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Ecclesiastical Discipline and the Crisis of the 1680s: Prosecuting Protestant Dissent in the English Church Courts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 August 2020

KIT MERCER
KIT MERCER*
Affiliation:
St Catherine's College, Oxford, OX1 3UJ
*
E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

This article argues that as a part of the Tory reaction (1680–5) England's church courts were revived and utilised in the prosecution of religious dissent. The records of the church courts in three deaneries in and around London demonstrate that the numbers of prosecutions in the courts increased significantly in the early 1680s after the defeat of the Exclusion Bill and that the vast majority of these prosecutions were for religious offences. This brief flowering of persecution sought to ‘exclude the excluders’ and to remove political and religious dissidents from positions of secular power and from parish vestries.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Ecclesiastical History , Volume 72 , Issue 2 , April 2021 , pp. 352 - 371
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2020

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Footnotes

This article is based on an MPhil dissertation for which I was fortunate to be supervised by Gabriel Glickman. I am extremely grateful to him, as well as to Grant Tapsell, for their advice and support.

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