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Consecrated Things and Places: Visitation and Sacralisation in the Jacobean Church

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 December 2024

MICHAEL B. KELLY
MICHAEL B. KELLY*
Affiliation:
Christendom College, Virginia
*
E-mail: mkelly12@christendom.edu
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Abstract

Jacobean visitation articles reveal increasing anxiety about preserving sacred space and material things from profane use. New churches and churchyards were consecrated by novel rites as sacred space was increasingly prioritised and emphasised in visitation. More and more prelates labelled the church building ‘the house of God’. By 1612, the archbishop of Canterbury's metropolitical visitation articles identified ecclesiastical space and furniture, notably the communion table, as ‘consecrated’ to God. English prelates widely adopted this sacralising rhetoric. These innovations originate not in the prescriptions of avant-garde prelates awaiting the advent of Laud but more commonly in those of Reformed conformist bishops.

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Research Article
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The Journal of Ecclesiastical History , First View , pp. 1 - 21
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2024

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Footnotes

The author is grateful to this Journal’s anonymous reviewer for helpful comments on an early draft of this article.

References

1 D'Ewes, Simonds, The autobiography and correspondence of Sir Simonds D'Ewes, Bart., ed. Halliwell, James O., London 1845, ii. 141Google Scholar; Visitation articles and injunctions of the early Stuart Church, ed. Kenneth Fincham, Woodbridge–Rochester, NY 1994–8, ii, p. xxv; Fincham, Kenneth and Tyacke, Nicholas, Altars restored: the changing face of English religious worship, 1547– c. 1700, Oxford 2007, 326CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Wren, Matthew, Articles to be inquired of within the dioces of Norwich, London 1636 (RSTC 10298), sig. A3r–vGoogle Scholar; Milton, Anthony, ‘Unsettled reformations, 1603–1662’, in Milton, Anthony (ed.), The Oxford history of Anglicanism, I: Reformation and identity, c. 1520–1662, Oxford 2017, 63–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar at p. 70; Fincham and Tyacke, Altars restored, 1.

3 ‘It was not so much the novelty of policy but its vigour that distinguishes the 1630s’: White, Peter, ‘The via media in the early Stuart Church’, in Fincham, Kenneth (ed.), The early Stuart Church, 1603–1642, Stanford, Ca 1993, 211–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar at p. 229. See also Bernard, George, ‘The Church of England, c. 1529–c. 1642’, History lxxv (1990), 183–206CrossRefGoogle Scholar at pp. 201–4, and Lane, Calvin, The Laudians and the Elizabethan Church: history, conformity and religious identity in post-Reformation England, London 2013Google Scholar. Lane emphasises (p. 80) Wren's ‘litigious, even neurotic need to buttress his work by reference to older directives’.

4 Anthony Milton, ‘Introduction: reformation, identity, and “Anglicanism”, c. 1520–1662’, in his Oxford history, i. 1–27 at p. 5; Peter Lake, ‘The Laudian style: order, uniformity and the pursuit of the beauty of holiness in the 1630s’, in Fincham, Early Stuart Church, 161–85 at pp. 164–5.

5 Milton, ‘Introduction’, i. 9. See also Milton, Anthony, England's second Reformation: the battle for the Church of England, 1625–1662, Cambridge 2021, 108CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 See Spicer, Andrew and Hamilton, Sarah (eds), Defining the holy: sacred space in medieval and early modern Europe, Aldershot 2005Google Scholar; Spicer, Andrew and Coster, William (eds), Sacred space in early modern Europe, Cambridge 2005Google Scholar; Walsham, Alexandra, and, ‘The Reformation “the disenchantment of the world” reassessed’, HJ li/2 (2008), 497–528CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and The Reformation of the landscape: religion, identity, and memory in early modern Britain and Ireland, Oxford 2011; Gayk, Shannon and Malo, Robyn, ‘The sacred object’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies xliv/3 (2014), 457–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Aston, Margaret, Broken idols of the English reformation, Cambridge 2016Google Scholar; Cameron, Euan, ‘Reformation and modernity: enduring questions: words, matter, and the reformation: revisiting the ‘modernity’ question’, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte cviii (2017), 12–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Church History: Material Culture in the Reformation lxxxvi/4 (2017).

7 Walsham, Alexandra, ‘Recycling the sacred: material culture and cultural memory after the English Reformation’, Church History lxxxvi/4, 1121–54Google Scholar, and ‘Reformation and “disenchantment”’, 527; J. Wickham Legg (ed.), English orders for consecrating churches in the seventeenth century, London 1911, p. xvii. For avant-garde conformism and ‘disenchantment’, and, its early manifestations see Peter McCullough, ‘“Avant-garde conformity” in the 1590s’, in Milton, Oxford history, i. 380–94.

8 Tyacke, Nicholas, ‘Puritanism, Arminianism and counter-revolution’, in Russell, Conrad (ed.), The origins of the English Civil War, London 1973, 128Google Scholar; Fincham, ‘Introduction’, in his Early Stuart Church, 9; Milton, Anthony, Catholic and Reformed: the Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant thought, 1600–1640, Cambridge 1995, 539–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Maltby, Judith, Prayer Book and people in Elizabethan and early Stuart England, Cambridge 1998, 105Google Scholar; Lake, Peter and Stephens, Isaac, Scandal and religious identity in early Stuart England: a Northamptonshire maid's tragedy, Woodbridge–Rochester, NY 2015, 10Google Scholar.

9 Hampton, Stephen, Grace and conformity: the Reformed conformist tradition and the early Stuart Church of England, Oxford 2021CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Hampton makes a compelling case (p. 13) for preferring the term Reformed conformist. See also Salazar, Greg, Calvinist conformity in post-Reformation England: the theology and career of Daniel Featley, Oxford 2022, 5CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Hampton, Grace and conformity, 1–8. For John Prideaux see Maddicott, John, Between scholarship and church politics: the lives of John Prideaux, 1578–1650, Oxford 2022, 343Google Scholar; for Joseph Hall see English orders, 322–3; for Thomas Morton see English orders, 319, 83, 130, 139, and Andrew Spicer, ‘“God will have a house”: defining sacred space and rites of consecration in early seventeenth-century England’, in Spicer and Hamilton, Defining the holy, 230 n. 94; for John Davenant see Long, W. H. (ed.), The Oglander memoirs: extracts from the MSS of Sir J. Oglander, Kt., London 1888, 9–12Google Scholar; for George Carleton see English orders, 320; for John Williams see Spicer, ‘Defining sacred space’, 229 n. 93, and English orders, 321. As for the seventh bishop, George Downame, my suspicion that he consecrated St Columb's Cathedral, Derry, in the year before he died, has yet to be verified.

11 Milton, Second reformation, 17–18; Kenneth Fincham, Prelate as pastor: the episcopate of James I, Oxford 1990, 131. For explicit contemporary deployment of visitation articles to support specific doctrinal or practical positions see John Williams, The holy table: name and thing, n.p. 1637 (RSTC 25726), 43, 77, 83–4. Effectiveness of visitation is an entirely different matter; no argument is offered here that episcopal ideals were shared broadly among the lower clergy or populace. For contemporary comments on visitation's effectiveness see Fincham, Prelate, 122, and Stuart royal proclamations, ed. James F. Larkin and Paul L. Hughes, Oxford 1973–83, ii. 249.

12 Early Stuart visitation, i, pp. xviii, xxi, xix. As early Stuart visitation documents tended to be ‘more uniform in content’ than those of Elizabeth's reign, modifications in early Stuart articles would seem more likely to have been deliberate and therefore to reveal more clearly their composers’ aspirations (i, p. xvii).

13 Roland G. Usher, for example, summarised church care in Elizabeth's reign as a ‘half century of neglect and pillage’: The reconstruction of the English Church, New York 1910, ii. 41; Andrew Foster, ‘Bishops, Church, and state, c. 1530–1646’, in Milton, Oxford history, i. 90–2.

14 Diarmaid MacCulloch, ‘The myth of the English reformation’, Journal of British Studies xxx (1991), 1–19 at p. 13; J. F. Merritt, ‘Puritans, Laudians, and the phenomenon of church-building in Jacobean London’, HJ xli/4 (1998), 934–60 at p. 942.

15 John Strype, The life and acts of Matthew Parker, London 1711, bk ii, 82, app. 27–8. It should be noted that, even in 1561, the special character of the chancel and the communion table are highlighted. For other early measures see the proclamation against iconoclasm, 19 Sept. 1560: Tudor royal proclamations, ed. Paul L. Hughes and James F. Larkin, New Haven 1964–9, ii. 146–8; royal letter, 24 June 1561: Edward Cardwell, Documentary annals of the reformed Church of England, Oxford 1844, i. 304–5; the royal orders of Oct. 1561: Visitation articles and injunctions of the period of the reformation, ed. Walter Howard Frere (Alcuin Club Collections 14–16, 1910), iii. 109; and the royal proclamation, 30 Oct. 1561 (repeated twice in the 1570s and again in 1587), imposing for brawls in church or churchyard fines that were ‘always to be converted to the repairing of the church’ where the offence occurred: Tudor royal proclamations, ii. 177–8, 367, 435, 534.

16 The seconde tome of homelyes of such matters as were promised and intituled in the former part of the homelyes, London 1563 (RSTC 13664), sigs 1v–2v, 8v. In fact, the word ‘reverence’ or some form of it appears twenty-four times in the twenty-two pages of the first homily. For the official status of the second Book of homilies see Fincham and Tyacke, Altars restored, 42.

17 Seconde tome, sigs 12r, 13r, 68r, 73v–74r.

18 Ibid. sigs 84r, 86v, 88r. Complaints of contemporary church conditions could come from opponents of the hierarchy as well. Puritan pamphleteers could deplore that chancels lay ‘ruinous in sundry places, quite contrary to her maiesties pleasure’: A lamentable complaint of the commonalty, [London] 1585 (RSTC 7739), sig. D3v.

19 Fincham and Tyacke, Altars restored, 43.

20 Certain sermons, or homilies, appoynted by the kynges maiestie, to be declared and redde, by all persones, uicars, or curates, euery Sonday in their churches, [London] 1547 (RSTC 13638.5), sig. U3v; Certayne sermons appoynted by the quenes maiestie, to be declared and read, by all persones, vycars, and curates, euery Sondaye and holy daye in theyr churches, [London] 1559 (RSTC 13648.5), sig. Aa3v.

21 Calendar of state papers domestic: Elizabeth 1601–3, ed. Mary Anne Everett Green, London 1870, 205–6; Usher, Reconstruction, ii. 44; Lambeth Palace Library, London, CM.II13.

22 MacCulloch, ‘Myth’, 13; English orders, passim; Spicer, ‘Defining sacred space’. For consecratory imprecation see English orders, 24, 42, 79–80, 199–203; John Samuel Fletcher (ed), The correspondence of Nathan Walworth and Peter Seddon of Outwood, and other documents chiefly relating to the building of Ringley Chapel (Chetham Society cix, 1880), 32; Thomas Oughton, Ordo judiciorum; sive, methodus procedendi in negotiis et litibus in foro ecclesiastico–civili Britannico et Hibernico, London 1738, ii. 266–8.

23 Fincham and Tyacke examine four consecration sermons preached between 1617 and 1624: Altars restored, 122–5. Anne-Francoise Morel's treatment of the genre is more wide-ranging in chronology: ‘Church consecration in England, 1549–1715: an unestablished ceremony’, in Maarten Delbeke and Minou Schraven (eds), Foundation, dedication and consecration rituals in early modern cultures, Leiden 2012, 297–313.

24 English orders, 14, 47–80. Andrewes's form included blessings of baptistry, pulpit, lectern, communion table (called ‘sacram … mensam’ in the rubric and, later, ‘SS: Mensam’), place of wedding vows and the whole pavement under which corpses might be interred (p. 59).

25 The above is a random sample from the rites employed by several bishops, 1607–15: English orders, 2–4, 10, 22–3, 31, 35. Later, Richard Baxter displayed impatience with the notion that places and things dedicated exclusively to the divine were not made holy. ‘To say, as some do, that (They are indeed consecrated and separated, but not Holy) is to be ridiculously wise by self-contradiction, and the masterly use of the word Holy contrary to custome and themselves’: A Christian directory: or, A summ of practical theologie and cases of conscience, London 1673, 915, question 170.

26 John Prideaux, A sermon preached on the fifth of October 1624: at the consecration of St Iames Chappel in Exeter College, Oxford 1625, sig. C3r. Laud, when accused at his trial of pronouncing ‘the place holy’ when he consecrated St Katherine Cree in 1631, defended himself by referencing this part of Prideaux's sermon: The works of the most reverend father in God, William Laud, D. D., Oxford 1854, iv. 248.

27 Quoted in Maddicott, Between scholarship and church politics, 141 n. 75.

28 Matthew Parker, Articles for to be inquired of, in the metropolitical visitation of the most reuerende father in God Matthew, n. p. 1560 (RSTC 10151), sig. A3v. For precedents in royal visitations see Reformation visitation, ii. 11, 122; iii. 13.

29 ‘5.2 Aeditui curabunt ut ecclesiae … diligenter et probe reficiantur. 5.3 Aeditui curabunt ut aedes sacrae, mundae et sancte conserventur, ne cuiquam vel pulvere, vel ramentis, vel sordibus moveant nauseam’: The Anglican canons, 1529–1647, ed. Gerald Bray, Woodbridge–Rochester, NY 1998, 190–3. Unratified by the queen, the canons of 1571 were nevertheless approved by the entire college of English bishops: Gerald Bray, ‘Canon law and the Church of England’, in Milton, Oxford history, i. 168–85 at p. 174; Anglican canons, l.

30 Edmund Grindal, Articles to be enquired of, within the prouince of Canterburie, London 1576 (RSTC 10155), sig. A2r. Church and churchyard care appear in article 5, with further brief allusion in article 39 (sigs A2v, B3r). For the influence of Grindal's articles see Usher, Reconstruction, ii. 28.

31 William Chaderton, Articles to be enquired of within the diocesse of Chester, London n.d. (RSTC 10174.5), sig. A2r. In contrast, Grindal's article concerning performers who ‘come unreuerently’ into churches and churchyards is sixty-first and does not explicitly identify such behaviour as abuse or profanation of the space as Chaderton's article does: Articles, sig. C2r.

32 It is possible that Chaderton was relying on earlier precedent; no articles from William Downham, his predecessor in Chester, would appear to have survived: W. P. M. Kennedy, Elizabethan episcopal administration: an essay in sociology and politics, London 1924, i, p. xi.

33 Fincham, Prelate, 258, 290; Diarmaid MacCulloch, ‘The latitude of the Church of England’, in Kenneth Fincham and Peter Lake (eds), Religious politics in post-Reformation England: essays in honour of Nicholas Tyacke, Woodbridge–Rochester, NY 2006, 41–59 at p. 56; Fincham, Prelate, 219, 230; Peter Lake, ‘Moving the goal posts? Modified subscription and the construction of conformity in the early Stuart Church’, in Peter Lake and Michael Questier (eds), Conformity and orthodoxy in the English Church, c. 1560–1660, Woodbridge–Rochester, NY 2000, 179–205 at pp. 184–9.

34 Christopher Haigh, ‘Chaderton, William (d. 1608)’, ODNB, at <https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/5011>; William Chaderton, Articles to be enqvired of, within the diocesse of Lincolne, Cambridge 1598 (RSTC 10235), 1; Articles to be enqvired of, within the diocesse of Lincolne, Cambridge 1601 (RSTC 10235.5), sig. A3r; and Articles to be enqvired of, within the diocesse of Lincolne, Cambridge 1604 (RSTC 10236), 1.

35 William Chaderton, Articles to be enqvired of, within the diocesse of Lincolne, Cambridge 1607 (RSTC 10236.5), sig. A3r. William Wickham, for example, inquired in 1585 whether clergy of Lincoln diocese kept within their dwellings ‘any alehouse, tippling-house or tavern; or … any suspicious women’: Kennedy, Administration, iii. 191.

36 Kennedy, Administration, iii. 209, 326; Early Stuart visitation, i. 70–91, 130, 136, 178, 185–6; ii. 1, 245.

37 In 1606 and 1609 Lancelot Andrewes's Articles to be enquired of within the diocesse of Chichester, London 1606 (RSTC 10181), sig. A2r, do not lead with church care (see Early Stuart visitation, i. p. xviii for identification of the articles of 1609), but by 1610 for Ely he has adopted the practice initiated by the prelate who had ordained him thirty years earlier: Early Stuart visitation, i. 84, 178; P. E. McCullough, ‘Andrewes, Lancelot (1555–1626)’, ODNB, at <https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/520>. For Neile and Montagu see Early Stuart visitation, i. 85–8; ii. 191.

38 Articles to be enquired of … within the peculiar iurisdiction of the dean and chapter of the cathedral church, London 1609 (RSTC 10207.5), sig. A2r. Sutcliffe's attitude toward Arminians appears in his will: ‘I hate as apostates from the faith and traitors to God's true church’ those ‘amonge us that palliate Popish heresies and under the name of Arminius seek to bringe in Poperie, and endeavour with all theire little skill to reconcile darkeness to light, Antichrist to Christ, heresie to the true Catholike faith’: quoted in Nicholas Tyacke, The anti-Calvinists: the rise of English Arminianism, c. 1590–1640, Oxford 1987, 215.

39 P. E. McCullough, ‘Hakewill, George (bap. 1578, d. 1649)’, ODNB, at <https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/11885>; Early Stuart visitation, i. 185; Joseph Hall, Articles to be enquired of within the diocesse of Exeter, London 1631 (RSTC 10206.5), sigs A2r, B2v, and Articles to be enquired of within the diocesse of Exeter, London 1638 (RSTC 10207), sigs A2r, B3; Fincham and Tyacke, Altars restored, 273; John Williams, Articles to be enquired of within the diocesse of Lincolne, London 1622 (RSTC 10240), sig. A2r; Articles to be enquired of within the diocesse of Lincolne, London 1625 (RSTC 10241), sig. A2r; and Articles to be enquired of within the diocesse of Lincoln … 1630 & 1631, [Cambridge] n.d. (RSTC 10243), sig. A4r.

40 For a contemporary view that priority in visitation did indicate significance, however, see Williams, Holy table, 84.

41 Early Stuart visitation, i. 110, 112.

42 William Laud, Articles to be enqvired of within the dioces of London, London 1628 (RSTC 10263), sig. B4r, and Articles to be enqvired of within the dioces of London, London 1631 (RSTC 10264), sig. A2r; Wren, Articles, sig. A2r–v.

43 Kennedy, Administration, iii. 317; John King, Articles ministred in the visitation, Oxford 1605 (RSTC 10305), sig. A2r, and Articles to be enqvired of within the archdeaconry of Nottingham, Oxford 1610 (RSTC 10305.5), (4)–(5); cf. Richard Vaughan, Articles to be enqvired of within the dioces of London, London 1605 (RSTC 10256), sig. B1r; Early Stuart visitation, i, p. xvii, 39; John King, Articles, to be enqvired of within the dioces of London, London 1615 (RSTC 10259), sig. B1v, and Articles, to be enqvired of within the dioces of London, London 1618 (RSTC 10260), sig. B2r.

44 King was one of James i's ‘preaching pastors’ according to Patrick Collinson (Richard Bancroft and Elizabethan anti-Puritanism, Cambridge 2013, 210), representative of the evangelical prelates and patron of godly preachers for Fincham (Prelate, 253, 255), and ‘Calvinist bishop’ to Milton and McCullough (Catholic and Reformed, 53; ‘King, John [d. 1621]’, ODNB, at <https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/15568>).

45 John King, A sermon at Paules Crosse on behalfe of Paules Church, London 1620 (RSTC 14982), 57 [numbered 49], 27.

46 English orders, 31, 318–19, and at p. 35 for Abbot; M. Kelly, ‘The invasion of things sacred: Church, property, and sacrilege in early modern England’, unpubl. PhD diss. Notre Dame, In 2013, 228.

47 ‘[P]rout domo Dei imprimis convenit, et in homilia quadam huius argumenti praecipitur’: Anglican canons, 378–81. The official text of the new canons was the Latin adopted by Convocation in the summer of 1604, ‘even though the English version was the original and was in fact the text usually cited in legal cases’ (p. lix). Canon 85, moreover, had expanded its predecessor, canon 5.2 from 1571, by adding a requirement that churchyards be ‘sufficiently repaired, fenced, and maintained with walls, rails or pales’ (pp. 190–3, 378–81).

48 Ibid. 380–1.

49 ‘Ecclesiarum religio profanis usibus non polluenda’: ibid. 382–3, cf. 194–5. New canons 18 and 111 dealt with reverence within churches during divine service: pp. 286–7, 410–11. Since these purported to defend religious activities from disruption they are less clearly indicative of anxieties about sacred space per se.

50 Vaughan, Articles, sig. B2r; Early Stuart visitation, i. 40. Even earlier, in 1603, Bishop Francis Godwin's injunctions for Llandaff had explicitly labelled the cathedral God's house: Early Stuart visitation, i. 2. Godwin's Catalogue of the bishops of England, London 1601 (RSTC 11937), reveals throughout a strain of outrage at violations of sacred space in English history and in his own time.

51 Early Stuart visitation, i. 100n. For Abbot's churchmanship see Diarmaid MacCulloch, The reformation: a history, New York 2003, 473, 497.

52 Early Stuart visitation, 100–1; cf. Richard Bancroft, Articles to be inquired of, in the first metropoliticall visitation, London 1605 (RSTC 10158), 16.

53 McCullough, ‘Avant-garde conformity’, i. 390; Lancelot Andrewes, Concio ad clerum pro gradv doctoris, &c., in Reverendi in Christo patris, Lanceloti, episcopi, Wintoniensis, opvscvla qvaedam posthvma, London 1629 (RSTC 602), 17, translated in his Sacrilege a snare: a sermon preached, ad clerum, in the Vniversity of Cambridg, London 1646 (Wing A.3151), 19; Fincham and Tyacke, Altars restored, 99; H. R. Trevor-Roper, Archbishop Laud, 1573–1645, London 1940, 37.

54 Roland G. Usher, The rise and fall of the High Commission, Oxford 1968, 219, 340 (emphasis added).

55 London Metropolitan Archives 9531/13, pt ii, fos 393v–5v; English orders, 31, 35. In this ritual, the justification by historical precedent for separating space from profane use predates by nearly a quarter of a century similar rationalisations noted in the arguments of Laudian divines in the 1630s: Peter Lake, ‘The Laudians and the argument from authority’, in Bonnelyn Young Kunze and Dwight D. Brautigan (eds), Court, country and culture: essays on early modern British history in honor of Perez Zagorin, Rochester, NY 1992, 149–75 at pp. 166–7.

56 Spicer, ‘Defining sacred space’, 218–19; Chaderton, Articles (1607), sig. B2r. It seems likely that the composer of Chaderton's article had worked from the official Latin text of the canon, for the English translation had preferred the term ‘dedicated’ – ‘chapels dedicated and allowed by the ecclesiastical laws of this realm’ – perhaps a less elevated translation than ‘consecrated’: Anglican canons, 362–3.

57 ‘Vel in capella vel in oratorio, aut publicas preces dicat in cuiusque privatibus aedibus, nisi episcopus illi autographo suo et manus suae subscriptione eius rei potestatem fecerit’: Anglican canons, 186; Spicer, ‘Defining sacred space’, 217–19; Early Stuart visitation, i. 80, 82, 85–6, 88–9.

58 Early Stuart visitation, i. 100.

59 Reformation visitation, iii. 27, 102, 225, 326, 371; Kennedy, Administration, ii. 79; iii. 210, 227, 318, 345; Early Stuart visitation, i. 10, 18, 31, 39–40, 48, 70, 84. In 1571: ‘Curabunt mensam ex asseribus composite iunctam’: Anglican canons, 192–3; ‘Mensis congruis et decentibus … mensae convenienter et decore conserventur’: 376–7.

60 Lancelot Andrewes, The pattern of catechistical doctrine at large, London 1650 (Wing A.3147), 298–9. For dating and discussion of this passage see Nicholas Tyacke, ‘Lancelot Andrewes and the myth of Anglicanism’, in Lake and Questier, Conformity and orthodoxy, 5–33 at pp. 15–16.

61 Early Stuart visitation, i. 100n; Fincham, Prelate, 202; Early Stuart visitation, i. 157n; cf. John Jegon, Articles to be inquired of in the dioces of Norwich, Cambridge 1611 (RSTC 10289.9), 4–5, and Early Stuart visitation, i. 159–60. Going beyond Abbot, Overall's article 3.3 did not simply reference canon 85 but explicitly labelled the church building ‘the house of God’.

62 Early Stuart visitation, i. 169–73; ii. 26, 31–2, 192–3.

63 Ibid. i. 110, 112–14. In 1622 Laud does, as Fincham notes (i. 110), crucially modify both Abbot's wording and canon 82 (which Abbot had dutifully replicated) about the placement of the table during the communion service in order to suggest that it must be kept within the chancel. By his 1630 visitation of London, however, Laud adopts Abbot's precise phraseology about the communion table being placed at communion time ‘within the Chancell or Church’ while, in the same article, expanding Abbot's strictures upon objectionable uses of the table ‘out of divine service’ with the ominous words ‘or in it’. Oddly, this set excises in the article dealing with encroachments upon the churchyard the very phrase about ‘any thing or place consecrated to holy use’ that one might have expected Laud to have seized upon most greedily: William Laud, Articles to be enqvired of within the dioces of London [London 1631] (RSTC 10264), sig. B1r–v. This is probably also true of Laud's first visitation of London in 1628; the Marsh's Library original reproduced by Early English Books Online is missing the relevant page: Articles to be enqvired of within the dioces of London, London 1628 (RSTC 10263), page preceding sig. B1r. My thanks to Amy Boylan, assistant librarian at Marsh's Library, for verifying this.

64 Cf. Williams, Articles (1625), sig. A2r; Articles … 1630 &1631, sig. Br; and Articles, Cambridge 1635 (RSTC 10244), sigs A3r, A4r; Early Stuart visitation, ii. 103.

65 Early Stuart visitation, i. 114–15.

66 Vivienne Larminie, ‘Davenant, John (bap. 1572, d. 1641)’, ODNB, at <https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/7196>; Early Stuart visitation, i. 173–5, quotation at p. 173 n. 8; Davenant, John, Articles to be enqvired of in the diocesse of Salisburie, London 1622 (RSTC 10330), London 1622Google Scholar, sig. A4r–v. His articles remained generally stable then in his visitations of 1628 and 1635: Early Stuart visitation, i. 174–6.

67 Fincham and Tyacke, Altars restored, esp. pp. 45–7, 109. Postponed outrage did not apply only to tables; the trigram on a pulpit cloth at St Bartholomew Exchange, for instance, seems to have caused no stir in 1616 but became obnoxious by 1643: Blake, Hugo, Egan, Geoff, Hurst, John and New, Elizabeth, ‘From popular devotion to resistance and renewal: the cult of the holy name of Jesus and the Reformation’, in Gaimster, David and Gilchrist, Robert (eds), The archaeology of Reformation, 1480–1580, Leeds 2003, 175–203Google Scholar at pp. 190–1.

68 Early Stuart visitation, ii, p. xxiii.

69 Merritt, ‘Puritans, Laudians’, 935–60, and ‘Religion and the English parish’, in Milton, Oxford history, i. 122–47 at p. 141; Felicity Heal, ‘Art and iconoclasm’, in Milton, Oxford history, i. 186–209 at pp. 94–8. ‘The provision of ecclesiastical terriers has usually been viewed as a Laudian concern; in fact, the policy was Jacobean, and its chief architect was Archbishop Abbot’: Fincham, Prelate, 188; Early Stuart visitation, i. 101; Kelly, ‘Invasion’, passim.

70 Morel, ‘Church consecration’, 297.