As the complex histories of the first texts on John Darrell's work in Burton and Nottingham suggest, what was going on at a literary level at the dispossessions of Darrell and his friends was just as important as their political or otherwise factual context. How and why the events were written about and how and why they were responded to in print are as important as the historical facts of the case, because the battle was one of representation and perception, fought through mutual stereotyping. It is difficult enough to establish the circumstances of the texts’ production – the basic story of what happened when – because each fragmentary account has its own cultural limitations and biases. But what can be said about how those accounts construct something beyond the factual – not just establishing that Darrell used Rogers's prayers, or Harsnett investigated Darrell's financial affairs, but taking part in a literary and cultural battle where imagery, genre and topos mattered as much as the disputed facts?

Chapter 2 established that the habitual discourses of social status and education, as well as constructions of godly culture as likely to be particularly sociable, were important ways in which contemporaries thought and wrote about the affair.