For my project I will be looking at Salisbury Cathedral as a working religious building and investigating how the religious Reformation orchestrated by Henry VIII affected it during the 1530s/40s. The official cathedral website can be quoted as saying that Salisbury ‘faced less of an adjustment’ than other cathedrals. This immediately interested me as some cathedrals suffered huge disturbance at the hands of this religious change, and I wanted to know why Salisbury was different. I was also interested because the cathedral website only touches briefly on the subject of the Reformation; the only information given by the website is that Salisbury experienced few alterations, and that it’s ‘basic organisation […] didn’t change.’ Immediately after reading, I felt that this was likely a very watered-down version of events, and I wondered how so little change really could be possible at this significant place during such major religious upheaval. Perhaps the running of the Cathedral remained largely unaffected, but this does not touch on any possible theological, material or architectural changes felt at Salisbury.

In this MA, I am specialising in the Tudors; specifically, the reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII. Last term I learnt about Henry VIII’s own personal religious practices both before and after the reformation through architectural scholarship and examining inventories of Henry’s private possessions in Maria Hayward’s module Fashioning the Tudor Court. I also learnt about how the royal family as a whole observed their religious beliefs throughout Henry VIII’s reign.  Currently, I am taking George Bernard’s module Religion and Politics in Henry VIII’s England, where we have looked specifically at the running of working religious buildings and the components of pre- Reformation religious life and worship during Henry VIII’s reign. Furthermore, we have contrasted this with changes faced by these places in general during and after the Reformation. Maria’s module made me curious to see how the Reformation directly affected religious institutions that were outside of the royal bubble, and George’s has given me the opportunity to look at the wider affects of the Reformation. Therefore, this project will relate to my personal research by allowing me to build on my previous (more general) knowledge of Reformation by using Salisbury as a case study to see how an individual religious site was affected in specific detail. I want to examine how the Reformation affected Salisbury and those within it who had dedicated their lives to a faith that was arguably being changed beyond recognition by a king who really had very little intent on observing truly protestant beliefs. To do this, I think briefly comparing Salisbury to another cathedral throughout my project will be extremely useful. Through doing so, I am hoping to establish what changes at Salisbury were typical or unusual, and to highlight any trends and differences between the two places. For this comparison, I will be using either Winchester or Canterbury Cathedral as these were other significant cathedrals during the Tudor era and underwent changes due to the Reformation.

In terms of both past and present scholarship Salisbury Cathedral has been heavily examined, with a lot of scholastic focus on the cathedral’s architectural qualities. Most have chosen to write on specific parts of the cathedral, such as Cathy Oakes who has closely studied the Tudor chantry chapel of Bishop Edmund Audley, and Matthew M. Reeve who has written on specific works of art inside of the cathedral. Lots of scholars do seem to touch on the effects of the Reformation on Salisbury Cathedral, but I have not yet found anyone focusing purely on any element during  this certain period in the cathedral’s history.

By using some of this wider scholarship which focuses on specific elements of the cathedral I am hoping to build up a clear picture of any changing elements of the cathedral during the Reformation. I will also use a large body of archival evidence to ascertain what did and didn’t change in different areas of the cathedral at this time. I am hoping that this will allow me to ultimately offer a concise and comprehensive record which focuses on Salisbury Cathedral and the changes it faced as a result of Henry VIII’s Reformation.

See link to Salisbury Cathedral website’s Reformation page here:

https://www.salisburycathedral.org.uk/history/reformation