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Factionalism in Town and Countryside: The Significance of Puritanism and Arminianism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Anthony Fletcher*
Affiliation:
University of Sheffield

Extract

Factionalism in the local communities of Stuart England is a many-sided subject which has hardly been investigated. I am concerned in this paper primarily widi die religious ingredient in local factionalism and in particular with a series of incidents of sustained hostility between clergy and laity, most of which occurred in the decade before the civil war. In every case conflict arose because clergymen were more or less assertively at odds either with deeply embedded custom and tradition or with strongly held views among the laity of their town or village. The intention is to consider die patterns of conflict that lie behind these incidents and to relate these patterns to the structures of rural and urban communities.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1979

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References

1 Cheshire R[ecord] O[ffice], MS QJF 71/4/23-4, QSOB 9a, fol 87.

2 [BL] Add MS 36913, fol 136; Richardson, R. C., Puritanism in North West England (Manchester 1972) p 40 Google Scholar; Morrill, [J. S.], Cheshire [1630-1660] (Oxford 1974) p 35 Google Scholar.

3 Cheshire RO, MS QJF 71/4/23-4.

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9 Ibid, Sessions Rolls 42/50, 46/6.

10 Ibid, Sessions Rolls 46/5.

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14 Cited in Spufford, M., Contrasting Communities (Cambridge 1974) p 316 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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19 BL, Loan MS 29/121/172. I am most grateful to Mrs Jacqueline Levey for letting me use a transcript she has made of this manuscript. See also BL, Loan MS 29/172, fol 344.

20 Ibid 29/173, fols 106v, 208v.

21 Collinson, Elizabeth Puritan Movement, pp 372-82; P. Collinson, The Godly: Aspects of Popular Protestantism in Elizabethan England (Papers presented to the Past and Present Conference on Popular Religion, 1966) p 3.

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23 Fletcher, County Community, pp 117-20.

24 Ibid p 235; Cross, C., ‘Achieving the Millenium: the Church in York during the Commonwealth’, SCH 4 (1967) pp 122-34Google Scholar.

25 Fletcher, County Community, pp 235-6.

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28 Clarke, English Provincial Society, p 363; Cal SPD 1636-7, pp 359-60, 390-1, 495: Cal SPD 1639-40, pp 79-80, 106-7.

29 Fletcher, County Community, p 237.

30 Clark, English Provincial Society, p 363.

31 SCH 4 (1967) pp 128-9.

32 Cal SPD 1630-40, p 106.

33 Cal SPD 1636-7, p 391.

34 Tyacke, N. R. N., ‘Puritanism, Arminianism and Counter-Revolution’, The Origins of the English Civil War, ed Russell, C. S. R. (London 1973) pp 119-43CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35 I am grateful to my wife and to Mark Greengrass for their comments on a draft of this paper.