Piety, Conformity and Dissent: Religious Belief in the Deanery of Craven, West Riding of Yorkshire, from 1450 to 1603

Reformation studies have been transformed since the ground-breaking research of Eamon Duffy and other revisionists. Medieval religion is now perceived to have been vibrant and popular; the disaffection of the laity with both liturgy and clergy, and their readiness for change, had been over-estimated and the establishment of the Reformed Church more contested. Subsequently, regional studies have demonstrated that the process of religious change and its cultural implications proceeded at different rates, depending on local circumstances. Using primarily unpublished material this regional study explores the evolution of religious belief in Tudor Craven, an area bounded by opposing religious influences. To the west and north lay traditional Lancashire and the North Riding; to the south and east were the emerging manufacturing areas of the West Riding, where religious reform had its earliest adherents. The thesis examines piety prior to the Henrician reforms in a region where monasteries and the religious exercised both economic and spiritual authority, which arguably influenced the motives for Craven's participation in two Tudor rebellions. It explores and considers the response to the oscillating religious reforms: Henrician Supremacy, resistance to Edwardian reform, the reversal to Catholicism under Mary, and the impact of the Elizabethan Settlement. To impose conformity in the North, Archbishops Grindal and Sandys installed university-educated preaching clerics. Although the majority of the Craven laity eventually adapted and conformed, from 1580 dissent intensified. Encouraged by Marian and seminary priests, many Catholics, who initially had adopted a pragmatic resistance to conformity, resorted to full recusancy. Conversely, Puritan nonconformists felt reform was incomplete, and opposed a hierarchical Church with surviving Catholic rituals. The emergence of these divisions meant that the Settlement was not, and could not be completely achieved, and laid the local foundations of wider contention and division of religious loyalties that were to emerge in Craven after 1603.