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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016
The root and branch bill was debated in the house of commons between 27 May and 27 July 1641. The original bill introduced by Sir Edward Dering was short, simply abolishing bishops, deans and chapters with all their dependents. But after the house had wrestled for two months with the business of replacing episcopacy with a new form of church government the bill had grown to more than forty pages. No complete copy of it, as it stood when it was dropped in August, has survived, but its main provisions can be reconstructed from the commons journals and parliamentary diaries. A new system of government was to be set up in two stages: its final form would be determined by a synod of divines, which it was intended should meet in the autumn of 1641 and work fast enough for the new jurisdiction to be established by 1 March 1642; in the meanwhile parliament would take all ecclesiastical jurisdiction into its own hands and proceed with the redistribution of the church’s financial resources. This paper is concerned with the first of these two stages, the commons’s interim programme of action to fill the vacuum left by root and branch. The speeches of MPs on three topics that dominated the June and July debates—church courts, ordination and deans and chapters— strikingly reveal their concern to use a period of temporary control over the church for reform and renewal.
1 The fullest account of the progress of the bill is in Shaw, [W. A.], [A History of the] English Church [during the Civil Wars and under the Commonwealth], 2 vols (London 1900] 2, pp 78–102 Google Scholar. See also Zagorin, P., The Court and the Country (London 1969) pp 238-41Google Scholar; Dering, E., A Collection of Speeches (London 1642) p 119 Google Scholar.
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34 I am grateful to my wife and to Lynn Beats for their comments on a draft of this paper.
