ABSTRACT
Examination of the geography of changing pieties in pre-Reformation England remains fragmentary and without a coherent comparative framework. The geographical variety of orthodox piety has not informed explanations of the different rates and degrees of compliance with state-sponsored reform in the sixteenth century from one town or county to the next. Kent is treated as a special case in the historiography of the Reformation. The county is seen as the most responsive in England to evangelical reform and the most precociously Protestant. Tenterden remained the second most important centre of wealth in the Weald next to Cranbrook. Tenterden’s testators endowed fewer chantries and although they gave quite regularly and generously for funerals and obsequies, bequests to secular clergy were conspicuously low and the religious orders were even more peripheral than at Cranbrook. To a greater extent than Cranbrook, agriculture formed the backbone of the parish’s economy.
