ABSTRACT
In the case of the diversity of thought in the Church, or the freedom of the laity the fairly consistent role of the courts in the nineteenth century and after has been to defend freedom. The courts attempted, through a series of controversial and highly-publicised cases, to respond to the Ritualist movement in the Victorian period by reference back to the Prayer Book, Articles and certain other historical texts, largely to constrain innovation. In the first generations of the early twentieth century, memory of the Ritualists was coloured by their veneration as confessors by the growing Anglo-Catholic movement, heroes who defied unjust law in the name of freedom of worship. Although the Ritualist clergy were personally out of sympathy with the Reformation, there is a sense, so obvious as to not need to be always publicly stated, that they too were righteous victims.
