ABSTRACT
Protestantism was an early tradition in these industrial villages, the successor to a strong lollard strain in the early sixteenth century. As early as 1556, in Mary’s reign, people hear of conventicles and ‘schismatic sermons and preachings’ in Dedham, involving a clothier, a tailor, a husbandman and twenty other persons. The conference of ministers which met in and around Dedham must have grown from the desire of Chapman, Crick and Dow to reproduce in this new context the presbyterian experiment which they had pioneered in Norwich. When a member was advised to baptize the child of offending parents only if ‘some of the friends, or of the church that be godly, be procured to answer for it, and to bring the party to repentance if it may be’, he was given an authoritative ruling, part of a growing corpus of tradition independent of the canons and formularies of the Church of England.
