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about Reformation history. Worshippers attending their local parish church were frequently encouraged to place their local experiences in the context of a larger, international and apocalyptic history of the Christian community. In March 1629 the minister at St Helen’s, Ashby-de-la-Zouch, delivered a powerful sermon on the need for Protestant solidarity across the whole of Europe: ‘Say not thou art a member of the Church of England, thou art a member of the Church of France, or of Germany, or of Bohemia: for all the Churches of the world that profess the same faith and religion, are but one body’. He went on to lament the lack of ‘fellow-feeling with their miseries’. Although these sufferings were commonly heard and talked about, and news circulated in the corantos, as much as any other news, it was treated ‘as if a matter that concerns not us at all’. This indifference risked provoking God ‘by our profane stupidity’.108

Of course, the need for the harangue suggests that many of his audience did not acknowledge these truths, but as war raged in Germany, a war perceived by many as crucial to the future of the church, it seemed to some observers that they were witnessing the battles of the last days. Many Scots had gone to serve in these wars, and some Englishmen too: according to one estimate 3,000 volunteers each year from 1562 to 1642, not counting those in the service of the English crown. Collections for distressed Protestants, and to support wounded veterans of the wars, were relatively common in English parish churches.109

Local worship was also about the celebration and formation of local community, of course. It was a ritual moment of common prayer in which hierarchy was reconciled with community. The moral and spiritual boundaries of community were physically represented in the decoration of the church and the disposition of its internal spaces. Pews were increasingly likely to be personally allocated, the best seats going to the local quality, their social inferiors ranged behind them. This was in fact one common problem in railing off the altar, that it might disturb the seating arrangements which were so carefully calibrated to reflect the local social order. Through the ritual year communal life was marked out and reproduced – even the physical boundaries of the community were marked by Rogation-tide processions, when the minister ‘beat the bounds’ with his parishioners. The life cycle was marked out by communal events – baptism, marriage and death. In a ritual much despised by the godly but promoted by the Laudians, women were formally received back intothecongregation after childbirth, a ceremony known as churching. Sinners did public penance and were readmitted to the bosom of the Christian community. Ritual forms might carry a considerable freight of local social and political significance; and that significance was in turn located within an apocalyptic scheme that embraced the whole Christian community.110 Sin and popery in (as it might be) Ashby-de-la-Zouch had a potentially cosmic significance, and Protestant preachers were anxious to make that clear. Episcopal authority in England therefore provided the framework for a participatory, and active, Christian practice; and that practice was, by principle, socially and politically engaged.

Although lay influence diluted the power of the head of the church, it was not nullified. As we have seen, during the 1630s, as episcopal powers were brought to bear, there was a distinct change in tone in many localities and changes to the internal arrangements of many churches. Some people, among them both the humble and very influential, clearly felt concerned about the future of reformation. During the 1630s, some of the godly in England fled to the New World (along with those motivated by more secular concerns), hoping to establish a new Zion, and many others seem to have gone to Europe.111 But separation from a church in which the Word and the sacraments could be found was no easy step. Even after the church did begin to appear popish, there were powerful reasons