Iconoclasm -

1644  -  William Dowsing comes to Shelford

    On March 12 1644, William Dowsing visited Great Shelford church. We don’t know if he was alone, but he often travelled with his deputies, or accompanied by soldiers. He was carrying a commission to inspect the church, and to determine whether Shelford church was displaying any “Monuments of Superstition and Idolatry”. These were serious times, with the country gripped by two violently opposed conceptions of how God should be worshipped, and a civil war raging across the country. Shelford was as involved as the rest of the country.

The war between Anglican and Puritan and the English Civil War

    This war of two religions: the Church of England and the Puritan faith had, of course, been raging for over 100 years, since the time of Henry VIII. Henry VIII’s Reformation had, in large measure, been a political event, with the king throwing off the control of the Pope. But it opened the way for the English Puritans to start their campaign against popish practices. Churches had successively been cleansed of “idolatrous images”, under Henry VIII and Edward VI. Or desecrated – your view of this would depend which side you were on. On each successive occasion the definition of an idolatrous image was expanded to cover more and more of the medieval apparatus of worship.

   But for all that, there had been reverses in the forward movement of the Puritans. When Mary became queen in 1553, England became once more a Roman Catholic country. On her death, we reverted to Protestantism, a Protestantism that was hotter - more extreme - than ever. In 1625, when Charles I became King he favoured a High Church style of worship, and from 1638, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Laud, set about enforcing an Anglican style of religion nicknamed “bells and smells” - bells rung at appropriate times during the service, and smells as in incense. This tended towards Roman Catholicism, and soon caused uproar.  

    In spite of so much change and religious disagreement, this was the first time that open fighting broke out. Now - under Charles I - England was in the throes of a Civil War.

    The King fled London, and set up his base at Oxford. The country was divided between the King and Parliament, with the Puritans on the side of Parliament, Anglicans with the King. Fighting began in August 1642, and was more or less over by summer 1646, but at the time that Dowsing came to Shelford, they were in the thick of it, with no notion of what would be the outcome. It was a time of fear. East Anglia was a Parliamentarian stronghold, with Cambridge the headquarters of the Eastern Association with its Parliamentarian army.  

William Dowsing and his Mission

    Dowsing was an East Anglian farmer. He was a Puritan with very strong convictions. He had been appointed “commissioner for removing the monuments of idolatry and superstition” for Suffolk and Cambridgeshire. It was already six months since churchwardens had been ordered to clear their churches. But evidently, even if they had done something to comply, they had left a lot untouched. Over the course of about 10 months Dowsing conducted a series of sweeps of the churches here and in Suffolk, inspecting each and leaving instructions for work to be done. Great Shelford was the first church on his route for March 12 1643 (1644 by our calendar -  at this time the old year only changed to the new on 25 March). Afterwards he would go on to Little Shelford, Stapleford, Hauxton, Harston and beyond. Each church was subjected to the same orders: no crucifixes and crosses, no saints or Blessed Virgin Mary, no inscriptions enjoining you to pray for the soul, no references to purgatory. All this was to be destroyed. The chancel was no longer to be a holy place, separated from the rest of the church, so all those things which emphasized its holiness were to be removed: the steps up to the chancel were to be levelled; the altar rails which, so recently, Archbishop Laud had insisted be reinstalled, were to be pulled down; and fixed altars – the solid stone constructions with consecration crosses marked on them – were to be taken down.

These objects which were to be destroyed were not necessarily – indeed probably weren’t – medieval ones, but ones that had been put up during Laud’s stint as Archbishop. But it is very difficult to tell exactly what was destroyed, and indeed what wasn’t.

    If you like visiting churches, as I do, you will see that there are traces everywhere of this century of destruction, and in the pictures on this page, you can see the sort of thing I am talking about. But what is surprising is that you will often find things which simply shouldn’t be there – things which there is no doubt should have been destroyed for their “idolatrous” nature. Everyone speculates why. It varies according to the church. Sometimes, the villagers decided they were going to save the images. Indeed, every now and then, a medieval artefact is discovered, plastered behind a wall, buried under the pavement, or hidden away in some barn. Sometimes, the church seems not to have been inspected, or not reinspected to make sure the instructions had been followed. What out-and-out opposition may not achieve, procrastination or outright incompetence may. But we in Cambridgeshire were right in the spotlight. Apart from us East Anglians, no-one else was subjected to a visitation like Dowsing’s.  

Why did they object to these images?

    The Puritan view of religion was not based on mystery and metaphor, like the Roman Catholic faith. What the Catholic church saw as beauty in the service of godliness – the light flowing through stained glass, highly-coloured paintings of saints, painted walls, the smell of incense – they saw as inconvenient distractions. Nor did they understand the human aspects of the Catholic religion – praying to the Virgin Mary or the saints in time of trouble, or visiting the church to see St Christopher before you set off on a journey. So churches became the minimalist spaces we are more used to today – white walls, plain glass in many windows (though the Victorians would put in much new stained glass), no saints or angels. For them, religion was not about mystery and the sacrament, it was about preaching – hearing the word of God. Theirs was a rational religion, or so they would have said, though in reality it had as much emotion in it as Catholicism. But it was a hard emotion, which seemed to combine both deep-seated feelings of unworthiness with extraordinary arrogance.

Dowsing’s Orders

    The two churchwardens at Great Shelford were Edward Fuller and Oliver Carter; the parish constables were William Dallison and Avery Howling. They were ordered to carry out Dowsing’s instructions.

    Churches were generally divided between the Rector (the person or body who receives the tithes) who was responsible for the chancel, and the congregation who maintained the nave. As Rector, Jesus College was ordered to level the steps in the chancel, and to remove a crucifix and 34 superstitious pictures there. In the village’s part of the church – the nave, and possibly outside too - Dowsing found 58 pictures, two crucifixes, 2 superstitious inscriptions, and 12 cherubim to object to.

    The constables were left to carry out orders, but we simply don’t know what they did. All we know is what the church is like now. Another of history’s mysteries…