The relationship between popular religious attitudes and the English Reformation has long been the subject of a fierce historical debate. The older “Whig-Protestant” view, championed most notably by A. G. Dickens, draws on evidence for clerical corruption and the spread of Lollardy to show that large numbers of English people were dissatisfied with the state of Catholicism, eager for religious change, and on the whole receptive to Protestant ideas. According to this version of events, Henry VIII and the Reformation Parliament rode a wave of popular discontent in breaking from Rome and dissolving the monasteries. If there was a split between the king and the masses, it came only later when Henry's conservative religious beliefs caused him to attempt to retain much of the substance of Catholicism in the face of popular clamor for more thoroughgoing reform. On the other hand, the “revisionist” camp, which includes such well-known names as J. J. Scarisbrick, Christopher Haigh, and Eamon Duffy, prefers to cite evidence from wills, local parish records, liturgical books, and devotional texts to show that “the Church was a lively and relevant social institution, and the Reformation was not the product of a long-term decay of medieval religion.” In this view, Henry VIII and his advisors pushed through a personally advantageous but widely disliked and resisted Reformation.

An examination of the religious content of the tales men and women told about Robin Hood in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries offers a fresh perspective on this long-running dispute.

As the number and interests of charitable institutions expanded throughout Britain during the eighteenth century, so special fund-raising events, anniversary celebrations, and meetings multiplied. During 1775, for example, the major metropolitan charities and a plethora of minor benevolent societies courted middle- and upper-class Londoners with invitations to concerts and exhibitions. Men could support various hospitals and other good causes by dining in taverns and City Livery Halls in company with civic and ecclesiastical dignitaries, even noble and royal dukes. Both men and women might attend charities' anniversary services, ornamented with special music and a sermon, choosing among dispensaries, hospitals, lying-in charities, religious societies, and various efforts to reform and reclaim the poor for public benefit. On Sundays, armed with tickets, special prayer books, and even keys to their rented pews, women and men might attend the chapel of a philanthropic institution. Alternatively, they could listen to a fund-raising sermon and watch charity-school children arrayed in the gallery of a parish church. Toward the end of the year, they might pay half a guinea each to hear Handel's Messiah in the Foundling Hospital Chapel or go to Covent Garden and Drury Lane to watch tragedies and farces. Charitable activity thus extended beyond churches, alms, and sermons into the theater. It spilled onto the streets as gentlemen processed to dinner; it accompanied art and music. Conversely, waves of fashion drove visitors to one philanthropic institution or another to see deserving recipients, hear a particularly popular preacher, or to be observed themselves.

In 1898, after forty-five years of enforcing mandatory infant smallpox vaccination, the British parliament passed an act to allow parents to “opt out” of the compulsory system. The 1898 Vaccination Act introduced a conscience clause that entitled parents who objected to the practice of vaccination to claim certificates of conscientious objection by applying to a magistrate for an exemption. This provided working- and lower-middle-class anti-vaccinationists a measure of relief from the repeated fines they had suffered for noncompliance with the law, and from the threat of imprisonment. By the end of 1898, over 200,000 certificates of conscientious objection had been issued. Many of these were granted in anti-vaccination strongholds where exemptions outnumbered vaccinations, but conscientious objection to vaccination was by no means limited to these regions. Once an amended conscience clause was passed in 1907, which made conscientious objector status much easier to attain, the national exemption rate grew to 25 percent of all births.

The vaccination conscience clauses were controversial. As most of the applicants who applied for these exemption certificates came from the working classes, and many were women, these acts generated a national debate over the classed and gendered nature of the conscience and the meanings of conscientious objection. The years between 1898 and 1907 thus mark a significant moment in the making of the modern subject and citizen. For, as the debate over conscientious objection to vaccination reveals, who exactly was entitled to make a claim to possess a conscience, with its concomitant rights, was itself a contested issue.

On 31 October 1847, the John Williams, a ship of the London Missionary Society, left Gravesend for the Pacific Islands from whence it had come. Its cargo included five thousand Bibles and four thousand copies of The Pilgrim's Progress in Tahitian. Like other such mission ships, the John Williams had been funded by the pennies and shillings of Sunday school subscription and had become a huge media spectacle. It was but one of the many international propaganda exercises at which mission organizations so excelled.

This picture of The Pilgrim's Progress (1678 and 1684) at the center of an international web is an appropriate one. Written in the wake of the English Revolution, the book had rapidly been disseminated to Protestant Europe and North America. By the late 1700s, it had reached India and by the early 1800s, Africa. Yet, some one hundred years on, this avowedly international image of The Pilgrim's Progress had been turned inside out. From being a book of the world, it had become a book of England. Today, John Bunyan is remembered as a supremely English icon, and his most famous work is still studied as the progenitor of the English novel. Roger Sharrock, in his introduction to the Penguin edition of The Pilgrim's Progress, best exemplifies this pervasive trend of analysis. His introduction begins by acknowledging Bunyan's international presence, but this idea is then snapped off from the “real” Bunyan who is local, Puritan, and above all English.