We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 July 2014
Social historians have long suspected that religious convictions made a difference in the sixteenth century, and historians of the late Tudor religious and political settlements have recently emphasized the differences that advanced forms of Calvinism are alleged to have made. They say that religious radicals—puritans and precisianists, to their contemporary critics—were social conservatives who thought wealth was a blessing and poverty a curse. According to Keith Wrightson and David Levine, the “firmly committed Puritans among the yeomen of the parish” promoted a “sense of social distance” between themselves (“the better sort”) and the less respectable. The 1995 republication of Wrightson's and Levine's study of social discontinuity, Poverty and Piety in an English Village, seemed a splendid occasion to revisit the intersection of religious conviction and social practice and to ponder the precision with which puritanism's supposed contributions to social stratification—and the stratification itself—have been, and can be, measured.
Measurements of a vastly different kind preoccupied Elizabethan religious theorists interested in gauging the effects of election and thus discovering whether they and their parishioners had been elected or chosen by God and redeemed. Assurances of election and of eternal reward were difficult to identify, because everything that Christians did or dreamed up was so deplorably flawed. “There remain relickes of syn” in the most righteous persons on earth, William Fulke preached in 1574; Christians desperate for assurance invariably experienced (and measured) those “relickes” as tokens of divine displeasure.
1 Wrightson, Keith and Levine, David, Poverty and Piety in an English Village: Terling, 1525–1700, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1995), pp. 173–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar, containing Wrightson's response to critics of the first edition (1979). Among the critics' alternatives, see the telling claim that the more intense Calvinists seldom settled and clustered at any single stratum of village society: Ingram, Martin, Church Courts, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1570–1640 (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 84–124Google Scholar; idem, “Religion, Communities, and Moral Discipline in Late Sixteenth- and Early Seventeenth-Century England: Case Studies,” in Religion and Society in Early Modern Europe, ed. Kaspar von Greyerz (London, 1984), pp. 177–93; Spufford, Margaret, “Puritanism and Social Control,” in Order and Disorder in Early Modern England, ed. Fletcher, Anthony and Stevenson, John (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 43–46Google Scholar; Tyacke, Nicholas, “Popular Puritan Mentality in Late Elizabethan England,” The English Commonwealth, 1547–1640, ed. Smith, Alan G. R., Clark, Peter, and Tyacke, Nicholas (Leicester, 1979), pp. 82–89Google Scholar. For reflections on, and refinements of, Elizabethan social stratification, see Cressy, David, “Describing the Social Order of Elizabethan and Stuart England,” Literature and History 3 (1976): 29–44Google Scholar, hereafter cited “Social Order”; Wrightson's, Keith “The Social Order of Early Modern England: Three Approaches,” The World We Have Gained: Histories of Population and Social Structure, ed. Bonfield, Lloyd, Smith, Richard M., and Wrightson, Keith (Oxford, 1986), pp. 177–202Google Scholar. For use of “puritan,” accepted by Wrightson and Levine and acceptable here, see Collinson, Patrick, The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (London, 1988), p. 95Google Scholar: “[P]uritanism was neither alien to Protestantism [n]or even distinct from it but was its logical extension, equivalent to its full internalisation.”
2 See Fulke, William, A Comfortable Sermon of Fayth (London, 1578) C6v–C7rGoogle Scholar.
3 For this and what follows, see Perkins, William, A Dialogue of the State of a Christian Man, in Works, 2 vol. (London, 1616), 1: 385–90Google Scholar. For Perkins' place among the radicals, see my Prayer, Despair, and Drama: Elizabethan Introspection (Urbana, 1996), pp. 56–68Google Scholar.
4 See Perkins, William, The Estate of a Christian Man in this Life, in Works, 1: 374Google Scholar; Freeman, John, The Comforter or A Comfortable Treatise wherein are contained many reasons taken out of the Word of God to assure forgiveness of sins (London, 1622), pp. 71–78Google Scholar.
5 Perkins, , Estate, p. 365Google Scholar. Also consult his Whole Treatise of the Cases of Conscience, in Works (London, 1631), 2: 67–68Google Scholar.
6 Greenham, , Exposition on the 119. Psalm, in The Workes of the Reverend and Faithful Servant of Jesus Christ, M. Richard Greenham, ed. Holland, Henry (London, 1612), pp. 483–84Google Scholar.
7 McRae, Andrew, God Speed the Plough: The Representation of Agrarian England, 1500–1660 (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 61–72Google Scholar; Gilpin, Bernard, A Godly Sermon Preached at Court (London, 1581), pp. 49–52Google Scholar; for the likelihood that the gospelers' social radicalism inclined the Henrician government against them, see Brigden, Susan, “Popular Disturbance and the Fall of Thomas Cromwell and the Reformers, 1539–1540,” The Historical Journal 24 (1981): 272–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
8 See Jewel's letter to Vermigli, Peter Martyr (1559) in The Zurich Letters, 2 vols., ed. Robinson, Hastings (Cambridge, 1842), 1: 17–18Google Scholar.
9 In addition to Burke's, Peter comprehensive study of withdrawal, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (London, 1978)Google Scholar, see Underdown, David, Riot, Revel, and Rebellion (Oxford, 1985)Google Scholar; Zaret, David, The Heavenly Contract: Ideology and Organization in Pre-Revolutionary Puritanism (Chicago, 1985)Google Scholar.
10 The “hunt” is mentioned in an angry letter from Parker and Sandys to a member of the ecclesiastical commission. Parker, Matthew, The Correspondence of Matthew Parker, ed. Bruce, John and Perowne, Thomas Thomason (Cambridge, 1853), pp. 434–35Google Scholar.
11 Henry V 4.1.24 (“Lend me thy cloak”)—4.1,280 (“What watch the king keeps to maintain the peace / Whose hours the peasant best advantages”). Also consult Helgerson, Richard, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago, 1992), pp. 206–07, 234–42Google Scholar; Patterson, Annabelle, Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (Oxford, 1989), pp. 89–91Google Scholar; Barton, Anne, “The King Disguised: The Two Bodies of Henry V,” reprinted in William Shakespeare's Henry V, ed. Bloom, Harold (New York, 1988), pp. 12–14Google Scholar; Stirling, Brents, The Populace in Shakespeare (New York, 1949), pp. 151, 185–86Google Scholar.
12 Henry V 4.1.189–200 and 4.1.124–46.
13 Henry V 3.1.25–28 and 4.3.60–63.
14 See Harrison's, Description of England in Shakespeare's Youth, ed. Furnivall, Frederick J. (London, 1877), pp. 133–34Google Scholar.
15 Smith, , De republica Anglorum, ed. Dewar, Mary (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 74–75Google Scholar.
16 Harrison, , Description, pp. 306–07Google Scholar. For Gaudy's “active estate policy,” see Smith, A. Hassell, County and Court: Government and Politics in Norfolk, 1558–1603 (Oxford, 1974), pp. 179–80Google Scholar. The displaced villagers reportedly retaliated later and denied Gaudy's corpse a place in the local churchyard.
17 Smith, Thomas, A Discourse of the Commonwealth, ed. Dewar, Mary (Charlottesville, Va., 1962), pp. 17–18Google Scholar. Also consult Wood's, Neal remarks in “Foundations of Political Economy: The New Moral Philosophy of Sir Thomas Smith,” in Political Thought and the Tudor Commonwealth: Deep Structure, Discourse, and Disguise, ed. Fideler, Paul and Mayer, Thomas (London, 1992), pp. 146–48Google Scholar.
18 See Manning, Roger B., Village Revolts: Social Protest and Popular Disturbances in England, 1509–1640 (Oxford, 1988), pp. 64–65Google Scholar; Hanawalt, Barbara, “Peasant Resistance to Royal and Seigniorial Impositions,” Social Unrest in the Late Middle Ages, ed. Newman, Francis X. (Binghamton, New York, 1986), pp. 41–44Google Scholar; MacCulloch, Diarmaid, Suffolk and the Tudors: Politics and Religion in an English County, 1500–1600 (Oxford, 1986), pp. 286–88, 302–07CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
19 See Leinwand's, splendid “Shakespeare and the Middling Sort,” The Shakespeare Quarterly 44 (1993): 284–303CrossRefGoogle Scholar; also review Cressy's, David restratification, “Social Order,” pp. 29–44Google Scholar; and see his comments in Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 150–61Google Scholar.
20 For “permeability” and the “permanent profits of land,” consult Payling, S. J., “Social Mobility, Demographic Change, and Landed Society in Late Medieval England,” Economic History Review 45 (1992): 51, 66–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Also see Macfarlane, Alan, Reconstructing Historical Communities (Cambridge, 1977), p. 158Google Scholar, which concludes from studying turnover in Essex and Cumbrian parishes that “property was very mobile”; and Hexter, J. H., Reappraisals in History: New Views on History and Society in Early Modem Europe (2nd ed.; Chicago, 1979), pp. 91–92Google Scholar, which picks apart “the myth of the middle class.”
21 The characterization combines Jim Sharp's remarks with Ian Archer's analysis of the opportunities for participation in parish, ward, and company government. See Sharp, , “Social Strain and Social Dislocation, 1585–1603,” in The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the Last Decade, ed. Guy, John (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 208–09Google Scholar; Archer, , The Pursuit of Stability: Social Relations in Elizabethan London (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 14–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For “urban yeomen,” see McIntosh, Marjorie Keniston, A Community Transformed: The Manor and Liberty of Havering, 1500–1620 (Cambridge, 1991), p. 193CrossRefGoogle Scholar; for the construction of that “middle layer,” see Harris, Tim, “Problematizing Popular Culture,” in Popular Culture in England, 1500–1850, ed. Harris, Tim (New York, 1995), pp. 1–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar. To be fair, Mildred Campbell forewarned more than fifty years ago against melting early modern yeomen into some amorphous middle (The English Yeoman under Elizabeth and the Early Stuarts [New Haven, 1942])Google Scholar. She imagined an impressive set of traits or “standards,” making yeomen compellingly conscientious and virtually incorruptible. Yet, giving ground, she also admitted that yeomen constituted something of “a land-hungry, profit-hungry, and profit-conscious class” (ibid., pp. 50, 63, 91, 220). Oddly, then, Campbell's exceptional study can be read as a striking monument to a distinct and stalwart caste of characters traditionally associated with yeomanry and, simultaneously, as an uneasier tribute to those same middlers “making their way” and, as she conceded, “on the make.”
22 For “ideological accomplice,” see Lake, Peter, “Defining Puritanism Again,” in Puritanism: Transatlantic Perspectives on a Seventeenth-Century Anglo-American Faith, ed. Bremer, Francis J. (Boston, 1993), pp. 12–13Google Scholar.
23 See The Collected Works of Christopher Hill: Religion and Politics in Seventeenth-Century England, 3 vols. (Amherst, 1986), 2: 120–24Google Scholar; Wrightson, and Levine, , Poverty and Piety, pp. 17–18Google Scholar; Wrightson, Keith, “Sorts of People in Tudor and Stuart England,” in The Middling Sort of People: Culture, Society, and Politics in England, 1500–1800, ed. Barry, Jonathan and Brooks, Christopher (New York, 1994), pp. 34–44Google Scholar; Hunt, William, The Puritan Moment: The Coming of Revolution in an English County (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), p. 312Google Scholar. For a contemporary analysis of the late Tudor perceptions of the able-bodied poor, consult Clay, C. G. A., Economic Expansion and Social Change: England, 1500–1700, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1984), 1: 223–24Google Scholar.
24 See, for example, Margo Todd, Christian Humanism and the Puritan Social Order (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 161–62Google Scholar.
25 See The Collected Works of Christopher Hill, 2: 117–19Google Scholar; and Hill's, “William Perkins and the Poor,” reprinted in Puritanism and Revolution: Studies in Interpretation of the English Revolution of the Seventeenth Century (London, 1962), pp. 219–38Google Scholar.
26 Patrick Collinson allows that those puritans resurrected by Tawney and Hill turned their desire to acquire “from a deplorable if natural frailty into the mainspring of society.” See Collinson, , Tudor England Revisited (London, 1995), pp. 13–14Google Scholar.
27 Wrightson, and Levine, , Poverty and Piety, pp. 176–81, 200–11Google Scholar.
28 Evidence for the combination of commerce and covenant is quite strong and suggestive. Evidence for bridling, by contrast, seems weak; Zaret is content to recycle general sixteenth-century comments on “the unruly multitude” and its irrationality, its fondness for “extremes.” Zaret, , Heavenly Contract, pp. 64–67, 192–95Google Scholar.
29 Bancroft, Richard, Dangerous Positions and Proceedings published and practiced within this Island of Brytain under pretence of Reformation (London, 1595) pp. 44–46, 61–62Google Scholar; Heylyn, Peter, Aerius Redivivus (Oxford, 1670), book 10, p. 341Google Scholar.
30 Gifford, George, Briefe Discourse of certaine points of the religion which is among the common sort of Christians, which may be termed the countrie divinitie (London, 1598), p. 96Google Scholar.
31 See the notes from John Bridges' sermon, Bodlian Library, Tanner ms. 50, f. 46r; and the testimony of Thomas Underdowne in the “Briefe and True Report of the Proceedings against some of the ministers and preachers of the diocese of Chichester”, Dr. Williams' Library, Morrice Mss. B.2.41 and C.398.
32 Gifford, , Countrie Divinitie, A2v–A3r and pp. 49–53Google Scholar.
33 Duffy, Eamon, “The Godly and the Multitude in Stuart England,” The Seventeenth Century 1 (1986): 31–55Google Scholar, makes a similar argument, largely, although not exclusively, using later sources. For the sources cited here, see Cartwrightiana, ed. Peel, Albert and Carlson, Leland H. (London, 1951), p. 144Google Scholar; A Dialogue Concerning Strife in our Church, 5v–8r; “for friendship,” see the letter from Pilkington, Bishop (1564) in The Correspondence of Matthew Parker, ed. Bruce, John and Perowne, Thomas Thomason (Cambridge, 1853), p. 221Google Scholar.
34 The Lamentable Complaint of the Commonaltie, in A Parte of the Register (Middelburgh, 1593), pp. 206–07, 221–23, 269Google Scholar.
35 Lake assesses the consequences of Marprelate in Anglicans and Puritans? Presbyterianism and English Conformist Thought From Whitgift to Hooker (London, 1988), pp. 82–85Google Scholar. For Thomas Rogers' assessment (“shameless, nameless”), see his Sermon upon the 6th, 7th, and 8th verses of the 12th chapter of St. Paul's epistle unto Romans (London, 1590), p. 14Google Scholar.
36 Smith, Henry, “A Dissuasion from Pride and an Exhortation to Humility,” in The Works of Henry Smith, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1866), 1: 203–14Google Scholar. For Foxe, consult Helgerson, , Nationhood, pp. 264–66Google Scholar; also see, in addition to the humble sorts elevated by Perkins, and Gifford, , Anthony Gilby's Pleausaunt Dialogue conteining a large discourse betweene a souldier of Barwick and an English chaplain (London, 1566)Google Scholar. For Perkins' “hammer,” see his Foundation of the Christian Religion, in Works, 1: 78–79Google Scholar; for Bridges' confidence, see his Sermon Preached at Paules Crosse (London, 1571), pp. 73, 80–82Google Scholar. Patrick Collinson, however, is sure that there was much less admiration for commoners' inspired common sense and that Gifford's Atheos was the more typical tyke (Tudor England Revisited, p. 5).
37 Bownde, Nicholas, The Doctrine of the Sabbath plainely layde forth (London, 1595), p. 260Google Scholar. Also see Green, Ian, The Christian's A B C: Catechesis and Catechizing in England, c. 1530–1740 (Oxford, 1996), pp. 71–79, 210–229CrossRefGoogle Scholar; for mourning and milkmaids, see Short Questions and Answeres conteyning the summe of the Christian Religion (London, 1580), A3r–A4vGoogle Scholar.
38 The Works of Lancelot Andrewes, 11 vols. (Oxford, 1854; reprint ed., New York, 1967), 6: 5–6Google Scholar, citing Luke 2:46Google Scholar.
39 Bownde, , Sabbath, pp. 214–21Google Scholar.
40 Chaderton, , A Fruitfull Sermon upon the 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th Verses of the 12th Chapter of the Epistle of S. Paul to the Romans (London, 1584), pp. 80–81Google Scholar.
41 Rogers, , Sermon, pp. 43–48Google Scholar. On respectability, Paul Slack makes a related point with reference to social control, “Poverty and Social Regulation in Elizabethan England,” in The Reign of Elizabeth I, ed. Haigh, Christopher (Athens, 1985), pp. 231–45Google Scholar; also see Todd, , Christian Humanism, pp. 147–49Google Scholar.
42 See Collinson, Patrick, “The English Conventicle,” in Voluntary Religion, ed. Sheils, W. J. and Wood, Diana (Oxford, 1986), pp. 233–59Google Scholar; Martin, Joseph W., Religious Radicals in Tudor England (London, 1989), pp. 13–39Google Scholar. For “consistorian” plots, see Bancroft, , Dangerous Positions, B1v–B2r, pp. 67–69Google Scholar; Bilson, Thomas, The Perpetual Gevernmenl of Christ's Church (London, 1593), pp. 357–61Google Scholar, for the terror of democratizing tendencies that privileged “the rashnesse and rudenesse” of commoners.
43 For Wigginton and Hacket, see Cartwright, Thomas, A Briefe Apologie (London, 1596), B4rGoogle Scholar. For Hacket and his affluent friends, see Cosin, Richard, Conspiracie for Pretended Reformation (London, 1592)Google Scholar. Wigginton's letter to Cecil, British Library (BL), Lansdowne Ms. 84, f. 238, elaborates a plan for the “worthy schollers”; a report of “Mr. Wigginton's Troubles” mentions Sedbergh's alternative congregation, Wigginton's “reasonable assembly,” Dr. Williams' Library, Morrice Mss. B.2.34v and C.765.
44 Compare Cawdrey's letter to Burghley, BL, Lansdowne Ms. 55, ff. 162r–165v (“milkesopes” at 165r) with Wigginton's note, BL, Lansdowne Ms. 77, f. 159.
45 See Bancroft, , Dangerous Positions, p. 44Google Scholar. Also consult Collinson, Patrick, “The Cohabitation of the Faithful with the Unfaithful,” From Persecution to Toleration: The Glorious Revolution and Religion in England, ed. Grell, Ole Peter, Israel, Jonathan I., Tyacke, Nicholas (Oxford, 1991), pp. 51–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Marsh, Christopher W., The Family of Love in English Society (Cambridge, 1994), esp. pp. 177–79Google Scholar on social integration and the conventional character of expressions of polarity.
46 See the dedication to the fifth book of Hooker's, Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, 6 vols. ed., Hill, W. Speed (Cambridge, Mass., 1977), 2: 1–4Google Scholar.
47 Sprint, John, Cassander Anglicanus (1618)Google Scholar, cited in Foster, Stephen, The Long Argument: English Puritanism and the Shaping of New England Culture (Chapel Hill, 1991), p. 102Google Scholar.
48 Tyacke, , “The ‘Rise of Puritanism’ and the Legalizing of Dissent, 1571–1719,” in From Persecution to Toleration, pp. 17–18Google Scholar.
49 Cressy, David, Bonfires and Bells: National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England (Berkeley, 1989), p. 34Google Scholar; Ingram, Martin, “From Reformation to Toleration: Popular Religious Cultures in England, 1540–1690,” Popular Culture in England, c. 1500–1850, pp. 95–96Google Scholar.
