The following is a guest submission by Dr. Daniel T. L. Moore.
The rosary. A simple word, a simple devotion, but a powerful spiritual weapon. The power of this most famous of all Marian devotions lies not solely in how it wards away demons and sin but how it brings spiritual comfort and strength in the midst of trials, whether physical and/or spiritual. Speaking from personal experience, the rosary has been a gateway into bolstering my spiritual life in ways found only in praying this strand of holy beads that enslaves our hearts and souls to Christ through our Lady. This kind of thinking and feeling is not a novelty. Historically speaking the rosary has ever been, as our Lady said to Gladys Quiroga de Motta on April 10, 1986, in San Nicolás, Argentina, “the refuge of those who look for relief in their sufferings.”[1] A period where the rosary was such a refuge and a treasure occurred during the English Rebellion (Reformation) of the 16th and 17th centuries, when Catholics in England faced harsh persecution under their Protestant overlords. However, before diving into the rosary during the persecution of English Catholics, one must realize that England before the Protestant Rebellion was not always so adverse to the rosary. On the contrary, it was once an advocate and great devotee of the rosary.
According to Fr. Donald Calloway, M.I.C., the Dominicans arrived in England in 1221 and brought the rosary, with the devotion becoming popular so quickly that in the same century London had a street named Ave Maria Lane where rosaries were made for the public.[2] In the year 1381, there was an English jeweler’s shop that gave a list of certain prayer beads in its inventory, which included “6 sets of aves of geet, and paternosters of silver gilt, of one pattern… 38 sets of aves of geet, with gaudees of silver gilt, of another pattern…[and] 14 sets of aves of blue glass, with paternosters silver gilt.”[3] This inventory clearly shows that these beads were rosaries.[4] England became so devoted to the Blessed Mother that the nation became known as “the Dowry of Mary,” with the rosary being a part of this dowry during the dark days of the 14th century when the rosary, unlike in England, was largely forgotten and abandoned in mainland Europe during the Bubonic Plague, more commonly known as “the Black Death.”[5] Archbishop Simon Islip of Canterbury gave a dispensation in 1362 in the Canterbury Hall statutes that if any layman could not attend mass they could “pray 50 Hail Marys with the Our Father and the Apostles’ Creed.”[6]
This devotion carried into the 15th century, with King Henry VI, who had a devotion to the Blessed Mother, implementing in Eton College’s statutes in 1440 a requirement that all students pray the “Marian Psalter (the rosary),” and Bishop William Waynflete of Winchester, (who was the founder of Oxford’s Magdalen College in 1458), ordered that the students and president of Magdalen College were to pray every day “50 Hail Marys with each group of 10 Hail Marys separated by an Our Father.”[7] Rosaries were left in baskets at the back of many English churches for those to pray who did not have one, which edified Catholics on the European continent.[8]
Rosary devotion continued in the early 16th century before the Protestant Rebellion (Reformation) when parishioners would gift their rosaries to their parish churches to be hung on saints’ statues on certain liturgical days, such as Beatrix Krikemer in 1509 who stated, “I bequeth [sic] to our Lady in the same church, my best beads [rosary] to hang about her neck on good days,” and Alice Carre likewise in 1523 donated her “coral beads [rosary]” to be hung around the Blessed Mother’s neck on feast days and then to be hung on other saints during their feast days.[9] During this time, the printers Wynkyn de Worde and Richard Pynson published “pamphlets advocating the merits of the rosary.”[10]
Once the English Rebellion (Reformation) occurred, the rosary was attacked by the English Protestants, for in 1538 a set of injunctions included a condemnation of saying the rosary in a mechanical manner and then in 1547 another injunction “condemned all recitation of the rosary.”[11] Such was the disdain of the rosary by Protestants that Eamon Duffy asserts that during a Catholic rebellion in 1549 there was a confrontation in the village of Clyst over the use of sacramentals, including the rosary, which increased the revolt.[12] The rebellion was only put down in Clyst when it was burned down, and Duffy places responsibility of such an incident on the Protestant rebel Thomas Cranmer, whose “dislike of rosary beads and holy water had cost the people of Clyst dear.”[13]
[1] “Our Lady to Gladys Quiroga d Motta,” as quoted in Fr. Renè Laurentin, An Appeal from Mary in Argentina: The Apparitions of San Nicolàs, trans. Juan Gonzalez (Milford, OH: Faith Publishing Company, 1990), 83, quoted in Fr. Donald H. Calloway, M.I.C., Champions of the Rosary: The History and Heroes of a Spiritual Weapon, (Stockbridge, MA: Marian Press, 2016), 151.
[2] Fr. Calloway, M.I.C., Champions of the Rosary, 56.
[3] Edmund Waterton, Pietas Mariana Britannica: A History of English Devotion to the Most Blessed Virgin Marye Mother of God: With a Catalogue of Shrines, Sanctuaries, Offerings, Bequests, and Other Memorials of the Piety of Our Forefathers, (London, UK: St. Joseph’s Catholic Library, 1879), 166, 167.
[4] Fr. Calloway, M.I.C., Champions of the Rosary, 56.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Cardinal Francis Aidan Gasquet, The Religious Life of King Henry VI, (London, UK: G. Bell and Sons, LTD., 1923), 49. Fr. Calloway, M.I.C., Champions of the Rosary, 61.
[8] Fr. Calloway, M.I.C., Champions of the Rosary, 61.
[9] Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580, (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2022), 40-41. Francis Blomefield and Charles Parkin, ed., An Essay Towards a Topographical History of the County of Norfolk, Vol. IV, (London, UK: W. Miller, 1805), 153, 154.
[10] Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, 78.
[11] Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, 450. Anne Dillon, “Praying by Number: The Confraternity of the Rosary and the English Catholic Community, c.1580–1700,” History 88, no. 3 (July 2003): 453.
[12] Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, 468.
[13] Ibid.
Dr. Daniel T. L. Moore earned his B.S. in History (2019), M.A. in History (2021), and Ph.D. in History (2025) from Liberty University. During his Ph.D. studies, he converted from Reformed Protestantism to Catholicism, along with his seven living siblings, instrumentally being brought in by their father who reverted to the faith. His dissertation is titled “‘Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam: The Religious and Political Missions of the American-Catholic Military Chaplaincy during the Mexican-American War,” which will be taken and published as his first book. He also runs a scholarly YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/@TheSt.BedeCenter), Instagram page (https://www.instagram.com/thestbedecenter/), and Substack account (https://substack.com/@thestbedecenter), named The St. Bede Center, where he posts Catholic and Catholic-related history content for academics and history buffs to learn and enjoy alike. He is also a freelance writer for 1Peter5, with his first article to be published this April, a history teacher for Scholè Academy, and a freelance editor for Arouca Press. He lives in North Carolina with his large family.
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