ABSTRACT
1559 began with a new monarch and soon introduced a new Archbishop of Canterbury (Matthew Parker) and a new Bishop of London (Edmund Grindal). The 1559 churchwardens, undoubtedly the sort of men who rotated in and out of those offices, sought to maintain the successful operations of the parish. Elizabethan burial rituals differed from those of the medieval church, and the theology of purgatory was denied, yet the grief and emotion in the face of death remained. By the Elizabethan era, the London church wardens operated in a vastly different fashion. The basic similarities found among London parishes included the general arc of religious transformation, the series of legally required changes, and the general cultural assumptions about the role of the parish in Tudor life. People who tended to run the parish offices tended to occupy the middle to upper reaches of the socio-economic scale, but were seldom in the very top group.
