Church and People in Interregnum Britain, ed. Fiona McCall

Abstract

There has been a significant uptick in historical interest in the interregnum Church in recent years. While a lot has been said about the various sects which came onto the scene in the 1650s, and the personal religion of the key political players, far less attention has been given to the national system of religious provision centred around the territorial parishes inherited from, and bequeathed to, the episcopal Church of England. Given that this is where the overwhelming majority of the population continued to worship, as Bernard Capp reminds us in a helpful scene-setting introduction, this shift in focus is welcome. As in so many areas of the past, historians tend to focus on the more visible instances of conflict and disagreement, rather than the bigger picture of grudging compliance and muddling through. This volume, edited by Fiona McCall, is further evidence that this might be changing. We have learned from recent work that the idea of a ‘national Church’ remained a powerful unifier throughout the 1650s, notwithstanding vigorous disagreement about the precise form it should take. One of the contributors here, Rebecca Warren, in her doctoral thesis of 2017, examined attempts to reconstruct a national Church during the Protectorate following the disorder of the Commonwealth. Coming at the topic from the perspective of the history of ideas, Anthony Milton’s recent England’s Second Reformation: The Battle for the Church of England 1625–1662 (2021) posited that, following a period of experimentation and fierce debate during the Commonwealth, the Protectorate was marked above all by the impulse towards unity. There have also been numerous conferences, and this collection of essays emerges from one of these, ‘The People All Changed: Religion and Society in Britain during the 1650s’, held at the University of Portsmouth in 2016.