Religions Reviewed

Besides the theological issues at stake with respect to priviness, some Lollards may have brought ideas about secrecy and its functions from their daily work. Historians now tend to agree that artisans and craftsmen constituted a crucially large, and sometimes perhaps majority, membership of Lollards in general.  Whether they participated in it or not, late medieval craftsmen would necessarily be aware of the deep traditions of craft secrecy. There are some vague intimations of craft secrecy in antiquity, with Xenophon’s observation that artisans keep their key techniques secret.  But urban medieval craftsmen organized in order to maintain proprietary control of craft knowledge, beginning at least as early as the thirteenth century. Members were generally required to take an oath (sacramentum) to maintain the secrecy of guild practices and craft techniques, and to observe other regulations of the guild.   In the late fourteenth century, guilds were one type of a diversity of associations that were viewed as threatening to the political status quo. In 1383 London Mayor Nicholas Bembre tried to suppress craft guilds by outlawing “congreaciouns, conuenticles…assembles…alliances, confederacies, conspiracies…[and] obligations forto bind men to gidre, forto systeyne eny quereles in lyuinnge and deyennge to gidre.”  In 1388, the English Crown required the registration of all guilds, with a documentation of their rules. At that time there were over 150 guilds in Norfolk alone.

 The English term misterie denoted a guild, with an etymology from maister, the word that gives modern English both ‘mister,’ and more pertinently ‘master.’ The relationship between masters and journeyman workers was the germ of the guild association, and the mistery could mean the secrets they shared.  But the word mysterie was also used in its theological senses of the rites of the Church and the inscrutability of revelation, and it could mean ‘ministry’ in both ecclesiastical and secular senses. The Wycliffite Bible used the word in Rom. xvi. 25:
“The revelacioun of mysterie holden stille, that is, not shewid…the which mysterie is now maad opyn by scripturis of prophetis.”

   William Thorpe seems to have quite deliberately evoked this multiple sense of misterie in response to the unnamed churchman who rebuked him:  ”And a clerke said to me: These be full mistie matters and vnsauerie, that thou shewest here to us. And I said: Sir if ye, that are maisters, know not plainlie this sentence, ye may sore dread that the kingdom of heauen be taken from you, as it was from the princes of priestes and from the elders of the Jewes.” Thorpe here accuses his ecclesiastical questioners of being the official “masters” of the craft of reading scripture, who are in peril of losing their privileged control of the business through incompetence!