After a fact-check, this retired priest was worse than we thought at the time.
Who: Reverend Canon Angela Tilby
What: Christian (Church of England)
Where: Retired
(Canon emeritus of Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford
LISTEN TO PODCAST
Original Angela Tilby Radio 4 broadcast
AI transcript of the Radio 4 broadcast
The Second-Thought Report (podcast script)
Welcome to the Second Thought podcast. We fill that rather niche spot for anyone who has ever been even mildly irritated by TftD and wondered why no-one was holding them to account.
This is throwback episode where we revisit an earlier review. We knew when we started that we’d likely make the odd mistake and in the spirit of keeping an open mind, we trawled back through feedback we’d received of the reviews to date to see what leads there were for further consideration.
The first TftD that we reviewed was presented by Angela Tilby. There was much wrong with Tilby’s contribution that day, 10 April 25. There was though a niggling doubt at Second Thought, shared by one or two of those who have been kind enough to provide feedback, that we’d perhaps been a touch harsh in our criticism of Angela’s account of how theology of marriage was brought out of the dark ages by an English Archbishop. Let’s be clear, it wasn’t. This Archbishop made several changes but the vows and the theology behind them were for the most part unchanged. At least, they were in all the ways that are relevant to Tilby’s broadcast.
The doubt centred on whether or not we’d taken too general approach to dismissing Angela Tilby’s claim that Thomas Cranmer had revolutionised the theology of marriage, when perhaps Tilby was making a point more focused on the words of the ceremony.
Here’s what we said at the time
Then, dire as they were, things got worse. We were led to believe that medieval clerics in England saw marriage as somewhat removed from the church and little more than a contractual means of reining in fornication and enforcing social order.
We’re then invited to contrast this dark spell of matrimonial theology with the enlightenment that accompanied the first English prayer book of 1549. The prevailing requisites of fornication and societal control were now accompanied, for the first time, by a suggestion that those getting married should love and cherish each other.
Quite frankly, hogwash.
I’m not an expert but there’s a lot of straightforward and verifiable information out there for anyone with 20 minutes to spare and passing familiarity with the internet.
For the vast the majority of Christian history before 1549 in England, direction for the church was provided exclusively by Rome.
Marriage had long been considered by the Roman church to be an act of divine significance, at least since a thing called the Fourth Lateran council of 1215.
Since at least then, marriage was understood to be a reflection of the union between the church and Christ. Love and cherishment had, somewhat obviously, been front and centre in marriage since long, long before the scribblings an English Archbishop in 1549 were turned into a prayer book.
So we set about fact checking her and us.
What we discovered was astonishing. Tilby had been much worse that we’d appreciated. It was also clear that our criticism of her claims about Cranmer were not only justified but spectacularly incomplete.
That said, our comments on Tilby’s claim about the use of Love and Cherish was slightly off. We’d conflated the content of the vows with the content of Cranmer’s little sermon on why marriage was ordained by god. In our defence, Tilby started it. We remain thankful that this error made no material difference. And everything else we criticised, was bang on. On to those that we missed. These were all in a relative short section on how Tilby described the changes to the marriage ceremony in England in the 1500s.
Listen to this:
TILBY: In the theology of the middle ages, marriage was a kind of contract, a way of ordering society and holding lust in check.
ST: It was. It still is. So far as the church is concerned nothing here has changed. Tilby’s implication that it has, is false.
TILBY: Marriages took place in the church porch, as if they were half worldly and pragmatic, half holy.
ST: Vows were indeed exchanged in the porch. To suggest this diluted their holiness is groundless speculation. Indeed, Tilby on this point could hardly be more wrong.
TILBY: In the first English prayer book of 1549 a more positive view was stated.
ST: No it was not. Tilby here makes veiled false claim that there was something negative about the porch-vow, pre-Cranmer marriage service.
TILBY: The ceremony was brought into the body of the church
ST: It was. But not because Cranmer though this made weddings more holy.
TILBY: and was now accompanied by a compulsory little sermon on why God had ordained marriage.
ST: The prayer book made a significant addition to one of the wedding vows, on the god-ordained estate of holy matrimony, so some sort of exposition in the service itself was likely felt necessary.
TILBY: Three reasons were given: first to provide for the procreation of children and to ensure they were brought up in the fear of the Lord, second, for the avoidance of the sin of fornication – sex outside marriage.
ST: So far, so good.
TILBY: But then Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury who drafted the new service, added something quite new. ‘Marriage was instituted for the mutual society, help and comfort, that the one ought to have of the other, both in prosperity and adversity’.
ST: This was not new. It had been in the vows themselves for centuries. The new bit from Cranmer came next but inexplicably, Tilby left it out. She went straight on to be wrong about something else,
TILBY: Cranmer also added the words ‘to love and to cherish’ to the marriage vows.
ST: Technically, that could be argued as correct but to do so would obscure the truth of the changes Cranmer made. Love and cherish were very much part of the wedding rite long before 1549.
TILBY: The historian Dairmaid McCulloch, suggests that we owe those additions to Cranmer’s own happy experience of marriage.
ST: No. While the experience of Cranmer’s two marriages almost certainly informed his approach to the revision of this service. This statement, though, from Tilby is misleading. It is true to say that it is possible to infer a suggestion from MacCulloch’s on what Cranmer draw from his own experience of marriage. It is not true to say that MacCulloch made this suggestion. We really never imagined that we’d have to read a biography on a dead Archbishop to factcheck a retired priest. Life is full of surprises. It is, though, an excellent book.
In any event, these are an astonishing cavalcade of cock ups. The Canon Tilby can barely type without unjustifiable speculation and blatant falsehoods filling the pages.
Let’s take each in turn.
Tilby’s presentation of a 1549 enlightenment in matrimonial theology is a simple straw man fallacy. The contrast she describes does not exist. At least, not as Tilby presents it. Attacking one side or other of an invented comparison is an irrelevance. This whole passage from Tilby is such an irrelevance. Its also dishonest and cowardly.
We should, though, pause for a second on straw man. From experience, it’s one of the least well understood of the common logical fallacies. Oddly, humans (at least, several large subsets of humans) appear to have a natural ability to use a straw man fallacy to their advantage despite no knowledge of what it is.
Rather than tackle the subject of a discussion, someone using a straw man will project an invented alternative discussion on the other person and then attack the projection instead. They stand up and then knock down the straw man, leaving the relevant subject well alone.
Person A says, “Blue is cool.”
Person B replies, “Why do you hate red?”
The subject here, established by Person A, is blue and its alleged coolness. Instead of engaging with the subject, the respondent creates a fake subject (the straw man) which is hatred of red. Which is used to make an irrelevant and groundless allegation about Person A.
Clearly, no-one is actually arguing about red and blue. More commonly, straw man arguments are similar to these examples:
Politician A, “We have a problem than can only be solved by giving our schools more resources for art and music.”
Politician B, “This is outrageous, my opponent wants to undermine our schools by defunding maths and science.”
Politician A, “We must cut carbon emissions to prevent a climate catastrophe.”
Politician B, “There is no way our economy can support the immediate banning of petrol and diesel cars.”
Using a straw man argument is an inherently dishonest act. There is in it an implicit acknowledgement in every example that the user doesn’t have the arguments, or perhaps the skill, to tackle the subject at hand. Rather than capitulate, they frustrate understanding, derail debate and fight reason.
Another form uses the straw man to advance a fallacious position. For example:
We have known for decades that Camembert causes heart disease. It’s important to note that Edam was not involved in any of those studies of Camembert, and has not been implicated as a hair-loss cheese. Perhaps, we can now live as hairy Edam-cheese eaters in the comfort of this knowledge.
Presumably a representative of the Dutch dairy industry thinks she can sway Camembert eaters to try Edam. She opens with a plausible but false assertion. She then leans on the consequences of this falsehood, while adding another, to promote a different cheese.
This is precisely what Tilby does. Her straw man is the dark theology of the middle ages, which she contrasts with a positive change brought about by a prayer book. In fairness, this change did somewhat neatly coincide with the end the middle ages but this is correlation not causation. More pertinently, the contrast Tilby is claiming simply doesn’t exist. It is an invention to promote Archbishop Cranmer and his prayer book.
Tilby casts the middle ages as the before and as inferior. Specifically, it is the theology of the middle ages on which Tilby throws shade. The contrast, if there is one, is not between the theology of the middle ages and what came from Cranmer. The contrast is between the established doctrine of the church of Rome and the reformation ideas that were bubbling across northern Europe. Effectively, Tilby is mad slinging at Catholicism. Notably, without any justification. In England, these reformation ideas were given a significant lift after the Pope told Henry VIII that his marriage to Catherine of Aragon would not be annulled. Henry was left in need of an heir, and new wife and, hence, a new church. One not subject to the whims of a Pope. Cranmer (the reformer) was hired as Archbishop. The new Archbishop clearly saw his chance to reform, and took it.
In fairness to Tilby, she’s largely seeking to promote the ideology and trappings of the reformation that became the foundation of her own church. While she was not actively slating Catholics, this is no defence against the falsehoods and inaccuracies is her reasoning.
Angela suggests that pre-reformation marriage was inferior; merely a contract to order society and to keep lust in check. Apparently, marriages were also then insufficiently godly. This godliness deficit is something that Angela, quite incorrectly, infers from pre-reformation vows being exchanged at the church door.
This happened for two reasons, one practical and one symbolic. The practical reason was so that the exchanging of the vows was public. Those outside and inside the church would hear the vows and all would have an opportunity before them to raise any impediment. It is also suggested in some histories that the door of the church was the appropriate placed for the payment, acknowledgement and witnessing of dowries.
So, nothing to do with Angie’s muddled musings on the half-holiness of medieval marriages.
On to the symbolic. Somewhat obviously the church door symbolised the threshold between the secular and the sacred. Once the vows were made, the couple would cross the threshold into the sacred space of the church from the secular exterior, while also entering the holy sacrament of marriage. Thresholds appear elsewhere in marriage traditions. These, though, hinge on folklore that thresholds were inhabited by evil spirits. Weirder still, the soles of the feet of women were somehow vulnerable to these spirits. Hence, the groom would carry the bride over the threshold of the matrimonial home to prevent the bride from becoming possessed. Men’s feet presumably featured some natural spirit repellent. As far-fetched as it all sounds, I’m sure there are many brides who will testify to the repellent nature of their husband’s feet.
TILBY: In the first English Prayer Book of 1549 a more positive view was stated. The ceremony was brought into the body of the Church and was now accompanied by a compulsory little sermon on why God had ordained marriage.
Angela’s claim that the new prayer book of 1549 gave a more positive view is hogwash. And as we have seen, her apparent attempt to justify this claim with a change in location for vow exchange only compounds the falsehood.
Several of Angela’s errors appear rooted in an approach to research that never ventured beyond Wikipedia.
So, first, some background.
The revisions to marriage on which Tilby was commenting was called The solemnisation of matrimony a part of the 1549 book of common prayer. The service described in the new prayer book as in substantial part simply a translation of its predecessor from Latin to English.
That predecessor was the order for the consecration of marriage in a thing called the Sarum Rite, which was the prevailing church manual of the time. ‘Sarum’ denoted Sailsbury, which is the diocese in which the most widely-adopted manual was developed. The Sarum Rite was in Latin but it instructed the priest to conduct the marriage ceremony in his mother tongue. The Sarum Rite was very similar to the Rite on which it was based, of the church in Rome.
Cranmer was an enthusiastic protestant reformer. This enthusiasm infused an extensive operation to Anglicise the church in England under his direction as Archbishop. Reformers put emphasis on accessibility and understanding. English was favoured over Latin. Congregational participation was encouraged with much less prominence for ritual, priest and alter. It was the end of the road in this English church for Roman concepts such as purgatory, penance and the veneration of saints. Another major casualty was a concept represented by the truly wonderful word: transubstantiation. This was the Roman church belief that the ceremonial bread and wine of communion was the actual flesh and blood of Jesus. Meaning that Christ’s body and blood were, for believers, physically present (and eaten) during the ceremony. Nice.
Cranmer and his protestant reformer allies had a much less permissive approach to sacraments that the Romans. They held that only baptism and something called the Eucharist would remain as sacraments. Before having read about all this to understand just how willing Angla Tilby was to deceive (either by intent or recklessness) the audience of Radio 4, I had little idea of what a sacrament was. I now have a little more and rather wish I didn’t. There are much better things with which to fill a mind. The Roman church has seven sacraments. The revision down to two by Cranmer was quite a hefty cut. His prayer book saw to it that marriage was demoted from this lofty holiness.
Contrary to Tilby’s intimation, the prayer book, it could be argued, objectively reduced the godliness of the marriage ceremony. Never mind her confusion over church porches.
For this fall from sacramental grace, marriage was though given something of a parachute. Cranmer may not have believed in marriage as a sacrament but he did believe that it was ordained by god and that it constituted something called a holy estate. Having whipped off the stripes of sacrament, the Archbishop clearly felt obliged to make up the difference. He did this with an entirely new vow. Technically, it was an addition to one of the five existing vows. This addition obliged the couple getting married to live together after god’s ordinance in the holy estate of matrimony.
So let’s focus on these vows for a second. The original vows of Rome and Sailsbury can be separated into five sections. Important to note there were other manuals and many variations in Latin word choice and translation. Broadly, though, there was consensus. The five sections of the Latin vows were, in order:
- Consent (do you take this man/woman)
- Cherishment (to love and honour)
- Constancy (in sickness and health
- Commitment (forsake all others)
- Ceaselessness (till death we do part)
On our website, secondthoughtfortheday.com, the Latin is reproduced next to each sections of vows. I was struck by just how familiar they are:
Consent: Vis habere hanc mulierem in sponsam
(Do you wish to have this man/woman as your groom/bride?)
The cherishment vows feature a notorious difference between that for the bride and that for the groom. Instead of vowing to love, honour, hold and protect, the bride was saddled with having to obey, serve, love, honour and protect.
Cherishment (bride): et illi obedire et servire, et eum diligere et honorare, ac custodire
(to obey, serve, love, honour and protect)
Cherishment (groom): et eam diligere et honorare, tenere et custodire,
(to love, honour, hold and protect)
It’s worth pausing on the love in this Cherishment section of the vows. The Latin word used here for love, diligere, means much more than just to have affection. Of particular relevance, it meant an expression of love demonstrated by having committed to a choice. The object of your affection is dignified by your choice to love it. This word is also commonly translated as esteem.
Constancy: sanam et infirmam
(in sickness and in health)
The commitment section had two parts. The first demanded that they each be to each other as a bride ought to be to a groom and a groom ought to be to a bride. The second was the familiar forsaking of all others.
Commitment: et sicut sponsus debet sponsam: et omnes alias propter eam dimittere
(and as a bride/groom must treat her/his groom/bride, dismiss all others because of him/her)
Ceaselessness: et illi soli adhaerere, quamdiu vita utriusque duraverit?
(and stay with him/her for as long as you both shall live?)
The prayer book added to the vows, the new bit joined the Consent vow, which became, using the 1549 wording:
Wilt thou have this man to thy wedded houseband, to live together after Goddes ordeinaunce, in the holy estate of matrimonie?
There was no exposition in the Sarum Rite on why god ordained marriage. Although you could reasonably infer from Tilby’s account that there was. It wasn’t as though there was no understanding among priests and their congregations of the reasons god ordained marriage, it’s simply that this understanding didn’t get a mandatory plug in the order of service.
Since Cramner had now made this ordination an addition to an actual vow, you can understand his motivation to sex up the order with some well-placed explanatory notes.
And it was the third reason for god’s ordination in the new prayer book that Tilby claimed was ‘quite new’. This is how it appears in the 1549 original:
Thirdelye for the mutuall societie, helpe, and coumfort, that the one oughte to have of thother, both in prosperitie and adversitie. Into the whiche holy estate these two persones present: come nowe to be joyned.
The mutual society, mutual help and mutual comfort that the one ought to have of the other simply spells out what is already in the Commitment section of the Sarum Rite vows: as a bride ought her groom and as a groom ought his bride. We then have a pre-run of the Constancy section of the Sarum Rite vow, but health becomes prosperity and sickness becomes adversity. The genuinely new section is, “into the holy estate these two people come now to be joined.”
Tilby fails to include the new bit in her commentary about new bits, while also including old bits and claiming them to be new! That’s quite a feat. Goes to show how quickly the truth can suffer when confronted with a scarcity of curiosity and an abundance of faith.
Which brings us to Angela’s love and cherish claim:
TILBY: Cranmer also added the words ‘to love and to cherish’ to the marriage vows.
Love had long been in the vows. Cherish, esteem and worship also feature in various translations of the various Latin church manuals.
It wasn’t that Cramner added love and cherish, What Cranmer did do was remove opportunity for interpretation by the priest that inevitably accompanied the extemporaneous translation of the Latin into English. Or more likely, the prepared preferred English translation that priest kept to hand.
It was Cranmer’s view that love and cherish was the appropriate interpretation to be in the first formal English order of the marriage service. He most certainly wasn’t adding anything different.
In Tilby’s defence, the Wikipedia page on the book of common prayer does say in the final sentence of its section about Marriage., “Cranmer added the words “to love and to cherish” (for the wife “to love, cherish, and obey”)”. A source is cited and we look forward to checking it when it arrives. In any event, the claim that Cramner added love and cherish to the wedding vows is at best a over simplification and at worst, false.
Finally, we have the comments on the happy marriage of Cranmer and how this influenced his approach to the revised service in his prayer book. The historian Tilby cites, Mr McCulloch did not pass judgement on the happiness of Cramner’s marriages.
Cranmer had two wives perhaps making him uniquely qualified as a bishop of his epoch for the revising of wedding services. His marriage experience might best, though, be described as chequered. Dates and details are sketchy but it seems likely that his first wife died in childbirth within three years of them having met. There is no evidence of Cranmer ever having commented on or written about this experience which was no doubt painful for him. Although this takes nothing away from the esteem Cranmer may or may not have had for this marriage.
His second marriage took place almost entirely in secret (not just the weeding, the whole marriage) and featured long periods of separation. This was a result of him having ignored his vows of clerical celibacy (so perhaps not the ideal arbiter of vows) and then being promoted to Archbishop forcing him to return from continental Europe to England.
Keeping his wife and daughter secret was in the words of MacCulloch, astonishing. He clearly valued marriage greatly (it was certainly difficult to keep him from doing it) and it is reasonable to imagine he drew considerable consolation and meaning from it. There is no record of him ever having commenting on the happiness or otherwise of his marriages. It seems likely that his second marriage did inform how he approached his tweaks to the wedding ceremony when preparing it in a new English manual for all churches England.
In summary, following our fact-check to ensure we’d not been to harsh on Tilby, we instead found that she had made many more errors that we originally found. She used a straw man argument to produce an invented contrast between the theology of marriage before and after the middle ages.
She intimated that pre-prayer book marriage was less holy, which is a direct inversion of the truth. Tilby suggested that pre-Cranmer marriage was merely contractual lust control when, as we pointed out in our original podcast on this, the Sarem Rite marriage had long been regarded as a divine act. What we hadn’t realised at the time was that marriage had before Cranmer been a holy sacrament. Tilby then falsely claimed that the third reason for god’ ordination of marriage in the service sermon, was completely new, when it had, in fact, been in the service for hundreds of years. . She then finished off by misrepresenting both a historian and the history of love and cherish in marriage vows.
Here’s how we concluded the original review.
Second Thought podcast with Dan Beach 