When England Was Catholic
By Patrick Martin
ive hundred years ago, a visitor to an English village would have stepped
into a devout Catholic world. This, of course, would have been before King Henry VIII broke with Rome and the subsequent Protestant Reformation abruptly cut Catholic England off from her thousand year old root. After that, a five century-long amnesia would settle over what was once ‘Our Lady’s Dowry’.
What was England like before the Reformation? Reformers have long claimed that the reformation arose from a discontented people kept deliberately ignorant of their faith. Recently, historians have begun to dismantle this myth so deeply ingrained in the English psyche, and a surprising picture of the Faith of ordinary English people is beginning to emerge.
Here, Patrick Martin, an historian who teaches at Maryvale Institute in Birmingham, England takes us on a visit to this distant time, when England
was Catholic.
F
In the years before the Protestant Reformation, huge sums of money were raised to rebuild, enlarge and beautify parish churches. In England today, large medieval churches can be found even in some of the smallest villages or settlements.
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