Sin and the Clergy

Professor Dickens has argued that the main feature of Elizabethan parish life was that of a small, closely integrated community, which enabled the detection of offenders to be a relatively easy task. ¹ However, in the northern province, of which Chester diocese was a part, matters were very different. Overall, the parishes of Lancashire and Cheshire and those in the archdeaconry of Richmond were very large and fragmented, so the task of detection was extremely difficult. A parish in the southern province with some forty or fifty households was easy to control but Lancashire parishes, and those in Cumbria and Westmorland, contained on average some 350 households.