Sonya Nevin

Someone has broken into a Suffolk village church and stolen a book that has survived nearly 500 years of English religious upheaval. The volume is a 1548 English edition of Erasmus’s Paraphrases, taken from a locked display case at St Mary’s Church in Chediston. The thief apparently used a chisel to prise it open. What makes the theft particularly poignant is the book’s history. Erasmus had written his Paraphrases as explanations of the New Testament. Catherine Parr, Henry VIII’s sixth wife and herself a formidable intellectual, helped promote their translation into English; in 1547, royal injunctions ordered that the English Paraphrases should be provided in parish churches alongside the great Bible, which explains how books such as this became woven into the fabric of ordinary English parish life. Then came Mary I and the Catholic restoration. Erasmus’s works were associated with the religious reforms of the previous reign and many copies disappeared or were destroyed. The Chediston volume somehow survived. It then survived the Reformation, the Marian reaction, Elizabethan religious settlement, the Civil War, Puritanism, the Enlightenment, two World Wars and almost five centuries of Suffolk weather...only for somebody in 2026 apparently to turn up with a chisel and nick it for something in the region of £5,000. There is something rather sad about the curate’s observation that churches were historically able to leave treasures like this accessible because they were understood as places of sanctuary and trust, whereas they are now “not equipped for the modern age of crime”. Quite apart from its monetary value, this is exactly the sort of object that really does constitute a piece of England’s common inheritance: not something manufactured for a museum, but a book that has remained in the life of a particular parish while kings, governments, religions and generations came and went. Five hundred years of history survived. Let’s hope one thief doesn’t get to write its final chapter. bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn8e…