ABSTRACT
Elizabethan market towns were natural centres of intercourse for the rural clergy as for any other social group, especially for such of them as were Calvinists with an instinct for brotherhood and mutual edification. Wherever the town and its dependent villages contained a good number of preaching ministers, there was likely to be a regular day when they could come together in the principal church of the place for ‘exercise’ – preaching, by one or more of their number – ‘conference’, and dinner at an inn. At the one extreme, the prophesying was a learned expository labour, conducted in Latin among scholars and students; at the other, it could be a lively occasion for exercising the liberty of the children of God. In early Elizabethan London, prophesying of the congregational variety was known in at least one parish, but the practice is unlikely to have survived the reaction of 1566.
