The primary purpose of this book has been very straightforward: to bring to wider notice the extraordinary deposit of manuscript materials describing the inner lives and ascribed and internalised religious identities of the godly and their enemies in Northamptonshire on the eve of the Civil War. The puritan separate account of the fate of Barker, Beatrice and Ursula, compounded by the testimony of The Northamptonshire high constable offers an almost unequalled opportunity to view the same set of events from two immediately contemporary, and mutually exclusive, perspectives.

We get to reconstruct the circumstances of the crime itself as well as its denouement on the scaffold, in part through what turns out to be a virtual transcript of Barker's last dying speech, and to set those tragic events in the wider context of contemporary puritan culture. Thanks to the survival, in print, of hundreds of pages of sermons preached at the Kettering combination lecture, precisely the same lecture of which Barker himself had been a member, we can reconstruct, in intricate detail, the theological and pietistic assumptions and assertions, within which both the puritan and anti-puritan responses to Barker's and Beatrice's tragic fall were framed, and which, in effect, provided the script that Barker and the ministers who attended him on the scaffold played out before an audience of thousands at his execution. Thanks to the highly wrought nature of The Northamptonshire high constable, we get an almost equally detailed picture of the opposite view of the matter, as it was put together by a virulent enemy of the godly.

Comparing the two rival accounts enables us to do a number of other things. Firstly, we can reconstruct something of the range of contemporary rumour surrounding not just this case but the Northamptonshire godly more generally conceived and, on that basis, see just how closely the stereotypes of the puritans produced by their enemies accorded with the statements and attributes of the puritans themselves. In fact, it emerges from the preceding account that we are not dealing here so much with mere stereotypes, but rather with, sometimes remarkably closely observed, caricatures. Sometimes grotesquely exaggerated, always seriously malign, they remain accentuations of what the sources produced by the godly when they were talking to and about themselves reveal to have been their own signature characteristics and propensities.