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How Socially Conservative Were the Elizabethan Religious Radicals?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 July 2014

Peter Iver Kaufman
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Extract

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.

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Research Article
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Albion , Volume 30 , Issue 1 , Spring 1998 , pp. 29 - 48
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference on British Studies 1998

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References

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12 Henry V 4.1.189–200 and 4.1.124–46.

13 Henry V 3.1.25–28 and 4.3.60–63.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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