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RELIGIOUS CHANGE AND THE TIMING OF BAPTISM IN ENGLAND, 1538–1750*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 May 2009

P. M. KITSON
P. M. KITSON*
Affiliation:
Downing College, Cambridge
*
Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, Sir William Hardy Building, Downing Place, Cambridge CB2 3ENpmk24@cam.ac.uk
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Abstract

The religious reforms of the sixteenth century exerted a profound impact upon the liturgy of baptism in England. While historians' attention has been drawn to the theological debates concerning the making of the sign of the cross, the new baptism liturgy contained within the Book of common prayer also placed an innovative importance on the public performance of the rite in the presence of the whole congregation on Sundays and other holy days. Both religious radicals and conservatives contested this stress on ceremony and publicity throughout the early modern period. Through the collection of large numbers of baptism dates from parish registers, it is possible to measure adherence to these new requirements across both space and time. Before the introduction of the first prayer book in 1549, there was considerable uniformity among communities in terms of the timing of baptism, and the observed patterns are suggestive of conformity to the requirements of the late medieval church. After the mid-sixteenth century, parishes exhibited a range of responses, ranging from enthusiastic adoption by many communities to complete disregard in religiously conservative parts of Lancashire and Cheshire. Additionally, the popularity of saints' festivals as popular days for baptism fell markedly after 1660, suggesting a decline in the observance of these feasts.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 52 , Issue 2 , June 2009 , pp. 269 - 294
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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Footnotes

*

I am grateful to Richard Smith for supervising the research upon which this article is based. Additionally, Tony Wrigley, Jeremy Boulton, Stephen Thompson, Clare Jackson, and two anonymous referees have also provided extremely helpful comments on earlier draft versions.

References

1 The best example of this approach can be found in D. Cressy, Birth, marriage and death: ritual, religion and the life-cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford, 1997), pp. 95–194.

2 J. D. C. Fisher, Christian initiation: baptism in the medieval west: a study in the disintegration of the primitive rite of initiation, Alcuin Club Collections, 47 (London, 1965), pp. 1–29, 101–40.

3 Ibid., pp. 82, 86–7, 105, 107–8, 111–12.

4 Ibid., p. 177. The translation is based upon the last edition of the Sarum manual published before the issue of the Book of common prayer, printed at Rouen in 1543.

5 R. Whiting, The blind devotion of the people: popular religion and the English Reformation (Cambridge, 1989), p. 124.

6 Fisher, Christian initiation, pp. 175–6.

7 John Mirk's Instructions for parish priests: edited from MS Cotton Claudius A II and six other manuscripts with introduction, notes and glossary, ed. G. Kristensson, Lund Studies in English, 49 (Lund, 1974), p. 72.

8 Cressy, Birth, marriage and death, pp. 117–23.

9 H. O. Old, The shaping of the Reformed baptismal rite in the sixteenth century (Grand Rapids, MI, 1992), pp. 111–44.

10 Ibid., pp. 154, 169.

11 Christian initiation: the Reformation period: some early reformed rites of baptism and confirmation and other contemporary documents, ed. J. D. C. Fisher: Alcuin Club Collections, 51 (London, 1970), pp. 73–9.

12 W. Coster, ‘Tokens of innocence: infant baptism, death and burial in early modern England’, in B. Gordon and P. Marshall, eds., The place of the dead: death and remembrance in late medieval and early modern Europe (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 269–70.

13 The two liturgies, A.D. 1549 and A.D. 1552: with other documents set forth by authority in the reign of King Edward VI, ed. J. Ketley, Parker Society (Cambridge, 1844), p. 106. This advice was removed from the 1662 revision of the prayer book.

14 Ibid., p. 114; this clause was reproduced in all subsequent versions of the Book of common prayer until 1662. See also The book of common prayer 1559: The Elizabethan prayer book, ed. J. E. Booty (East Brunswick, NJ, 1976), p. 277.

15 The book of common prayer, ed. Booty, p. 270. Similar clauses were present in the 1549 and 1552 versions of the prayer book.

16 Whiting, Blind devotion of the people, p. 34.

17 The book of common prayer, ed. Booty, p. 278. Similar clauses were present in the 1549, 1552, and 1662 prayer books.

18 For Bucer's comments upon the 1549 prayer book, see his Censura of 1551, reprinted and translated in Martin Bucer and The book of common prayer, ed. E. C. Whitaker, Alcuin Club Collections, 55 (London, 1974), p. 82.

19 E. Duffy, The stripping of the altars: traditional religion in England, 1400–1580 (New Haven, CT, and London, 1992), pp. 543–55, especially p. 545.

20 Visitation articles and injunctions of the period of the Reformation, ed. W. H. Frere and W. M. Kennedy (3 vols., London, 1908–10), i, pp. 86–95, items 26, 49, and 50; R. A. Houlbrooke, Church courts and the people during the English Reformation, 1520–1570 (Oxford, 1979), p. 244.

21 Elizabethan episcopal administration: an essay in sociology and politics, ed. W. P. M. Kennedy, Alcuin Club Collections, 26–8 (3 vols., London, 1924); Visitation articles and injunctions of the early Stuart church, ed. K. Fincham (2 vols., Woodbridge, 1994–8).

22 The Anglican canons 1529–1947, ed. G. Bray; Church of England Record Society, 6 (Woodbridge, 1998), p. 729.

23 Cressy, Birth, marriage and death, pp. 117–23.

24 Elizabethan episcopal administration, ed. Kennedy, i, pp. cxii, 172.

25 The Anglican canons, ed. Bray, pp. 817, 820.

26 Christian initiation 1552–1969: rites of baptism and confirmation since the Reformation period, ed. P. J. Jagger, Alcuin Club Collections, 52 (London, 1970), pp. 173–6.

27 Acts and ordnances of the Interregnum, ed. C. H. Firth and R. S. Rait (3 vols., London, 1911), i, p. 582.

28 Ibid., ii, pp. 715–18. Several parishes seem to have maintained a register of baptisms as well as births from this time, as is clear from Berry, B. M. and Schofield, R. S., ‘Age at baptism in pre-industrial England’, Population Studies, 25 (1971), pp. 453–63CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed, especially table 1, p. 456.

29 6 and 7 Wm & Mary c. 6. This act required either the recording of births or baptisms. However, 7 and 8 Wm & Mary c. 35 required the incumbent to keep a register of births.

30 Berry and Schofield, ‘Age at baptism’, table 7, p. 462.

31 Ibid., pp. 456–7, table 1.

32 J. C. Cox, The parish registers of England (London, 1910), p. 57, reproduces notes within parish registers recording baptisms by midwives for Bishop Wearmouth (Durham) in 1730, Hanwell (Middlesex) in 1731, and Clunbury (Shropshire) in 1787.

33 Cressy, Birth, marriage and death, pp. 188–94; D. M. Thompson, Baptism, church and society in modern Britain (Bletchley, 2005), pp. 16–20.

34 The parish registers of Ardingly, Sussex 1558–1812, ed. P. S. Godman, Sussex Record Society, 22 (1916); Bury St Edmunds St James parish registers: baptisms 1558–1800, Suffolk Green Books, 17 (Bury St Edmunds, 1915).

35 Thompson, Baptism, church and society, p. 19.

36 Ambler, R. W., ‘Baptism and christening: custom and practice in nineteenth-century Lincolnshire’, Local Population Studies, 12 (1974), pp. 25–7Google Scholar; R. W. Ambler, Churches, chapels and the parish communities of Lincolnshire, 1660–1900 (Lincoln, 2000), p. 187.

37 Cressy, Birth, marriage and death, pp. 332–5; J. R. Gillis, For better, for worse: British marriages, 1600 to the present (Oxford, 1985); Boulton, J., ‘Itching after private marryings? Marriage customs in seventeenth-century London’, London Journal, 16 (1991), pp. 15–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

38 The best introduction to English parish registers remains Cox, Parish registers of England.

39 Baptism registers have attracted some attention, but principally for the study of godparentage. See W. Coster, Baptism and spiritual kinship in early modern England (Aldershot, 2002).

40 Schofield, R. S., ‘“Monday's child is fair of face”: favoured days for baptism, marriage and burial in pre-industrial England’, Continuity and Change, 20 (2005), pp. 93–109.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

41 C. Haigh, English reformations: religion, politics, and society under the Tudors (Oxford, 1993), pp. 152–67.

42 The piece of legislation in question was canon 70; see The Anglican canons, ed. Bray, p. 361. This particular piece of legislation had its antecedents in the canons of 1597; see ibid., p. 253, canon 12.2.

43 For a full description of this database, see P. M. Kitson, ‘Family formation, male occupation and the nature of parochial registration in England, c. 1538–1837’ (Ph.D. thesis, Cambridge, 2004).

44 Data for twelve of the parishes in this sample were kindly provided by Ros Davies from the family reconstitution databases maintained at the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure. The author inputted the remaining thirty-eight registers, totalling 145,499 events, in an intermittent fashion over a seven-year period from 1999.

45 This computer script followed the basic strategy employed by the procedure described in E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The population history of England, 1541–1871: a reconstruction (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 21–3, 697–704.

46 A significant number of registers used dating systems other than the Julian calendar, such as regnal years or the Roman calendar. Here, A handbook of dates for students of British history, ed. C. R. Cheney, revised M. Jones (Cambridge, 2000), proved invaluable.

47 The day of the week was identified by first calculating the number of days elapsed since 1 January 1 ad (a Wednesday) to the date in question, and then finding the remainder after dividing this figure by seven. No remainder would indicate that this day is a Wednesday, while a remainder of one would show this day to be a Thursday, a value of two would show that the date is a Friday, and so on.

48 This was done using a procedure known as Oudin's algorithm, which may be found in A handbook of dates, ed. Cheney and Jones, p. 5. A more systematic account of how this might be done is provided in Schürer, K. and Oeppen, J., ‘Saturday's child: coping with the calendars of the past’, Local Population Studies, 45 (1990), pp. 43–56.Google Scholar

49 For seasonality of baptism in early modern England, see Wrigley and Schofield, Population History of England, pp. 286–93; and Dyer, A., ‘Seasonality of baptism: an urban approach’, Local Population Studies, 27 (1981), pp. 26–34.Google Scholar

50 See C. H. Feinstein and M. Thomas, Making history count: a primer in qualitative methods for historians (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 25–7, for a more complete rationale for this process.

51 Ibid., pp. 131–6, for a fuller description of the Z-score.

52 The Appendix to this article gives a fuller description of the technical details described here.

53 The list was compared with the schedule of feast days reported in Cheney, C. R., ‘Rules for the observance of feast-days in medieval England’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 34 (1961), pp. 117–47Google Scholar.

54 The book of common prayer: 1662 version: includes appendices from the 1549 version and other commemorations (London, 1999), pp. 504–28.

55 For a history of the observance of both 29 May and 5 November, see D. Cressy, Bonfires and bells: national memory and the Protestant calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England (London, 1989), pp. 64–6, 141–55, 171–89; and R. Hutton, The rise and fall of merry England, 1400–1700 (Oxford, 1994), pp. 182–6, 249–58.

56 Official observance of this day was given statutory force by parliament through 3 Jac. I c. 1.

57 Parliament also recognized this day as one for official remembrance through 12 Car. II c. 14.

58 The book of common prayer: 1662 version, p. 525.

59 The technical details underlying this procedure are described in the Appendix to this article.

60 The top line corresponds to a value of 1·96, while the bottom corresponds to a value of −1·96. Events taking place outside these bounds should only account for 5 per cent of all instances if the values are normally distributed; this represents the usual threshold for statistical significance for a distribution with two tails.

61 Cressy, Bonfires and bells, pp. 171–89.

62 J. de Vries, ‘Between purchasing power and the world of goods: understanding the household economy in early modern Europe’, in J. Brewer and R. Porter, eds., Consumption and the world of goods (London, 1993), pp. 85–132; J. de Vries, The industrious revolution: consumer behaviour and the household economy, 1650 to the present (Cambridge, 2008), pp. 89–92.

63 W. Farrer and J. Brownbill, eds., A history of the county of Lancaster (8 vols., London, 1906–14), ii, p. 55.

64 J. Langton, ‘The continuity of regional culture: Lancashire Catholicism from the late sixteenth century to the early nineteenth century’, in E. Royle, ed., Issue of regional identity: in honour of John Marshall (Manchester, 1998), pp. 82–101.

65 J. Bossy, The English Catholic community, 1570–1850 (London, 1975), p. 100.

66 P. M. Tillott, ed., ‘Tudor York: religion and the Reformation’, in A history of the county of York: the city of York (London, 1961) pp. 142–55.

67 Both Heswall and Aughton share this pattern, suggesting that some form of initiative by the bishop or archdeacon in this year was the reason underlying this change.

68 K. E. Wrightson and D. Levine, Poverty and piety in an English village: Terling, 1525–1700 (Oxford, 1999), pp. 158–61.

69 This was calculated from the machine-readable version of the register of baptisms for Terling, which is included within the type ‘B’ database.