Since the late 1960s, the English Reformation has often been represented as a process of change forced upon an unwilling people by an educated social elite. The religious system of the elite, by this view, is seen as inimical to a broad range of popular practices and beliefs, with puritan ideology giving extreme expression to socially repressive tendencies. Although recent scholarship has sought to modify this view, the relationship of popular and elite culture in London is still often perceived as confrontational. The present article seeks to examine patterns of religious behaviour among the social elite in London during the later sixteenth century, arguing that continuity in certain traditional forms of piety, such as charitable benefaction and funerary practice, expresses a complex of fundamental attitudes and beliefs which operated across the social spectrum. These practices, when enacted, defined and legitimated the parish as a religious community. They also served to reattach a shared belief system to a historically changing religious context, a process of renegotiation in which the whole civic population participated.