Norwich's transformation into a Protestant town was further accomplished by a veritable team of committed pastors, who were settled in the city to articulate the moral values enforced in 1570. The fortunes of Elizabethan and Jacobean Norwich's famed teaching ministry are examined here. Our impression of the city's religious life in the last decades of the sixteenth century owes much to the panegyric offered by William Burton, a preacher who was forced to leave the city in 1589 after delivering a sermon, for which he was ‘accounted an enemy to Caesar’. Dedicating a translation of Erasmus's Seven Dialogues to the corporation, he recalled his time in Norwich with a tinge of nostalgia. For Burton, the city could be compared favourably with the Biblical paradigms of Bethel and Jericho, which ‘maintained the Schooles of Prophets among them’; magistrates and ministers ‘embracing and seconding one as another and the common people affording due reverence and obedience to them both’. No motion put to the city Assembly was done without first consulting ‘your grave and godly preachers’. It was a great joy to witness ‘the continuall resorte that was every day … for many years together unto the holy exercise of religion’, of so many devout magistrates and so ‘great a meeting of learned and faithfull Pastors’, resorting to one another's houses ‘whither some went, all went, none were excluded’ to ‘receive incouragement alike in the word of the lord’.