Godly Reformers and their Opponents in Early Modern England

NORWICH is widely believed to have been foremost among English provincial cities in its embrace of Protestant Reformation. Matthew Reynolds cites Patrick Collinson's eloquent depiction of a city ‘“saturated with Calvinist preaching”, a “self-contained East Anglian Geneva”, a shining example of the close union between magistracy and ministry, which municipal authorities everywhere aspired to foster in Elizabethan England’. The challenges to this godly harmony most visible to previous historians of Norwich came from interfering bishops: Edmund Freke (1575–84), Samuel Harsnett (1619–29), and Matthew Wren (1635–8). These prelates’ campaigns, especially Freke's to uphold ceremonies, Harsnett's to regulate preaching, and Wren's to enforce the railing off and altarwise placement of the communion table, have been seen as the chief causes of protest and discord in this most thoroughly reformed of English cities. Dr Reynolds's painstaking prosopographical investigations and wide-ranging research in municipal and diocesan archives and episcopal papers have enabled him to enhance our understanding of developments in the city in two particular respects. First, he gives a much fuller and more rounded account of the early partnership between godly laity and clergy that was crucial in the city's reformation. The outlines are reasonably familiar from the work of Patrick Collinson and others. The most wholeheartedly Protestant aldermen co-operated with Bishop Parkhurst (1560–75). The planting of John More, ‘apostle of Norwich’, in St Andrew's parish was one fruit of this co-operation. Edmund Freke's campaign divided the ranks of the godly, and contributed to the development of separatism, but the partnership between ‘magistracy and ministry’ nevertheless survived and flourished during the episcopates of Freke's more sympathetic successors until 1619. Some of Reynolds's more notable additions to the story can be found in his contextualisation of the famous Norwich poor-relief measures of 1570, his account of John More's successors at St Andrew’s, and his narrative of the survival of Norwich separatism after Robert Browne's departure for the Netherlands in 1582. The last of these in particular draws on skilful and thorough scholarly detective work

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