We know, or at least think we know, how the Reformation fared in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Norwich. Generally the transition from a Catholic to a Protestant city is seen as having carried on apace under the Tudors, with Norwich swiftly emerging as a noted centre of radical puritanism thereafter. Moreover, the grassroots of religious dissent were somehow deeply enmeshed in the fabric of urban life. Turning to the secondary literature, we find a classic statement of this idea within John Browne's History of Congregationalism and Memorials of the Churches in Norfolk and Suffolk, published in 1877. Browne was, from 1849, the Congregationalist minister at Wrentham, Suffolk, and later secretary of the Suffolk Congregational Union. His published work was intended as a hagiography of the puritan movement in East Anglia: his heroes were the select band of saints who followed his namesake Robert Browne along the path of separation from the episcopalian church. The ‘little Brownist rivulet’ became ‘the broader and stronger stream of Congregationalism, and flows on to the present day’.

However, Brownism belonged very much to the East Anglian environment, Norfolk and Suffolk having ‘long been distinguished by the zeal for Protestantism cherished and manifested in their towns and villages’. After all ‘one of the first victims of the writ de heretico comburendo was a Norfolk man’. A regional religious mythology was born, and came to be embellished twenty years later by Alfred Kingston's account of East Anglia during the Civil War.