Sacred Space in Laudian England

Graham Parry

The concept of sacred space was elaborated and refined to an unusual degree in the decades before the Civil War, in the time of the Laudian ascendancy in the Church. With the rise of the High Church move- ment, associated in its early stages with bishops Lancelot Andrewes, Richard Neile and William Laud (who became Archbishop of Canter- bury in 1633), a pervasive change occurred in attitudes towards the places of worship throughout the country. In Elizabethan times, the parish church was regarded, broadly speaking, as a utilitarian place. It was where the people came together to worship God, where preaching and prayer took place regularly, where baptisms were performed, and where, several times a year, the sacrament of Holy Communion was administered. It was fitting that the church should be maintained in decent order, that is should be ‘well adorned, comely and clean kept’, as the ‘Homily for repairing and keeping clean, and comely adorning of Churches’ urged on the parishioners. But this same homily, first published in 1563, and reprinted throughout Elizabeth’s reign, gives several glimpses of the actual state of affairs prevailing in many places, where neglect and disarray were more common than decent order. ‘It is a sin and shame to see so many churches so ruinous, and so foully decayed, almost in every corner’. This widespread neglect was what caused this homily to be issued, to counteract the broad indifference to the condition of the fabric and the role of the church as the house of worship. ‘Do ye your parts, good people, to keep your churches comely and clean; suffer them not to be defiled with rain and weather, with dung of doves and owls, stares and choughs, and other filthiness, as it is foul and lamentable to behold in many places of this country. It is the house of prayer, not the house of talking, of walking, of brawl- ing, of minstrelsy, of hawks, of dogs’.1 The picture here painted of neglect and casual behaviour proba- bly presents an exaggerated scene in order to emphasise the need for

1 Certain Sermons or Homilies appointed to be read in Churches, Oxford, 1840, 244–45. 124 graham parry improvement, but there must be some truth in it. Improvement began to take a purposeful hold in the later 1610s, as a more decorous form of worship began to spread through the ecclesiastical system, promoted particularly by the prelates mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. The most significant figure for our theme was Lancelot Andrewes, for it was his example that set the tone for a more reverential mode of worship and a more elevated respect for the setting of the services of the Church. Widely admired by contemporaries for his piety as well as his learning, and for his authority in spiritual matters, he would have been a prime candidate for sainthood, had the Church of Eng- land ever decided to create its own Protestant saints. His explorations in the records of the early Church and in the writings of the Church Fathers, allied to his own natural temperament, led him to aspire to an exceptional holiness of life, and gave him a heightened reverence for the places dedicated to the service of God. Andrewes’s sensitive attitudes towards the church, the reverence that it merited, and the solemn conduct of services were reinforced by the writings of Richard Hooker, particularly the fifth book of The Lawes of Ecclesiastical Polity. There Hooker had defended the use of ceremonies in worship and fine furnishings in churches against the hostility of the Puritan movement in late Elizabethan England. Puritan zeal reached such a height that the very need for churches was called into question, as Hooker reminded his readers. They were part of the old supersti- tious and ritualistic world that should have been swept away by the Reformation. God could be worshipped anywhere by the sincere and contrite soul; the setting was of no consequence, and churches car- ried with them the lingering odour of popery. Hooker resolutely and eloquently defended the rites of the Church of England, and dilated on the benefits brought by traditional forms of worship, emphasising its continuity from Old Testament times, through the age of the early Church, and into the long centuries of the Catholic Church. ‘The very majesty and holyness of the place where God is worshipped, hath in regard of us great value, force and efficacy, for that it serveth asa sensible help to stir up devotion, and in that respect, no doubt, bet- tereth even our holiest and best actions in this kind’. He reminded his readers that sacred space was essential to right worship, and that space must be formally created and honoured by decorous furnishings and reverential behaviour. The custom of consecration, now fallen into disuse, should be revived, for ‘we know no reason wherefore Churches should be the worse, if at the first erecting of them, at the making of