Introduction
Henry VIII’s death on 28 January 1547 left the English Crown to his nine-year-old son Edward. The new king inherited a Church already separated from Rome, an authorised English Bible, a royal supremacy enforced through statute and a religious settlement still containing the Mass, bishops, dioceses and much of the sacramental life familiar to Henry’s subjects. Government passed into the hands of councillors headed first by Edward’s maternal uncle Edward Seymour, soon created Duke of Somerset and appointed Lord Protector. The reign that followed lasted only six and a half years, yet it altered the words, objects, ceremonies and spaces through which people experienced public worship more quickly than any earlier reign in this series.
At Loxwood the change of king reached a chapel whose history already stretched back almost a century and a half. St John the Baptist’s chapel remained a dependent place of worship within Wisborough Green parish and the Diocese of Chichester. Its trustees still managed rent-bearing land, its former oratory beside it had recently been adapted as the priest’s house, and the medieval stone altar that had governed the proportions of the original 1404-1407 building still served as the sacred centre of the chapel. The surviving rood structure, nave door, chancel framing and altar-linked timberwork preserved the older theology of the site just as the Crown began to impose a more explicitly Protestant order.
The local evidence makes Edward VI’s reign one of the most revealing chapters in the Loxwood story. A trustee conveyance in 1547 shows the chapel’s property administration continuing under the child king. The first English Book of Common Prayer changed the sound and rhythm of worship in 1549. Bishop George Day of Chichester resisted the order to remove stone altars in 1550 and was deprived of his see. The Loxwood altar was then concealed within the former oratory to save it from destruction. By the end of the reign, the same community had passed from an inherited late-medieval religious world into a Church whose authorised public services, communion rite, furnishings and doctrine had been recast in English.
A Child King Inherits an Unfinished Reformation, 1547
Edward was the son of Henry VIII and Jane Seymour and had been educated for kingship from childhood. His tutors gave him a strong classical education and a religious formation shaped by the evangelical currents already active at his father’s court. He became king immediately on Henry’s death and was crowned at Westminster Abbey on 20 February 1547. The coronation retained the anointing, oath, crown, sceptres and Eucharistic setting through which English kingship had long been presented as a sacred office, while the political reality of a nine-year-old monarch placed executive government in adult hands.
Edward Seymour became Protector and Duke of Somerset. He was the young king’s uncle through Jane Seymour and had risen through military and court service under Henry VIII. The council around him included experienced administrators, soldiers, lawyers and noblemen whose authority depended upon acting in Edward’s name. Royal proclamations, statutes, commissions and injunctions therefore carried the force of a child’s kingship through officials who controlled the machinery of government.
The inheritance was expensive. Henry VIII had left wars with France and Scotland, a debased coinage, heavy fiscal demands and religious property already transferred on a vast scale. Somerset continued the Scottish campaign and won a major victory at Pinkie in September 1547. Garrisons and military operations consumed money, while prices, taxation and the disruption of landholding added to social strain. For western Sussex, war remained close enough to matter through the south coast, Portsmouth, musters, transport and the flow of provisions. The roads from Chichester into the Weald carried orders and news alongside grain, livestock, timber, charcoal, ironwork and other supplies.
The structures that linked Crown and countryside remained familiar. Chichester served as diocesan city and county centre; Arundel Castle dominated the lower Arun valley; Horsham drew market traffic from the northern Weald; Petworth organised a great estate; Amberley and Drungewick represented the temporal lordship of the Bishop of Chichester. Loxwood occupied the wooded country between these centres, close to the diocesan frontier at Alfold. Royal policy entered this landscape through bishops, magistrates, estate officers, parish clergy and written commands, turning decisions made around the council table into changes experienced inside local churches.
Royal Injunctions Enter the Churches, 1547
The religious programme began quickly. Royal visitors carried injunctions through the dioceses during the second half of 1547. Parish clergy were required to teach authorised doctrine, provide access to Scripture in English and remove objects and practices condemned as superstitious. English biblical readings occupied a larger place in the daily offices. The Epistle and Gospel at Mass were to be heard in English. Homilies supplied authorised teaching for clergy who lacked licence or learning to preach their own sermons.
The change reached far beyond books. Religious processions were curtailed, the use of images was increasingly restricted, and the older landscape of candles, shrines and devotional objects came under official scrutiny. Bells remained essential for summoning worshippers, although their liturgical use was regulated. The English Litany, introduced under Henry VIII, became part of a more stationary form of corporate prayer in which congregations knelt within the church while clergy led petitions in the vernacular.
For a worshipper from Loxwood, Wisborough Green, Kirdford, Rudgwick or Billingshurst, such instructions altered familiar actions as well as familiar words. Medieval religion had taught through the senses: the elevation of the Host, the light before an image, the movement of a procession, the sound of a bell, the painted rood, the rhythm of seasonal ceremonies and the physical approach from nave to chancel. Edwardian reform increasingly concentrated attention upon Scripture, authorised preaching and a redefined sacramental order. The same church walls therefore began to frame a different experience of worship.
Chichester Cathedral carried these commands into the diocese under Bishop George Day. Day had been Bishop of Chichester since 1543 and had accepted Henry VIII’s royal supremacy while retaining strong convictions about inherited sacramental doctrine and ceremonial. His position placed him between a reforming royal government and clergy and congregations whose religious expectations had been formed by the older order. At Amberley and Drungewick, episcopal estate administration continued; within churches, the bishop now faced instructions that reached directly into altars, books, images and rites.
The Loxwood Trustees under the Chantries Act, 1547-1548
The property supporting religious foundations came under renewed pressure in the first year of the reign. Parliament’s Chantries Act of 1547 extended the Crown’s claim over colleges, chantries, fraternities, endowed obits and other property devoted to intercessory religion. Commissioners valued endowments, identified priests and recorded income. Lands that had maintained prayers, lights, anniversaries and religious guilds could be transferred to the Crown, while many priests received pensions.
Loxwood occupied a distinct legal position within this national survey. The chapel of St John the Baptist served a living rural congregation under the authority of Wisborough Green and traced its right to worship to Bishop Rede’s perpetual grant of 1404 and Bishop Moleyns’s confirmation of 1447. Its trustees held property for the continuing needs of the chapel and the community. That history placed Loxwood within the broad world of endowed religion targeted by Edwardian policy while preserving a documented pastoral purpose that had always extended beyond prayer for individual founders.
The local records show the trustees actively administering property while the new legislation was being implemented. A surviving copy records a bargain and sale dated 29 August 1547 by John Mulle, Richard Yrlond, John King and William Hole to Henry Strodewyke of Kirdford, a yeoman. The transaction concerned Stevynsfield in Kirdford, a field that had formed part of the property conveyed into the renewed trustee body in 1531. Its boundaries were described against Broke Reden, Motons and Barnefield, placing chapel property within the worked agricultural landscape of Kirdford.
The deed advances the trustee narrative into Edward VI’s reign. John Yrlond had renewed the trusteeship in 1531 as the surviving representative of the line descending from the founder Philip Neldred through Margery Irlond. By 1547 responsibility rested in another group of local men. The four surviving trustees acted through a legal conveyance in the same way earlier guardians had used deeds to keep religious property productive and intelligible. National legislation was transforming the religious economy while the Loxwood trustees continued to work through title, rent and local witnesses.
The surrounding places in the deed matter. Kirdford supplied the field and its purchaser. Wisborough Green remained the mother parish. Drungewick had supplied one of the 1531 trustees. Rudgwick was connected with the Yrlond family. Alfold had earlier supplied a tenant of chapel property and stood immediately beyond the diocesan boundary. The trust therefore belonged to a neighbourhood extending across several parishes, held together by land, kinship and recurring responsibility for the chapel.
The Religious Year is Reordered, 1548
By 1548 the Edwardian programme had reached the Christian year itself. Ceremonies that had given individual seasons their particular texture were removed from authorised worship. Candlemas ceased to centre on blessed candles carried in procession. Ash Wednesday lost the ceremonial use of ashes. Palm Sunday palms and processions were suppressed. Maundy Thursday altar-washing, the Good Friday Easter Sepulchre and the ceremonial creeping to the Cross disappeared from the official order.
These observances had once turned the church building into a sequence of sacred actions through the year. Parishioners moved between doors, font, nave, rood, chancel and altar as the life of Christ was remembered through gesture, image and ceremony. The reforming programme concentrated the calendar more sharply around Scripture, preaching and the sacraments recognised by the new theology. A church could retain its medieval roof, benches and walls while the meaning assigned to its furnishings and spaces changed around them.
At Loxwood the effect can be understood through the surviving fabric. The medieval oratory had been designed as a procession from preparation in the west bay through the nave to the sanctuary and altar in the east. Its later chapel continued the same inherited religious culture through rood, altar, bell, priest and congregation. The Edwardian changes reduced the ceremonial uses for which many such fittings had been created. The building remained useful to the community, while parts of its visual and ritual language moved out of authorised worship.
The bell still mattered. Rural congregations required warning because farms and houses lay beyond sight of the church, and the hours of work had to be coordinated with worship. At Loxwood, where the original foundation had been justified by distance and difficult winter roads, a local bell continued to solve the practical problem recognised in 1404: bringing a dispersed population together at a known time. The sound survived even as the ceremonies to which it called people were changing.
Communion in English and the Approach to the Prayer Book, 1548-1549
Easter 1548 introduced a further change through an English Order of Communion. The traditional Mass still provided the surrounding structure, while communicants now heard an English exhortation, confession and absolution and received both bread and wine. Receiving the chalice as well as the consecrated bread made a doctrinal change immediately visible. The reform therefore entered the hands and voices of the laity, joining theology to a physical action at the communion rail or table.
The move toward a single English liturgy gathered pace under Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury and the leading architect of Edward’s religious settlement. Cranmer and other reforming bishops and theologians sought an order of worship that would teach Protestant doctrine through repeated public use. Printing made such uniformity possible on a national scale. A prescribed book could place the same English sentences before clergy in Chichester Cathedral, Wisborough Green parish church, Kirdford, Alfold and the smaller chapel at Loxwood.
This development carried forward a long thread in the monarch series. English religious instruction had existed beside Latin worship for centuries. Wycliffite manuscripts had challenged control of biblical translation. Reginald Pecock had used English prose to defend the Church. Caxton and his successors had widened the market for printed English. Tyndale, Coverdale and the Great Bible had brought Scripture into a new age of reproducibility. Edward VI’s government now moved the vernacular from biblical reading and instruction into the authorised structure of public worship itself.
The First Book of Common Prayer, 1549
Parliament’s Act of Uniformity established the first Book of Common Prayer for use throughout England in 1549. The book gathered Matins, Evensong, Holy Communion, baptism, marriage, burial, churching and other rites into one authorised English order. Its national introduction at Whitsun made the liturgy itself an instrument of uniform government. Parish priests who had worked from Latin missals, manuals, breviaries and local custom now received a single printed book defining the services expected across the realm.
For ordinary worshippers, the most immediate change was the sound of the service. Familiar biblical phrases, prayers and sacramental words were now heard in English from beginning to end. Matins and Evensong brought substantial passages of Scripture into regular public worship. The Communion service combined inherited forms with a theology increasingly centred on remembrance, thanksgiving and worthy reception. Baptism, marriage, burial and the purification or churching of women were also placed in English.
The last of these rites gave Loxwood an unusually direct continuity with its foundation. Bishop Rede’s grant of 1404 had expressly allowed the purification of women after childbirth because the journey to Wisborough Green was burdensome. The 1549 Prayer Book kept a service for the same pastoral moment and recast it in English. A mother could therefore enter St John the Baptist’s chapel for a rite authorised on the site for nearly a century and a half, while hearing words and theology formed by an entirely new religious settlement.
The prayer book also changed the relationship between clergy and congregation. More of the service became intelligible as spoken language. Responses, exhortations and scriptural lessons placed listening at the centre of participation. The nave, pulpit or reading place and communion setting acquired greater practical importance as the congregation heard a continuous English text. At Loxwood the medieval benches could continue to hold the same households while the words reaching them changed fundamentally.
St John’s Day at Loxwood under the English Prayer Book, 24 June 1549
The timing gives the Loxwood story a particularly vivid moment. The first Prayer Book came into use at Whitsun in June 1549. Only a short time later, on 24 June, Loxwood reached the feast of the Nativity of St John the Baptist, the patron of the chapel. The same dedication that had shaped the identity of the medieval foundation now stood within the first weeks of nationally prescribed English worship.
The chapel bell could call households from the surrounding lanes and farms as it had done for generations. They entered a building whose benches, timber framing and memory belonged to the medieval foundation. The service they heard came from the new English book. Biblical lessons, collects and prayers were now ordered through a printed national liturgy. The congregation’s patron remained St John the Baptist, yet the devotional culture surrounding saints had been sharply reduced and the service focused more directly upon Scripture and the authorised prayer of the Church of England.
The contrast in experience arose from continuity of place and transformation of use. The medieval founders had built for God with substantial oak, a stone altar, a rood and carefully ordered thresholds. Their descendants and neighbours still gathered on the same site. The religious settlement now taught them through English words and a simplified ceremonial order. Loxwood therefore preserves an unusually concentrated example of how the Reformation could occur within one small community: the people, building and dedication endured while the public theology expressed inside the building was rewritten.
Rebellion, Scarcity and the Fall of Somerset, 1549
The first Prayer Book entered a kingdom already under economic and social strain. Coinage debasement, rising prices, enclosure disputes, taxation and the costs of war sharpened grievances in several regions. During the summer of 1549 two major rebellions revealed the pressure. In Devon and Cornwall, the Western Rising joined local grievances to demands for the restoration of older religious practices and the Latin service. In Norfolk, the movement led by Robert Kett focused strongly on enclosure, local government and economic injustice.
The western rebels’ religious demands show how deeply the earlier ceremonial world remained embedded in community memory. They called for the older Mass, processions, images, holy bread and holy water and the familiar seasonal rites. Their programme demonstrates that a royal liturgical book could change the legal form of worship far faster than inherited devotional expectations changed in every parish. The rising was defeated with force, and the government insisted upon obedience to the new service.
The principal theatres of rebellion lay in the South-West and Norfolk. In Sussex, the crisis produced immediate political consequences through the men governing the realm. Henry Fitzalan, Earl of Arundel, was the head of the great lordship centred on Arundel Castle and one of the leading nobles of southern England. He joined councillors who turned against Somerset as military expense, disorder and criticism weakened the Protector. John Dudley, Earl of Warwick, emerged as the dominant figure in the council during the autumn.
News of rebellion and the fall of the Protector travelled through the same routes that served markets and government. Horsham’s market brought together farmers, craftsmen and carriers from the northern Weald. Arundel and Chichester linked royal authority to western Sussex. Petworth, Pulborough and Billingshurst stood on routes connecting great estates, river crossings and market traffic. Loxwood lay within this network, its trustees continuing to manage property while national government changed leadership around the young king.
Warwick, Northumberland and a More Determined Reformation, 1549-1550
John Dudley, Earl of Warwick, became the leading figure in Edward’s council after Somerset’s fall and was created Duke of Northumberland in 1551. Government under his ascendancy pursued financial recovery and political stability while pushing the religious settlement in a more explicitly Protestant direction. Peace reduced the immediate cost of foreign war, and the council concentrated more closely on administration, religious conformity and revenue.
The change in political leadership also altered the balance among the nobility. Arundel remained a major councillor and Sussex magnate whose support mattered at court. His estates and castle connected national faction with local lordship. Petworth’s great estate was still shaped by the consequences of Percy forfeiture and Crown intervention. Episcopal estates around Amberley and Drungewick faced their own pressures as the government looked closely at the property and obedience of bishops.
By 1550 reform had moved from removing selected images and ceremonies toward the physical centre of the church interior. The question of the altar became decisive. For centuries the consecrated stone altar had represented the place of Eucharistic sacrifice and had organised the sanctuary around itself. The new Protestant understanding favoured a movable wooden table expressing the Lord’s Supper as a communal meal. The change required stone to give way to timber and altered the visual focus of chancels throughout England.
The Order Against Stone Altars, 1550
In 1550 the royal council required bishops to ensure that stone altars were taken down and wooden communion tables set in their place. This instruction struck at an object whose meaning extended far beyond furniture. Medieval altars were consecrated, marked with crosses and associated with relics, Masses, lights, vestments and generations of prayer. Parish gifts had often been directed toward their maintenance and adornment. Removing them therefore changed the material centre around which the older religious life had been organised.
The practical work varied from church to church. Some stones were broken. Others were reused as paving, steps or building material. Some communities buried or concealed sacred objects in the hope that they might be needed again. Churchwardens and parish officers stood between royal command and inherited local attachment, responsible for carrying out orders while living among the people whose gifts and memories were embodied in the church fabric.
The command reached the Diocese of Chichester through Bishop George Day and his officials. Day regarded the stone altar and the sacramental doctrine attached to it as matters of serious religious principle. He resisted the order. His resistance gave the Loxwood episode an unusually close diocesan setting: the bishop responsible for the chapel’s church government objected to the very policy that placed its medieval altar in danger.
Bishop George Day Resists at Chichester, 1550-1551
George Day’s conflict with the council developed during 1550. He refused to support the destruction of altars and resisted elements of the new liturgical settlement. The government pressed him through correspondence and conference with senior reforming churchmen. By the end of December he was committed to the Fleet prison, and in 1551 he was formally deprived of the see of Chichester.
His register preserves evidence that resistance extended beyond the bishop himself. A council letter complained that altars were still standing in several churches in the diocese and ordered the diocesan chancellor to ensure their removal and the installation of tables. The wording shows that Edwardian reform required repeated enforcement within Sussex. Clergy and parishes were moving at different speeds, while the council expected the bishop’s administrative machinery to produce uniform results.
A severe outbreak of sweating sickness in 1551 produced another revealing order. The chancellor was instructed to persuade the people throughout the diocese to attend the Book of Common Prayer more diligently and to join prayer with amendment of life. Worship, public health and obedience were thus drawn together in the language of government. The same network of cathedral officers, archdeacons and parish clergy that had once enforced medieval canon law was now used to enforce the new English liturgy.
For Loxwood, the delay visible elsewhere in the diocese helps explain the setting in which the altar could be protected. The chapel stood at the northern edge of Chichester’s jurisdiction, close to Drungewick and the Winchester boundary. Its trustees were established landholders with a long memory of the foundation. Their religious responsibilities had descended through families since 1404. When the order against stone altars reached the chapel, those responsibilities met the most disruptive command yet directed at its sacred fabric.
The Altar of St John the Baptist is Hidden at Loxwood, c.1550
The local record preserves the response. When royal authority reached Loxwood for the destruction of the high altar, the chapel’s great stone was removed and concealed within the adjoining priest’s house, the former oratory. A later account preserved by the Napper family records that the villagers protected the altar and presented rubble as evidence that the required destruction had been carried out. The stone survived because the earlier sacred building beside the chapel offered a place in which it could be hidden.
The physical evidence now gives that account exceptional force. The former oratory’s east bay had already been adapted for domestic use. A substantial inglenook and chimney were constructed at the eastern end, with the stack set to the north of the central axis. On the south side, the bread-oven arrangement and angled brickwork created a recess about eight feet long and three and a half feet wide. The altar’s top measures about seventy-six inches in length, fitting comfortably within the concealed space.
The position carried a deeper continuity. The east bay was the sanctuary of the original oratory built between 1404 and 1407. The same altar had governed the proportional system of that building and had stood at its eastern end before passing into the larger chapel after the development of 1447. Concealing the stone in the former oratory therefore returned the sacred centre of the foundation to the part of the site where it had first served worship.
The choice becomes intelligible within the religious culture of the people who made it. For generations the altar had been the place at which Mass joined the community to Christ’s sacrifice, where the consecrated Host was offered and where lights, vestments and sacred vessels concentrated attention upon the sanctuary. The founders had built around it; later guardians had maintained it; households had approached it for worship and churching. Preserving the stone protected a physical link with the salvation, memory and identity of the community.
The act also demonstrates the strength of local stewardship. The trustees managed property because worship required material support, yet their responsibility extended to the sacred things the property sustained. The concealment joined legal guardianship to religious guardianship. Land, deeds, timber and stone all became part of one continuing effort to carry the foundation through a period when the Crown itself had redefined the form of authorised worship.
Church Cottage Preserves the Older Sacred Fabric
The hidden altar formed part of a wider process already visible within Church Cottage. During the alterations begun in the early 1540s, the medieval nave door had been reused as an upper-floor bedroom door. The former chancel arch became part of the domestic interior. The lower rood beam remained in the frame. Sections of the upper rood arrangement survived, together with mortices that recorded the positions of the cross and the attendant figures of the Virgin Mary and St John. Timbers once belonging to a sacred division were absorbed into floors, partitions and rooms.
Edwardian reform gave those survivals new significance. The chapel’s rood and altar belonged to a religious order being dismantled. In the former oratory, structural parts of that order remained embedded within a functioning house. Domestic adaptation protected pieces of the earlier liturgical scheme because they continued to carry loads, frame openings and divide rooms. Sacred carpentry was therefore retained inside a building whose everyday use concealed its first purpose.
The result is rare. The Reformation usually removed the visual ensemble while leaving only fragments or empty mortices. At Loxwood, the combination of surviving timber structure and surviving altar allows the earlier system to be read together. The stone supplies the dimensional key, while the frame preserves the thresholds, rood structure, sanctuary geometry and devotional workmanship built around it. Edward VI’s reign, which threatened the ensemble most directly, also created the conditions through which its most important parts were hidden and retained.
Chichester and Winchester Change Bishops, 1551-1552
The removal of Bishop Day changed the leadership of the Diocese of Chichester. John Scory, a reforming churchman who had already served as Bishop of Rochester, was appointed to Chichester in 1552. His arrival aligned the see more closely with the council’s religious programme. The cathedral chapter, archdeacons and clergy now worked under a bishop prepared to enforce the Edwardian settlement that Day had resisted.
Across the diocesan boundary the same political process transformed Winchester. Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester and one of the most influential conservative churchmen of the Tudor age, had opposed important parts of the Edwardian reform. He was imprisoned and deprived in 1551. John Ponet, a Protestant theologian and reforming bishop, succeeded him. Alfold therefore passed from one episcopal leadership to another at almost the same moment that Loxwood’s Chichester diocese changed from Day to Scory.
This parallel mattered at the border. For centuries Loxwood’s founders had been concerned that inhabitants crossed into the Winchester diocese to worship at nearby Alfold. Under Edward VI, both sides of that old frontier were governed by bishops committed to the royal Protestant settlement. The geographic boundary remained; the confessional direction of episcopal authority had been brought into closer alignment.
Episcopal property also entered the new political economy. The wealth of sees had long supported hospitality, administration, buildings and diocesan government. Under Edward’s ministers, transfers of episcopal estates increased the Crown’s ability to reward servants and strengthen secular ownership. The ancient pattern in which bishops exercised temporal lordship through places such as Amberley, Drungewick and the great Winchester manors therefore faced pressures alongside the transformation of worship itself.
The Second Book of Common Prayer, 1552
A revised Book of Common Prayer appeared in 1552 and was enforced by a second Act of Uniformity. The new book carried the religious settlement further. The daily services were presented as Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer. The Communion rite placed stronger emphasis on receiving bread and wine in remembrance of Christ. The minister’s dress was simplified to the surplice for ordinary parish service. The language and ceremonial moved the Church more clearly away from the sacrificial and visual culture associated with the medieval Mass.
The position of the communion table reflected that theology. A movable table could stand in the body of the chancel or be placed for the congregation’s reception, emphasising a sacred meal shared according to the prayer book. The old fixed stone altar had gathered the sanctuary around a permanent consecrated centre. The table belonged to a liturgy whose authority rested upon Scripture, the printed order of service and the lawful ministry of the reformed Church.
Morning and Evening Prayer also reshaped ordinary churchgoing. The offices were shorter than the full medieval sequence and brought psalms, lessons and prayers together in two principal public services. A bell could summon those willing to attend. Sundays and major festivals remained the chief occasions for the wider congregation, while clergy were expected to maintain daily prayer. The same bell that had once announced matins, Mass and evensong could therefore continue to order the religious day under new names and new texts.
At Loxwood this meant another layer of change within an already altered building. The medieval benches still organised the congregation. The bell continued to call people from farms and holdings. Baptism, churching, marriage and burial remained recognisable pastoral needs. Their authorised words now came from the revised English book. The stone altar was hidden. A communion table supplied the Eucharistic focus. The chapel’s function as a local place of worship endured through a transformation in doctrine, language and furnishing.
Scripture, Printing and a Protestant Parish Culture
Edward VI’s reign accelerated a process that had begun long before his birth: the movement of religious authority into printed English texts. The Great Bible remained an authorised source of Scripture in churches, while the Prayer Books placed psalms, biblical lessons, collects and sacramental forms into repeated public use. Printed Homilies provided teaching. Catechetical instruction increasingly presented doctrine through questions, commandments, creed and Lord’s Prayer in English.
The effect extended beyond individual literacy. A person could absorb large amounts of English Scripture simply by attending worship and hearing lessons read aloud. Children and adults encountered the same phrases in church, catechism and household devotion. Clergy worked from books produced in many copies to an approved text. Uniform printing therefore changed the relationship between centre and parish: government could define the words of worship nationally and expect a small chapel in the Western Weald to hear substantially the same service as a city church.
This development continued the story of English religious language traced through the earlier monarchs. The Wycliffite Bible had circulated as manuscript under ecclesiastical suspicion. Pecock had defended Catholic teaching in English. Printing had expanded under Caxton and Wynkyn de Worde. Tyndale’s translation had entered England against royal prohibition before authorised Bibles followed. Under Edward, English became the ordinary language of the established liturgy. The revolution lay in repetition: every authorised service taught the new settlement again.
The final doctrinal stage of the reign came in 1553, when the Forty-Two Articles and an authorised catechism set out a more developed Protestant theology. Edward’s health was already failing, so their practical life under his government was brief. They nevertheless show the direction in which the Church had moved: from Henry VIII’s royal supremacy with much traditional doctrine intact to a public settlement shaped by Reformed teaching, English Scripture and an English prayer book.
Church Goods and the Material End of the Edwardian Reformation, 1552-1553
The government also looked again at church property during the final years of the reign. Commissioners surveyed plate, jewels, vestments, bells and other goods, distinguishing what was required for the reformed service from what could be taken into royal hands. This process extended the Reformation from doctrine and liturgy into the accumulated possessions of parish communities.
Such goods represented generations of local giving. A chalice might have been bought by parishioners, a vestment given in memory of a family member, a bell cast through collective subscriptions, a light endowed by rent or a cope preserved for principal feasts. Their removal converted inherited devotional wealth into Crown property and reduced the material variety of parish worship. The result was especially visible in churches whose pre-Reformation interiors had depended upon many altars, images, lights and specialised vestments.
The surviving Loxwood evidence for this reign is strongest for land, trusteeship and the altar, while details of the chapel’s plate and textiles remain undocumented. Church Cottage preserves a complementary material record. The hidden stone, retained rood fabric, reused door and surviving medieval benches reveal objects and structural elements that passed through the reforming years by concealment, adaptation and continued practical use.
Life in the Western Weald during the Edwardian Years
Religious upheaval unfolded within an agricultural and woodland economy that still had to function day by day. The heavy clay around Kirdford, Wisborough Green, Loxwood and Rudgwick required careful timing for ploughing and carting. Cattle and pigs remained important to farms. Woods supplied oak, underwood, fuel and charcoal. Ironworking, glassmaking and building trades depended upon timber and transport. Mills converted water power into flour and other useful work.
Market towns connected these dispersed holdings to cash and information. Horsham served the northern Weald. Petworth concentrated estate demand around the Rother valley. Pulborough occupied an important Arun crossing. Arundel linked castle, borough, river and the coastal route. Chichester supplied the cathedral, courts, merchants and officials through which diocesan and royal orders entered western Sussex. Guildford opened the road toward London.
The changes inside churches drew upon the same economy. Removing a stone altar required labour; making a wooden communion table required timber and joinery; acquiring a new Prayer Book required money and a bookseller; repairing walls after images or screens were altered required craft skill. Religious policy therefore generated practical work and expense within communities already managing rents, crops and household obligations.
The Loxwood trustees stood at the meeting point of these worlds. Their property produced rents; their deeds protected title; their chapel required maintenance; their neighbours supplied labour and materials. The 1547 Stevynsfield transaction shows the trust still operating through the ordinary legal economy. The concealed altar shows the same community responding when government reached beyond income and touched the sacred object around which the foundation had first been built.
Edward Falls Ill and the Succession is Rewritten, 1553
During the early months of 1553 Edward’s health deteriorated sharply. The king was fifteen. The religious settlement had become closely identified with his monarchy and with the councillors and bishops who had promoted it. The expected succession of his elder half-sister Mary raised the prospect of a queen committed to the Mass, papal reconciliation and the restoration of the Catholic worship she had continued privately despite Edwardian pressure.
Edward responded through a document known as his Devise for the Succession. Henry VIII’s succession arrangements had placed Mary and then Elizabeth after Edward. The Devise redirected the Crown toward Lady Jane Grey, a great-granddaughter of Henry VII through his younger daughter Mary Tudor. Jane was young, highly educated and Protestant. Her marriage in May 1553 to Guildford Dudley, a son of the Duke of Northumberland, linked the proposed succession closely to the family of the council’s dominant minister.
The plan depended upon law, council support and acceptance across the realm. Judges and councillors were pressed to give the arrangement formal effect. The question was therefore larger than personal preference: it concerned the relationship between royal will, statute, inheritance and the religious future of the kingdom. England had already seen contested successions under Lancaster and York. The Tudor dynasty now approached another crisis through documents and proclamations prepared before the reigning king’s death; armed support would determine which succession the kingdom accepted.
Western Sussex contained men capable of influencing the outcome. Henry Fitzalan, Earl of Arundel, remained a leading councillor and one of the kingdom’s greatest nobles. His castle and estates gave him a powerful regional base, while his place at court connected Sussex directly with the struggle that followed Edward’s death. The same lord who had helped remove Somerset would soon have to decide whether to sustain Northumberland’s succession settlement or support Mary Tudor.
Edward VI Dies and Mary Claims the Crown, July 1553
Edward VI died at Greenwich on 6 July 1553. His short reign had begun with a coronation shaped by inherited sacred kingship and ended with a Church transformed through English prayer books, Protestant doctrine and the dismantling of much traditional religious material culture. The government initially concealed the death while arrangements for Jane Grey were completed. Jane was proclaimed queen in London on 10 July.
Mary moved quickly to assert her claim. She was Henry VIII’s eldest surviving daughter and had broad support among those who regarded the statutory succession as binding, among Catholics who hoped for religious reversal and among political figures alarmed by Northumberland’s control. Support gathered around her in East Anglia. The council’s unity weakened as Northumberland left London to confront her forces.
Arundel became central to the change. Henry Fitzalan joined councillors who shifted their support to Mary and helped bring the proclamation of her queenship in London on 19 July. The decision placed the great Sussex lordship behind the successful claimant and connected Arundel Castle’s political world directly with the end of Edwardian government. Jane’s reign collapsed within days, and Mary entered the capital as queen.
At Loxwood the succession arrived in a chapel already carrying the physical consequences of Edward’s Reformation. The Book of Common Prayer had replaced the old Latin services. The stone altar had been hidden. The medieval rood arrangement had been cut, reused and absorbed into the priest’s house. The trustees still held their legal tradition and the foundation remained alive. A change of monarch was therefore about to meet a religious site capable of remembering another order of worship in its surviving fabric.
The Edwardian Inheritance in Loxwood and the Western Weald
Edward VI’s reign lasted from January 1547 to July 1553, a short span measured against the centuries covered by the Loxwood story. Its effect upon worship was immense. English moved from an important language of Scripture and instruction into the authorised language of the national liturgy. The first Prayer Book established uniform public worship in 1549; the second carried the settlement further in 1552. Processions, seasonal ceremonies, images, roods, pyxes and stone altars lost their authorised place. Parish churches remained the centres of baptism, marriage, burial, prayer and community gathering while the theology and material setting of those acts were recast.
The Diocese of Chichester reveals how contested that process could be. Bishop George Day resisted the removal of altars and lost his see. John Scory brought reforming episcopal leadership in 1552. Across the border, Stephen Gardiner was replaced at Winchester by John Ponet. The medieval diocesan geography around Loxwood survived while the convictions of the men exercising episcopal authority changed dramatically.
The local documentary line remained equally important. The 1547 transaction concerning Stevynsfield shows the Loxwood trustees continuing to administer chapel property as chantry legislation altered the national religious economy. Their office had developed from the obligations accepted by the petitioners of 1404 and carried through the Naldrett-Irlond succession into the recorded trustee body. The reign changed religious law around them; the practice of collective guardianship continued to preserve the foundation.
The altar provides the most powerful material link across the whole sequence. It had stood at the centre of the original oratory, passed into the larger chapel, governed the proportions of the surviving frame and received generations of worship. Edwardian policy ordered its destruction. The people responsible for the chapel concealed it within the earlier sacred building and preserved the stone through the very years in which stone altars were being removed across England. Church Cottage therefore became both a priest’s house and a repository of the religious past embedded within its oak and brick.
Mary I inherited a kingdom whose parish churches could still carry memories, objects and people formed by the older Catholic order. She also inherited a printed English prayer book, reforming bishops, married clergy, redistributed church property and a generation that had heard Protestant doctrine through six intense years of royal policy. At Chichester, George Day was still alive. At Loxwood, the altar remained safe. The next monarch story begins with the Crown changing hands and the religious direction of the kingdom turning again.