It may seem a facile pun, but the demonic possession of William Sommers was partly a battle for the physical and spiritual possession of the town of Nottingham itself: its corporate body and ecclesiastical soul. Darrell, his friends’ dispossession and their joint account of it had found a warm welcome in Burton, where the godly were at home with such ideas and dominated town politics. But Nottingham was different: a much larger and more conservative town ripe for conflict between godliness and established authority. It was just the kind of town Richard Bancroft had had in mind when he spoke of places where the godly might dangerously gain influence, to the detriment of the national church and national peace. From the Pilgrimage of Grace to the Civil War, Nottingham was of vital religious and strategic importance: David Marcombe calls it a ‘front-line base’. The author known only as the ‘Narrator’, who published the first account of the Nottingham dispossession, celebrated the fact that ‘God hath lighted a candle, not in a corner, but hath advanced it as it were on a candelstick in the heart, or center of our land’. And there was a further, textual, level of meaning of ‘possession’, in that what was being contested during and after the dispossession at Nottingham was the possession of the meaning of events surrounding Sommers – the control of the narrative (both verbal and then in print) and its interpretation, which now came to be highly controversial as the events surrounding Thomas Darling were not.