Today is St Bartholomew’s Day, celebrating one of the 12 disciples of Jesus. In medieval times, the day was seen as the end of summer and beginning of autumn. It was a time for miracles of healing, with people rolling naked in the dew, which was thought to heal skin diseases on this day alone. And it was a time for fairs, with the famous Bartholomew Fair of Smithfield, London, running from the 12th century until the 19th, when it was abolished for being a public nuisance.
The stone-eater, the man that swallows fire,
Giants, ventriloquists, the invisible girl,
The bust that speaks and moves its goggling eyes,
The waxwork, clockwork, all the marvellous craft
Of modern Merlins, wild beasts, puppet-shows…
All jumbled up together to make up
This parliament of monsters.
William Wordsworth witnesses the Bartholomew Fair, in The Prelude, 1805
Pope Pius XII broadcast a public appeal for peace on Vatican Radio today in 1939, eight days before the outbreak of the Second World War. The previous day, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union stunned the world by signing a pact in Moscow, agreeing they would not attack each other in the event of war, which now seemed inevitable. Pius, who had become Pope six months earlier, said:
‘The danger is imminent but there is yet time. Nothing is lost with peace: all may be lost with war. Let men return to mutual understandings. Let them begin negotiations anew.’ Pope Pius XII, radio broadcast, 24 August 1939
It is the anniversary of the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (above), which began today in 1572, in the hours before dawn in Paris. King Charles IX, a Catholic, ordered a targeted assassination of the leading Huguenots – French Calvinist Protestants who made up 10 per cent of the population of France. But once the killing started it became unstoppable. Parisian mobs dragged Huguenot families into the street and slaughtered them. The massacre spread into the French provinces and only ended in October, leaving between 10,000 and 30,000 people dead. Many surviving Huguenots either converted to Catholicism, or fled into exile.
Exactly 90 years later was the Black Bartholomew in England, when some 2,500 church ministers (20 per cent of all the clergy) lost their livings and were ejected from the Church of England. The restoration of King Charles II after the Civil War brought a new law requiring all ministers to follow the 1662 edition of the Book of Common Prayer, and many of them in good conscience could not. The parting of the ways created Church and Chapel, and the nonconformist tradition, for the centuries to come.
The Book of Merchants, a French knockabout satire of Catholic church abuses, was published in London today in 1534. The book was written by Antoine de Marcourt, who the previous year had created a sensation when copies of his poster attacking the mass were posted overnight in several French cities, including on the king’s bedroom door. The book characterises Catholic priests as merchants, money-making retailers of God’s grace, who need to be cut out of the supply chain by believers obtaining grace wholesale, direct from God. Publication of the English translation marked the first wave of radical Protestant propaganda from France hitting the English Church.
‘Some poor fool comes to the temple, devoutly (as they say), and sticks up a candle on a pillar. After a while, our merchant snatches it and puffs it out, and then sells it for a price to someone else, who sets it up in the same place. Our merchant watches for it, and is ready to snatch and blow, and sell it to someone else who will set it up again, so that by snatching and puffing, our merchant gathers all day, becoming rich, as wares and money keep returning to him.’ Antoine de Marcourt, The Book of Merchants, 1547 edition
Image: Rijksmuseum