In the close-knit valleys communities of South Wales where I was brought up, some fingers are still pointed at ‘the scab’, the miner who, for whatever reason, did not show solidarity in the strike of 1984-5, cement the definition between ‘them’ and ‘us’. In trouble-torn Palestine of the twenty-first century, or among the paramilitary groups of Northern Ireland today, suspected informers are summarily assassinated. In South Africa, the Truth and Reconciliation Committee continues its work in the post-apartheid era. In second-century Rome and elsewhere, the ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’ who made up the fictive kinship groups – the churches – in the growing but illicit cult of the Christians were conscious both of their own vulnerability to outside opinion and of their failures in relation to their co-religionists. The questions which they asked, too, were questions about reconciliation and/or (spiritual) death.

Throughout the modern period Catholic and Orthodox Christians alike have taken it for granted that forgiveness for sins committed after baptism is obtained first and foremost through confession to a priest and absolution by a priest, the humility of confession plus the power of the sacrament being deemed the most effective remedy for human weakness. Other elements in overcoming sin, such as regular religious observance and the avoidance of the occasions of sin, were not forgotten, but were put in second place. The falling away from sacramental confession in the Catholic Church today is doubtless a complex phenomenon, but one reason for the decline is the widespread perception that this remedy does not work, that a penitential discipline that places so heavy a reliance on the power of priestly absolution, without adequate attention to the other aspects of repentance and forgiveness, is ineffectual. It also represents what is arguably an impoverished and clericalized Catholicism. The aim of this paper is to explore those elements of penitential practice in the early middle ages that belong to a tradition at once richer and more flexible.

As any parish priest will tell you, the first step in repentance and reconciliation is a recognition that you have done wrong. When, in 651, Oswine of Deira was betrayed into the hands of his enemy, Oswiu of Bernicia, and was put to death, Oswiu was left in little doubt about the sinfulness of such an action, for, if Bede is to be believed, the killing was met with universal disgust. Oswiu might, I think, have been forgiven had he at first wondered why his action provoked such horror. After all, Oswine was not trying to make peace when he was killed. Even Bede, who condemns the murder, admits that Oswine was lying low, awaiting an opportune time to re-open hostilities.

On 28 January 1077 at the castle of Canossa in the northern Appenines King Henry IV was absolved from his excommunication by Pope Gregory VII. Henry’s reconciliation with the Church represented the successful conclusion to what had been a hazardous mission for both him and his small entourage, one which had involved a difficult journey through the alpine passes in winter. It culminated in the king, having abandoned his royal garb for simple woollen clothing and with bare feet, standing for three days before the gates of the castle of Canossa, ceaselessly weeping and imploring divine mercy.

Medieval popes can scarcely have expected such spectacular results from a bull as Gregory EX achieved in 1237. His bull Cum hora undecima of 1235, a fundamental statement of the Church’s missionary function, gave specific licence to the Dominican William of Montferrat to preach, dispense the sacraments, absolve and excommunicate in the lands of schismatics and heretics of the East. Two years later, Philip, the Dominican provincial of the Holy Land, wrote to the pope announcing the conversion to Rome of the Syrian Orthodox (Jacobite) patriarch of Antioch, Ignatius II, the anticipated conversion of the Nestorian catholicos in Baghdad and possibly also the conversion of the Coptic patriarch. It was a staggering return from a mission only two years old, and represented a triumph for the Dominican Order as well as for the papacy.

Reconciliation of the relationships broken by sin, or the fall, is one of the central themes of Christianity, as this collection, of studies duly highlights. The themes of reconciliation to God and reconciliation to neighbour run throughout both the New Testament, with special emphasis in Paul’s letters to the Corinthians, and the Hebrew Scriptures, for in this passage from the Gospel of Matthew Jesus was quoting from Deuteronomy and Leviticus. This text would have been well-known to Christian authors on the subject of reconciliation in Western Europe in the thirteenth century; and the passage, or at least its message, should have been familiar to most clergy and many of their people. As an item of catechesis, one of its virtues is that it is short, and thus easy to teach and to remember.

It is often forgotten that the medieval Church imposed public penance and reconciliation by law. The discipline was administered by the church courts, among which one of the most important, because it acted at local level, was that of the archdeacon. In the later Middle Ages and certainly by 1435, the priors of Durham were archdeacons in all the churches appropriated to the monastery. The priors had established their rights in Durham County by the early fourteenth century and in Northumberland slightly later. Although the origins of this peculiar jurisdiction were long ago unravelled by Barlow, there is no full account of how it worked in practice. Yet it is not difficult from the Durham archives to elicit a coherent account, with examples, of the way penance and ecclesiastical justice were administered from day to day in the Durham area in this period. The picture that emerges from these documents, though not in itself unusual, is nevertheless valuable and affords an extraordinary degree of detail which is missing from other places, where the evidence no longer exists. This study should complement the recent work by Larry Poos for Lincoln and Wisbech, drawing attention to an institution which would reward further research. It is only possible here to outline what the court did and how and why it was used.

The title, and subject, of this piece is ‘satisfaction’, though its main locus in time is the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I chose the subject because it fitted in with our president’s preoccupations, and because it interested me; it turns out, to my surprise, to jog our elbow about some contemporary matters, as I guess he wished.

We had better start with the word, where there are two distinctions to be considered. The obvious one is between making up for, paying for, making amends, making reparation; and contentment, gratified desire, giving satisfaction, what you can’t get none of. I shall say that the first is the strong meaning, the second the weak one. The first is always other-directed, and entails an offence previously committed; the second is principally self-directed. ‘To content’ is a classical meaning of satisfacere, but it means to content someone else: to do something (facere), as against receiving something. A short history of the word in Latin and English records that the strong meaning emerged into late Latin as a description of church penance, and so passed into English in the fourteenth century. Its heyday was from then until the eighteenth. It referred to ecclesiastical penance (interrupted by the Reformation), the theology of the Redemption (encouraged by the Reformation), and in general public usage to the meeting of any kind of obligation, payment, atonement or compensation. From the eighteenth century it passed from public use, superseded by the weak meaning except in technical or professional fields. One professional usage, to which The Oxford English Dictionary gives a good deal of attention, is ‘to satisfy the examiners’: they think it is a case of ‘content’; may it be a case of ‘avert wrath’?

At the beginning of his De captivitate Babylonica ecclesiae praeludium of early October 1520, Luther announced that there, were not seven sacraments of the Church, but only three – baptism, penance, and the Lord’s Supper. By the end of the treatise, the three had been reduced to two. His reasoning was starkly logical. A sacrament, to be a sacrament, must contain the promise of forgiveness of sins, and have attached to it a visible sign instituted by Jesus Christ. Because no such visible sign is associated with the rite, penance cannot be a sacrament. A reasonable inference to draw is that Luther must have come to reject the sacramentality of penance by the time he composed De captivitate Babylonica, in perhaps August 1520.

Among the diversions for Londoners in the early summer of 1562 was the sight of a man confined in the pillory at Cheapside, bizarrely dressed in grey animal skins, and accompanied with the caption: ‘For seducinge the people by publyshynge ffallce Revelations’. Ellis Hall had come to London from his home in Manchester with the intention of presenting to the Queen a ‘greate booke’ containing secret revelations written in verse. He went to the palace at Greenwich, but was denied his interview with Elizabeth. Instead, Hall was interrogated by the bishop of London, Edmund Grindal, on 12 June, and castigated in a sermon by the bishop of Durham, James Pilkington, two days later. On 18 June he was questioned by five members of the Privy Council, and on 26 June, after his spell in the pillory, he was sent on Grindal’s orders to Bridewell, where he died three years later.

This essay assesses ideas and evidence about the response of Calvinists to sin during the Early Modern period. It takes as a starting-point the analysis provided by Max Weber about the development of Reformed salvation theology in later Calvinism. Weber suggested that Calvinists came to connect the eternal fate of their souls with their behaviour on earth, and attempted to exert systematic controls over their own conduct. Calvinists, Weber argued, developed a mind-set of methodical self-analysis and exhibited constant vigilance, concern and guilt about ongoing sin. Some early modern Calvinists certainly did demonstrate this highly refined personal anxiety about their wrong-doing, and worried about what their lack of enthusiasm and commitment to true religion and moral conduct might mean. However, most Reformed ministers across the Continent seem to have been rather more concerned that members of their congregations did not feel guilty enough about their sins, and alongside encouraging self-discipline through sermons and catechizing, turned to elders and, where possible, to state authorities, to enforce high standards of morality on often recalcitrant parishioners.

By 1600 many, perhaps most, English people knew the story of Francesco Spiera, whom they usually called ‘Francis Spira’. Spiera, an Italian lawyer, recanted his Protestant beliefs in 1548, then he despaired and died, convinced of his own damnation. For Protestants during the mid sixteenth-century persecutions, the moral of the tale was urgent and could not have been clearer: recant and you will meet with God’s retribution – in agony, like Spiera.

Spiera’s story was part of the ‘anti-Nicodemite’ propaganda campaign aimed at faint hearts who would not stand up and be counted. Contemporaries called them ‘Nicodemites’ after Nicodemus in the Gospels, who came to Christ by night. This theme was begun by Protestants in the 1540s and 1550s, but was later taken up by Catholics, when they too faced persecution. One particular quotation from Scripture was hammered home relentlessly: ‘The one who disowns me … I will disown’. Recantation was that sin against the Holy Ghost for which there was no forgiveness. In this European polemic, Spiera acquired a totemic significance.

John Bossy’s recent book, Peace in the Post-Reformation, should, I think, finally lay to rest Thomas Hardy’s notion that ‘War makes rattling good history; but peace is poor reading.’ In it he suggests that the ‘moral tradition’ was a feature of traditional religion, transformed by the religious and social changes taking place between about 1500 and 1700, and eroded by a current of civility. Furthermore, Bossy argues that in England even the godly sought the moral tradition and attempted to make peace with their neighbours. In this article, I will trace peace-making between the godly and their Catholic neighbours in the North of England in the early seventeenth century. In doing so, I will suggest some alternatives to Bossy’s argument: that the language of civility was exploited by the godly to make peace on their terms; that it was changing in this period; and that it appropriated rather than ran directly against the moral tradition.

In June 1637, Anthony Sparrow and Sylvester Adams, two Cambridge scholars, preached in Great St. Mary’s Church on the subject of confessing sins. Their sermons caused such a scandal that a deeply divided vice-chancellor’s court had to act. These sermons have not gone unnoticed by historians, but they have not been contextualized in a way that makes complete sense both of the sermons and of their reception. Sparrow’s sermon, published shortly after it was delivered, is the better-known of the two, but not the more radical. Although no complete text of Adams’s sermon survives, there are manuscript sources that make it possible to reconstruct the gist of it and to prove that it made novel claims concerning the necessity of confession for salvation. Moreover, in defending Adams his supporters challenged the sources of doctrinal authority in the English Church in unprecedented ways.

In Ugborough, Devonshire, in the mid-1640s, the young son of Emmanuel Sharp, the former Royalist rector of Bathealston, Somerset, joined a group of children at a bonfire. As people gathered to hear news of another battle won by Parliament, a local tailor spotted one child and denounced him as a ‘priest’s bastard’. Mrs Sharp flew to the defence of her son’s legitimacy and her own marital honour. Heavily pregnant, Mrs Sharp miscarried as a result of the commotion. The involuntary abortion was allegedly acclaimed by local Puritans, who purportedly celebrated ‘[t]hat ye calf was dead, & if ye cow had died also they would have made a Bonfire… [up] to Heaven’.

The aim of this paper is to account for the busyness of the ecclesiastical courts in England during the first half of the eighteenth century, and to suggest why, apart from matters of strictly ecclesiastical business, and defamation, matrimonial and probate causes, their business declined during the second half of the century.

The ecclesiastical courts in the first part of the century were a popular part of the lowest level of judicial activity in England. That the churchwardens of St Mary’s Beverley paid the ringers 2s. 6d in 1721 for ringing when ‘the Spiritual Court Men came’ suggests the arrival of the consistory court to conduct business in a town was an occasion of note. Archdeacons’ and consistory courts show evidence of considerable activity in almost every diocese in which research has been undertaken about eighteenth-century church life. The diocese of Ely seems to be the exception, where the evidence for much activity in the courts peters out in 1704.