As part of the truism that the North of England was uncivilised, primitive and retarded, it was held that nowhere was this more apparent than in its religious character, which was marked by its persistent adherence to Roman Catholicism in the face of the Protestant reformations of the sixteenth century. But this is to adopt a rigid, binary interpretation of the religious complexion of England in the early modern period. For it has been convincingly argued that it is misleading to see the English Reformation as a ‘struggle between two tightly consolidated blocs … facing each other across a deserted religious no-man’s land’. Nor was it a ‘coherent battle between two incommensurate world views’, for the majority neither wholly embraced nor wholly accepted it. The later years of the sixteenth century saw the English church facing an internal battle between Protestant conformists and a spectrum of the discontented, the most extreme of whom were Presbyterians, while tensions were also developing among English Catholics. This was as applicable to England's north-eastern parts as to elsewhere in the kingdom. For instance, an appraisal of the ‘martyr’, Margaret Clitherow, executed in an exceptionally gruesome manner in March 1586 for creating a priests’ house and a Catholic school, concluded that the affair exposed deep divisions within the Catholic community of York. In particular, it demonstrated the rift between recusants and church papists, and between radical and moderate Catholics, who regarded her apparent determination to achieve martyrdom, and failure to exploit loopholes offered to her by the judge, as damaging to Catholics in general. Similarly, it is increasingly difficult to trace a single Catholic community, despite Diarmaid MacCulloch being as convinced in 2001 as he had been in 1990 that the tendency of Catholic families to marry into other Catholic families made the community ‘ever more identifiable’. It could be argued that this might have been especially so after the introduction of recusancy legislation from 1572. For conditions were created to illustrate Phythian-Adams's point that, ‘shared susceptibility to the same outside influences’ was a distinguishable cultural trait, which, in turn, was also a crucial element in shaping identity. But how accurate are these premises? And how can they be tested?