Denizens of early modern Norwich were keenly aware of the two props upholding an ordered urban society: good governance and religion. The close association between the two was recognised by Joseph Nobbs, a late seventeenth-century clerk and schoolmaster at St Gregory's parish, as well as a chronicler of his adoptive city, who heaped fulsome praise on the orderliness and industriousness of his fellow citizens. Such traits he attributed to the clear guardianship of Norwich's famed magistracy. The city's elite did not shrink from the task of firm government ‘not suffering any debauched or idle persons to be found in the streets, chastising the unruly, quickening the sluggish and encouraging the willing, holding no want either for wages for such as can or will work’. But this model commonwealth was strengthened by Protestant teaching. In Norwich the Reformation ran deep, the city having been ‘stored with learned preachers for many years by reason whereof the inhabitants are reasonably instructed in the principles of religion’.

Three hundred years on, and Nobbs's account of the pious civility permeating early modern England's second city skill holds sway. Patrick Collinson, for instance, has depicted Norwich as a borough ‘saturated with Calvinist preaching’, a ‘self-contained East Anglian Geneva’, a shining example of the close union between magistracy and ministry, which municipal authorities everywhere aspired to foster in Elizabethan England. But how, and to what extent did Tudor Norwich come to model itself after Geneva?