[In this essay, Fairfield examines The vocacyon of Johan Bale as a unique example of an early autobiographical work.]

Sixteenth-century Englishmen were not frequently given to self-scrutiny—at least not in writing. This was a disinclination which they shared with their medieval forbears, since autobiography was not a very common form of literary activity in the Middle Ages. Monastic self-analysis, sub specie aeternitatis and guided by the standard categories of virtues and vices—yes. Coherent study of the self, for its own sake and in all its quirks and idiosyncracies—scarcely ever.¹ In the early sixteenth century, the murmur of new ideas from Italy did begin to touch England: a sense of distance and of difference between the present and the past, and an awakened appreciation for the discrete, the singular in human personality. These stirrings did evoke an interest in biography in England, at least in Sir Thomas More and his circle; though in that respect these men were a bit ahead of their time.² Autobiography remained practically nonexistent until the last quarter of the century—and even then, one can almost count the number of English autobiographical works on the fingers of one hand.³ This dearth of self-portraiture, especially in the earlier sixteenth century, makes especially precious (perhaps beyond their intrinsic literary worth) the few examples which did appear. The earliest of these—and expletive for expletive, the most colorful—was The vocacyon of Johan Bale to the bishoprick of Ossorie in Ireland: ‘the first separately printed prose autobiography in English.’⁴ Perhaps ‘autobiography’ is the wrong word; The vocacyon of Johan Bale dealt with only one year (1552-53) in the author's life, and certainly the work made no attempt to sum up a lifetime of experience.⁵ The 1550's were probably too early to look for that kind of achievement in England. But even though the work was not a full-dress autobiography, still it offers us a valuable insight into the way a mid-century Englishman thought about himself. Was The vocacyon of Johan Bale step in the direction of self-portraiture for its own sake, toward the notion that ‘the proper study of mankind is man?’ Or, if not a precursor of modern secular autobiography, did the work then point toward the religious self-analyses (Bunyan's Grace Abounding, for instance) which the ideological upheaval of the English Revolution encouraged? If neither of these, then what? In a word, where does The vocacyon of Johan Bale stand in the tradition of English autobiography?

A word about the author, first, and about the year in his life which he chose to describe. John Bale was one of the most versatile—and certainly the most irascible—of the first-generation reformers in England. He was born on the coast of Suffolk in 1495, and joined the Carmelite order in Norwich while he was in his teens. The Carmelites sent him up to Cambridge in 1513 or 1514, and he eventually took his doctorate in theology there in the carly 1530's.⁶ During this latter period, too, Bale was prior (successively) of three Carmelite houses in Maldon, Ipswich, and Doncaster.⁷ But the spread of Protestant ideas, the breach with Rome, and the imminent dissolution of the Carmelite order all combined to shake Bale's late-medieval patterns of life and thought. In 1536 he left the Carmelites and in January of the following year he found himself in trouble with Thomas Cromwell for preaching inflammatory Protestant sermons.⁸ But Cromwell had a use for this kind of zeal, and he released Bale to write plays against superstition and the pope. For the next three years Bale traveled up and down England with a small band of players, producing at market crosses and in churchyards the verse plays (including Kynge Johan) for which later centuries would remember him best. This wandering life apparently gave Bale the chance to pursue another lifelong interest, dating from his early Carmelite days: searching out and recording the works of bygone English authors.⁹ All this was cut short by the fall of Cromwell in 1540. Bale, without a protector, had to flee for his life to the Low Countries—to Antwerp first, and then about 1546 to Wesel.¹⁰ Making full use of the printing press, Bale showered England with a deluge of vituperative Protestant pamphlets; but he also managed to compile and publish his first historical compendium of English writers, his Summarium. When young Edward VI came to the throne, and the religious atmosphere in England was favorable to radical Protestant opinions, Bale returned home (probably in 1548). Briefly he found patronage in the Duchess of Richmond's household, and then in 1551 he was presented to the rectory of Bishopstoke in Hampshire by John Ponet, Bishop of Winchester.¹¹ Bale hardly had a chance to catch his breath in this rural setting, however, for in August of 1552 came a summons from the king. Edward promoted Bale to the see of Ossory in Ireland—a thorny position which the king had had a hard time filling.¹² And this brings us to the stormy year which Bale described in The vocacyon.

It is a shame to spoil the racy flavor of Bale's narrative by paraphrasing it, but we ought to consider briefly what happened that year. The narrative portion of The vocacyon—after a brief but important preface (to which we must return in a moment)¹³—opens in August 1552. Bale recounts how he resisted the king's call—with considerable prescience, as it turned out—but all in vain. Bale landed at Waterford in January of 1553, and reached his see the following month. He fell sick at once (shock, conceivably?) but he managed to preach in Kilkenny cathedral every Sunday and holy day during Lent—typical Balian energy. Bale did his best to bring his flock around to Protestant views: to accept Christ as sole Saviour and the Second Prayer Book as authoritative, and to renounce images, transubstantiation, and prayers for the dead. But the local clergy were foursquare against him. Bale had the audacity to suggest that they take wives; no converts recorded. By midsummer the storm clouds of conservative wrath began to gather around him, and the death of King Edward in July knocked a vital prop from beneath Bale's Protestant program. By the time Queen Mary was proclaimed at Kilkenny on August 20, the town was unsafe for Bale, and he retired to his episcopal estate in the country. Now events moved swiftly. On September 8 (Our Lady's Nativity) Bale—ignoring the holy day—sent five of his servants out to cut hay. He might have known better. Armed men sprang from the bushes near the field and murdered the servants, and Bale thought that his own end had come. But the sympathetic Mayor of Kilkenny arrived in the nick of time, and (with a hundred horse and three hundred foot) got Bale back to town. But here the beleaguered Bale found all the trappings of Romish practice reestablished in the cathedral, and he heard whisperings of a plot to murder him. All this was too much. Bale had courage enough, but no urge to emulate Thomas Becket. So he shook Kilkenny's dust from his feet and set out for Dublin. But here the archbishop of Dublin was cooperating more or less willingly with the Marian reaction, and Bale found no support or security. So he resolved to cross over to Scotland, where he could keep an eye on developments in Ireland and wait for an auspicious moment to return. While Bale's little ship was awaiting the tide in Dublin harbor, however, the captain of a Flemish privateer—hearing a rumor that Bale was a rich Frenchman—boarded the ‘pyckarde’ and captured him. The captain's eye apparently gleamed at Bale's purse of twenty-one pounds, and he decided to hold the bishop for ransom. They set out to sea, but in a day or two a storm blew up and drove them into St. Ives harbor in Cornwall. The captain allowed Bale ashore, but kept the money aboard ship; and Bale found no succor in St. Ives—only the exasperating sight of the lusty parish priest rejoicing in the reestablishment of papistry. Early next morning, the Flemish captain evidently decided to take Bale's money and run, and he put out to sea. Nothing daunted, Bale hired a rowboat and set off in chase. In a mile or two, the bishop caught the privateer. It was a calm day. But the captain kept the money—and Bale. They cruised the English Channel for a week or more, during which time the privateer took two English prizes (which was piracy pure and simple, for England and Flanders were at peace). Finally, the captain and crew threated to put into Dover and sell Bale to the English authorities as a heinous traitor. Of course Bale denounced the charge of treason, but he quailed at the thought of a confrontation with Mary's officials ashore. So he persuaded his captors to accept fifty pounds more (which he didn't have) if they would set him ashore in the Low Countries. The bargain struck, off they sailed; and somewhere in Flanders the owners of the ship held Bale captive for three weeks until the ransom money came in from the bishop's friends and fellow exiles. Then Bale made for Wesel, where in December of 1553 he published The vocacyon¹⁴—venting his spleen against Irishmen, Flemish pirates, and papists in general.

The unselfconscious gusto with which Bale narrates his own adventures—without recourse to allegory or to the medieval dream-vision convention—seems at first glance to point forward in time, to the efflorescence of res gestae in seventeenth-century England,¹⁵ even though the chronological scope of The vocacyon was merely a single year. Likewise, in Bale's talent for noticing the interesting but nonessential detail, we seem to catch a hint of a modern frame of mind which can appreciate the data of sense perception for their own sake, and not simply as exempla of abstract truth. Take, for instance, the account of Flemish piracy:

In the meane tyme they went a roavinge by a whole wekes space and more. And first they toke an Englishe shippe of Totnes / going towardes Britaine and loaden with tinne / and that they spoiled both of ware and moneye under ye colour of Frenche mennis goodes. The next daye in the afternone / behelde they.ii. English shippes more / whome they chaced all yt night longe / and the nexte daye also till.x. of the clocke / & of them they toke one by reason yt his topsaile brake / and that was a shippe of lynne. In this they had nothinge but apples / for he went for his loadinge. After yt traced they the seas over / more than halfe a weke / and founde none there but their owne countray men / beinge men of warre and sea robbers as they were.¹⁶

But we would be quite wrong to place too much emphasis on such hints of modernity in this work of the mid-sixteenth century. In point of fact, its traditional (or ‘medieval’) characteristics are much more fundamental.

The vocacyon of Johan Bale is essentially an autobiographical saint's life—peculiar as that may sound. To understand this, we have to retrace the story of Bale's life a few years, and consider the historical and theological concerns which had been occupying him since his conversion in the 1530's. While he was still a Carmelite, Bale had become acutely aware that the order in his day had declined from its thirteenth- and fourteenth-century vigor. In the mid-1530's, his disillusionment with the Carmelite order had expanded to include the whole Roman Church. In this Bale was hardly unique. But alone in England in the 1530's and 1540's,¹⁷ Bale tried to describe and periodize this decline in an elaborate historical scheme, understanding the whole process as the fulfillment of divine prophecy. Bale developed his theory in The Image of bothe churches (a commentary on the Book of Revelation) which he finished in about 1543, in exile, though it was not printed in full until 1548.¹⁸ In that work, Bale argued that the Roman Church had decayed in successive stages, symbolized by the seven seals in Revelation 6-8; that England had held out longer than the rest of Europe against this decay, but had finally succumbed to Romish intrigue; but that God had maintained a few faithful (particularly in England) in each age to bear witness to the truth. It is these ‘few faithful’ that concern us here. Having established his historical pattern, Bale felt obligated to demonstrate that his faithful were the true saints of God: they, and not the Romish saints of the Golden Legend.¹⁹ In order to do this, Bale had to redefine sainthood—as fidelity to the belief and worship of the early Christian Church, and as resistance to later Romish corruption. But it was no use trying to define Protestant sainthood in the abstract. To convince his readers, Bale needed to give them concrete examples. And this is what he proceeded to do. In 1544 Bale published an edition of the examination and trial of Sir John Oldcastle, the Lollard rebel executed in 1417; and in 1546-47 Bale rushed into print with the two examinations of Mistress Anne Askew, the outspoken young sacramentarian who was burned at Smithfield in July of 1546.²⁰ Each of these works expressed the typical aims of traditional hagiography: to blacken the persecutors' reputations, to console the persecuted, to strengthen the wavering, and to edify all men by giving them a good example to follow. Bale presented both Oldcastle and Mistress Askew as types of the early Christian martyrs: Oldcastle was compared with Sts. Peter, Andrew, Barnabas, and so on, and Anne Askew with Blandina, the virgin martyr of Lyon whom Eusebius of Caesarea had described.²¹ In the case of Anne Askew, Bale possessed a first-person narrative from her own pen, which he published verbatim—so the prickly yet attractive personality of the lady did shine through the typological exegesis. But Bale made it totally clear that Oldcastle and Mistress Askew were important, not as individuals, but simply as types or exempla of true Christian sainthood.

The vocacyon of Johan Bale lay squarely within the tradition of hagiography—this tradition which Bale in 1553 had already exploited for Protestant purposes. In the Preface to the work, Bale declared his intentions quite plainly. His story, he says, is to provide an exemplum of the following truths: that the duty of a Christian bishop is to preach the Gospel, not to ‘loyter in blasphemouse papistrie’; that continual persecutions afflict the bishop who lives up to his duty; but that God may always be trusted to deliver the faithful servant in the end.²² As an example of the latter truth, particularly, Bale intends the tale of his misfortunes and deliverance to comfort the persecuted Protestants in England.²³ The significance of Bale's story, in other words, is totally extrinsic to the story itself: in the realm of moral and theological truth. Furthermore, Bale finds that his individual life has meaning only insofar as it represents a type—that of the ‘few faithful’ in each age. The Old Testament prophets were, like Bale, ‘first called / than afflicted / and gracyously alwayes in the ende delyvered.’²⁴ Christ Himself was sorely persecuted by the ‘clergie.’²⁵ So were the apostles. But Bale sees himself most clearly as a type of St. Paul. For one thing, Paul supplied an unimpeachable precedent for ‘boasting’ (which is how the medieval friar in Bale regarded autobiography) in 2 Corinthians 11, 16-33; for another, Paul's experiences on his last journey to Rome did—on several points—parallel Bale's misfortunes during his voyage from Dublin to Flanders (the tempest, for example).²⁶ So in both its didactic concerns and in its typological thought-patterns, The vocacyon stood within the tradition of Protestant saints' lives which Bale had already developed.

It is interesting to note in passing that in The vocacyon Bale chose to identify with the external aspects of Paul's career (his outward misfortunes), rather than with Paul's internal conversion experience on the road to Damascus, which so fascinated seventeenth-century spiritual autobiographers.²⁷ There were several reasons for this. In the first place, Bale's ‘conversion’ occurred some two decades before the year which The vocacyon describes; and that experience is not at issue in the pamphlet. Second, the factors which caused Bale's conversion (as he describes it in various other works) were all of an essentially objective nature: Henry VIII's political breach with Rome; the painfully obvious decline of the Carmelite order in discipline and intellectual vigor; and the persuasion of Thomas, Lord Wentworth of Nettlestead in Suffolk, Protestant courtier and Bale's neighbor while the latter was prior of the Carmelites in Ipswich.²⁸ If Bale went through any sort of agonizing, inner spiritual crisis, he left no note of it in any of his writings. For—and this is the third point—Bale the elderly, first-generation reformer was never affected by the Calvinist propensity to internalize spiritual struggle, to locate the forces of evil within the soul—rather outside it, in allegorical form. So it is not really surprising that The vocacyon stands within the res gestae tradition, particularly the tradition which (previously) narrated the outward events of a saint's life, rather than in the tradition of the spiritual autobiography in the Augustinian mode. Bale was a total extrovert; he thumped his enemies (verbally), not his own breast.

This last observation raises another point. We miss the full medieval flavor of The vocacyon if we merely consider its place within the tradition of the saint's life. For Bale's purpose in writing the work was not merely to edify and console the faithful, with the exemplum of a moral truth. He was equally eager to blacken the reputation of his enemies, the conservative Roman Catholic clergy in England and Ireland: or, as Bale would have put it, to reveal the depths of their depravity. Although hagiography often served to defame the persecutors, from this point of view The vocacyon had its roots as much in the earthy literature of late-medieval satire and complaint, as in the genre of hagiography. G. R. Owst has pointed out how much the mordant attacks by late medieval preachers on clerical vice prefigured and influenced the scurrility of humanist and Protestant invective.²⁹ It is instructive to remember, in this connection, that Bale spent more than twenty years of his early adult life as a Carmelite friar—heir to a ripe heritage of mendicant vituperation against the sins of the clergy.³⁰ Bale was not merely an antiquary, dramatist, hagiographer, and historical thinker; in the very core of his being, he was a preacher too. This often landed him in hot water—at Doncaster in 1534, for example, while he was prior of the Carmelites there, and at Thorndon in Suffolk two years later, after he had left the order.³¹ In both of these cases, Bale had attacked the beliefs and the life-styles of the conservative clergy a bit too aggressively, causing a public outrage. So the passages in The vocacyon in which he gives free rein to his satiric anger are consistent both with his earlier homiletical career, and with the tradition of late-medieval mendicant complaint. We could do worse at this point than to quote Bale at some length. In the following passage he portrays the parish priest of St. Ives, with whom Bale had a conversation on Sunday evening, together with a certain (unnamed) gentleman:

And the seyde Gentilman brought him into an other talke of olde familiaritees Wherein he confessed / that he had in one daye / bygetten.ii. mennis wyves / of that parishe with childe / to encrease the churches profyght in crisyms and offeringes / where as their husbandes were not able to do it. Yea / marry sir James / sayth the Gentilman / & ye have done more miracles than that. Went ye not one daye a fishinge? sayth he. Yes by ye masse ded I / sayde the preste againe / and made the fyshes more holye than ever the whoresons were afore. For I sent out my maker amonge them / whome I had that daye recyved at the aulter. By the masse (quoth he) I was able to holde him no longar. Sens that daye / I am sure (quoth he) that our fyshart hath had better lucke / than ever thay had afore.³²

This is burlesque—effective because probably true—in a fine old tradition, stretching back to the fourteenth century and on forward, through the Marprelate tracts, into the period of the English Revolution. Now, the inclusion of attacks on one's enemies is a perfectly common feature of modern autobiography,³³ and by itself would not tell us whether or not the author was thinking in typically medieval terms. But the point is here that in The vocacyon Bale sees the conservative clergy not merely (or even primarily) as his own enemies, but as enemies of God and of the truth. They provide a foil for Bale's good example: they are mala exempla. Their importance lies outside themselves; more than individuals (though sometimes highly individualized), they are types. And this was indeed a traditional and medieval attitude toward personality.

But despite the medieval characteristics which we have seen in The vocacyon, we are still confronted with the fact that the work is a fragment of autobiography. Bale cast himself as a Protestant saint: as a type of St. Paul, and of Sir John Oldcastle, and of Anne Askew. And he drew on his own experience for exempla of theological virtues and vices. Now, auto-hagiography was exceedingly rare in the Middle Ages. In England, perhaps The Book of Margery Kempe comes closest—and even this work was written down by a third party. Similarly, it was uncommon for medieval preachers to draw on autobiographical material for the exempla in their sermons.³⁴ In The vocacyon Bale actually did begin to shatter these medieval conventions. If the work is by no means the story of a whole life, still it does demonstrate a concentration on the self and on the data of personal experience which was foreign to the writing of medieval saints' lives and to medieval preaching. What encouraged—or drove—Bale to write about himself?

There are at least two probable factors which we can identify—neither of them (interestingly) having much to do with the impact of Renaissance ideas in England, but both of them having a great deal to do with the unsettled social and ideological state of England in the years after 1533. In the first place, Bale had already written at least three brief autobiographical sketches before he composed The vocacyon; and this may have made his excursion into auto-hagiography rather easier. All of these sketches came at the end of biobibliographical surveys of English literature, two of which (in manuscript) Bale completed about 1538, and one (in print) which he published in 1548.³⁵ Bale had had a twofold purpose in compiling his painstaking surveys. First he had wanted to demonstrate the glories of England's literary past—a desire which Bale's chauvinistic friend John Leland had communicated to him very strongly.³⁶ But in order to glorify this past, Bale felt driven to preserve what he could from the whirlwind which was striking the English monasteries in the late 1530's. And preservation was the second facet of his purpose. Bale realized that in the tremendous social flux of the mid-sixteenth century, England's precious heritage of manuscripts would not always—if ever again—be available; so in haste and in desperation he wrote to inform his countrymen what they had had, and what they might be losing for ever.³⁷ It was with this desire to inform, to present a complete record of English literature, that Bale sketched his own life and listed his own writings. Do we nevertheless detect a hint of boastfulness in what Bale says?: ‘Among the others I insert myself—though I am the least of all of them—so that posterity may know that I (like them) have not always been idle.’³⁸ It is hard to be sure. But in any case, the pressing need to preserve an account of English literature convinced Bale that in this context, his life and letters had an intrinsic significance. This was an interesting deviation from the medieval tendency to subsume individuals under general types; and these autobiographical sketches did supply precedent for Bale's concentration on his own life in The vocacyon.

But still Bale did revert to the viewpoint sub specie aeternitatis in The vocacyon; and the second factor in his decision to use the autobiographical mode was probably the more important one. This was simply that Bale had already published Anne Askew's account of her own examinations—and that these had been highly successful. No fewer than five editions of the Anne Askew pamphlets had appeared between 1546 and 1551.³⁹ Now, England in Bale's later life saw a literate, aggressive, and utterly convinced Protestant minority attempting to convert a still largely conservative nation and Church. The beliefs which this minority held about salvation and about the true Christian life were radically different from those of the past, and from those of the conservative majority in England. Bale (as one of the minority) was trying to impress upon the English consciousness a totally new image of sainthood—of what it meant to be one of the ‘few faithful.’ Because this image was new, the individual personality of the Protestant ‘saint’ could more easily break through (as had Anne Askew's) the mold of the standard virtues and stock incidents which reappeared everywhere in late medieval saints' lives. And because this new image was not everywhere accepted, it needed reinforcement and validation by the testimony of people who were willing to die for it. From this point of view, the situation of English Protestantism during Bale's lifetime bears comparison with that of Christianity in second- and third-century Rome. Both periods saw militant but persecuted minorities trying to establish a new definition of what it meant to be ‘religious’; both periods produced an efflorescence of autobiographical testimony.⁴⁰ Now in 1553 Bale recognized how effective and fitting first-person testimony could be, especially because he had seen the success of Anne Askew's narratives. So as he recuperated in Wesel from his nautical adventures and cast about for material to print, what could have been more natural for him than to write his own testimony—his own account of what God had done for and through him? The appropriateness of the autobiographical mode to Bale's needs, therefore, and his previous success with the narratives of Anne Askew—such were the major considerations which led him to use his own life as an exemplum.

So in The vocacyon Bale refashioned the medieval hagiographical and homiletical traditions by depicting his own life and his own experiences. But The vocacyon was of course not a sustained autobiography: not a study of Bale's whole life. In this sense it represents only a small step in the direction of the modern genre. For Bale narrated only as much of his life as he needed to in order to demonstrate a moral and theological truth—namely, that God would deliver the faithful servant in the end. Despite his multiplication of circumstantial detail, Bale was basically not interested in his life for its own sake. This persistence of traditional habits of thought in a first-generation English reformer should not surprise us; but it is interesting to note how strongly they appeared in this early experiment with autobiography.

Notes

1. See especially Donald Stauffer, English Biography Before 1700 (Cambridge, Mass., 1930), pp. 175-177; Wayne Shumaker, English Autobiography (Berkeley, Calif., 1954), pp. 5-17; and Paul Delany, British Autobiography in the Seventeenth Century (London, 1969), pp. 6-39.

2. See Stauffer, pp. 33ff.

3. Shumaker, pp. 17-18; for perhaps the first prose treatment of a whole life, see James Osborne, ed., The Autobiography of Thomas Whythorne (Oxford, 1961).

4. The words are Stauffer's, p. 178.

5. Shumaker correctly points this out, p. 57.

6. For general data on Bale's early life, see J. Bale, Illustrium maioris Britannie Scriptorum … Summarium (Wesel: D. van der Straten, 1548), fol. 242^v, and idem, Scriptorum Illustrium maioris Britannie … Catalogus (Basel: Oporinus, 1557), pt. 1, p. 702. There are also numerous bits of autobiographical data scattered through the following manuscripts: British Museum mss. Harley 1819 and Harley 3838; Bodleian Library mss. Bodley 73 and Selden supra 41; and Cambridge University Library ms.Ff.6.28. Concerning the date of Bale's doctorate, there can be no certainty at the moment. Neither Grace Book B (Mary Bateson, ed., Cambridge, 1903) nor Grace Book T (W. G. Searle, ed., Cambridge, 1908) record the degree. Yet by July 4, 1534, Bale was being styled ‘theologie doctor’: see Borthwick Institute, York, ms. r.1.28, fol. 85^v.

7. For this period of Bale's life, see the present writer's unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, ‘The Historical Thought of John Bale, 1495-1563’ (Harvard University, 1969), pp. 10-15, 38-48.

8. For this incident, see the following documents in the Public Record Office, London: SP 1/111, fols. 183-187; SP 1/114, fol. 54; and SP 1/115, fol. 63. See also Bale's letter to Cromwell: British Museum ms. Cotton Cleopatra e. IV,. 167.

9. Bale's early collections related exclusively to Carmelite authors: see British Museum mss. Harley 1819 and Harley 3838, and Bodleian Library ms. Selden supra 41. However, Bale's interests broadened in the 1530's, under the influence of John Leland and when Bale began to suspect that the English monastic libraries might not survive the impending storm. Bale says that he worked for three years after 1533 in the libraries of the Carmelites and the Augustinians: J. Bale, Illustrium maioris Britannie Scriptorum. … Summarium (hereafter ‘Summarium’), fol. 246^v. But it seems likely that his bibliographical activity continued on after 1536: viz., J. Bale, Scriptorum Illustrium maioris Britannie. … Catalogus (hereafter ‘Catalogus’), pt. 1, p. 700, re Ralf Radcliff's library at Hitchin. For Bale's later agony over the loss of the monastic libraries, see J. Bale, The laboryouse Journey & serche of Johan Leylande (London: S. Mierdman, 1549), sigs. A7^v-A8.

10. Seven of Bale's published works appeared between 1543—the date of the first one—and 1546 from the Antwerp presses of Christopher van Endhoven's widow, A. Goinus and Stephen Mierdman. In 1546 began a series of eleven works from the press of Dirik van der Straten at Wesel. I owe this information to Miss Katharine Pantzer and her staff at Houghton Library, Harvard University, who are preparing the revised edition of the Short-Title Catalogue, soon to appear. See—in this revised edition of the STC—nos. 848, 850, 1270, 1274a, 1276, 1279, 1280, 1287, 1291, 1296, 1296.5, 1303, 1305, 1309, 14717, 15180, and 17320. (Henceforth all references to the STC will be to the revised edition.)

11. For Bale's connection with the Duchess of Richmond, see John Foxe, Acts and Monuments, ed. J. Pratt (London, 1870), III, 705. For Bale's collation to the living at Bishopstoke, see the Hampshire County Record Office, Winchester, ms. Reg. Ponet, fol. 12^v.

12. See W. K. Jordan, ed., The Chronicle and Political Papers of King Edward VI (Ithaca, N.Y., 1966), p. 179.

13. J. Bale, The vocacyon of Johan Bale to the bishoprick of Ossorie in Ireland (‘Rome,’ i.e., Wesel: Joos Lambrecht, 1553), fols. 2-15^v. For the printer of this work, see below, no. 14.

14. Ibid., fols. 15^v-42. Actually the colophon to the pamphlet claims that it was printed ‘in Rome / before the castell of S. Angell / at ye signe of S. Peter / in Decembre / Anno D. 1553’ (ibid., sig. g7—sigs. a1-g1 are numbered consecutively 1-49, but sigs. g2-g8 bear no numbering). There is no reason to question the date, but the place given is obviously a bit of bravado. The woodcut on the title page offers a clue, however, to the whereabouts of the press: it was a cut which had previously been used by one Joos Lambrecht (see W. T. Davies, A Bibliography of John Bale, Oxford Bibliographical Society, Proceedings and Papers, V, pt. 4 [Oxford, 1940], p. 268). As of late 1553, Lambrecht's press was located at Wesel: viz., P. Bockmuehl, ‘Wo ist die erste Ausgabe des Werkes von Johannes Anastasius Velanus: “Der Leeken Wechwyser” im Jahre 1554 gedrukt?’ Theologische Arbeiten (Neue Folge), XIII, 115-116. (My thanks to Miss Katharine Pantzer of the Houghton Library, Harvard University, for this latter reference.) So it seems likely that in late 1553 Bale headed for Wesel, where he had spent several years during his first exile. One bibliographical puzzle remains, however, concerning the printer of The vocacyon. At the end of the work, on sig. g8^v, we find a printer's device which later appeared on books (printed on the Continent and in London) from the press of Hugh Singleton—the printer's rebus within a border, under which appears the motto ‘God is my helper’ (R. B. McKerrow, Printers' and Publishers' Devices in England and Scotland, 1485-1640 [London, 1913], no. 127). Miss Christina Garrett has suggested that Singleton spent some time at Wesel during Mary's early reign—which would fit with the date of The vocacyon. So probably Singleton and Lambert collaborated in printing the work, at Wesel. (For Singleton's movements, see Christina H. Garrett, ‘The Resurrection of the Masse, by Hugh Hilarie—or John Bale?’ The Library [4th series], XXI, 154-155.)

15. See particularly Delany, pp. 107-157, and Shumaker, pp. 56-58.

16. J. Bale, The vocacyon of Johan Bale, fol. 37-37^v.

17. But not totally alone, if we include the Continent: see the chronicle of Johannes Carion (1532), written under Melanchthon's influence. Carion's chronicle differed from Bale's work in its principle of organization—Carion used a Four-Monarchy scheme—and it does not seem to have influenced Bale's own thought.

18. J. Bale, The Image of bothe churches (London: S. Mierdman for R. Jugge, 1548): STC no. 1297. The revised edition of the STC will list an edition of the first two parts (of a total of three) of The Image from the press of Stephen Mierdman, probably at Antwerp, in 1545: STC no. 1296.5.

19. See J. Bale, A Mysterye of inyquyte (‘Geneva: Michael Woode,’ i.e., Antwerp: A. Goinus, 1545), fol. 60^v: ‘Nothynge els are youre histories of the Saintes but fables / lyes / and fantasyes taken out of Legenda aurea made by fryre James de Voragine. …’ For the Legenda Aurea, and Protestant attacks upon it, see Helen C. White, Tudor Books of Saints and Martyrs (Madison, Wisc., 1963), chapters II and III, though this work omits Bale's rather central role in the attack.

20. J. Bale, A brefe Chronycle concernynge the Examinacyon and death of the blessed martyr of Christ syr Johan Oldecastell (Antwerp: A. Goinus, 1544); J. Bale, The first examinacyon of Anne Askewe (Wesel: D. van der Straten, 1546); and J. Bale, The lattre examinacyon of Anne Askewe (Wesel: D. van der Straten, 1547).

21. J. Bale, A brefe Chronycle … syr Johan Oldecastell, fol. 54^v; J. Bale, The first examinacyon of Anne Askewe, fol. 8^v.

22. J. Bale, The vocacyon of Johan Bale, fol. 2.

23. Ibid., fol. 43.

24. Ibid., fol. 3.

25. Ibid., fol. 2^v.

26. See, ibid., fols. 4^v-7^v for Bale's identification of his misfortunes with those of St. Paul.

27. See Delany, pp. 29-31.

28. On the influence of Henry VIII, see J. Bale, Summarium, fols. 229^v-230: ‘… quod am Evangelii regni Dei (ut spero) per eius (sc. Henrici) administrationem particeps, cum ante illius in Romanum Pontificem edictum, obstinatissimus papista fuerim.’ On the decline of the Carmelite order, see Bale's ‘Anglorum Heliades,’ British Museum ms. Harley 3838, fol. 40. For the influence of Wentworth, see J. Bale, Catalogus, pt. 1, p. 702: ‘… non a monacho aut sacrifico vocatus, sed ab illustri Domino Vuenfordo … serio excitacus, deformationem meam quamprimum vidi et agnovi. …’

29. Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England (New York, 1966), p. 235: ‘In a word, then, our medieval pulpit satire adequately explains alike the coarseness and the acerbity of both Humanist and Reformer.’

30. Ibid., pp. 247-269.

31. For the incident at Doncaster, see Borthwick Institute, York, ms. r.1.28, fol. 91-91^v; for the altercation at Thorndon, see Public Record Office, London, SP 1/111, fols. 183-187; SP 1/114, fol. 54; SP 1/115, fol. 63; and also British Museum ms. Cotton Cleopatra e. IV, 167.

32. The vocacyon of Johan Bale, fo.l 36. For other Balian forays against clerical vice, see ibid., fols. 4^v, 18, and 45.

33. Simply as one example, see the pair of autobiographies in the 1950's from the pens of Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers.

34. See G. R. Owst, Preaching in Medieval England (New York, 1965), p. 58.

35. See British Museum ms. Harley 3838, fols. 111^v-112^v; Bodleian Library ms. Selden supra 41, fol. 195-195^v; and J. Bale, Summarium, fol. 242. For the dating of the manuscripts, see this writer's unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, ‘The Historical Thought of John Bale, 1495-1563’ (Harvard University, 1969), pp. 49-52 and 368-369. Bale, of course, published one more autobiographical sketch—after he had written The vocacyon—in his Catalogus (Basel, 1557): pt. 1, p. 702.

36. For the efflorescence of English patriotism in general, see particularly A. L. Rowse, The England of Elizabeth (London, 1951), chapter 2; for Bale's relationship with Leland and for the former's motives in compiling his surveys, see British Museum ms. Harley 3838, fols. 3-5.

37. For Bale's attitude, see his The Laboryouse Journey & serche of Johan Leylande.

38. Bodleian Library ms. Selden supra 41, fol. 195: ‘… me inter ceteros intersero, omnium minimus, ut sciant posteri inter hos me non semper ociosum fuisse.’

39. See, in the revised edition of the STC, nos. 848, 850, 851, 852, 853, and 853.5. The first two editions contained only one of the examinations each; the last two editions were undated, but probably appeared around 1550.

40. For the earlier period, see for example René Aigran, L'Hagiographie: ses sources, ses méthodes, son histoire (Paris, 1953), pp. 132ff. For the later period, see the testimonies scattered through Foxe's Acts and Monuments.