8 - Popular observance

Summary

On 1 October 1673 fourteen people from Somerford Magna appeared before the bishop's court charged with failing to receive communion. The previous year, during the period of the Declaration of Indulgence, the rector Nathaniel Aske had tried to present many of the same villagers for absenting themselves from services or coming late. Yet, despite this evidence of nonconformity, the villagers professed their conformability to the church government and their willingness to participate in church services. They explained that they had been reluctant to receive communion from their minister because he had behaved in an unsuitable manner. In response to the rector's presentment, the villagers submitted their own lengthy list of charges against him and petitioned the bishop to replace him with some other honest minister. This episode demonstrates the difficulties of studying popular religious observance within the Church of England after the Restoration. Clergymen were unable to understand non-observance as anything but dissent or irreligion, which they regarded as two sides of the same coin. It is hard for historians to avoid sharing their assumptions. The same court processes that detected nonconformists, whose principles would not permit them to accept the patterns of worship laid down in the Prayer Book, also detected others who offended but remained loyal to the Church. It is, nevertheless, just possible to detect the outlines of popular observance of the liturgy beneath the outward appearance of nonconformity.