Robert Strange's position as bailiff, and the network of connections set up by marriages of his daughters, was the strategic core of his political machine. We can assume on the basis of the past that opposition factions had a continuous if amorphous existence even when they generated no direct evidence. Cirencester was too small a place for everyone not to know who was communing with whom, and what the issues were. Had the evangelical Edward VI not died in 1553 and been replaced by the Catholic Mary, it is possible that Strange's control of the manor and, especially, the parish, would have been challenged earlier. Evangelical protestantism had paid its first visit to Cirencester in the person of Bishop John Hooper, in 1551, but the death of Edward VI and the accession of the Catholic Mary made him a heretic. He was burned at the stake under the walls of Gloucester Cathedral in 1555.

In 1551–2, Hooper turned Gloucestershire inside-out and upside-down. In two extraordinarily busy years, he visited and made systematic enquiries into the state of the clergy, churchwardens and congregations of every one of the 350 or so parishes in his diocese. His records provide vivid and detailed illumination of a region of the commonwealth of England at a time of momentous, enduring change. John Hooper's visitation and court records bear detailed witness to one of the most remarkable social experiments of the English Reformation.