In recent years, our understanding of the Tudor religious changes has been considerably increased by local studies, each concerned with a particular city, county or region and employing a range of different sources for the task. This essay is concerned instead with one of the principal varieties of material used in such studies, the accounts kept by parish churchwardens, and attempts to make a national survey. By taking the surviving accounts from across the whole of the country, with supporting information from visitation returns, sermons, official correspondence and literary sources, it is possible to examine issues which cannot be considered convincingly in local studies, and so to offer a different perspective to earlier work on the subject.

Most of the churchwardens' accounts are incomplete, and several of those surviving give mere annual totals of income and expenditure without individual entries. In large part these faults are the work of time and personal inclination respectively, but they also reflect the tensions prevailing in the period as detailed sets of accounts often break off or become summary (infuriatingly) as the religious changes commence. Contentious items were erased as regimes and policies altered. Thus, of the 198 sets used for this study, being the great majority of those extant, only eighteen cover all the years between 1535 and 1570, in detail. Furthermore, they are geographically limited. The third of England north of the Trent is reflected by only a thirteenth of the accounts, and the four northernmost counties and the whole of Wales have yielded only one set each.