ABSTRACT
The moderate, progressive tendencies of Grindal’s archiepiscopate withered under fire from both the opposed flanks of the Elizabethan Church. The fint check came from the queen and her party, but the blow might never have fallen but for the provocations of the puritan left wing. The downfall of the prophesyings had been greeted with cries of dismay from all the godly. ‘The want of those godly exercises which were the universities of the poor ministries is greatly to be lamented,’ wrote a Leicestershire minister from Cambridge to Gilby. The pattern of the exercise was a sermon once, twice, or four times a month, preached in rotation by an association of ‘the preachers of the country’ and attended by the whole company as well as by the ‘well-affected’ of the town and the surrounding villages. One of the commonest complaints of catholic controversialists was that protestants did not fast.
