ABSTRACT
In the past both nonconformist and Anglican historians have tended to agree in the assumption that the Book of Discipline expressed the common mind of virtually all the puritan ministry, and many have quoted the unsubstantiated figure of five hundred subscribers which cannot be traced behind Daniel Neat’s eighteenth-century History of the Puritans. The puritan ‘church within the Church’ should definitely if not openly repudiate the established Church of the bishops as Antichristian and derive its validity from its practice of the true, reformed Discipline. Most of the puritan ministers who were now to make Northamptonshire something of a presbyterian model were of a new and younger generation. The provincial synod was held in accordance with the provision made at Cambridge in the previous autumn when the arrangements had been committed to the Warwick classis on the advice of the other classes of the shire.
