Search

Religion meant far more in early modern England than church on Sundays, a baptism, a funeral or a wedding ceremony. The Church was fully enmeshed in the everyday lives of the people; in particular, their morals and religious observance. The Church imposed comprehensive regulations on its flock, such as sex before marriage, adultery and receiving the sacrament, and it employed an army of informers and bureaucrats, headed by a diocesan chancellor, to enable its courts to enforce the rules. Church courts lay, thus, at the very intersection of Church and people. The courts of the seventeenth century – when ‘a cyclonic shattering’ produced a ‘great overturning of everything in England’ – have, surprisingly, had to wait until now for scrutiny. Church Courts and the People in Seventeenth-Century England offers a detailed survey of three dioceses across the whole of the century, examining key aspects such as attendance at court, completion of business and, crucially, the scale of guilt to test the performance of the courts. While the study will capture the interest of lawyers to clergymen, or from local historians to sociologists, its primary appeal will be to researchers in the field of Church history. For students and researchers of the seventeenth century, it provides a full account of court operations, measuring the extent of control, challenging orthodoxies about excommunication, penance and juries, contextualising ecclesiastical justice within major societal issues of the times and, ultimately, presents powerful evidence for a ‘church in danger’ by the end of the century.

An authoritative account of the life and achievements of George Morley, who was for years a teacher at Christ Church, Oxford, before becoming Dean of the College, and then ultimately the Bishop of Worcester and then Winchester. He was as such an important C17th figure, even beyond the University of Oxford and Dioceses of Worcester and Winchester, and fundamentally entwined nationally in the heightened political and religious controversies of his time. He was involved in the restoration of the monarch in 1660, as well as in the consequent deliberations regarding a settlement with a view to establishing church unity in the subsequent decades. He was also a man who straddled cultures and political epochs, born at the end of the C16th and living through much of the C17th, thus a life that began in the era of the Gunpowder plot and which ended in the run-up to the so-called Glorious Revolution. This meant that Morley’s personal and professional evolution touches on moments of extraordinary tumult and contention, requiring him to develop profound skills of negotiation, compromise, and bridge-building. As such he become a skilled mediator, a diplomat at a time when this was most in demand.

This book attempts to assess the ministry of the Church in Winchester – a premier diocese – in the seventh century – a time of outstanding upheaval – as it underwent the awesome challenges of Archbishop Laud's Arminianism, abolition during the wars and emergence after the Restorations into an age of Toleration. The focus is the parish. While the hierarchy was immersed in national policy, the parish clergy were the front line – the interface – between Church and people. They performed the essential rites of passage in the communities, from baptisms to communion – and with the churchwardens, oversaw the fabric of their church, its fittings and charity. Five critical points – 1615, 1637, 1663, 1675, and 1697 – form the basis of this study. Early chapters examine such characteristics as ‘class,'education, an d income of the clergy; later chapters, likewise, parochial activity over the century. It is the contention of this survey that the mid-century upheavals smashed traditional loyalties but that the parish clergy and their overlords, when restored, reverted to type and failed to heed the lessons of the 1640s/50s. Problems from outmoded parochial boundaries to pluralism and working into old age remained unaddressed, depriving the church of the vigorous ministry needed in the changed circumstances of post-restoration Britain.