Applications of authority: Social discipline, religious reform, and the church courts in the deanery of Stottesden, 1560--1640 (England)

Though largely unaffected by the initial changes wrought by the Reformation in England, the archdeaconry courts in the deanery of Stottesden experienced a significant transformation between the years 1560 and 1640. Initially concerned primarily with sexual improprieties and the settlement of the estates of the deceased, in the mid-1580s the courts abruptly shifted both the intensity of their oversight and the breadth of their concerns. The courts suddenly became much more active, consistently prosecuting a much wider range of offenses, offenses that now included the failure to attend services and misbehavior both during church and within the community at large. In the seventeenth century, the courts began to prosecute individuals charged with violating the Sabbath, as well as those expressing the first public rumblings of frustration and criticism toward the courts themselves.; In the first years of the seventeenth century under the administration of Archbishop Richard Bancroft and again some three decades later under Archbishop William Laud, a succession of Hereford bishops regularly began to use the courts as a punitive weapon against churchwardens and ministers who were neglecting the care of their flocks or failing to secure the provision of adequate buildings and the furniture and fabrics conducive to proper worship. While the effectiveness the courts had always depended upon the cooperation of churchwardens and ministers, as these local figures became increasingly alienated from and pitted against the courts, the courts transformed into much more invasive and offensive weapons of authoritarian and episcopal control. Subject to widespread criticism, it is then of little surprise that the courts were eventually abolished by the Long Parliament in the 1640s.