Cromwell, Ten Articles, 1536, Act of Six Articles, Thomas Cranmer, New Prayer Book, forty two Articles of Religion, 1552, Second Tome of Homilies, 1563

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been deprived of its sacramental status following its exclusion from Cromwell’s Ten Articles of 1536. Although nobody went so far as to reinstate the sacramental status of matrimony several measures were taken to compensate for this situation. The Act of Six Articles that outlawed clerical marriages was revoked in the first parliament of Edward’s reign. In 1549 Arch Bishop Thomas Cranmer, a driving force for reform following Henry’s death, standardised the marriage service and purged it of vestiges of secularism thereby “appropriating marriage from first to last for the church”. Then, in a Protestantised revision of the new Prayer Book (1552), Cranmer set out the respective duties of husbands and wives. In the same year it was stipulated in the thirty second of the forty two Articles of Religion, for which Cranmer was also largely responsible, that single life, unlike marriage, was not a fiat of divine will. ²⁷⁶

Alison Wall points out that, although there was a torrent of reforming texts promoting marriage, they may not have been disseminated widely because

the book market was small and centred on London, where most of these books were published: books were expensive and few could afford them. Most Englishwomen and a majority of men were illiterate.²⁷⁷

The reforming crusade to rehabilitate marriage nonetheless reached an extensive audience and was communicated to various sections of the populace from the pulpit, in the classroom and during leisure time, thus ensuring that the illiterate, and provincial members of society, as well as the literate, urban community were exposed. A translation of Erasmus’s Encomium Matrimonii was included in what was probably the most widely read textbook of its day, Thomas Wilson’s Arte of Rhetorique (1553). Another was the sermon, ‘An Homily of the State of Matrimony’, which appeared in The Second Tome of Homilies in 1563 and, like the 1549 and 1552 prayer

²⁷⁶ See Eric Joseph Carlson, Marriage and the English Reformation (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1994), p.52.
²⁷⁷ Alison Wall, Power and Protest in England 1525-1640 (Arnold, 2000), p.85.

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