The Birth of a Protestant Town: the Process of Reformation in Tudor Colchester, 1530–80

Abstract

In 1555, the Catholic justice Sir Anthony Browne issued a draconian order to the officers of Colchester, requiring that they make periodic searches ‘in every house’, and arrest ‘all strangers… for this town (said he) is a harbourer of all heretics, and ever was’.¹ Tudor Colchester enjoys a similar reputation among modern historians, home as it was to one of Marian England’s most persistent Protestant communities. Yet although Colchester is widely cited as an early centre of Protestantism, the process of reformation there, and in other similar towns, has been relatively little explored in print.² If Colchester was such a Protestant town, how and when did it become so?