‘Neither Godly professors, nor ‘dumb dogges’: reconstructing conformist Protestant beliefs and practice in Earls Colne, Essex, c. 1570-1620

Abstract

This article focuses on the other side of the parish from that explored so expertly and compellingly by Margaret Spufford in Contrasting Communities. Or rather, if Margaret sought out the first shoots of religious enthusiasm, and then went on to trace how the different plants were connected together by genus and over time, this research is more concerned to study the mud in which they were sometimes planted. We can say ‘mud’ rather than ‘soil’ because an acute agrarian historian like Margaret understood the distinction between tilled, aerated, well-manured, weed-free ‘soil’ or ‘tilth’, and the lumpen, muddy fallows, where things grow because they are left largely to their own devices. It is this rather unkempt, weed-strewn, parochial religion that is the subject under consideration here. [...]