ABSTRACT
The events of 1566 for ever dissociated the beneficed parish clergy of London from the clerical leadership of the puritan movement. Parker and Grindal had done their work so effectively that few truly radical incumbents were left, and it was not until the following century that the Anglican church polity was again seriously threatened from the relative respectability of the London parsonages. When the puritans spoke of ‘the church in London’ they meant, in effect, a group of unbeneficed stipendiary curates and preachers, some of diem lecturers in the parish churches or in the inns of court, others lacking even that measure of settled responsibility. The liberty of the Minories, where both Held and Wilcox preached, Field for a short time as curate, was the original home of puritanism in the sense that it seems to have been with ‘the godly’ who frequented its parish church that the name was first associated.
