Eamon Duffy > Quotes

“For townsmen and countrymen alike, the rhythms of the liturgy on the eve of the Reformation remained the rhythms of life itself.”
― Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580

“Some priests had led their people against the new religion, and had been hanged in their chasubles for their pains, and still the altars had come down, the royal arms replaced the Rood, the beloved images been axed and burned. Some priests, probably more than we are likely to be able to count, refused to serve the new order, and moved away – to secular life, to a diminished role as a schoolmaster or a chaplain in a traditionalist and ultimately recusant household, to exile abroad. But for a man like Trychay there was nowhere to be except with the people he had baptized, shriven, married, and buried for two generations.”
― Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580