The “Middle Men” of the English Reformation: Religious Change and Continuity in Three London Parishes, 1530–80

Traditional accounts of the Reformation in London have focused on the governments, religious policies, and legislation of Henry VIII and his successors.  For the most part, they tend to emphasize the religious upheaval, reversal, and “settlement” wrought by successive Tudor monarchs.  When examining people on the “street level,” historians tend to focus on evangelical reformers, iconoclasts, staunch religious conservatives, preachers at Paul’s Cross, Marian martyrs, persecutors of all stripes, Continental refugees, and outspoken persons of conscience, many of whom are known to historians because they were arrested.  These extraordinary individuals, however, were a breed apart from the vast majority of ordinary Londoners, who are largely invisible in the surviving documents. This paper, by contrast, explores the Reformation as microhistory by addressing religious change and continuity at the parish and neighborhood levels.  Drawing on extensive dissertation research, it examines churchwarden accounts, parish records, and hundreds of wills from Saint Andrew Hubbard, Saint Peter Westcheap, and Saint Dunstan in the West in order to argue that churchwardens and other neighborhood leaders—especially well-connected citizens, who were householders and members of London’s trade guilds or livery companies—were not only able to meet most challenges posed by rapid regime changes and abandoned religious policies, but also to create a Reformation that was very much their own.