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REFORMERS, CONFLICT, AND REVISIONISM: THE REFORMATION IN SIXTEENTH-CENTURY HADLEIGH

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 March 1999

JOHN CRAIG
Affiliation:
Simon Fraser University

Abstract

The cloth-making town of Hadleigh in Suffolk has often been cited in the annals of the English Reformation as a town that early embraced Protestantism apparently effortlessly. This view owes much to John Foxe's famous description of this ‘Universitie of the learned’, yet a closer examination of the surviving evidence from Hadleigh indicates that the Reformation was as bitterly contested here as it was in many another mid-Tudor community. And the nature of the bitter struggle between the advocates of reform and a group of conservatives in the town may have proved so fierce that the energies for further reform under Elizabeth all but dissipated.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
© 1999 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

I wish to acknowledge the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and to thank Patrick Collinson, Tom Freeman, Diarmaid MacCulloch, Peter Northeast, and Marjorie McIntosh for their comments on an earlier draft of this essay. An earlier version of this essay was awarded the Archbishop Cranmer prize in the University of Cambridge for 1991.