Achieving the Millennium: the Church in York during the Commonwealth

Abstract

Anglican historians from the Restoration until relatively recently have tended to see the Commonwealth as a catastrophic interruption in English church history, a time when Puritan enthusiasts loosed religious anarchy upon the country; but perhaps the twenty years from 1640 to 1660 can be studied with more understanding if they are considered as the culmination of a century’s long struggle to cleanse the English church from the corruptions of Rome. Certainly in the mid-seventeenth century many York men, laymen as well as clerics, looked at the revolutionary period in this light, as the time during which they at last achieved a church purged of all superstition. Whether in fact to those who lived through it, this period did appear so revolutionary in ecclesiastical history is open to doubt, for in York, at least, the ruling oligarchy kept tight control over events and repressed licentious gatherings of the common people who here, as elsewhere, sympathised with the Baptists and the more extreme sects. The intention of this essay is to try to uncover the religious attitudes of the city’s governing class: for some of these men the break in church life came, not in 1644 with the discontinuance of the Anglican liturgy, but in 1662 when exultant Anglicans set their face against a comprehensive church, and they, the leaders of their local society, for the first time found themselves excluded from the established church.