It had always been a central duty of the episcopate to preach, and other spiritual functions such as confirmation and visitation, not to mention secular responsibilities at the opening of Parliament and at court, provided ample opportunity to extend the normal pastoral range. Distinguished preachers such as Stephen Langton and John Fisher were regarded as among the finest ornaments of the medieval Church, so that, at one level, Tobie Matthew’s commitment to preaching was part of a long tradition expressed in the careers of distinguished forebears and enjoined in the Scriptures and the Fathers. At another level, the Reformation both shifted the emphasis which bishops were to place on preaching, and changed the context in which it took place.

The Bowes of Streatlam, in the bishopric of Durham, were notable on two counts in the later part of the sixteenth century. On the one hand, they were highly regarded for their uncompromising loyalty to the Crown, an attachment which was to bring them disastrously close to the brink of financial ruin under the parsimonious Elizabeth, who repeatedly failed to reimburse and compensate them for activities undertaken in her name. On the other hand, the family was particularly noted in the religiously conservative north for its staunch adherence to the Protestant faith. The seeds of this Protestantism were in evidence from the earliest years of the Reformation, but it was given greater definition and inspiration by the example of Elizabeth Bowes, the ardent adherent and later mother-in-law of the Scottish reformer John Knox. Yet, if Elizabeth was the first, she was certainly not the only uncompromisingly Protestant matron in the Bowes family during this period. Towards the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth century the second wife of her grandson Sir William Bowes was to assume Elizabeth’s spiritual mantle, thereby reinforcing still further the family’s attachment to the Reformed faith.

The relations between bishops of the Church of England and lay patrons could be fraught and were certainly variable. Local circumstances and the general distribution of patronage within a given diocese combined with the personalities and concerns of the bishop and patrons involved to provide a distinctive environment for negotiation. It would be rash, therefore, to suggest that any case study of co-operation or conflict between a patron and a bishop could be typical. This said, such a case-study cannot but inform and stimulate because negotiation, amicable or otherwise, was essential for all parties wishing to exercise patronage. The co-operation between John Coke and Bishop Thomas Morton demonstrates not only the possibilities for concerted action in a given religious cause, but also the way in which the rules and regulations of the Church of England might be stretched and bent in that process. It indicates the importance for the Church of the web of connections which the bishops built up during their careers. It underlines the close interrelationship of the parochial ministry and the role of household chaplain in so many upper-gentry homes. It highlights the dependent relationship between the clerical client and his patron and the differing reactions of ministers to this situation.

The Puritans of northern England have been well served by modern historians. The work of J. T. Cliffe and R. C. Richardson has shed a considerable amount of light on the Yorkshire and Lancashire godly in the seventeenth century, while case-studies of prominent northern parliamentarians, such as Claire Cross’s recent biography of Alderman Hoyle of York, have contributed much to our understanding of how the region’s Puritans reacted to the Laudian ‘captivity’ of the Church and the endeavours after 1640 to build a new Jerusalem.

THE work of Richard Baxter, Edmund Calamy, and John Walker in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and of the indefatigable A. G. Matthews and Charles Surman in the twentieth, has illuminated the history of the sufferings of the clergy ejected from their livings in the 1640s and 1650s, and of those who lost their livings at the Restoration and in its aftermath. The history of their families, however, is much less well known. This essay is concerned with the chronicling of the sufferings and with the economic and psychological plight of the families of the clergy ejected in the 1640s and 1650s.

IN the dark days of 1662, ‘one of the yeares of the captivity of the Churches, and of the passion of the ministers of Christ’, Cocker-mouth Congregational Church set down an account of its beginnings during the Interregnum, so that people would know ‘in after times, that somewhat hath been a doing in this corner of the earth in a church way’:

IN 1974 Margaret Spufford was able to describe wills as ‘largely unused by local historians’. Over the last quarter of a century this situation has changed radically, and wills have been called upon to provide evidence on subjects as diverse as popular piety, charity, literacy, economics, demography, and familial ties. In this process a divide has developed between religious historians, who have largely been concerned with the preambles of wills, and social historians, who have confined themselves to the content. This paper attempts to bridge that gap by examining the relationship of geography, status, and the life course, with the form and content of the wills.

THE contents of what was described in 1885 as ‘the most extensive and the most interesting of the old Grammar School Libraries of Lancashire’, the Burnley Grammar School Library, shed interesting light on the state of religious controversy in the north between the late sixteenth and the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The library, which, through the generosity of Burnley Grammar School and with the kind co-operation of the Lancashire County Library, is now on permanent loan at Lancaster University, forms, as presently constituted, a collection of 875 volumes, published mainly in the seventeenth century. It owes its foundation to, and, as we shall see, reflects the religious interests, aims, and viewpoint of, the Revd Henry Halsted (1641-1728), rector of Stansfield, in Suffolk, who left the whole of his personal library to the Burnley Grammar School in 1728. Shortly after Halsted’s death, the collection was augmented by a small addition of books presented by another clergyman, the Revd Edmund Towneley of Rowley, rector of Slaidburn, Lancashire. It is, therefore, essentially a clerical and religious library and provides an interesting example of what sort of material typical, affluent English incumbents of the Augustan and early Hanoverian period considered worthy of places on their study shelves. For purposes of comparison within the region, a collection by two laymen made in another northern town and, like the Halsted-Towneley collection, charitably gifted, the Petyt Library, built up to over two thousand volumes by two brothers in the first decade of the eighteenth century, and now housed within Skipton Public Library, with its heavy emphasis on divinity, can be profitably examined. In the essay that follows we shall consider the Burnley Collection as essentially that of its principal donor, Henry Halsted, and as enshrining his aims.

IT is always a surprise to discover one’s prejudices. Some time ago while attending a meeting at Ushaw College, Durham, I was surprised to see the extent to which the College and its chapel reflected the sense of being in continuity with the Church of Bede and Cuthbert. But why was I surprised? Because I had always associated that continuity with the Church of England and the magnificent cathedral church of Durham. I have no hesitation in regarding the Presbyterianism of Northumberland as part of that continuing tradition, because I regard the pre-Reformation Church as part of all our traditions. So the only reason to be surprised to find the same sense at Ushaw is an underlying prejudice that Roman Christianity represented an alien intrusion into the indigenous Church - a proposition that only has to be articulated for its incoherence to become apparent, for where did the indigenous Church come from, except originally from Rome?