In this text a Reformation historian takes us inside the mind
and heart of Morebath, a remote and tiny sheep-farming village
where 33 families worked the difficult land on the southern edge
of Exmoor. The bulk of Morebath's conventional archives have
long since vanished. But from 1520 to 1574, through nearly all
the drama of the English Reformation, Morebath's only priest,
Sir Christopher Trychay, kept the parish accounts on behalf of
the churchwardens. Opinionated, eccentric and talkative, Sir
Christopher filled these vivid scripts for parish meetings with
the names and doings of his parishioners. Through his eyes we
catch a rare glimpse of the life and pre-reformation piety of a
16th-century English village. The work also offers a window into
a rural world in crisis as the Reformation progressed. Sir
Christopher Trychay's accounts provide direct evidence of the
motives which drove hitherto law-abiding West-Country
communities to participate in the doomed Prayer-Book Rebellion
of 1549 - culminating in the si