The Lollards

Catriona Troth explores some roots of Quakerism

A memorial stands on the hill overlooking the Buckinghamshire market town of Amersham. It marks the spot where, at two separate times in the early sixteenth century, seven men and women were burnt at the stake for heresy.

The seven were Lollards and part of a growing group across Europe who wanted to be able to read the Bible for themselves, in their own language, without a priest as intermediary. Since 2001 their lives and deaths have been commemorated through a community play put on at the behest of the Amersham Museum.

Amersham folk in the early sixteenth century clearly had a strong desire to think for themselves. At that time the area was at the centre of ‘Lollardy’ and, for a while, the relatively tolerant bishop Smith of Lincoln seems to have turned a blind eye to their conventicles (as their gatherings were known). At some point, however, they must have drawn too much attention to themselves.

In 1511 there was a crackdown, during which at least sixty people were arrested and penalised. The worst punishments were reserved for William Tylesworth, who was burnt at the stake, and his daughter, Joan Clark, who was branded and forced to light her father’s pyre. Even this was not enough to suppress the movement in the area.

Ten years later, a less lenient bishop, Longland, arrived in Amersham to try another group, which included several of those who had recanted a decade earlier. This time five more, including a women, Joan Norman, were sentenced to burn at the stake.

I had studied at little about the Lollards at school, but my knowledge was limited to their struggle to be allowed to read the Bible in English. It was only when I attended a performance of the community play, five years ago, that I began to realise the extent to which Lollard ideas can be seen as the forebears of some espoused by Quakers a century later. The Lollards, for example, considered all people to be ‘men of God’, they encouraged women to play a strong part in spreading their word, and they saw no need for a priest to intervene between them and their God.

The community play

The community play is a remarkable thing, involving a company of over a hundred adults, students and child-ren. Like the Passion Plays at York Minster or Coventry Cathedral, it is a promenade performance, with the action moving between four stages and the audience following on foot. But it is what happens around the four scripted scenes that plunges the audience into the sixteenth century and, from the moment they enter the church, makes the experience unforgettable.

The script was originally devised in 2001 by director Stan Pretty with a small group of local writers, and remains largely unchanged. Pretty understood that the real drama lay in the impact the events would have had on a small market town at the time. The way to tell that story, he felt, was to recreate their community – something which, as I discovered, is done from scratch for each new set of performances.

Six months before the first performance the company – many of whom had never acted before – began by researching life in Amersham in the sixteenth century; from that we developed characters and storylines. We had to decide our names, our trades, where we lived, how we spent our days and, most importantly, what we thought of the Lollards who were causing trouble in the town. Did we support them, openly or secretly? Or did we see them as dangerous heretics who must be stopped?

This was so that when the audience enters the church they find themselves not in a makeshift theatre but in the midst of a functioning sixteenth century town on market day, with the townsfolk going about their business and paying them no heed.

As the play commences and the scripted scenes are played out the townspeople continue to mingle with the audience and offer reaction and commentary on what is happening. A procession of people carry faggots to the site of the burning (an act for which they are awarded forty days off purgatory). A red carpet is rolled out for the bishop and archdeacon, and so on.

Three central women

The characters in the scripted play I find most fascinating are the three central women. Emmy Tylesworth was wife of the first martyr to burn and was described affectionately by her husband as ‘a true known man’ (a recognised dissenter). She supports him even when her heart is breaking. Sarah Scrivenor, wife of one of Tylesworth’s protégés and mother of his four young children,  knowing that the growing Protestant movement in Europe must soon bring religious freedom, begs her husband to recant and, when he refuses, flings the words at him: ‘Have your martyrdom, John Scrivenor – it will be the only selfish thing you have ever done!’ Finally, Joan Norman, who mocks the bishop’s ecclesiastical court, plays word games with the bishop himself and is dragged away still vowing to say her prayers in English to her dying breath.

The play can have a profound effect on those who take part. One of the hardest parts, for me, was making the switch from one of the darkest moments of the play – the branding of Joan Clark, a scene that often left me close to tears – to the burst of energy and high spirits required, moments later, for the start of the Charter Fair. That Fair scene is so necessary, for audience and actors, as it represents an interlude of joy and fun in what would otherwise be an unremittingly grim story. But the shift in mood was hard to deliver.

A tragic timelessness

David Cuffley, one of the actors who played John Scrivenor, told me how, between two performances, he took a walk through some nearby fields and came across the site of a bonfire. A big circle of ground was completely blackened, and there was ash beneath his feet. He said: ‘It was a very strange feeling. I went and stood in the middle of the circle. It struck me then, with such force, what these people had been willing to endure for what they believed.’

These men and women died not because they went to war, or took up arms against anyone else, but because they were willing to give up their lives rather than disavow their beliefs. They were murdered by a state that was terrified of the threat posed to them by a freethinking populace.

Just over a century later Quakers in this area – including William Penn, Isaac Penington and Thomas Ellwood – risked imprisonment and the loss of their property for worshipping in the way they wanted. Edward Perrott, the Friend who bequeathed Amersham Quakers the beautiful meadow that would serve as their burial ground, had his own funeral disrupted by a justice of the peace, who sent the mourners off to jail in Aylesbury and dumped his coffin in the middle of the High Street. Thankfully, though, those early Quakers no longer risked the terrible death faced by the Lollards.

As terrible events unfold in other parts of the world this community play, which commemorates events that took place 500 years ago, seems to acquire a tragic timeliness.

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