Religion and ideas
Kilton
Tea Party about 1910 - Mrs Ann Farndale, Charles Farndale,
visiting vicar (The Rev W Slader, O Wardley or W Nicholson perhaps?), Vincent
Grainger (who worked on the farm) and Grace Farndale
Exploring the role of religions of
various denominations and its weaving with new intellectual directions and its
influence on the family
This page
is still a first draft
Making
sense of the World
As our
ancestors grunted and sweated to make their living, religion helped them to
make some sense of the world. They were constantly threatened by the dread of poverty and faced daily worries about their
survival. Inevitably they would have hoped for something better, but would have
dreaded what might happen next.
Hamlet’s
soliloquy recognised the worries of the unknown that led our ancestors to plough
on.
For who
would bear the whips and scorns of time, The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's
contumely, The pangs of despised love, the law's delay, The insolence of office
and the spurns That patient merit of the unworthy takes, When he himself might
his quietus make With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear, To grunt and sweat
under a weary life, But that the dread of something after death, The undiscover'd country from whose bourn No traveller returns,
puzzles the will And makes us rather bear those ills we have Than fly to others
that we know not of? Thus conscience does make cowards of us all; And thus the
native hue of resolution Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, And
enterprises of great pith and moment With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.
Perhaps it
was the dread of something after death, the undiscover'd
country from whose bourn no traveller returns, that instilled an acceptance
of life’s struggles, and conformity to the beliefs and social pressures of a
hierarchy from Squire to peer.
Medieval
Enlightenment
The Venerable Bede (672 to 26 May 735) was the
English monk, author and scholar who wrote the Ecclesiastical History of the
English People which he completed in about 731 CE. His home was the
monastery of St Peter and its companion monastery of St Paul at Monkwearmouth
and Jarrow in the Anglian Kingdom of Northumbria, not so far from the lands of
the Farndale ancestors.
He wrote
that in the seventh century of the Christian era, seven Saxon kingdoms had
for some time existed in Britain. Northumbria or Northumberland, the largest of
these, consisted of the two districts Deira and Bernicia, which had recently
been united by Oswald King of Bernicia.
Bede gave
intellectual and religious significance to a burgeoning nation at Jarrow from
where many centuries later John
William Farndale was the youngest member of the Jarrow marchers. Bede first
defined an English identity. At his monastery at Jarrow he had access to a
university library with more books than were in the libraries of Oxford or
Cambridge 700 years later.
By the 750s,
the York school led by the golden age of Archbishop Ecgbert was renowned as a
centre of learning in the liberal arts, literature, and science, as well as in
religious matters. From here, Alcuin of York
drew inspiration for the school he would lead at the Frankish court.
There was a
significant revival of writing and literature emerging by the early twelfth
century, possibly deriving from English traditions, but written in Latin and
French.
The first
significant historical writings since Bede started to appear.
Religion
in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries
People in
the middle ages believed that, after death, the soul spent a certain length of
time in Purgatory and that the prayers of the living hastened the soul’s
passage to Paradise.
Alms houses were
built where poor people were cared for. In return, those who relied on this
charity had to attend daily masses and religious services where they said
prayers, especially for their benefactors.
There were
many people in medieval England who, while not having the wealth of the landed
gentry to pay for such chantries, had become relatively rich through trade and
they formed religious guilds to ensure a less painful progress to Heaven.
The
seventeenth century
The Act
of Uniformity 1662 prescribed the form of public prayers, administration of
sacraments, and other rites of the Established Church of England and for
preventing mischiefs and dangers that may arise by certain persons called
Quakers, and others refusing to take oaths. The Act declared it altogether
unlawful and contrary to the word of God to refuse to take an oath, or to
persuade another person to refuse to do so. It further made it an offense for
more than five persons, commonly called Quakers, to assemble in any place under
pretence of joining in a religious worship not authorised by the laws of this
realm.
The
Eighteenth Century Enlightenment
Francis
Bacon (1561 to 1626) was the father of modern scientific method.
From about
the time of the Glorious Revolution in 1688, folk across Europe came to
contemplate the universe and themselves in new way in what came to be referred
as the Age of Enlightenment, or the Age of Reason. New ideas
generated economic innovation and accelerated overseas contact, though also
conflict.
Isaac Newton
(1642 to 1727) began with experiments by pushing pieces of metal into his own
eye. His Principia Mathematica
(1687) remains a significant influential work. He made fundamental insights
into the forces holding the universe together. His own story of the apple gave
popularity to his important work on gravity. He found an ordered world and
benevolent creation. He remained a pious Anglican Cambridge don. He was
President of the new Royal Society and Master of the Mint.
John Locke (1632 to 1704)
was influential in changes in philosophy and political thought. He was a
political adviser to Earl Shaftesbury during the Exclusion Crisis and went into
exile in 1682. In exile his views were radicalised, and he wrote his Essay
Concerning Human Understanding and Two Treatises of Government. In the latter,
his contract theory, in line with Hobbes’ ideas in Leviathan, saw government as
arising from an agreement with the governed. He argued against contemporary
Tory ideas that a king derived authority from God. He returned from exile after
the Glorious Revolution. His Essay Concerning Human Understanding was a seminal
philosophical work. He argued that humans were born with minds like a piece of
black paper and felt there were no innate ideas of principles. All were capable
of reasoning. His Letters on Toleration (1689 to 1692) prompted
religious tolerance. People did not permanently surrender their liberty and he
recognised natural laws. His ideas have perhaps retained their influence after
Locke’s death most notably in the US, for instance in ideas within the American
Declaration of Independence including that governments were made by the consent
of the people.
The Royal Society
was founded in 1660 to promote sociable intellectual discussion.
The Third
Earl of Shaftesbury in his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times
(1711) promoted politeness and an innate sense of right and wrong. This in turn
found a place in ideas of good breeding. The Spectator (1711 to 1714)
endorsed the idea daily. In contrast to this developed a counter culture of
flouting the rules of politeness deliberately, through drinking, and bawdy
jokes. There was an interest in racing and boxing and fox hunting (which became
increasingly important in rural life) and masculine ideas.
Ideas and
institutions emerged which have come to be seen as British ideas of rationality,
tolerance, optimism and politeness.
There was greater freedom to debate. For the first time the English
language and English ideas started to spread overseas. As Europeans began to
think about the universe and there was greater secular awareness.
There was a
new parody of traditional religious ideas, as in Laurence
Sterne’s The Life
and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1759).
A new form
of literary work emerged in the eighteenth century, the novel, focused on
ordinary people and the present. The probable father was Daniel Defoe and Robinson
Crusoe (1719), with direct prose and vigorous narrative, and vice, danger
and crime in Moll Flanders (1722). Novels worked through the imagination
of both author and reader and inspired by getting inside peoples’ heads.
In due
course the novel would evolve away from Tory or Whig ideals, to a bridge across
the political divide, where conflict is resolved, as in courtship tales such as
The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749) by Henry Fielding. In due
course this would evolve to the rationalist and romantic ideals as Jane
Austen’s works.
There was a
new and moral response to and a new vision of nature. There was a new taste for
paintings with a picturesque ideal.
There was
also the invention of a new idea of the English garden, idealised nature,
carefully planned to seem unplanned, Garden designers came to fame including William
Kent, a Yorkshire apprentice from Bridlington, who came to fame in the
1730s and is now considered to be the father of modern gardening; Lancelot
‘Capability’ Brown (1716 to 1783) whose opulent parkland style can be found
at Kew, Warwick, Blenheim and Chatsworth, and Humphrey
Repton.
Exploration
went beyond the merely commercial. The President of the Royal Society
commissioned James Cook for his
voyages of exploration, and he brought back stories of Polynesian exoticism,
the Tahitian prince Omai and even the story of his
death in a clash with the Hawaiians in February 1779 (which highlighted that
exploration was not such a benign affair), as well as importantly his answering
remaining questions about the southern hemisphere.
Even the
London Stock Exchange was described by Voltaire in the 1720s as peaceful, although
Baron de Montesquieu felt that in England money was more important than honour.
Ordinary
folk were now reading for pleasure, prestige and empowerment. 300,000 books
were published between 1660 to 1800. Daniel Defoe’s True
Born Englishman sold 80,000 copies. The Methodists were pioneers of
innovation in reading and produced an abridged Pilgrim’s Progress in a
4d booklet in 1743 and similar initiatives.
The end of
the Licensing Act in 1695 brought an end to press controls. These were the
early days of newspapers and magazines. The first London daily of note was the
Courant which began in 1702. By the mid eighteenth century 35 provincial papers
sold 200,000 copies per week. Magazines such as the Spectator, Tatler
and Gentleman’s Magazine were popular.
Samuel Johnson
(1709 to 1784) published his Dictionary
of the English Language in 1735. He was a Tory with Jacobite
sympathies. James
Boswell (1740 to 1795), his young friend, wrote his biography (1791).
Johnson was a literary pioneer and authored works from Latin poetry to travel
writing. He produced a scholarly edition of Shakespeare and his Life of the
English Poets (1781). His Dictionary evidenced that language was not a static
system.
This was a
new age of the exchanging of information in the public sphere. New and
fashionable coffee houses. Freemasonry spread rapidly. Libertine groups such as
the
Hellfire Club, founded by Philip
Wharton. Literary,
philosophical, scientific and debating societies such as the Newcastle Literary and Philosophical Society (The
Lit and Phil) and Samuel Johnson’s Literary Club.
There
emerged a new momentum of public opinion and political discussion. Politics was
opened to public scrutiny. Montesquieu, the French Philosopher, recognised an
English sense of liberty in his De l’esprit des Lois
(1748). The public was restricted to those with money, education and
respectability, but even so there was greater permeability in social
boundaries.
The national
character emerged in songs and fictional characters. John Bull was the
invention of the Scot, John Arbuthnot in 1712. Fielding composed the light
hearted patriotic song Roast Beef of Old England. But there was also a
questioning of English identity, such as the sarcastic poem of Daniel Defoe,
The True Born Englishman (1701), who felt that successive invasions and
immigrations into the country meant “we have been Europe’s sink.”
These new
characteristics have been interpreted as insular and xenophobic. There was a
focus on new freedoms and rights. However it came with an admiration for
Continental culture (especially Italian and French) and the nation perhaps saw
itself more as fighting for liberties in a European context.
In the late
eighteenth century Francois de La Rochefoucauld was amazed by the confidence of
ordinary farmers, who he saw as mere peasants, talking knowledgeably and
meeting in clubs.
Trends in
dress codes were sometimes pioneered by ordinary folk, such as the adoption of
round hats instead of wigs.
There was a
new interest in travel, or for those less adventurous, vicarious travel through
reading travel books. At the end of each war there was a rush to the continent.
Young gentlemen started the tradition of the Grand Tour. Influences arrived
from overseas such as classical statuary. These new collections at scale led to
the founding of the British
Museum (established 1753, largely based on the collections of the
Anglo-Irish physician and scientist Sir Hans Sloane and opened in 1759) and the
National Gallery (founded in 1824).
Musical
tastes became more cosmopolitan with fashions for Handel and Johann Christian
Bach.
Nineteenth
Century
Victorian
Britain was a highly religious society. The most reads books were the Bible and
Pilgrim’s Progress.
In 1851 a
relatively high 5.3M people neglected religious services, 29% of the
population. However 7.3M attended church, 41% of the population. More than half
of the attendances were to Nonconformist chapels.
There had
been an explosion of New Dissent groups, particularly methodists from the
1770s.
The Old
Dissent groups were the Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists, and Quakers.
The New Dissent groups were the Methodists
The Church
of England remained the largest religious body, with 85% of marriages in 1851
being in churches. The Church of England continued to play a key role in
information, education, welfare, judicial and local government issues.
Science
and religion
Religious
belief were challenged by new geological, archaeological and astronomical
discoveries.
Charles Lyell’s Principles
of Geology (1830 to 1833).
Robert Chambers’
Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844)
Charles
Darwin’s On the Origin of
Species by Natural Selection was largely written after the HMS Beagle
voyage in the 1830s, under Malthus’ influence but publication was delayed until
1859.
Samuel Smiles’ Self
Help.
These all
had implications for theories of divine creation and led to a clash with the
Church at a meeting of the British Association of Oxford in 1860 between Thomas Henry Huxley,
defending Darwin and Soapy Sam Wilberforce, son of the anti slavery campaigner, William Wilberforce, Bishop of
Oxford. The Evangelical literal interpretation of the Bible was particularly
threatened.
See the Kirkdale cave discoveries.
There was a
religious response by building churches and chapels at scale, with networks of
charities, sports clubs and Bible study groups.
With these
changes came a growth in ideas of freedom. Science was the embodiment of
progress. The universe was seen as perpetually developing.
Social
Darwinism was pioneered by Herbert
Spencer, applying Darwin’s theory of natural selection to human society,
with race, nationality and class being subjected to the survival of the fittest
theories.
Church of
England
Anglicanism
was rooted in its ancient structures. It was strongest in the Midlands and the
south of England. It was solid in southern agricultural areas and had
significant power there in its parishes. An Anglican village thrived as a
stable unit often with high employment, paternalistic labour relations and good
housing. The squire and parson gave local leadership and the Church of England
was often seen as the Tory Party at prayers.
Our Pew
at the Church,
Charles Dickens, Pickwick Papers, Chapter 2
Here is
our pew in the church. What a high-backed pew! With a window near it, out of
which our house can be seen, and is seen many times during the morning’s
service, by Peggotty, who likes to make herself as
sure as she can that it’s not being robbed, or is not in flames. But though Peggotty’s eye wanders, she is much offended if mine does,
and frowns to me, as I stand upon the seat, that I am to look at the clergyman.
But I can’t always look at him—I know him without that white thing on, and I am
afraid of his wondering why I stare so, and perhaps stopping the service to
inquire—and what am I to do?
In Lark
Rise, Flora Thomson wrote if the Lark Rise people had been asked their
religion, the answer of nine out of ten would have been 'Church of England',
for practically all of them were christened, married, and buried as such,
although, in adult life, few went to church between the baptisms of their
offspring. Every Sunday, morning and afternoon, the two cracked, flat-toned
bells at the church in the mother village called the faithful to worship.
Ding-dong, Ding-dong, Ding-dong, they went, and, when they heard them, the
hamlet churchgoers hurried across fields and over stiles, for the Parish Clerk
was always threatening to lock the church door when the bells stopped and those
outside might stop outside for all he cared. The interior was almost as bare as a barn, with its grey, roughcast walls, plain-glass
windows, and flagstone floor.
The Parish
Clerk sat at the back to keep order. 'Clerk Tom', as he was called, was an
important man in the parish. Not only did he dig the graves, record the banns
of marriage, take the chill off the water for winter baptisms, and stoke the
coke stove which stood in the nave at the end of his seat; but he also took an
active and official part in the services. It was his duty to lead the
congregation in the responses and to intone the 'Amens'. The psalms were not
sung or chanted, but read, verse and verse about, by the Rector and people, and
in these especially Tom's voice so drowned the subdued murmur of his fellow
worshippers that it sounded like a duet between him and the clergyman.
In
delivering his sermon, Mr. Ellison in the pulpit was the Mr. Ellison of the
Scripture lessons, plus a white surplice. To him, his congregation were but
children of a larger growth, and he preached as he taught. Another favourite
subject was the supreme rightness of the social order as it then existed. God,
in His infinite wisdom, had appointed a place for every man, woman, and child
on this earth and it was their bounden duty to remain contentedly in their
niches.
The Rector
visited each cottage in turn, working his way conscientiously round the
hamlet from door to door, so that by the end of the year he had called upon
everybody. When he tapped with his gold-headed cane at a cottage door there
would come a sound of scuffling within, as unseemly objects were hustled out of
sight, for the whisper would have gone round that he had been seen getting over
the stile and his knock would have been recognized. The women received him with
respectful tolerance. A chair was dusted with an apron and the doing of housework
or cooking was suspended while his hostess, seated uncomfortably on the edge of
one of her own chairs, waited for him to open the conversation. When the
weather had been discussed, the health of the inmates and absent children
inquired about, and the progress of the pig and the prospect of the allotment
crops, there came an awkward pause, during which both racked their brains to
find something to talk about. There was nothing. The Rector never mentioned
religion. That was looked upon in the parish as one of his chief virtues, but
it limited the possible topics of conversation. Apart from his autocratic
ideas, he was a kindly man, and he had come to pay a friendly call, hoping, no
doubt, to get to know and to understand his parishioners better. But the gulf
between them was too wide; neither he nor his hostess could bridge it. The
kindly inquiries made and answered, they had nothing more to say to each other,
and, after much 'ah-ing' and 'er-ing',
he would rise from his seat, and be shown out with alacrity.
Catholic
Church
In Lark
Rise, Flora Thomson wrote the Catholic minority at the inn was treated
with respect, for a landlord could do no wrong, especially the landlord of a
free house where such excellent beer was on tap. On Catholicism at large, the
Lark Rise people looked with contemptuous intolerance, for they regarded it as
a kind of heathenism, and what excuse could there be for that in a Christian
country? When, early in life, the end house children asked what Roman Catholics
were, they were told they were 'folks as prays to images', and further inquiries
elicited the information that they also worshipped the Pope, a bad old man,
some said in league with the Devil. Their genuflexions in church and their 'playin' wi' beads' were described
as 'monkey tricks'.
Non
Conformity
Methodism
had the greatest influence in the society of nineteenth century Cleveland, and is the primary subject of Act 31.
Twentieth
century
The inter
war years saw a gradual decline in institutional religion, especially
nonconformity.
Poast War
literature at first explored the lives of the gentry. Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead
Revisited, DH Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, P G Woodhouse, Right Ho!
Jeeves.
Modernism in
art was tempered by a revival of traditional cultural forms. Then literature
followed a multiplicity of different paths from T S Eliot, Virginia Woolf,
to John Betjeman
to J B Priestley (born
in Bradford)’s English
Journey 1933 (see Chapter 7, the Potteries, Chapter 9, the Tyne,
Chapter 10 East Durham and the Tees).
There was
cultural novelty in entertainment in the mass phenomenon of the cinema, the
gramophone and later the wireless. The cinema also became a source of news and
propaganda through newsreels.
American
trends led to the
Roaring Twenties – the Jazz Age, the Charleston (1925) and flappers
with bobbed hair and relatively short skirts.
British
entertainers included the working class Lancastrian Gracie
Fields and George
Formby.
The wireless
was supervised by a paternalistic elite including John
Reith, director general of the British
Broadcasting Company, which in time overshadowed the Church of England as
the provider of moral compass. George V made his first
royal broadcast in 1932 and Stanley Baldwin started to use the wireless as
a means to talk to the population in their own homes. The BBC had grown significantly
in its size and impact in the Second World War, adding the Light Programme and
newsreaders like Alvar Lidell and Bruce Belfrage
became celebrities. A new type of satirical and rather mad comedy took hold,
such as Its That Man Again. War became a seedbed for post war British
humour.
The Proms
started to attract mass audiences and Myra Hess organised daily lunchtime piano
concerts in the now empty National Gallery.
The Entertainments
National Service Association (“ENSA”) took travelling shows including
Gracie Fields, Vera Lynn and Goerge Formby.
Cinema
became popular. The Ministry of Information encouraged morale boosting films.
The film industry though sometimes took a critical view, such as the challenge
of British values in The
Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943). The Royal Navy often featured
in films as in Noel Coward’s In Which We Serve
(1942). Historic films depicting Britain’s unchanging character, such as
Laurence Olivier in Henry
V (1944) were popular; We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.
Evelyn War wrote of action in Norway and Alistair Maclean wrote the Guns of Navarone.
Films of the 1950s included The Wooden Horse
(1950), the Cruel Sea
(1953) and The
Cockleshell Heroes (1955).
or
Go Straight to Chapter 31 – the
Methodists