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Our theme is religion and the early modern state, with all the polarities such a title implies. In this chapter, I want to consider the impact of the Reformation in a community in which “folk belief” and the state religion – or at any rate the religion of the local clerical and social elites – were intimately bound together, and in which the social, economic, and religious dynamics and interests of the community were represented and inscribed in a great building, one of the most harmonious perpendicular churches of fifteenth-century England. I want to explore the way in which that building even now encodes the interplay of social realities and relations within a gentry-dominated community on the eve of the Reformation. I also want to raise some questions about the extent to which the Reformation should be considered not an act of state so much as an assertion of social hegemony, a radical simplification of social as well as religious space, the elimination or overwhelming of some of the key constituent elements in the balance of a late medieval community. THE PARISH OF SALLE The great church of Salle stands isolated in the north Norfolk fields near Aylsham: There is no longer anything that could be called a village. The parish was once a rich and important place, weaving linen and Hessian for the region as well as wool, but there were never enough people in Salle to fill the church. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

‘SISTERS OF THE REFORMATION’ Writing in 1645, Joseph Hall provided what may be taken as a definitive account of the way in which the Elizabethan and Jacobean Church of England had viewed her Reformed neighbours: Blessed be God, there is no difference in any essential matter betwixt the Church of England and her Sisters of the Reformation. We accord in every point of Christian doctrine without the least variation; their public Confessions and ours are sufficient conviction to the world of our full and absolute agreement. The only difference is in the form of outward administration; wherein also we are so far agreed that we all profess this form not to be essential to the being of a church, though much importing the well or better being of it, according to our several apprehensions thereof; and that we do all retain a reverent and loving opinion of each other in our own several ways, not seeing any reason why so poor a diversity should work any alienation of affection in us, one towards another. This form of argument may be found in almost every work of anti-papal polemic of the Elizabethan and Jacobean period whenever the writer addressed Roman charges of Protestant disunity. The authors emphasized that all Protestants were in complete agreement over the fundamentals of true doctrine – they merely agreed to differ on minor issues relating to ecclesiastical discipline. The Church of England's basic identification with the forces of Protestantism was unquestioned. Although this argument became the standard reply to Roman charges of Protestant disunity, there was an extent to which it also served a polemical purpose in controversies among Protestants themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AN ‘ANTI-RELIGION’? The Roman Church was not alone in being judged doctrinally erroneous. In an especially contentious age most forms of Christianity accused each other of heresy. What was unique about the Church of Rome was the nature of the errors that Protestants imputed to her. Protestants generally believed Rome's errors to have a decreed purpose and significance that transcended the ways in which Rome might choose to maintain or defend them. Quite often, doctrines were damned because of their connection with her, rather than Rome being damned for espousing them. The background of the apocalyptic tradition was of fundamental importance here, as it lent a sense of inevitability to Rome's errors, which were preordained and of eschatological significance. Thus George Downame explained that because the pope was Antichrist, he was incapable of doing anything save what was papism and mere antichristianism. Errors which appeared to be fulfilments of scriptural prophecy were thus granted a significance well beyond their apparent doctrinal heterodoxy. In works of apocalyptic exegesis, and also in many popular works of anti-papal polemic, Rome's errors were therefore depicted, not as a mere hybrid of false and erroneous doctrines and practices, but as the direct embodiment of a false religion. Popery was often presented, especially in the works of converts from Roman Catholicism, as a coherent system of false divinity. It was, as Dr Lake has noted, depicted as ‘an anti-religion’ – a separate religion which worked by essentially inverting the values and norms of Protestant Christianity. Crucial here was the theme of deception, whose prominencewe have noted in expositions of the Romish Antichrist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THE ATTRACTIONS OF ANTI-POPERY In 1600 Andrew Willet had urged anti-popery as the main vocation of the Church of England. He argued that it would unite puritans and bishops, enabling them to put the presbyterian upheavals behind them, and would stimulate an awareness of a common identity which conformists and precisians shared. In practice, things were rarely that simple. Estimations of the relative importance of the papal threat, and therefore of the value of opposition to it, were changing during the early Stuart period. Later chapters will study the structure of anti-papal thought in England and will investigate some of the doctrinal changes which possibly underlay these different assessments. However, it will be necessary to devote this first chapter to exploring the rationale of Elizabethan and Jacobean antipopery, and the purposes which it served. After an initial examination of the evaluations built into this ideology, the changes within it will then be placed within the context of the political chronology of the period, and the rapid developments during the 1630s, when the value of anti-popery was fundamentally challenged.Recent scholarship has already demonstrated how anti-papal polemic acted during the Elizabethan period as the established means whereby moderate puritans such as Willet could both display their loyalty to the Church of England, and at the same time affirm their commitment to further reformation.In Jacobean times anti-papal writings, at least in the first half of the reign, were the most distinctive feature of English Protestant theology and occupied the energies of all the principal members of the Jacobean episcopate. Recent scholarship has already demonstrated how anti-papal polemic acted during the Elizabethan period as the established means whereby moderate puritans such as Willet could both display their loyalty to the Church of England, and at the same time affirm their commitment to further reformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]