ABSTRACT
Roger Morrice's dearest ambition was to write the history of the Puritans, and he devoted the 1690s to the attempt. He failed. He published nothing, and died obscurely.1 But at his demise in 1702 he left behind a massive corpus of manuscripts, some written by himself as notes towards his intended 'politico-ecclesiastical' history of England since the Reformation, and some collected by him as an archive of primary sources. It is this body of material which became indispensable to future attempts, from Daniel Neal's History of the Puritans (1732-38) to Patrick Collinson's The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (1967) and beyond.
