Reformation historians frequently argue that the sixteenth century witnessed the introduction of new ideas on how society should be regulated. In particular, Professor Collinson has asserted that a certain type of activism emerged from the reform of the Church that resulted in:

A few years earlier Keith Wrightson and David Levine had argued that social regulation in the localities had changed in both degree and scale during the sixteenth century. In their study of the English village of Terling, Wrightson and Levine argued that this change in degree and scale stemmed from the intersection and interconnectedness of ‘democratic growth; commercialization; the socioeconomic polarization of local societies; the growth of poverty; the expansion of popular literacy; the impact of the Protestant reformation.’ In recent years this argument has had its share of detractors. Margaret Spufford challenged the ‘Terling thesis’ by arguing that 'the attempt to enforce ‘godly discipline’ was not new to the sixteenth century. For Spufford, it 'is very necessary to separate puritan beliefs, or the beliefs of the “hotter sort of protestant” and, indeed, any other type of religious belief, from their moral application to everyday life.’