Looking back a hundred years after the death of Constantine the historian Sozomen wrote:

He contrasted this with Constantine’s success in repressing the sects. Sozomen is clearly right as far as he goes. Antiheresy laws gave powers to bishops they did not have before. He goes on:

We shall look more closely at this change.

The earliest Christian monasticism falls within the definition of voluntary religious societies since it was not the product of institutional reform in the Church directed by bishops or councils. The founders of fourth-century Egyptian monasticism undertook their task voluntarily and without episcopal constraint. As the founders of voluntary and at first unofficial associations, they deserve our attention. I shall examine some aspects of the sources for the life of one, Pachomios of Tabennesi (c.292–346).

‘The medieval drive to association’. That phrase comes from a monograph by Susan Reynolds. It is to be found in a chapter on guilds and confraternities. And it is representative of the quasi-biological vocabulary to which historians of those institutions seem especially prone. ‘How appropriate is this talk of drives? What, in this context, is the force of ‘medieval’? My ultimate purpose is to address those questions from a Byzantine perspective; to ask in effect whether evidence of confraternities from the eastern Roman empire between approximately 400 and the Ottoman conquest will sustain talk of a Byzantine ‘drive to association’. The enquiry is, however, worth a preliminary approach on a broader front. This is partly because the historiography of European confraternities shapes the questions that must be put to the Byzantine sources. It is also because, unusually, a Byzantine perspective may illuminate problems arising from the western material. Finally it is because the comparative history of confraternities may, by implication, have a modest contribution to make to the larger question of the differences between eastern and western Christianity. Much energy has been expended on accounting for the ‘parting of the ways’ - less, perhaps, on measuring the distance between them.

It is always dangerous to proclaim novelty in religious matters, and seldom more so than in relation to the changes of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. In particular the assertions of contemporary observers, bishops, chroniclers and others, that new doctrines were being disseminated or new forms of behaviour detected among the people (a word which, like them, I use in a strict sense to mean the unlettered and the unprivileged, and not simply as a synonym for laity) were usually false, and almost always profoundly misleading. But the assertions themselves are new. They are not without precedent, of course: no epoch of the Christian era has been so bereft of the blessings of civilisation as to be entirely unable to produce episcopal denunciations of novelty. But granted the dangers inherent in all such pronouncements it does seem to me that we encounter in these centuries, for the first time since late antiquity, a rising and, as it turned out, continuous chorus of anxiety that the people were acting collectively for religious purposes if not necessarily outside the church, at any rate without its initiation or approval. In that sense it is appropriate to maintain that the modern history of voluntary religious associations, at least as a source of alarm and despondency to those in positions of authority, begins here. Obviously, therefore, it must be a central preoccupation of this paper, though I hope not the only one, to consider to what extent the source of the anxiety lay in the eye of the clerical beholder rather than in the external popular reality, as well as to wonder in either case what needs gave rise to it, and what purpose it served.

The confraternities of late-medieval Europe have been seen as associations which were in some ways almost independent of the Church, and drew their special dynamism from the fact that the parish was supposedly in decline and had ceased to provide an adequate religious service to the lay community. However true this may have been north of the Alps, the problem when this proposition is applied to southern Europe, and particularly Italy, is that very little is known about the late-medieval parish to ascertain whether confraternities were really syphoning off the adherence of the local inhabitants. So often our impressions about the state of the Italian church derive from the sporadic visitations of local bishops or the ribald stories of a Boccaccio or Franco Sacchetti, later repeated and taken almost at face value by such influential writers as Burkhardt. But we may also be in danger of seeing late-medieval religion filtered through sixteenth-century eyes and taking for granted the correctness of the criticisms of the Council of Trent or for that matter following Luther’s gripes that confraternities had become no more than beer-drinking clubs.

Perhaps the most striking features of the history of Renaissance Venice are its highly commercialised economy and its precocious sense of secular state sovereignty. These characteristics owed much to the city’s independence of and isolation from rural and seigneurial influences in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. However, the high level of business activity and the confident awareness of statehood could also be related to the weakness of ecclesiastical influence in economic and political affairs. This was the case long before the spectacular conflict of 1606 when Venice was placed under the Interdict. The location of the Cathedral had always been a telling symbol of the place of the Church in Venetian life. It stood at San Pietro di Castello in an isolated area of the city. It is easy to overlook the fact that the centre of religious life, Saint Mark’s, was the Doge’s private chapel: a constant reminder of the intimate relationship between religious and political power, a material manifestation of the divine favour attached to Venice’s wealth and authority, both of which were unmistakably worldly.

While most scholars agree that fraternities played a major role in the religious and social experiences of late medieval folk in town and village, little has been said about the characteristics which allowed these voluntary associations to fulfil so major a role. Were religious fraternities cherished as venues for more rigorous personal participation in which lay men and women could shoulder duties and tasks beyond those demanded by the Church, or did they act as agents for expression of a vernacular piety which was somewhat removed from Latin liturgy and sacramental ritual? In this paper I shall examine a sub-group of fraternities, those dedicated to Corpus Christi, and through their response to an addition to the calendar shall attempt to assess the aims and means of spiritual expression offered by such groupings.

The evidence given us by John Foxe in his Book of Martyrs provides more information about the social and theological standing of Lollards than we know about many later religious dissidents. Recent work has added to our knowledge. Geoffrey Dickens and Claire Cross have reconsidered the place of the Lollards in the development of the English Reformation, especially in theological matters. John Thomson drew our attention to the continuity shown in some areas. Claire Cross and Margaret Aston showed the importance of women Lollards. J.F. Davis has supported the idea of a continuous movement, and stressed the involvement of the remaining Lollard brotherhoods in the Reformation proper. Margaret Aston saw the reformers using Lollard texts to settle the Reformation into a tradition. And John Fines found one group of Lollards definitely not of a low or ‘middling sort’. But despite this attention on the part of historians, we still know little of the people labelled Lollards. How did they react to developments locally and nationally? Did they assimilate into their local communities despite their beliefs? What social and economic standing did they have? Was contemporary abuse, which dismissed them as ‘lowly sorts’, justified?

It is now a truism to say that the European Reformation of the sixteenth century brought into being a religion of the word. It arose in literate and learned debate; it was fomented by the printing of written propaganda; it defined itself according to written formulae, including creeds, confessions, and catechisms. It is perhaps almost as generally accepted, and certainly as true, that the ‘Word’ as envisaged by the Reformers was a doctrine based on reasoning and logic, logically expressed, and meant to be understood in an intellectually coherent way. This trait in the aims of the Reformers emerged most obviously when they set about writing catechisms and pieces of pastoral instruction. In his Formula Missae seu Communìonis of 1523, Luther required that

The history of Scottish protestantism as a clandestine, underground movement can be traced, albeit unevenly, over three decades from parliament’s early ban on Lutheran literature in 1525 to the protestant victory of 1560 when, in disregard of the wishes of its absent queen then resident in France, parliament finally proscribed the Latin mass and the whole apparatus of papal jurisdiction in Scotland and adopted instead a protestant Confession of Faith. Out of a loosely-defined body of beliefs in the 1530s, ranging from a profound dissatisfaction at ecclesiastical abuse (shared by those who remained Catholic), to a recognition of the need for a reformation in doctrine (less readily conceded by orthodox Catholics), Scottish protestantism by the 15 50s had developed a cellular organisation, enabling it to survive periodic persecution. Early protestants, themselves brought up within the Catholic church as baptised and communicating members, by the 1550s had taken the agonising and momentous step of separating themselves from the fellowship of the established church by forming their own separate communities of believers, worshipping in secret and centred on the privy kirks which arose in the years immediately preceding the Reformation.

My motives in choosing this subject are: to respond to the invitation of our chairman; to expound the conviction that the persistence of French Catholicism through the crises of the Reformation was largely the result of the voluntary association of French Catholics; and to try to discover whether there was anything in Catholic theological or pastoral teaching of the period which might have given these associations a theoretical perspective, or grounded them in some kind of associative conception of the Church. I add that, despite the very considerable importance of the subject, one might even claim its decisive importance for the outcome of the wars of religion in Europe as a whole, it has (with some shining exceptions) not received very much attention from historians, and that in England essential texts and studies are hard to come by.

The doctrine and membership of the Family of Love in England remain something of a mystery, despite extensive recent work. Why should such an apparently small group have been the specific subject of a royal proclamation? Between June 1575 and November 1580 the sect was referred to a dozen times in Privy Council correspondence, and was clearly the object of considerable anxiety. The Bishops of London, Norwich, Exeter, Ely, Winchester, Lincoln, Salisbury and Worcester were all instructed to conduct investigations. Puritan writers like John Rogers and William Wilkinson published books attacking the sect. The reasons for such sustained persecution over so short a period are hard to establish. One fact which must have contributed to the panic was that there were Familists in the Queen’s guard, close to the centre of the political nation. Moreover, reports of the sect in each of the dioceses listed above had presumably been received. It is likely that the Family of Love was much larger than the surviving evidence reveals. Familism, as the proclamation suggests, was also thought to involve the threat of social revolution. In a series of letters which Rogers later published, one Familist writer stated that

and quoted Scripture to emphasize the point: ‘The Lorde preferueth the simple.’ Views like this were dangerously disrespectful, and implied social insubordination.

The inside cover of the Elizabethan register of St John’s, Ousebridge, York contains the following entry:

The corresponding register of the adjoining parish of All Saints, North Street, where Stoddart became the pluralist rector in March 1594, begins very similarly. These (at least for York) uniquely full registers, supplemented by a set of churchwardens’ accounts from St John’s and the eighty or so wills which can now be traced for the two parishes make it possible to chart the development of a loosely associated group of committed protestants in an area of central York which the arrival of a resident minister stimulated in both a positive and, less predictably, negative way. The story of voluntary religion which emerges is not one of high drama, faction-fighting, or even separation between the godly and the rest, but rather of a sustained and ultimately triumphant attempt of a minority to enrich the spiritual life of their parishes.’

In the midst of the nervous excitement of the autumn of 1640 a Londoner called Roger Quatermayne, a puritan and, as we might say, barrackroom lawyer, was investigated by Archbishop Laud and other Privy Councillors for the offence of holding religious meetings in circumstances which were politically as well as ecclesiastically suspect, since it was thought that Quatermayne and his friends had made treasonable contact with the Scottish army, then at war with its king and in occupation of English soil. Quatermayne, charged with holding a conventicle, asked the archbishop to inform him ‘what a Conventicle is.’ Laud replied: ‘Why, this is a Conventicle, … when ten or twelve or more or lesse meet together to pray, reade, preach, expound, this is a conventicle.’ Laud’s definition may appear uncontroversial, particularly if to his ‘ten or twelve or more or less’ is added the formula of the 1664 Conventicle Act, ‘over and above those of the same Household’. But Quatermayne objected: ‘My Lord, I do not so understand it.’

The ministerial career of the presbyterian divine Oliver Heywood, spanning as it did the years from 1650, when as a young man still technically too young for ordination he first accepted the call of the congregation at Coley chapelry in the parish of Halifax, until 1702 when on 4 May he died there, a patriarchal figure respected and admired by fellow ministers and congregation alike, was considered by contemporaries and has subsequently been thought of by historians as an exemplary study of the pastoral tradition within old Dissent. His career illustrates how one man could lie at the centre of a network of nonconformist divines, patrons and adherents scattered throughout West Yorkshire, South Lancashire and Cheshire and also demonstrates the ambivalent and shifting relationship between Dissent and the Established Church in the latter half of the seventeenth century. These insights into both the internal and external relationships of Dissenters depend mainly on the corpus of Heywood’s writings, not his published works but his autobiographical notes, diaries and memoranda books published just over a century ago, and it is these writings which form the basis of this paper. To begin with though we can turn to the diary of the antiquary Ralph Thoresby who attended Hey wood’s funeral on the 7 May 1702 and recorded the event as follows:

One does not have to believe in free trade to recognize that in religion as well as economic life the erosion of a monopoly can provoke an uprush of private enterprise. It must be more than coincidental that two modern ‘church in danger’ crises which accompanied an erosion of Anglican hegemony - the Revolution of 1688 and the constitutional crises of 1828–32 – were followed by bursts of voluntary activity. Clusters of private societies were formed to fill up part of the space vacated by the state, as it withdrew itself further from active support of the establishment. After the Toleration Act perceptive churchmen felt even more acutely the realities of religious pluralism and competition. Anglicanism was now approaching what looked uncomfortably like a market situation; needing to be promoted; actively sold. Despite the political and social advantages still enjoyed by the Church, the confessional state in its plenitude of power had gone, and Anglican pre-eminence had to be preserved by other means. One means was through voluntary societies. The Society for the Reformation of Manners hoped by private prosecutions to exert some of the social controls once more properly exercised by the Church courts. The S.P.G. sought to encourage Anglican piety in the plantations and the S.P.C.K. to extend it at home by promoting charity schools and disseminating godly tracts. It was a task of voluntarism to reassert, as far as possible, what authority remained to a church which, because it could not effectively coerce, had to persuade.

In April 1799 Francis Wollaston, rector of Chislehurst, published a pamphlet warning his parishioners and the public at large of the activities of certain seditious societies whose purpose was that of disseminating Jacobin principles; ideas already responsible for plunging France into chaos. His enquiries, he announced, had confirmed his worst suspicions:

Wollaston’s message, an ecclesiastical variant of the more general concern to engage in active defence of the established order, received its definitive form the following year at the hands of Bishop Samuel Horsley. In an important passage in his second visitation charge to the clergy of Rochester diocese the bishop referred to the emergence of an ecclesiastical subculture consisting of religious conventicles, Sunday schools and itinerant preachers. In Horsley’s eyes these ecclesiastical excrescences were merely the outward manifestations of a more sinister and worrying development, the appearance of associations designed to defray the costs of the current spate of unauthorized ‘religious’ activity.