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Settling the London Tithe Debates Kent Academic Repository Full text document (pdf) Citation for published version Morrison, Stuart (2018) Print, Debate and the Public Sphere in the London Tithes Cause, c.1600-1650. Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) thesis, University of Kent,. DOI Link to record in KAR http://kar.kent.ac.uk/68978/ Document Version Publisher pdf Copyright & reuse Content in the Kent Academic Repository is made available for research purposes. Unless otherwise stated all content is protected by copyright and in the absence of an open licence (eg Creative Commons), permissions for further reuse of content should be sought from the publisher, author or other copyright holder. Versions of research The version in the Kent Academic Repository may differ from the final published version. Users are advised to check http://kar.kent.ac.uk for the status of the paper. Users should always cite the published version of record. Enquiries For any further enquiries regarding the licence status of this document, please contact: [email protected] If you believe this document infringes copyright then please contact the KAR admin team with the take-down information provided at http://kar.kent.ac.uk/contact.html PRINT, DEBATE AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE IN THE LONDON TITHES CAUSE, C.1600-1650 For Books are not absolutely dead things, but doe contain a potencie of life in them to be as active as the soule was whose progeny they are John Milton, Areopagitica (London: [s. n.], 1644), p. 4. Presented to the Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies at the University of Kent, in fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Word Count: 87,290 Stuart Morrison CONTENTS Abstract ................................................................................................................................................... ii Acknowledgements .............................................................................................................................iv Introduction ........................................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1: The Jacobean Defence of Jure Divino Tithes ....................................................... 28 James I, Archbishop Bancroft, and the Hampton Court Conference ................................ 33 George Carleton and the Growth of Bancroft’s ‘Publishing Circle’ ................................... 43 Legal History, Antiquarianism and Support for the Tithe Cause ........................................ 55 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................... 64 Chapter 2: John Selden, Censorship and Intertextuality ........................................................ 67 John Selden and The Historie of Tithes ........................................................................................ 72 The Organised Response to Selden’s Historie ......................................................................... 89 William Swaddon and his ‘Treatise of Tithes’ ....................................................................... 107 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................. 113 Chapter 3: Settling the London Tithe Debates ....................................................................... 116 Previous Assessments of the Sources .................................................................................... 121 New analysis of the tithe sources ............................................................................................ 130 City, court and clergy dynamics .............................................................................................. 148 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................. 166 Chapter 4: Tithes and the Public Sphere in 1640s London ................................................. 169 Public Opinion and the Publication of Opinion .................................................................. 176 The Politics of the Parish and the Parochial Public Sphere ............................................... 194 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................. 210 Conclusion ......................................................................................................................................... 213 Appendix ............................................................................................................................................ 219 Bibliography...................................................................................................................................... 232 i ABSTRACT The debates over tithe payments in early modern London have been understudied as well as largely misunderstood and misdescribed in histories of the early modern period; it has been suggested that the tithe debates ‘[do] not seem to have been of very great interest or importance’, and some of the extant material concerning the tithe debates has been described as having ‘no information likely to be of general interest’.1 This has led Edith Bershadsky to suggest that ‘the majority of historians’ concerned with early modern history have ‘regarded London tithes as an insignificant question’.2 In this thesis I challenge these misconceptions by providing a detailed study of the London tithes cause, with a particular focus on ideas of print, debate and the public sphere. The majority of the historiography on early modern tithes has focused on the legal ambiguity surrounding the clerical tax, and only recently – and still rather sporadically – have thoughts turned to their wider social, political and religious significance. Here I adopt an interdisciplinary approach to the study of the tithe debates and focus particularly on the patterns of language and rhetoric employed by the disputants in printed and manuscript sources, both ‘literary’ and ‘non-literary’. By focusing on the City of London over a period of 50 years in this thesis, and by assessing the source material from both quantitative and qualitative angles, I provide a more thoroughgoing narrative of continuity and change in the course of the tithe disputes – both in terms of the theoretical discussion of their legality and the practical aspect of their enforcement. In Chapter 1 I examine the proliferation of printed works defending the divine right to tithes in the early years of James I’s reign and suggest that there was a concerted effort by James and his Archbishop, Richard Bancroft, to foster a publishing circle of lay and clerical individuals to defend the Church’s right to tithes. Chapter 2 focuses on perhaps the single-most influential 1 William Page (ed.), The Victoria County History of London (London: Constable, 1909), i, 326; T. C. Dale, The Inhabitants of London in 1638: Edited from MS. 272 in the Lambeth Palace Library (London: Society of Genealogists, 1931), pp. iv- v. 2 Edith Bershadksy, ‘Politics, Erudition and Ecclesiology: John Selden’s “Historie of Tithes” and its Contexts and Ramifications’ (Unpublished PhD Thesis: The Johns Hopkins University, 1994), p. 56, n. 2. ii text in the early modern tithe debates – John Selden’s The Historie of Tithes (1618). In this chapter I am particularly concerned with ideas of intertextuality and censorship, and I contextualise Selden’s work by analysing it next to works – some of which were state-sponsored – written to refute Selden’s claims. Chapter 3 transitions to a consideration of the more practical aspects of the tithe disputes in London and is concerned with the clerical attempt to improve the value of their livings through tithes in the 1630s. Here ministers of an array of styles of churchmanship united to petition Charles I, but met resistance in the form of the civic authorities. In this chapter I engage with archival material held at Lambeth Palace and correct a number of misconceptions that have been passed down through the historiography of the tithe debates, and I explore how the lay and clerical corporate bodies interacted with one another. In Chapter 4 I focus on the turbulence of the 1640s and examine how the tithe debates were conducted in printed pamphlets as well as in the intra-mural parochial vestries. Here we see how the non-payment of tithes becomes linked with ideas of liberty of conscience and religious toleration in the conforming literature, and how conforming lay persons attempted to effect change at a parochial level through the mechanisms available to them. Throughout the thesis, then, I argue: that the tithe debates were near universal in their impact upon various aspects of early modern life; that the discussion of tithes was considered vitally important both locally and nationally; that a great deal of effort and time was put into the publication of arguments for and against the system of tithes; and that there existed a public sphere in London in which the issue of tithes was hotly debated, both in literature and in ‘real life’. More broadly, this thesis shows that in focusing on the issue of tithes we are able to see how individuals and institutions interacted and communicated over a fiercely-debated topic in the early modern period, and how these politically engaged people employed their linguistic and rhetorical skills to involve themselves
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