Since it is an obvious convention to begin a preface with ‘This book’ –well, this book began life as an attempt to address two closely related themes: the nature of ‘popular’ response to the English Reformation, and the relevance of that response for the formation of political allegiance prior to the English Civil War. I leave defining the ideological rifts among Christians in early Stuart England to the Introduction. Suffice it to say that the following embellishes what Stephen Sykes has noted with dismay as the ‘tendency to present church history as a chronic succession of disputes’. But I hope this will not be a cause for regret. Likewise, any predisposed to view the established church of Elizabeth I, James I and Charles I as being characterised by a high degree of workaday consensus will no doubt come away from this study disappointed.

Such caveats aside, I have enjoyed being immersed in the everyday town – parish life of early modern England. On a personal level, the ‘politics of the parish pump’ under the Tudors and Stuarts has a familiar quality: disagreements arising from matters of worship being a perennial feature of the disputatious – yet never dull – small-town parish of my upbringing. Not that I have sought to view Reformation England through the lens of churchgoing in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Even so, the experience has – consciously or not – allowed for an appreciation of the intensity of feelings provoked by Reformation change in an age when obligatory participation in parochial worship was as much a compulsive act for a proportionally higher number of people, given the pervasiveness of religion in early modern society.