Women, Religious Dissent, and Urban Authority in Early Reformation Norwich

Abstract

In July 1557 Elizabeth Cooper was burned as a Protestant heretic at the Lollards Pit just outside Norwich’s Bishopgate. She was the wife of a pewterer and lived in the city’s St. Andrew’s parish. She had, apparently, repudiated her Protestant beliefs earlier in Queen Mary Tudor’s reign, although no record of any formal abjuration survives. That renunciation had, however, left her “greatly troubled inwardly.” As a result, she went into St. Andrew’s church one day while a service was in progress and publicly rescinded her recantation of Protestantism. She told the assembled worshippers that “she was heartily sorry that she ever did it [i.e., recanted], willing the people not to be deceived, neither to take her doings for an example.” After that declaration Cooper left the church.