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Can We Count the ‘Godly’ and the ‘Conformable’ in the Seventeenth Century?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2011

Margaret Spufford
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Extract

In 1966 Keith Thomas wrote an article in the Times Literary Supplement which laid down the axiom, ‘All historical propositions relating to the behaviour of large groups, for example… religious activity, are susceptible of treatment in this [statistical] way, and indeed permit of no other.’ Social historians have increasingly adopted this approach ever since. It has obviously great merits: I am sometimes afraid, indeed, that the principle is in some ways not being carried far enough, and that only the letter, and not the law, is being implemented. For instance, in my own field, individual village studies, often of high quality, are produced. But their authors frequently omit to indicate the nature of the agricultural and marketing region in which their community lies, and therefore fail to establish either its probable social structure or its ‘normality’ or ‘abnormality’ within its area. Quantified studies of great complexity and considerable value are therefore produced; but this value is diminished by the total ignorance of the reader, and sometimes it seems of the author, of the ‘typicality’ of the example.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Ecclesiastical History , Volume 36 , Issue 3 , July 1985 , pp. 428 - 438
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1985

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References

1 Houston, Rab in Social History, viii (1983), 385–7Google Scholar.

2 Furthermore, despite the great merits of Religion and the Decline of Magic, London 1971Google ScholarPubMed, Mr Thomas's findings in it did not, despite his credo of 1966, by any means rest firmly on a quantified base. He had presumably discovered the difficulties involved.

3 See my Small Books and Pleasant Histories, London 1981, 194–5Google Scholar.

4 For lack of space I have not included here figures from Houlbrooke, Ralph, Church Courts and the People during the English Reformation 1520–70, London 1979Google Scholar, or from Ingram's, Martin unpublished Oxford D.Phil, thesis (1976)Google Scholar, ‘Ecclesiastical justice in Wiltshire, 1600–1640’.

5 Wrightson, Keith and Levine, David, Poverty and Piety in an English Village: Terling 1525–1700, New York, San Francisco, London 1979, 119 (Table 5.2), 156, 158–60Google Scholar.

6 Collinson, Patrick, ‘Cranbrook and the Fletchers’, in Godly People, London 1983, 410 (Table I), 418–19Google Scholar.

7 The Diary of Ralph Josselin, 1616–1683, ed. Macfarlane, A., London 1976, 77, 96, 234–7Google Scholar.

8 Stieg, Margaret, Laud's Laboratory: The Diocese of Bath and Wells in the early Seventeenth Century, Lewisburg 1982Google Scholar, Table 9:15.

9 Proceedings of the Short Parliament of 1640, ed. Cope, Esther S. with Coates, William H. (Camden Society, 4th sen, xix, 1977), 277Google Scholar.

10 The latter are now under investigation by Miss Judith Maltby with a view to a Ph.D. dissertation at Cambridge. I am grateful to Miss Maltby for calling the Hertfordshire petition quoted above to my attention.

11 My Contrasting Communities, 269.

12 Wrightson, Keith, English Society, 1580–1680, London 1982, 218Google Scholar.

13 Dickens, A. G., ‘The extent and character of recusancy in Yorkshire, 1604‘, Yorkshire Archaeological Journal, xxxvii (1948), 32Google Scholar. Dr David Palliser kindly supplied me with this reference. He has himself listed, with L.J.Jones, the surviving returns for 1563 and 1603 in Local Population Studies, xxx (1983), 55–8Google Scholar. He has also used them for both England and Wales, in the form uncorrected by Wrigley and Schofield, in The Age of Elizabeth: England under the later Tudors, 1547–1603, London 1983, 331Google Scholar. I am also particularly grateful to Dr Palliser for supplying me with the detailed figures for Ely and London, referred to later in this paragraph, from his own files, as well as much general information. The 1563 and 1603 returns are currently being investigated in detail by him.

14 Wrigley, E. A. and Schofield, R., The Population History of England 1541–1871, London 1981, 569Google Scholar. I have, of course, omitted the 35 per cent that they added to represent those under sixteen, who were also mainly non-communicants.

15 The State of the Church in the Reigns of Elizabeth and James I as Illustrated by Documents Relating to the Diocese of Lincoln, ed. Foster, C. W. (Lincoln Record Society, xxiii, 1926), i. 443–5Google Scholar.

16 Burke, Peter, ‘Religion and secularisation’, in Burke, Peter (ed.), New Cambridge Modem History, xiii (Companion Volume), Cambridge 1979, 309CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Burke took his figures from Gilbert, A. D., Religion and Society in Industrial England, London 1976Google Scholar, who based them in turn on a note in Canon Foster's introduction to his Lincoln diocesan documents, op. cit., p. lviii. The actual number of communicants given in the bishop of Lincoln's return of 1603 was 196,926. There were forty non-communicants listed for two archdeaconries only, but the relevant columns for the other archdeaconries were left blank; Foster, ibid., pp. 444–5. The archbishop's summary of figures of communicants for Lincoln shot them up to 242,550, and, reasonably in the circumstances, he added ‘quere’. As Canon Foster wrote, rather dryly,’ most of the figures in this summary have been altered, and their appearance does not inspire confidence’ (p. lv).

17 Some of these may appear in the course of Dr Palliser's research, and others may indeed be already in print, since my investigations for this communication have necessarily been of the briefest kind.

18 Foster, n. 15 above, shows from the ecclesiastical court records that non-communicants were usually admonished and were willing to conform.

19 Wrigley and Schofield, Population History, 570 and ch. 2.

20 It is just possible that Miss Maltby's current work on the few petitions in favour of the Prayer Book which bear original signatures may reveal another source for a few rural areas. They, however, will only permit the historian to count the ‘conformable’, not the ‘godly’.