To a large extent lay people remain the forgotten participants in the Anglican history of the modern period. This omission is now even more apparent when it is contrasted with the growth of interest in lay religion among medievalists and early modernists. Several reasons may account for the neglect. One is the common assumption that the onset of industrialisation led to the final collapse, in the popular imagination, of the Christian world-view, and that from the middle decades of the century Christianity became a solely middle-class preoccupation. The publication of Horace Mann's Report on the Religious Census of 1851 did much to propagate this notion among contemporaries, by drawing their attention to the extent to which the working classes stayed away from church. Yet such interpretations tend to overlook the tenacity of aspects of Anglicanism (and also the extent to which varieties of Nonconformity and Roman Catholicism had taken root in the urban environment). They tend to equate religiosity rather narrowly with Sunday attendance, and they ignore the experience of the majority of Britons, for whom life in a rural community remained the norm until the second half of the century.