Lollards in the English Reformation

Abstract

Politics, culture and society in early modern Britain General Editors professor alastair bellany dr alexandra gajda professor peter lake professor anthony milton professor jason peacey This important series publishes monographs that take a fresh and challenging look at the interactions between politics, culture and society in Britain between 1500 and the mid-eighteenth century. It counteracts the fragmentation of current historiography through encouraging a variety of approaches which attempt to redefine the political, social and cultural worlds, and to explore their interconnection in a flexible and creative fashion. All the volumes in the series question and transcend traditional interdisciplinary boundaries, such as those between political history and literary studies, social history and divinity, urban history and anthropology. They thus contribute to a broader understanding of crucial developments in early modern Britain.

Oath-taking and the politics of secrecy in medieval and early modern British towns

“…Conventicles were banned on three separate occasions in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 77 Some later interpolations in town books included oaths of supremacy alongside civic oaths that were recorded in an earlier period, suggesting that the politics of oath-taking (and fealty to the Crown in particular) were not only matters of local concern but also part of wide-ranging changes in religious policy after 1540. J. Michael Gray has argued that oath-taking during the English Reformation was itself a vehicle through which religious and political transformation was solidified, going so far as to claim that the Henrician Reformation did not just depend on the promises of fealty contained in oaths, but that the act of oath-taking constituted the entire foundation upon which the Reformation rested.…”