ABSTRACT
Most historians would now agree that on the accession of Elizabeth I the majority of men and women in England and Wales were Catholic in belief. From the evidence of wills it would appear that Protestant commitment was only strong in the south-east, and that even there it still represented a minority of belief. Only 14 per cent of Sussex wills contained Protestant formulae and bequests by 1559, and no more than 10 per cent of Kent wills before 1560 had a statement of Protestant belief in the preamble. The task of the new Protestant regime of Elizabeth was, therefore, to wean the population away from its traditional beliefs and convert the country to Protestantism through preaching and education (Whiting 1989).
