Setting & History

Participants are not expected to be experts in the history of the period: the Team are definitely not experts. None of the characters nor the Priory are based on real people or places. The setting is divergent from history in a number of ways, both deliberately and accidentally. Deliberate diversions will be clearly marked as fiction in design materials.

We encourage participants to have a collaborative approach to creating an immersive setting: add historical details and authentic elements if you know about them and wish to do so. But don’t challenge or ‘correct’ other people unless you have been asked for your opinion. If a historical detail is interfering with your interaction with the event, or if there is something you would like to change or add, please discuss with the design team.

Monasticism

Since the very early days of Christianity, people have withdrawn themselves away from normal secular life, in order to spend time contemplating God. A life devoted in this way, a Religious Life, is considered a very holy one, and many such people are revered as saints. Over the centuries Religious Life has developed traditions and rites of its own. The most common ‘tree’ of tradition is monastic community. This has many branches, known as Orders.

Monastic communities can be involved in preaching and working with and among secular people: these Orders are called friars. However, the older and more typical Orders live separated (‘cloistered’) from the world, in communities which are always segregated by sex. Most houses are for a single sex only.

People enter a community, first as postulants and then novices. After a few years, they could take, or 'profess', solemn vows, after which point they would permanently be a member of the Religious Order - for women, “a nun”.

Each Order follows its own set of laws, known as the Rule, all of which descend from the pre-eminent Rule created by St Benedict. Nuns or Houses which do not adhere strongly to the Rule will be disciplined.

The only theoretical way to leave would be to apply to the Head of the Church (until recently, the Pope, but now the King - see below), proving that your vows were not valid in some way. Alternatively, unhappy or recalcitrant nuns might be moved to another (usually stricter) Order. Apostate or runaway nuns would be fugitives, pursued by the authorities to be returned to their place.

The sisters of Alma Mater belong to a fictional Order called the Montacutian Order, which follows the fictional Rule of St Agnes. This Order was founded in 1235 by St Agnes of Montacute and has 8 houses in England and several in Scotland and France.

Formally, this house is called The Abbey of The Nurturing Mother of the Redeemer at Whitwood, which in Latin is Alma Redemptoris Mater. Therefore it is commonly called either Whitwood Abbey or Alma Mater.

The Reformation

Criticisms of the Church have built from deep within. Martin Luther, a German friar, broke away from the Church and its traditions, calling Rome “the worst whorehouse of all whorehouses”. Throughout the 1520s this Reformist movement, sometimes called by the slur 'Protestant', has been building. Areas of Northern Europe including (what in the 21st century will be known as) Germany, Denmark and Sweden have renounced the authority of the Pope for more local control, and made sweeping reforms to religion. In Sweden, all monastic property was seized by the crown and nobility in 1527, although religious people were allowed to remain living in their communities.

Until now, religious texts and services have been almost universally in Latin. Yet, while the printing press has meant more and more people can read, Latin fluency has been declining. Even in religious houses very few sisters understand Latin. William Tyndale is trying to make scripture directly accessible to English-readers, but when he published his anti-authoritarian Bible translation, he was called a heretic and the texts were burnt.

In England, King Henry VIII had originally been strongly critical of Luther, to the point that the Pope titled him “Defender of the Faith”. However, when the Pope declined Henry’s request for a divorce from Queen Catherine, “the King’s great matter” of divorce became a burning political question. The solution, in the end, was The Act of Appeals in 1533 and The Act of Supremacy in 1534 - new laws which created an independent “Church of England”, and put King Henry at its head.

The Act of Supremacy required all men holding church offices to swear an oath of allegiance to the King over the authority of the Pope. The vast majority have done so, but a handful of zealous monks, Bishop John Fisher, and former Lord Chancellor Thomas More, are all imprisoned for refusing to say the oath.

As of 1536, what the Church of England’s theology will be is still a matter to be decided. King Henry is not a Lutheran, nor even really a Reformist - and there are those in his court who are on both sides. Parliament is soon expected to set forth the first definitions of the new Church as the Articles of Religion.

In the meantime, the King has set up a Commission to “visit, repress, redress, record, order, correct, restrain, and amend all [...] errors, heresies, abuses”. On the surface this appears like any number of inspections that Religious Houses have had regularly under the Church hierarchy for many years. However, the Commissioners have been taking scrupulous details about the property and finances of each House. And the Commissioners no longer report to a Bishop, but directly to Cromwell, the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Though not a priest, the king has appointed Cromwell as Vicar General for the whole country. There are rumours that Cromwell works closely with Lutherans.

Recent History of the Abbey Alma Mater at Whitwood

Nuns are all ladies of relatively high social status (the top of the middle to the bottom of the upper class); nobody here has ever ploughed a field or had to beg on the street.

From one point of view, religious communities of women don’t do anything 'useful', at least in the physical world. Nuns don’t spend their day working, sewing, nor illuminating manuscripts etc. Their ‘job’ is to sing through the whole book of psalms every week; in order to pray on behalf of the people who founded and sponsored the abbey. Protestants throw accusations of “laziness” and “inutility” at them.

10 years ago, the Abbess Henrietta died after a long illness, and was replaced via election by the current Abbess, Joan.

The nun Margery is a major spiritual attraction for pilgrims to the Abbey because of her mystical visions. Around 8 years ago, a book was published about Margery's prophecies. It was called 'A marvellous shew of the voice of our Judge wrought through the least of his servants'. It caused a minor scandal as it cut against the political grain, as well as because women are legally forbidden to preach or give sermons. As with all books which cause a stir: A Marvellous Shew was censured and all copies were burnt by the authorities.

After the censorship of A Marvellous Shew, the Bishop performed a visitation of the Abbey as does every decade or so. Fortunately, he pronounced the standard declaration when all is found to be well in a visitation - omnia bene.

The 1534 Act of Supremacy required all church members to swear an Oath of Supremacy, aknowledging the king as Supreme Head of the Church (not the Pope). There were no female religious who refused. Refusal (martyrdom) was almost never an option for anyone in an English monastic community. Of about 12,000 Religious, there were only a few score monks who did refuse the oath. However, these were mainly from extremely strict orders (chiefly Carthusians), and they were men. The agency of the refusers can't be compared with female communities. They were and will be executed for their refusal between 1535-38. The nuns of Alma Mater have already sworn the oath, Abbess Joan having taken it on their behalf.