Beginnings: Mansfield

When John Darrell was released from prison in London in 1599, he vanished, keeping his whereabouts secret for a period of eight years until he reappeared in the records of an ecclesiastical court, and was shown to be living at Teversal in Nottinghamshire. But although his disappearance was initially by design, for Darrell it was merely a return to the condition in which he was born and lived in his home town of Mansfield in the years c. 1562–75. The lives lived in Mansfield in the late sixteenth century were only written as they touched such bodies as the church, the civil administration or the courts. And many of these records are now lost. Darrell's story is one of an emergence into view, and then into text, because what he had been quietly doing and the beliefs that he had been quietly holding for over a decade had suddenly been raised to prominence by geographical, literary and political accidents. Darrell was noticed, and became an author, because other people perceived him – rather suddenly – as a threat and some began to write urgently about his activities, attacking or defending him. So we still have only these two views of his life – offensive and defensive, both from polemical angles.