Walsham's aim is to chart the changing relationship between religion and the landscape in the first two centuries of Protestantism, tracing a continuous tension between church teaching and popular belief. Nevertheless, fired with examples from the Old Testament about the need to cast down idols, the English reformers set about making the land fit for their purified religion. An attempt to level Stonehenge was soon abandoned. These too had to be overthrown, but they were so numerous, especially in the remote Celtic regions, that many were left alone.
LOST RUINS ASCETIC LIFESTYLE FULL
The land was full of idols that needed to be destroyed, among them the remains of paganism – standing stones and barrows that still retained a mysterious power. Those who worshipped at the old centres of pilgrimage, or visited hermitages, holy wells, sacred trees or wayside crosses were committing idolatry according to the reformed faith.
Salvation depended on the message of the scriptures, and on preaching and prayer. Sites associated with the Celtic saints who first spread the faith though the land, sites where Christians had been martyred by Romans, Saxons or Danes, or where people had witnessed miracles or apparitions – all such locations were now devalued by the rigorous Calvinism of the reformed religion. I f we think about the effects of the reformation on the landscape of Britain, we're most likely to conjure up images of ruined abbeys, but the monasteries were only the most prominent casualties of the reforming zeal that swept through the country in the 16th century, as the change in religion aroused a fierce passion to eliminate what Protestants saw as the corrupt and superstitious practices of the Roman Catholic church.Īlexandra Walsham's book reveals the ways in which the whole countryside had to be purged of the traces of false devotion, for a thousand years of Christianity had turned Britain into a holy isle dense with sacred places.