ABSTRACT
The Reformation officially came to England under the Tudors who brought the country out of feudal anarchy, after the devastating Wars of the Roses. In order to produce a unified nation and state machine, more than a century before the centralization of France by Louis XIV, and more than three centuries before Bismarck unified Germany. The noble sport of lawless private brawling, along with the noble sport of war, declined after the turn of the sixteenth to the seventeenth centuries as English society moved from the Tudors to the Stuarts. The chapter presents some of the more important ways in which the Puritan movement was related to the new way of life which was gradually emerging in Tudor and Stuart England. Beginning in the Elizabethan period and rapidly accelerating under the Stuarts, the Puritan legal gentry progenitors of the emerging rational-legal age of achievement and mobility found their political home in the House of Commons.
