‘All thought’, wrote Fernand Braudel, ‘draws life from contacts and exchanges’. In a sense, this may serve as an epigram for all that follows. I have been concerned to trace a clerical community, or rather a series of overlapping and interlocking communities, to examine forms of contact and exchange, and to root these forms in a piety that encouraged a sociability beyond the stimuli of professional identity and the duties of kinship ties. The godly clergy who are the subject of this study took their relationships with their like-minded colleagues well beyond these ‘natural’ needs, and it is this heightened sense of community that needs to be explained. We should not assume that the very notion of ‘community’ is a trans-historical phenomenon, simply a matter of ‘friends getting together for a chat’. The communities that I deal with are not forms of the premodern, face-to-face, ‘natural’ communities of Ferdinand Tönnies' Gemeinschaft but the ‘imagined communities’ of a complex, pluralist society. ‘Community’ here is not the organic solidarity of homogeneous individuals, not an integrative device as in Durkheim, but a way of thinking that aggregates and often serves to deny heterogeneities, particularly at the boundaries of community. As Arthur Hildersham pleaded: ‘Though we differ in iudgement in these things, yet should we endeavour, that the people may discerne no difference, nor disagreements amongst us.’

The communities that are the subject of this study defined themselves through a variety of voluntary religious practices which blurred our boundaries of religious, social and administrative activities.