What impact did post-Reformation Catholicism have on England’s oral
culture? The Protestant theologian Joseph Hall provides one point of entry
in an influential passage from his tract The Old Religion, usually held to
be the first occasion in English when oral tradition is named as such.2
Attacking Catholics for investing tradition with an authority comparable
to the written word ofGod, he makes pejorative use of the familiar idea that
traditions could be passed down verbally as well as contained in writing,
and links oral tradition, oral transmission and unreliability in a way that
implies a strong pre-existing association between Catholics and orality.3
As against the fixedness of print, oral communication was seen as having
infinite potential to distort, and it became a powerful metaphor to express
the fears about the fertility of ignorance that are so common in anti-Catholic
polemic.
But this is only one reason why the association between orality and
Catholicism was a natural one in post-Reformation England. An antiquarian
would have pointed to the rich anecdotal tradition surrounding
ruined abbeys, which kept England’s Catholic past and the depredations
of the Reformation alive in the popular memory, a puritan minister in a
rural parish might well have deplored the use of popish spells among his
flock, while a seminary priest would have recognised the missionary usefulness
of ballad-singing to drive home the anti-Protestant message and
commemorate martyrs.