What impact did post-Reformation Catholicism have on England's oral culture? The Protestant theologian Joseph Hall provides one point of entry in an influential passage from his tract The Old Religion, usually held to be the first occasion in English when oral tradition is named as such. Attacking Catholics for investing tradition with an authority comparable to the written word of God, he makes pejorative use of the familiar idea that traditions could be passed down verbally as well as contained in writing, and links oral tradition, oral transmission and unreliability in a way that implies a strong pre-existing association between Catholics and orality. As against the fixedness of print, oral communication was seen as having infinite potential to distort, and it became a powerful metaphor to express the fears about the fertility of ignorance that are so common in anti-Catholic polemic.

But this is only one reason why the association between orality and Catholicism was a natural one in post-Reformation England.