Writing in the late nineteenth century, the church historian Charles Abbey confessed, ‘our readers are spared the once famous Bangorian controversy. Its tedious complications are almost a by-word to those who are at all acquainted with the Church History of the period.’ A century later, J. C. D. Clark was keener to emphasize the great importance of the dispute – ‘the most bitter domestic ideological conflict of the century’ – to the history of English church and society. He nevertheless lamented that the literature of the Bangorian controversy was ‘[s]o extensive … that historians have been deterred from tackling it, and no full study of the subject exists’.

Clark's views curiously chime with those of the first chronicler of the Bangorian controversy, the young heterodox whig fellow of Merton College, Oxford, Thomas Herne. In his contemporaneous account, he located the dispute in the context of the ongoing theological debates which followed the Reformation, and hoped ‘some exact Enquirer and learned Antiquary, will one time or other take in deducing from that Period a good Account of the Rise, Decay and Revolutions of Opinions, and the Advancement of Learning’. Recommending his own bibliographical labours, Herne commented wistfully, ‘If the time of a Work of this Nature's appearing be at any considerable Distance, whoever shall undertake it, will, I dare say, find no Reason to disapprove of the Information this Account may give him in that Part of the Work which will treat of the three last Years.’