baltay lemenet… ne hagyja kend koplalni
azt a pesti urat; a mit kér, csak adjon kend neki, legalább emlegesse
meg, hogy itt volt.
– De jó kedve van a nagyságos úrnak! – csudálkozik András; –
czigányokat ne hozzak?
– Két bandát, András, – nevet az úr, – az egyik banda jobbról
hegedüljön, a másik pedig balról.
– Jó lesz, jó! – teszi hozzá András, egy tányérhalmazzal odább
menve; – de úgy elszomorodott, hogy már nagy kedvet érzett volna
a tányérhalmazt földre csöppenteni.
András nem gondolhatott egyebet, mint hogy Galiba a pört
megnyerte; azért van ily nagy kelete a nagyságos úr előtt; hanem
mivel az öreg nem szólt magától, András elhatározta, hogy Galibát
kérdi meg.
– Tekintetes uram, ugyan jó kedvet csinált az öreg uraságnak.
– Én ugyan nem tudom mivel, – mondja a prókátor, – sőt még
most is azt hiszem, hogy ki akar dobatni.
– Elvesztettük a nagy pört? – kérdi némi gyanítással András.
– Nem vesztettük biz azt; hanem nem is nyertük meg.
– Ilyen pört sem hallottam, tekintetes uram, hol kell ennek örülni.
– Én legalább nem örülök neki, András, hanem ha ki nem
egyeznek…
– Hát egyezkedni kell nekik? – kérdi András egész
kiváncsisággal, mit Galiba megint nem értett.
– A kuria megrendelte, hogy az egyezséget próbálják meg.
– Nem éhes a tekintetes úr? – kiáltja András, az ajtó felé
fordulva, hogy ételért rohanjon; mert most már mégis értette a
nagyságos urat, ki a kibékülhetés miatt lett olyan jókedvű, valamint
András is, ki annyira beléjött az emberségbe, hogy Galibának még a
csizmáját is lehúzta lefekvéskor minden parancsolás nélkül, s
annyira sürgött-forgott, hogy a nagy szívességből kicsinyben mult,
hogy magát is, mint a kocsija kerekét, meg nem hájaztatta.
Galibát jó ajándékkal eresztette el a nagyságos úr, és csak azt
kivánta, hogy a pört küldje le, az egyezséget pedig megkisérti, mikor
maga ráér vagy a szomszédok kérik.
Az öreg úr mindig halasztotta a dolgot, mert nem tudta, mi volna
a legjobb módja, hogy a végét békével megérjék, valamint a helyet
sem tudta meghatározni, minthogy ő sem akart máshoz menni, meg
mást sem magához hívni, valamint Keszthelyen sem akart
alkalmatlankodni, tehát mivel a pör Körmenden került meg, végre
oda kivánt menni az öreg úr.
Jó messze esett Körmend, a tél is erős volt; de már mindegy,
Körmend elég messze esik Pesttől, hol Galiba a nyakában lett volna,
tehát megegyeztek, hogy egy bizonyos napon valamennyien ott
lesznek, s az öreg úr értette mások által, hogy ő senkinek nem
kivánja a kárát.
Ilyen körülmények közt egy héttel előbb megindult mind a két fél,
még pedig Keszthelynek, hol a gróf mind a két félnek tudott egy-két
szót mondani, nem is gyanítván, hogy az isten ezt a dolgot
másképen akarja elintézni, tehát menjünk egymás után.
Ezen útban megleljük ösmerőseinket, azért olvasóinkat még egy
kis türelemre kérjük: sétáljanak velünk.
X.
(A «kenyeretlen» csárda.)
Jaj nektek farkasok, ha a «Kenyeretlen» csárdára rohantok, oly

éhes ott a gazda, hogy még a farkast is megeszi! Régen ott feledte
valaki a csárdát, még a tetőfát is ott hagyta, hisz miért szedegesse le
a korhadt fát, mikor egy jó szóért a legegyenesebb fát döntheti le a
Bakonyban. Ott maradt tehát farkasordítónak, hová csak kínjában
huzódott be egy elkésett utas, akkor is megelégedett, ha tető alá
kapott, fizetésképen pedig egy szalonnadarabot vagy fél kenyeret
hagyott a kenyeretlen gazdának, ki sokat járkálhatott a nagy
világban, mielőtt ideért; mert ide már csak egy lábát hozta.
Az egykori ivószobában most már csak az ivott, ki csutorát hozott
magával, s a gazdát is megkinálta, a többi pedig kiment a sürüig, s
kalapjával vagy a vödörrel merített vagy neki hasalt a forrásnak, s
ivott, a meddig csak tetszett, mert ebben a csárdában az itcze-
számot nem tartotta számon senki.
Az ablaknak még volt egy pár fiókja, melyen nappal befért egy kis
világosság; de a kinek nem volt elég ennyi, kirántotta a
bundadarabot, melylyel a gazda a hézagot benyomta, és eresztett
be annyi friss levegőt, mennyit elállhatott, – s ha már egyéb
kényelmet keresett, végig nyújtózkodhatott a padon, asztalon vagy
földön, ha véletlenül valaki az asztalról vagy a padról le nem lökte,
vagy a földön a képére nem lépett.
Az egyik sarokban egész helyet foglalt el a kályha, melynek a
gazda adott annyi eledelt, a mennyi belefért, hisz a Bakony
erdejében faszükséget nem hallott még senki, – s a gazda
naphosszat üldögélt kívül a konyhán a kályha szájánál, s a
favágáson kívül megelégedett annyi dologgal, – hogy a parazsat
piszkálta.
Egy istálló is volt a ház végében, hol a beterelt baromnak tűrhető
menhelye akadt, hanem a padláson nem volt annyi abrak, hogy egy
torkos egér ünnepre valót csíphetne belőle, mert összedült a tető s a
gazda maga is csak akkor ment föl, mikor a bomladozó kéményt
támasztotta meg, hogy valamikor agyon ne verje a padlást.
A czégérnek nyele most is kinyujtózkodik még, de a káposztafej
és a tüskecsomó rég leszakadt, s a mint a tetőn levő rothadt nádat
föltúrta a vihar, messziről úgy látszik, mintha valaki egy póznával
állna a háztetőnek sarkán, s a vendéget akarná elijesztgetni.
A tetőt megnyomta a vénség, itt-ott egy szarufának a vége dugja
ki sovány könyökét, és a varjú messzire röpül ijedtében, mert a
kunyhó füstje közé legfölebb az a dohányszag keveredik, mit a
gazda a ház végében termeszt, s mitől az udvaron is megbolondul a
légy, s ki tudja mikor volt az a nap, mikor itt rántásszag dült ki a
konyhából?
Az udvarnak közepén állt a félszer, tán a legjobb épület a
csárdánál, mert a bevonulók előrelátásból nem hagyták kidülni, s a
tetejére raktak annyi tüskét, hogy az esőnek erejét elfogja a
letéglázott tetőtől, s ha a szekér alatta állt, nem érte a vihar.
Itt állapodott meg Meddig Józsi. A mogorva szabados elfoglalta a
gazdátlan helyet, s ha már egyetlenegy élő pára nem volt, a ki
engedelmeskedett volna neki, – legalább élvezte azt a gondolatot,
hogy neki sem parancsol senki.
A «Kenyeretlen» csárdának megszorult vendégei hálaképen
tarták el a szabadost, ki egy kenyérrel, egy kis szalonnával és
elviselt ruhával fizettette magát; és a rengeteg erdőnek megvolt az a
jó tulajdonsága, mint az útmutatófának, hogy néha legalább árnyékot
nyújtott az elfáradt utasnak.
Pista koronkint megnézte a roskadozó embert, ki kényelemre,
zajos örömökre nem vágyott, és félelem nélkül várta végóráját: hisz
annyiszor nézett szemközt a halállal! – Ha sorsa a csaták zajába
nem löki, lett volna belőle garázda, folyton veszekedő, tán még
útonálló is, ha egy elhibázott ütés kikergeti az emberek közül; de
midőn a katonasorban állt, s megrémülni látott ezer meg ezer
embert, akkor a szilaj vérű ember büszkén megereszté a kantárt, az
ellenre vágott, s büszkén nézett vissza az elmaradókra s az ő
lelkében is megszólamlék egy gondolat: nézd, ezer meg ezer
vitéznél vitézebb vagy!
Nem jutott eszébe többé a korcsma, megutálta a dicsőségtelen
marakodást, s míg egykor izmainak erejét részeg pajtásokon
próbálta, s dicsősége befért abba a csárdazugba, honnét néha
páronkint szórta ki az embert; megcsömörlött attól az élettől, midőn
megrémült emberek voltak ellenei, s kiket félerővel lehetett kilökni,
hisz félig önmaguktól rohantak kifelé, hogy öklétől
menekülhessenek.
Az ágyúmoraj volt az a harangszó, mely előtte megnyitá a
vitézség templomát, hol erő erő ellenében áll ki, hol az egyik azért
meri megölni a másikat, mert maga is meg mer halni; – mondom, a
legelső ágyúszónál lehullott róla a korhelység, vére megérzé a
dicsőség ösztönét, s a korhely most már nem erősebb, de bátrabb
akart lenni, – hisz ilyen küzdelemben meghalni nem gyalázat, sőt a
legszebb érdem.
Mellette állt a béres, – egy nyommal sem maradt hátrább, – s az
ágyúk tüzében elfeledte az egykori kudarczot, tettétől
megundorodott, orozva tett lövését megszégyenlé, s ámbár
ezereknél kitünőbb volt, egyetlenegy gondolatra törekedett, hogy
még vitézebb legyen mint a béres.
Őt is megkereste a golyó, a pécsi kórházban temették el egyik
lábát; s a megsebzett vad kínosan nézett elfolyott vérére, – hisz nem
versenyezhet többé, – s midőn Pistával találkozék, kínosan gondolt
arra, hogy elvádoltatván, kit a golyók nem birtak megölni, gyalázattal
hal meg.
Pista megint győztes maradt, – nem tudja őt elárulni; pedig tán
még a gyalázatos halált is eltűrné, ha a végórában azt mondhatná
neki: elárultál? nézd nyugodtan halok meg!

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Visions of British Culture from the

Reformation to Romanticism: The

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European Memory and Conflicting Visions of the Past

Visions of British Culture

More information about this series at

Histories of the Sacred and Secular, 1700–2000

2 Ritual, Ceremony, and Custom in the Aftermath of the

3 “Remaines of Gentilisme and Judaism”: Erudition,

4 The Antiquities of the Common People 89

5 Embodied Religion in Eighteenth-Century Britain: “All

6 Religion in the Bardic Revival161

7 Against the Cold Calculus of Modernity203

British Romanticism idealized the “common people,” especially those

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

between “Enlightenment” and “Romanticism.”1 It is clear that eighteenth-­

British Romanticism, thus broadly conceived, was, I argue, both rooted

religious conflict.7 This destabilization led to closer scrutiny not only of

not, of course, have referred to themselves as priests), it can serve as an

indiscriminately to both. Consider, for example, the word “mummery.”

“disenchantment” was what late seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and

Perhaps it is not surprising that British Protestants who upheld this

morass of pagan customs—was a powerful polemical tool in the religious

presbyterians, such as seasonal festivities, processions, lighting candles in

eighteenth-century polemic. Indeed, the notion that a corrupt, self-­

This is an appropriate place to note that I have elected to use both

prehistoric stone circles helped to lay the foundations of the specifically

England, but eventually on British and anglophone Protestant culture

Ritual, Ceremony, and Custom

In his Ecclesiastical Sketches of 1822, William Wordsworth invoked the

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 19

The Protestant Reformation has been described as a “revolution in rit-

Christian meaning was no longer readily conceivable. The conceptual flu-

seventeenth-­century reverberations in the civil wars and the Revolution of

In this chapter, I seek to add an additional dimension to this discussion

Buc, The Dangers of Ritual, 169–70.

393, 402–402 (V:lxx.3, lxxv.2–5).

Attacking and Defending Customs in Britain’s

ground) in religion—whatever was not expressly commanded by God was

the Book of Common Prayer and all of their reverberations in vernacular

The early Church’s gradual transformation of pagan festivals into

honour.”24 At least a moderate degree of ceremonial practice was deemed

Britain’s Culture Wars

describe both. The rite of baptism, as prescribed in the Book of Common

festivities as a means of promoting “amitie” among the common people.31

­ isapprobation of holy days, most editions of the Book of Common

Holydayes Modestly Discussed and Determined…(London, 1651) (a representative contempo-

A virágnak megtiltani nem lehet,

Félre azokkal a nagyon okos emberekkel. Előttük hiú boldogság

A virágnak megtiltani nem lehet,

A szeptemvir úr gyűlésre készült s éppen most eresztette el

Jaj nektek farkasok, ha a «Kenyeretlen» csárdára rohantok, oly

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2 Ritual, Ceremony, and Custom in the Aftermath of the

3 “Remaines of Gentilisme and Judaism”: Erudition,

4 The Antiquities of the Common People 89

5 Embodied Religion in Eighteenth-Century Britain: “All

6 Religion in the Bardic Revival161

7 Against the Cold Calculus of Modernity203

between “Enlightenment” and “Romanticism.”1 It is clear that eighteenth-

eighteenth-century polemic. Indeed, the notion that a corrupt, self-

seventeenth-century reverberations in the civil wars and the Revolution of

isapprobation of holy days, most editions of the Book of Common