ABSTRACT
In one of his last published forays into the popular Reformation debate, A.G. Dickens contended that the early “heartland of the English Reformation” consisted of a crescent that stretched from Norwich to East Sussex, and a western offshoot out of the Thames Valley that included Gloucestershire. Dickens was particularly aggrieved at the revisionist overemphasis on the large, more cosmopolitan cities, such as London and Bristol, as the sole pockets of reform, “since without any doubt another special locus classicus of early English Protestantism was the minor urban or near-urban community: the smallish weaving town, the even smaller market town, the large, semi-industrial village,” such as Gloucester and its environs.1 It is no surprise that a port town would have been more likely to come into contact with early Protestant ideas, but Gloucester was not at the center of an international mercantile community, say in the way its neighbor Bristol was, and besides, contact with heresy did not automatically translate into widespread adoption of it. What then contributed to Gloucester’s early reception of the Reformation-at least among town elites and surrounding gentry?
