Society and Puritanism in Pre-revolutionary England by Christopher Hill

Author:Christopher Hill
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

III

The complaint throughout is twofold: humbler men were subject to vexatious penalties whilst the richer got off; but wider questions of church government were also involved. The bishop had to supervise hundreds of parishes, whose inhabitants he could not know personally. Discipline, the Puritans thought, should be administered parochially by the ‘physician of souls’, the minister, and his natural advisers among the propertied of the parish. Instead men were hauled off (at considerable expense to themselves) to distant courts on the information of ‘a base apparitor’, who was a lay official: and there they were tried by the ‘subordinate officers’ of the bishop, laymen again; or the parish was visited by lay officials from outside, who were understandably unpopular with the local community. Professor Notestein quotes an agreeable instance from the parish of Bishop’s Stortford, where in 1634 the churchwardens voted 5s. to be paid to the bellringers for not ringing the bells when the bishop’s Chancellor arrived, and 2s. 6d. for ringing them on the day he went away!2

In the presbyterian view no laymen except elders – who were sacred officers of the Church, not properly laymen at all – should have anything to do with ecclesiastical government.3 Elders and the minister watched over and knew their congregations: their discipline would be intimate and well-informed. Distant officials of ecclesiastical courts could merely administer a cold and formal law, enforcing external observances, not a paternal discipline. It is a matter of local society, under its ‘natural rulers’, asserting its independence against the alien demands of a distant state machine: we may compare the hostility of the J.P. class to the prerogative courts, which they also overthrew as soon as the Long Parliament met. But opposition to the Church courts had this ‘popular’ basis in that it drew upon the traditional community sense of the parishes.

Puritan ministers had wider ambitions than the merely negative reaction of laymen to the church courts. They also wanted to obtain power to exclude from communion those whom they regarded as being in a state of sin.1 This could be a serious penalty where the parish was still a real community, and where belief in God was still more than conventional. It lost some of its significance when imposed by a distant church court, associated in the public mind with the governmental machine. The object of the puritan ministers was to restore it to reality by giving the minister the right to exclude. Thus the attitude of the puritan ministers before 1640 was complex. On the one hand they wished to strengthen the local authority, to restore to the minister (but in conjunction with elders) some of the powers that had been lost since confession, penance and absolution were abolished. The Admonition to Parliament of 1572 wished to see excommunication restored to its former force.2 But at the same time the ministers, and still more their lay supporters, wished to reduce the power wielded by the hierarchy in the matter of excommunication. Experience taught them that the lay courts were more amenable to outside pressure than the ecclesiastical courts.

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