Chippenham to the World. A Macrocosm to Microcosm.

Some time in the early 1980s an animated discussion among then youngish historians of the English Reformation who had spent their doctoral years in the '60s and '70s ploughing through diocesan archives was subdued by a remark of Cliff Davies to the effect that some of the more important documentary evidence for early modern religion might well have been found in non-ecclesiastical archives.(1) This was a few years after the publication of Margaret Spufford's Contrasting communities(2) and, novel as Davies's idea seemed at the time, that volume ensured that the next generation of Reformation historians would not be caught similarly off their guard. Since then it has become impossible to write a local or regional study of post-Reformation religion without due reference to the surviving social and economic as well as the ecclesiastical archives, and among the most distinguished of these studies are some by Spufford's students.(3) The publication of a volume written largely by those students, and edited by Margaret Spufford herself, provides an opportunity to assess the contribution which her approach has made to our understanding of what contemporaries understood by post-Reformation religion. Notwithstanding their continuing commitment to linking the socio-economic and the ecclesiastical sources, the method adopted by Spufford and her students over the past twenty years has been subject to significant alteration. Eschewing her earlier approach, which concentrated on detailed studies of particular parochial communities and which produced a variety of religious groupings 'formed of an infinite mix of different social and economic compositions', Spufford and her students have started to examined heretical and sectarian groupings at a regional level in an attempt to 'illustrate their antecedents with conviction ,(4) This forms the core argument of the book, and is most forcibly presented in the chapters by Plumb and Stevenson on the Lollards and on post-Restoration dissenters respectively, and by the jointly authored section, supported by appendices, which concentrates on the Chiltern Hundreds. Derek Plumb's work on Lollardy confirms his earlier studies in demonstrating that the heretics were to be found among the wealthy peasantry as well as the poorer brethren,(5) and extends this to show that, not only were they wealthy, but for most of the time they were also respectable in the eyes of their neighbours, being well integrated into the life of their local community through filling such offices as bailiff and, more surprisingly, churchwarden. This level of integration coexisted with a strong sense of identity which was sustained by links with Lollards in the capital carried along the trade routes of the area mapped by Michael Frearson and through a spiritual, and often familial cousinage, which kept those 'personally linked clusters' in touch with each other. This is all well documented and adjusts the argument of Richard Davies on the importance of locality rather than household within Lollard experience,(6) though the differences between him and Plumb are not as great as Plumb suggests.

The question posed in Plumb's second chapter, as to whether these clusters formed a 'gathered Church', is less convincingly answered. In a series of richly detailed case studies the existence of groups of Lollards meeting for worship, and their ability to keep in touch with like-minded brethren over long distances and many years is amply demonstrated. Their Lollardy was clearly not one born of isolation, but was nourished and sustained by regular contact with groups of adherents elsewhere. It is tempting to see this network as the crucial element in the establishment of the 'nonconformist base' characteristic of the region. This assumes, however, that this is how they saw themselves, but in other respects, as Dr Plumb recalls in this final paragraph, they were 'full-time members of their communities, their guilds, and their parish church'.(7) Perhaps the model here should not be drawn from dissent, into which they were periodically thrust by a persecuting authority, with its formalised confessional boundaries, but from evangelicalism or Puritanism, where the boundaries between the 'hotter sort' and the ordinary Christian were just as clear in theory but more fluid in practice. Such an analysis makes more intelligible the easy relationship which many Lollards had with their conforming neighbours and which is recalled in the testamentary material of the Bartlet and Hobbes families of Amersham. It seems plausible to suggest, …