Fiona McCall's collection of essays begins with Bernard Capp's statement in his introduction to her edition: “This book has a simple goal: to shed new light on the still shadowy world of the interregnum Church, primarily the established Church in its 1650s incarnation” (1). Such a goal follows a trend in the broader study of the British Civil Wars and Revolutions—a growing spotlight on the period between 1649 and 1660. Indeed, historians have recently viewed the Interregnum as integral to state formation, to cultural creativity and experimentation, to the development of religio-political radicalism, to England's so-called Second Reformation, to the Scottish Revolution, and to the dimensions of Scottish and English Presbyterianism. In this historiographical context, McCall has gathered eleven scholars to contribute essays exploring, from “ground level,” the social, cultural, religious, ecclesiastical, and political dynamics that existed during the Interregnum.
Having Capp author the introduction is a great benefit to McCall and her contributors. Presenting a picture that has become more familiar to scholars in recent years, Capp lays out nicely the structural elements of England's national church after the regicide, especially those elements resulting from the creation of the Protectorate in 1653 that led to a lax enforcement of church attendance and a de facto environment of religious liberty. This reality existed in spite of Oliver Cromwell's enjoyment of a large cache of clerical patronage and potential oversight of clergy with the creation of the committees known as the “Triers” and the “Ejectors.” Therefore, a “fiercely competitive ‘religious marketplace’” (5) emerged during the decade, in which the roughly 9,000 parishes that existed in England and Wales obtained unprecedented degrees of local autonomy to conduct parochial affairs as they saw fit. A diverse array of confessional groups—episcopalians, Presbyterians, Independents, Baptists, and Fifth Monarchists—found room to worship within “a very broad national Church or, more accurately, one that was flexible and localized” (2) and thus “one that made accommodation remarkably easy” (16). However, with pastoral instability from the aftershocks of the mass ejections of clergy from parishes in the 1640s, this broad Church commonly proved a minefield for ministers attempting to navigate parochial realities that often were in flux and contentious. All of this has made it challenging to understand how Sunday services functioned in the parishes, how usage of the Prayer Book manifested vis-à-vis adoption of the Directory, how a supposed puritan revolution could enforce moral discipline after the dissolution of ecclesiastical courts, and how the spiritual lives of the English and Welsh found expression and meaning in the 1650s.
The edition's contributors seek to shed light on much of what Capp outlines in the introduction for the Interregnum Church, though they do so with varied success. We should excuse readers if they come away with the impression that many of the essays merely offer expositions of data—data accumulated after counting things found in parochial and ecclesiastical records. Kudos to the University of London Press for permitting so many graphs, tables, and maps throughout the edition, but these commonly exist without or little accompanying explanation or analysis. Most glaring is the absence of a stand-alone conclusion that pulls together the chapters’ shared thematic threads. Last, while there are two chapters that center on Scotland and Wales respectively, the rest of the essays are predominantly Anglocentric, perhaps making the book's title less than appropriate.
Yet this should not deter readers from delving into individual chapters, since many of them offer compelling stories and insights, fascinating and thoughtful use of evidence, and deft displays of the historian's craft. McCall's essay—the longest in the collection—dives into 2,500 extant assize and quarter sessions records on secular prosecutions of religious offenses in such counties as Cheshire, Yorkshire, Northamptonshire, Devonshire, Essex, and Kent, providing important glimpses of the state's and local magistrates’ attempts at monitoring swearing, adultery, Sabbath breaking, paying of tithes, and nonconformity. Rebecca Warren's contribution on Cromwell's clerical patronage in the 1650s reminds us how the exercise of such power proved central to his overall role as Lord Protector, how it considerably shaped the Interregnum Church at the parochial level, and how it left a substantial legacy for the national Church after the Restoration. Sarah Ward Clavier provides perhaps the book's most British perspective with her chapter on clergy in Wales between 1646 and 1660. Examining diaries, notebooks, sermons, manuscript ballads, and printed pamphlets, she discusses episcopalian and royalist divines—many of them living in exile from England—and their understanding of their suffering, most intriguingly suffering in its spiritual forms. Through these hardships, Episcopalians in Wales proved resolute and steadfast, maintaining their personal pieties, their liturgical practices, their confessional identities, their religious morale, and their resolute opposition to Parliamentarian authorities.
Combined with Capp's introduction, these three chapters illustrate the merits of Church and People in Interregnum Britain. For scholars in North America, be aware that the table of contents advertised by the American distributor of the edition, the University of Chicago Press, contains discrepancies with the contents of the U.K. version. Nevertheless, no matter what version in which their work appears, McCall and her contributors have done a welcome service furthering and sharpening historians’ gaze on Interregnum Britain. Consequently, even with the few flaws here and there in its pages, we should not ignore the book.
