'He was not less concerned to relieve their Temporal Wants': Nelson's 'Life of Dr. George Bull' on the parson, parish, and the poor
In the Middle Ages, the poor were regarded as our brothers and sisters in Christ to whom we were bound in love. After the Reformation, poverty came to be seen as a sign of God's punishment and ... a problem to be dealt with through discipline and often punishment. So said Timothy Radcliffe OP - now a cardinal - in a 2012 letter to the Daily Telegraph , critiquing the late Hilary Mantel's praise for Thomas Cromwell. It is, of course, a rather standard Roman Catholic meme, entirely lacking in serious historical research, the result of 'Merrie England' fantasies encouraged by some readings of Duffy's panegyric of pre-Reformation English religion. Ironically, Radcliffe's letter opened by stating that Mantel "is not as good a historian as she is a novelist". At the heart of this fantasy is the view that with the dissolution of the monasteries, the care for the poor provided in pre-Reformation England by religious orders was abolished, to be replaced by grub...
