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Achieving the Millennium: the Church in York during the Commonwealth

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Claire Cross
Claire Cross*
Affiliation:
University of York
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Extract

Anglican historians from the Restoration until relatively recently have tended to see the Commonwealth as a catastrophic interruption in English church history, a time when Puritan enthusiasts loosed religious anarchy upon the country; but perhaps the twenty years from 1640 to 1660 can be studied with more understanding if they are considered as the culmination of a century’s long struggle to cleanse the English church from the corruptions of Rome. Certainly in the mid-seventeenth century many York men, laymen as well as clerics, looked at the revolutionary period in this light, as the time during which they at last achieved a church purged of all superstition. Whether in fact to those who lived through it, this period did appear so revolutionary in ecclesiastical history is open to doubt, for in York, at least, the ruling oligarchy kept tight control over events and repressed licentious gatherings of the common people who here, as elsewhere, sympathised with the Baptists and the more extreme sects. The intention of this essay is to try to uncover the religious attitudes of the city’s governing class: for some of these men the break in church life came, not in 1644 with the discontinuance of the Anglican liturgy, but in 1662 when exultant Anglicans set their face against a comprehensive church, and they, the leaders of their local society, for the first time found themselves excluded from the established church.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 4: The Province of York , 1967 , pp. 122 - 142
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1967

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References

Page 123 of note 1 In the first part of this essay in particular I have relied heavily upon the pioneering work of Dr R. Marchant: R. A. Marchant, The Puritans and the Church Courts in the diocese of York 1560-1642, 1960, especially chapters 4, 5, 6. Mr G. C. F. Forster has also surveyed the religious life of York throughout the Commonwealth in his chapter, ‘York in the seventeenth Century’ in VCH, the City of York, 1961, 200-206.

Page 124 of note 1 York Borthwick Institute, Original wills, proved May, 1645. Also in full in York City Library, Housebook 1638-50,143.1 have modernised the spelling here, as in all subsequent quotations.

Page 124 of note 2 , B. I., Reg. Test. XLI, 447, 653Google Scholar; Reg. Test. LXII, 109. I. M. Calder, Activities of the Puritan Faction of the Church of England 1625-1633, 1957, xxiii-xxiv.

Page 125 of note 1 Marchant, Puritans and Church Courts, 78. , B. I., Reg. Test. LXII, 694, 711Google Scholar. Original wills, Thomas Atkinson, June 1642.

Page 126 of note 1 York City Lib., Housebook 1626-37, 33, 68, 77, 98,151,153,156, 234, Housebook 1638-50, 23. Marchant, Puritans and Church Courts, 226-7, 291-2. , B. I., Reg. Test. XLI, 653 Google Scholar.

Page 127 of note 1 City Lib., Housebook 1638-50, 78, 83, 85.

Page 127 of note 2 VCH, York, 202-3. City Lib., Housebook 1626-37, 44.

Page 128 of note 1 VCH, York, 174, City Lib., Housebook 1626-37, 242, 246, 278, 288-9, 294, 327; Housebook 1638-50, 45.

Page 129 of note 1 City Lib., Housebook 1627-37, 186, 207, 218-9, 219-20, 224, 225, 229, 230, 231-2.

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Page 131 of note 2 The post-Restoration valuations are taken from a 1664 survey, Lambeth. 923, 328-331. The pre-1640 valuations from York Minster Library, Torre MSS, City volume, 623 (based on the Valor Ecclesiasticus).

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Page 137 of note 1 Marchant, Puritans and Church Courts, 270. Matthews, Calamy Revised, 532. Dale, Yorkshire Puritanism, 116-7, 121, 166-7. Venn, , Alumni Cantabrigienses, pt. I, vol. II, 358 Google Scholar; vol. III, 349, 358; vol. IV, 527, 535.

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Page 140 of note 1 City Lib., Proceedings of the Northern Association, 20, 62, 64, 76-7, 84; Housebook 1650-1663, 48, 59.

Page 140 of note 2 City Lib., Proceedings of the Northern Association, 47, 58, 67, 76.

Page 141 of note 1 City Lib., Housebook 1638-50, 149, 206, 243; Housebook 1650-1663, 30, 54, 60, 125; Proceedings of the Northern Association, 118.

Page 141 of note 2 City Lib., Housebook 1613-25, 54; Housebook 1638-50, 147; Quarter Sessions F 7,187, 353.

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