Towns and Religious Change

People in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were grappling with beliefs about the nature of this world and the existence of a life after death, the purpose of human life and the requirements of a Creator. This was a universal phenomenon but the effects of wide communal interactions in towns gave it a particular momentum. The Christian church from its establishment was always town-based. The very language of the religion was urban as it spoke of the city of God and the building of a new Jerusalem or warned that ‘here is no abiding city’. A city was distinguished from a mere town simply on the basis of the presence of a cathedral and a cathedral often took up at least 10 per cent of the urban space. Towns were a key focus for religious instruction. Stow wrote that ‘the doctrine of God is more fitly deliuered and the discipline thereof more aptely to bee executed, in peopled townes then abroad, by reason of the facilitie of common and often assembling’.1