This
fusion of political and religious change is essential to understanding the
English Revolution. The overthrow of Charles I and the abolition of episcopacy
were more than constitutional adjustments: they directly challenged the
ideological and property foundations of the feudal state. The Church of England
was not merely a religious institution; it was a central pillar of the old
social order, a major landowner, an instrument of social discipline, and a
guardian of inherited privilege. Its destruction and reorganisation were
therefore integral to the revolutionary process.
In this context, Fiona McCall’s edited volume, *Church and People in
Interregnum Britain*, positions itself. The book explores how religious
transformation unfolded at the local level in the 1640s and 1650s. Drawing on
parish records, church surveys, quarter sessions documents, and clerical
correspondence, it reconstructs the lived experience of the “second
Reformation”—the sweeping changes Parliament imposed in 1645, when it abolished
the Church hierarchy, banned the Book of Common Prayer, and put ecclesiastical
lands up for sale.
The
book belongs to the Royal Historical Society’s New Historical Perspectives
series, which encourages early-career scholars to write tightly focused studies
based on archival research. In this respect, *Church and People in Interregnum
Britain* reflects both the strengths and limitations of contemporary academic
historiography. It is rich in detail, often meticulous in its use of sources,
and offers valuable insights into how revolutionary policies were
implemented—or resisted—in particular localities. At the same time, it is
shaped by the methodological narrowness that has dominated British early-modern
scholarship since the “revisionist” assault on Marxist interpretations in the
1970s and 1980s.
The
revisionists, led by figures such as Conrad Russell and John Morrill, argued
that no English Revolution existed, only a series of local accidents, personal
quarrels, and constitutional misunderstandings. Their successors have moved
away from the most extreme forms of this argument but retained its
methodological core: breaking the revolution into micro-studies, emphasising
local variation, and avoiding analysis of the social forces driving events. The
result is a historiography that excels at reconstructing parish disputes and
clerical careers but struggles—or refuses—to explain why a revolution occurred
at all.
This
outlook shapes McCall’s volume. Its contributors examine how national
initiatives interacted with “local spaces, traditions and personal agendas.”
They trace the persistence of traditional practices, the survival of loyalist
clergy, the uneven enforcement of godly discipline, and the administrative
challenges of reorganising church livings. Yet they say almost nothing about
the class dynamics that propelled the revolution: the interests of the
merchants, yeomen, and lesser gentry who supported Parliament, or the radical
demands of the Levellers, Diggers, and sectaries who pushed religious reform
toward social equality.
Yet
read critically—and placed within a Marxist framework—the archival material in the volume takes on a sharper meaning. The church surveys
reveal a revolutionary state attempting to rationalise medieval property
relations. The transfer of moral discipline from church courts to secular
magistrates exposes the class content of Puritan “godliness,” which fell
disproportionately on labourers and servants. Cromwell’s ecclesiastical
patronage reflects the tension between revolutionary energy from below and the
need to stabilise a new propertied order.
Church
and People in Interregnum Britain is best understood not as an interpretation
of the English Revolution, but as a repository of evidence. It shows, from the
ground up, how the revolution reshaped everyday religious life and imposed new
forms of social discipline—even if its contributors stop short of naming the
revolution for what it was.
A “second Reformation” born of revolution
The book’s premise is stated plainly: in 1645, as the First
Civil War drew to a close, a “second Reformation” swept through England.
Parliament abolished the Church of England’s hierarchy, banned the Book of
Common Prayer, and put ecclesiastical lands up for sale. No stable state or
cautious government imposed this reform for administrative tidiness. A
revolutionary regime fighting for survival amid civil war carried it out,
determined to uproot the institutional foundations of the old order. The destruction
of episcopacy and seizure of church property were part of a broader assault on
feudal authority that accompanied the king’s military defeat.
Expropriating bishops and cathedral chapters directly
challenged the ancien régime's ideological and property foundations. The Church
was more than a religious institution: it was one of England’s largest
landowners, a central pillar of the feudal state, and a means of reproducing
social hierarchy. Its lands, rents, and tithes supported a powerful clerical
elite whose interests aligned with the monarchy and aristocracy. Abolishing the
hierarchy and selling its estates struck at the economic base of the old ruling
class. The sale of church lands was part of a vast property transfer that also
accompanied the confiscation of royalist estates. In both cases, the
beneficiaries were the rising bourgeois and gentry layers, whose political expression
was Parliament.
The “second Reformation” was therefore more than a religious
programme: it was a political and social revolution expressed in religious
terms. The language of godliness, purity and reformation gave the revolutionary
bourgeoisie the ideological vocabulary to justify its assault on feudal
property relations. As Engels observed, the English bourgeoisie fought its
battles in biblical terms not because it was especially pious, but because
religious discourse was the age's dominant ideological medium. The destruction
of the Church’s institutional power went hand in hand with the creation of a
new social order based on private property, contractual relations and the
authority of Parliament.
This revolutionary transformation extended far beyond the
Church’s upper levels, reshaping parish life, abolishing the Book of Common
Prayer, and imposing a preaching ministry aimed at changing everyday religious
practice. Reorganising livings, merging or dividing parishes, and redirecting
tithe income were intended to rationalise a medieval ecclesiastical structure
and adapt it to a modernising state. These initiatives achieved only partial
success, and the Restoration swept many away. Yet their ambition reveals the
scale of the revolutionary project.
Equally significant was the transfer of moral discipline
from church courts to secular magistrates. After ecclesiastical jurisdiction
was abolished, justices of the peace, overwhelmingly drawn from the local
gentry, prosecuted offences such as swearing, Sabbath-breaking, and pew
disputes. This shift revealed the class character of Puritan “godliness.” What
seemed like a religious campaign for moral reform was, in practice, a way to
discipline labourers, servants, and low-income people. Fines and punishments
fell disproportionately on those at the bottom of society. The emerging
bourgeois order required a sober, orderly and industrious population, and the
machinery of godly discipline helped create one.
Seen in this light, the “second Reformation” was not merely
an episode of cultural change but a central part of the English bourgeois
revolution. It was the ideological and administrative counterpart to the king’s
military defeat and Parliament’s political ascendancy. It reshaped property
relations, redefined authority, and imposed new forms of social regulation. Understanding
it requires examining the class forces that drove the religious upheaval of the
1640s and 1650s.
What the archives reveal
The strongest chapters in Church and People in
Interregnum Britain are those that allow the archival material to speak
with minimal theoretical interference. Read critically, they reveal the
revolutionary pressures acting on the parish, the pulpit, and the machinery of
local governance.
Rationalising the medieval church
Alex Craven’s study of parliamentary surveys of church
livings exposes the revolutionary state’s attempt to rationalise a chaotic
medieval system of benefices. The surveys, preserved in Lambeth Palace Library
and the Chancery papers, aimed to unite tiny parishes, divide unwieldy ones,
and redirect tithe income to support a preaching ministry. This was not
administrative tinkering. It was an embryonic effort to replace feudal
endowments with a modern, centralised plan for religious provision.
The inherited ecclesiastical structure was a patchwork of
medieval foundations, private patronage rights and uneven tithe arrangements.
Parliament’s surveys sought to impose coherence on this jumble, aligning
religious organisation with the needs of a revolutionary state that required
ideological unity and reliable preaching. The failure of these reforms — swept
away at the Restoration — underscores the incomplete character of the English
Revolution. But failure does not diminish the scale of what was attempted. The
very ambition of the surveys reveals a government determined to remake the
religious landscape in accordance with new social and political priorities.
Cromwell’s balancing act
Rebecca Warren’s chapter on Oliver Cromwell’s ecclesiastical
patronage between 1654 and 1660 is equally revealing. As Lord Protector,
Cromwell controlled many ministerial appointments. His choices illuminate the Protectorate's
political contradictions. On one side stood the revolutionary sects—Independents, Baptists, Fifth Monarchists—whose energy had propelled the New Model Army and whose demands threatened to push the revolution beyond limits acceptable to property owners. On the other stood the Presbyterian and moderate
Independent interests, representing the propertied layers determined to halt
further upheaval.
Cromwell’s patronage record reflects this tension. He
appointed godly, reliable ministers but avoided empowering those whose
radicalism might destabilise the new order. Leon Trotsky described Cromwell as
a figure who combined revolutionary daring with the determination to build a
bourgeois state. Warren’s evidence reflects that dual character. Cromwell
sought to preserve the revolution's gains while preventing its extension into
social equality or democratic control. His ecclesiastical appointments were
instruments of political management, designed to stabilise a new ruling class
while containing the forces that had made its victory possible.
The secularisation of moral discipline
McCall’s own chapter is the most politically significant.
With the abolition of church courts, the policing of religious offences — pew
disputes, swearing, Sabbath breaking — passed to the justices of the peace.
Moral discipline did not disappear; it was transferred to the secular
magistracy, dominated by the local gentry. This shift exposes the class content
of Puritan “godliness.”
The church courts had been instruments of ecclesiastical
authority, often cumbersome and uneven in their enforcement. By contrast,
justices of the peace represented the propertied class. Their courts became the
arena in which the godly reformation of manners was carried out. Fines for
swearing, drunkenness and disorder fell disproportionately on labourers,
servants and people with low incomes. The emerging bourgeois order required a
disciplined, sober and industrious population. The machinery of secular moral
regulation helped produce it.
In this context, Puritanism was not simply a religious
movement. It imposed the habits of regular labour demanded by an emerging
capitalist economy. The transfer of moral discipline from ecclesiastical to
secular authority reveals how deeply the revolution penetrated everyday life.
It reshaped not only institutions but behaviours, expectations and the rhythms
of work and leisure.
The limits of the “localist” method
The volume’s methodological approach is also its weakness.
Each chapter focuses on a specific parish, county or institutional case study,
often reconstructed with admirable archival care but framed within a narrow
interpretive horizon. The stated aim is to show how national initiatives
interacted with “local spaces, traditions and personal agendas.” This
formulation has become a mantra in early‑modern British historiography,
signalling a commitment to micro‑history and a suspicion of overarching
explanations. But it also reflects the intellectual retreat that has dominated
the field for nearly half a century.
Since the 1970s, the study of the English Revolution has
been shaped by the “revisionist” assault on Marxist interpretations. Conrad
Russell, John Morrill and their followers insisted that no English Revolution
existed — only a series of local accidents, personal quarrels, administrative
breakdowns and religious misunderstandings. They rejected the idea that the
conflict had structural causes or expressed the interests of identifiable
social classes. In their hands, the revolution dissolved into a mosaic of
county studies, parish disputes and elite political manoeuvring.
The post‑revisionist generation has retreated from the
crudest versions of this argument. Few now deny that the 1640s witnessed a
profound political crisis. But they have retained the revisionist method:
fragment the revolution into micro‑studies, emphasise local variation, and
avoid analysing the social forces driving events. The result is a
historiography that excels at reconstructing the texture of everyday life but
struggles — or refuses — to explain why the upheaval occurred at all.
This outlook shapes McCall’s volume. Its contributors
examine how national religious policies were implemented, resisted or adapted
in particular localities. They trace the persistence of traditional practices,
the survival of loyalist clergy, the uneven enforcement of godly discipline and
the administrative challenges of reorganising church livings. But they say
almost nothing about the deeper forces that propelled the “second Reformation”:
the interests of the merchants, yeomen and lesser gentry who supported
Parliament; the economic pressures that made ecclesiastical expropriation
attractive; or the ideological needs of a rising bourgeois class seeking to
legitimise its assault on feudal authority.
The words “revolution,” “class” and “property” scarcely
appear. The social groups whose interests the parliamentary cause expressed —
the middling sort in towns, the commercially oriented gentry in the
countryside, the London merchants whose wealth underpinned Parliament’s war
effort — are largely absent. So too are the Levellers, Diggers, and radical
sectaries, whose demands for social equality terrified the grandees and
revealed the revolution's deeper logic. The religious radicalism of the 1640s
and 1650s cannot be understood apart from these movements, yet they barely
register in a volume ostensibly devoted to “church and people.”
Even sympathetic reviewers have noted the book's narrowness. The “people” in the title are mostly clergy, and “Britain” is
overwhelmingly southern England. Two chapters focus on Sussex, one on Dorset,
and another on the region from Bristol to the Isle of Wight — a geographical
skew that reflects the Portsmouth conference from which the volume emerged. A
book on church and people in the revolution that says little about London, the
army or the radical congregations is necessarily lopsided. London was the
epicentre of revolutionary politics, the New Model Army the decisive instrument
of revolutionary power, and the sectarian congregations the crucible of
ideological innovation. Their absence is not accidental; it reflects a
historiographical approach that avoids the revolution's most politically
charged aspects.
The emphasis on “local spaces” and “continuity” serves a
political function. It downplays the period's revolutionary character,
presenting upheaval as a series of administrative adjustments filtered through
local traditions. Continuity becomes a way to deny rupture; local variation becomes a way to deny structural change. The revolution appears not as a
decisive break in English history but as a set of regional peculiarities, each
shaped by personal agendas and parish politics.
This methodological narrowing is not simply an academic
choice. It reflects the ideological climate of the late twentieth and early
twenty‑first centuries, in which grand narratives, class analysis and
structural explanations have been marginalised. The English Revolution, once
understood as a foundational moment in the emergence of modern capitalism, is
now often treated as a constitutional crisis with religious overtones. McCall’s
volume, despite its archival strengths, is shaped by this intellectual retreat.
Continuity and rupture
A recurring theme in Church and People in Interregnum
Britain is “continuity.” Bernard Capp’s introduction is pointedly titled
“Stability and flux,” and several chapters emphasise the persistence of
traditional practices. Historians rightly show that many parishes carried on
much as before, that Puritan ministers often remained in place, and that
private traditionalism survived beneath the surface of official godliness. No
serious scholar denies that elements of the old religious culture endured. The
English Revolution, like all bourgeois revolutions, did not sweep away every
vestige of the past.
But treating continuity as the main finding downplays the revolution itself. It shifts attention from the structural
transformation of English society to the survival of familiar rituals and
habits. The persistence of old forms is taken not as evidence of the
revolution’s contradictions but as proof that the revolution was limited,
superficial, or even illusory. This interpretive move characterises the
revisionist and post‑revisionist schools, which have long sought to minimise
the revolutionary character of the 1640s and 1650s.
A Marxist analysis sees continuity differently. The survival
of old practices reflects the incomplete and contradictory character of a
bourgeois revolution that halted halfway, made its peace with the landed
interest, and restored the monarchy and episcopacy in 1660. The English
Revolution did not abolish the gentry; it strengthened them. It did not destroy
the social foundations of landlordism; it reconfigured them. It did not produce
a democratic republic; it produced a brief experiment in republican government
followed by a conservative settlement. Continuity is therefore not evidence
against revolution but evidence of the revolution’s limits.
The emphasis on continuity also obscures the profound
ruptures that did occur. The abolition of episcopacy, the king's execution, the
sale of church lands, the transfer of moral discipline to secular courts, the
rise of sectarian congregations, and the politicisation of the army were
unprecedented developments. They represented a decisive break with the feudal‑absolutist
order. The persistence of some parish customs does not negate the revolutionary
nature of these transformations. It merely shows that revolutions unfold
unevenly, with different tempos in different social spheres.
Moreover, continuity often masks bigger change. A Puritan
minister who remained in his parish might preach in familiar tones, but he did
so under a radically altered ecclesiastical structure. Parishioners might
continue to attend services, but the authority overseeing those services had
been uprooted. Traditional practices might survive in private, but the
abolition of the Book of Common Prayer and the imposition of a preaching
ministry reshaped public religious life. Outward forms can remain continuous even as social relations, property structures, and ideological authority shift profoundly.
The revisionist fixation on continuity serves an ideological
purpose. It lets historians present the revolution as a series of
administrative adjustments filtered through local traditions rather than a
decisive break in English history. It reduces structural transformation to
parish‑level variation. It replaces class analysis with micro‑history. It
treats the revolution not as a struggle between contending social forces but as
a mosaic of local peculiarities. In this framework, the survival of old customs
becomes a way of denying the existence of revolution itself.
This approach also reflects the broader intellectual climate
of the late twentieth and early twenty‑first centuries, in which grand
narratives, class analysis and structural explanations have been marginalised.
The English Revolution, once understood as a foundational moment in the
emergence of modern capitalism, is now often treated as a constitutional crisis
with religious overtones. The emphasis on continuity fits neatly within this
depoliticised historiography.
But a Marxist reading restores the revolution to its proper
place. Continuity does not negate rupture; it reveals the contradictions of a
bourgeois revolution carried out by a coalition of classes with divergent
interests. The persistence of old forms shows the revolution was incomplete—not that it did not occur. Historical analysis should understand these contradictions, not use them to deny the revolutionary
character of the period.
Why the book still matters
Despite its limitations, Church and People in Interregnum
Britain contains valuable archival research. Its open‑access publication is
a welcome break from the paywall‑dominated academic industry, which routinely
restricts access to scholarship and places historical inquiry behind commercial
barriers. The contributors have worked carefully with underused sources, and
their findings illuminate aspects of parish life, clerical careers and local
governance that are often overlooked. For that reason alone, the volume
deserves attention.
But its value lies not in the interpretive framework it
offers — which is narrow, localist and shaped by the intellectual retreat of
post‑revisionist historiography — but in the evidence it assembles. For readers
seeking to understand the English Revolution, the book works best as raw
material rather than a guide to interpretation. Read alongside Christopher
Hill’s The World Turned Upside Down or Society and Puritanism in
Pre-Revolutionary England, the archival fragments here acquire sharper meaning.
The church surveys, the secular prosecutions of swearers and Sabbath‑breakers,
the stubborn loyalist clergy, the uneasy balancing act in Cromwell’s patronage
— all become evidence of a society being forcibly remade.
The English Revolution was not a constitutional quarrel or a
series of local accidents. It was a bourgeois revolution that shattered the
feudal‑absolutist state and reconfigured English society's ideological and
property structures. The “second Reformation” of 1645 was a central moment.
Parliament’s abolition of episcopacy, its ban on the Book of Common Prayer, and
its sale of ecclesiastical lands were not administrative reforms. They were
revolutionary acts that aimed to destroy the institutional foundations of the
old order. The transfer of moral discipline from church courts to secular
magistrates was not a procedural adjustment. It imposed a new social discipline
aligned with the needs of an emerging capitalist economy.
These transformations cannot be understood through parish‑level
micro‑studies alone. They require a framework that explains why the revolution
occurred, what social forces drove it, and how its contradictions shaped its
outcome. The merchants, yeomen and lesser gentry who supported Parliament; the
radical sectaries who pushed the revolution toward social equality; the grandees
who halted it; the army that embodied its most advanced democratic impulses —
these actors are largely absent from McCall’s volume. Their absence is not
accidental. It reflects a historiographical method that avoids structural
analysis and treats the revolution as a mosaic of local peculiarities rather
than as a decisive break in English history.
Yet the evidence the book assembles points beyond its
interpretation. The church surveys reveal a revolutionary state attempting to
rationalise medieval property relations. The quarter sessions records show the
gentry enforcing godly discipline on labourers and servants. Cromwell's
patronage decisions expose the tension between revolutionary energy from below
and the need to stabilise a new propertied order. The persistence of
traditional practices reveals the revolution's incomplete character, not its
absence—old forms survived alongside profound ruptures in authority, property,
and ideology.
A rising bourgeois class led the English Revolution, using
the language of God to break the old order — and then to discipline the people
who helped win it. Puritan ideology provided the vocabulary for expressing
class struggle. The religious upheaval of the 1640s and 1650s was not a
separate sphere of experience but the form through which political and social
transformation unfolded. The “second Reformation” was the religious
superstructure of the bourgeois revolution.
Despite its methodological constraints, McCall’s volume
offers a ground‑level view of that process. It shows how revolutionary policies
were implemented, resisted and adapted in the parish, the pew and the village.
It reveals the tensions between national initiatives and local realities,
between ideological ambition and administrative capacity, between revolutionary
rupture and conservative persistence. It deserves attention for what it
documents, not for what it concludes.
To understand what it truly reveals, however, requires a
Marxist framework — one capable of situating parish‑level evidence within the
broader dynamics of class struggle, property transformation and ideological
change. Without that framework, the revolution dissolves into continuity,
localism and personal agendas. With it, the archival fragments assembled in Church
and People in Interregnum Britain become part of a larger story: the birth
of modern England through the contradictory, incomplete and world‑historical
process of bourgeois revolution.
Articles and Bibliography
Further Reading and Key Articles
The following works provide essential context for
understanding the English Revolution, the “second Reformation,” and the broader
social and ideological transformations of mid‑seventeenth‑century Britain. They
complement the archival material in Church and People in Interregnum Britain
and provide the interpretive framework the volume lacks.
- Christopher
Hill, “The English Revolution 1640”: A foundational Marxist analysis
of the revolution’s class dynamics, property transformations and
ideological forms.
- Christopher
Hill, “The World Turned Upside Down”: The classic study of radical
sectaries, Levellers, Diggers and the democratic impulses suppressed by
the revolutionary grandees.
- Christopher
Hill, “Society and Puritanism in Pre‑Revolutionary England”: Essential
for understanding the ideological and social roots of Puritanism and its
role in reshaping everyday life.
- Brian
Manning, “The English People and the English Revolution”: A powerful
account of popular participation, class struggle and the revolutionary
movement from below.
- Brian
Manning, “Revolution and Counter‑Revolution in England, 1640–1660”: A
detailed Marxist analysis of the revolution’s phases, contradictions and
ultimate containment.
- David
Underdown, “Revel, Riot and Rebellion”: A study of popular politics
and local conflict that complements the parish‑level material in McCall’s
volume.
- Michael
Braddick, “God’s Fury, England’s Fire”: A modern narrative history
that, while not Marxist, provides a comprehensive overview of the
political and military crisis.
- Leopold
von Ranke, “History of England” (selected chapters):
- Useful for contrasting nineteenth‑century
conservative interpretations with modern social history.
- Friedrich
Engels, “The Peasant War in Germany”: Not about England, but
indispensable for understanding how religious language expresses class
struggle in early bourgeois revolutions.
Bibliography
Primary Sources and Archival Collections
- Lambeth
Palace Library, Parliamentary Surveys of Church Livings (MS collections).
- The
National Archives (Kew), Chancery Papers relating to ecclesiastical
surveys and sequestrations.
- Quarter
Sessions Records for Hampshire, Sussex, Dorset and Somerset (various
county archives).
- Cromwellian
State Papers, 1653–1658 (British Library, Thomason Tracts).
- Parish
Registers and Vestry Minutes, 1640–1660 (regional archives).
Secondary Works
- Braddick,
Michael. God’s Fury, England’s Fire: A New History of the English Civil
Wars. London: Allen Lane, 2008.
- Capp,
Bernard. England’s Culture Wars: Puritan Reformation and Its Enemies in
the Interregnum. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
- Hill,
Christopher. The English Revolution 1640. London: Lawrence &
Wishart, 1940.
- Hill,
Christopher. Society and Puritanism in Pre‑Revolutionary England.
London: Secker & Warburg, 1964.
- Hill,
Christopher. The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the
English Revolution. London: Penguin, 1972.
- Manning,
Brian. The English People and the English Revolution, 1640–1660.
London: Heinemann, 1976.
- Manning,
Brian. Revolution and Counter‑Revolution in England, 1640–1660.
London: Pluto Press, 1994.
- McCall,
Fiona, ed. Church and People in Interregnum Britain. London:
University of London Press / Royal Historical Society, 2021.
- Morrill,
John. Revolt of the Provinces: Conservatives and Radicals in the
English Civil War, 1630–1650. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1976.
- Russell,
Conrad. The Causes of the English Civil War. Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1990.
- Underdown,
David. Revel, Riot and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in
England, 1603–1660. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.
- Woolrych,
Austin. Britain in Revolution, 1625–1660. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2002.
Marxist and Theoretical Works
- Engels,
Friedrich. The Peasant War in Germany.
- Marx,
Karl. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.
- Trotsky,
Leon. History of the Russian Revolution (for comparative
revolutionary analysis).
- Perry
Anderson. Lineages of the Absolutist State. London: Verso, 1974.
1. Baal’s Priests: The Loyalist Clergy and the English
Revolution (Ashgate, 2013)
This is McCall’s major monograph, based on her doctoral
research. It examines the experiences of loyalist (royalist) clergy and their
families during the English Civil War and Interregnum. The judges of the 2013
Samuel Pepys Prize commended the book.
2. Church and People in Interregnum Britain
(University of London Press / Royal Historical Society, 2021)
An edited collection bringing together early‑career scholars
working on religion and society in the 1640s–1650s. McCall is the editor and
also contributes a chapter based on her research into quarter sessions records
and religious discipline.
Forthcoming / In‑Progress Scholarly Projects
These are not yet published as books but are confirmed
ongoing projects:
3. Archbishop Matthew Parker’s 1561 Survey of the
Elizabethan Clergy (forthcoming)
McCall is a collaborator on a Leverhulme‑funded project
producing a modern edition of the Parker Certificates for the Church of England
Record Society.
4. The Irresistible Authority of a Troop of Horse:
The New Model Army and Parish Life (Article, 2026)
Not a book, but a significant scholarly article relevant to
her research trajectory.
