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The pastor’s pedagogical role dominated in all aspects of Reformed pastoral care: administering the sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, visiting the sick, and preaching at funerals. Basel retained certain medieval practices, such as the acceptance of godparents and sickbed visitation with communion, although it modified them in accordance with evangelical doctrine. Other practices, such as emergency baptism by midwives, were gradually eliminated as Basel moved into greater conformity with other Reformed churches. Basel’s pastors shared the responsibility for church discipline with lay officials. Although complaints about individual parishioners persist, visitation reports from the early 17th century give a positive picture of religious belief and practice in Basel’s rural parishes and the development of a Reformed religious culture.

This chapter studies the texture and significance of semi-formal relief in rural parishes by analysing the contribution of alms, doles, and endowments to the relief of the poor. It emphasizes the resilience of private charitable initiatives, which were never entirely ‘crowded out’ by formal relief; discusses the influence of the criteria of eligibility for charity on the demeanour of would-be recipients; and analyses the strategies of those who sought to be eligible to endowments.

Preaching and catechization were the primary responsibilities of Basel’s Reformed pastors. Rural pastors preached twice weekly; by the end of the 16th century, church attendance on Sundays was satisfactory although the clergy still complained about weekday attendance. Catechism instruction was also held more frequently than before. Although pastors in rural parishes complained that teenagers did not attend catechism instruction, many were satisfied with their parishioners’ knowledge of the catechism. The general level of religious knowledge at the end of the century was much higher than it had been in the decades immediately following the Reformation. Enforcement of edicts requiring attendance at worship and catechism instruction played a key role.

This chapter explores the often neglected labour and employment schemes in the Elizabethan relief statutes. It explains the problems which led to the abandonment of experiments to set the poor on work in rural parishes; suggests that the imperative to labour discipline enshrined in the legislation was more successfully met by apprenticing the children of the labouring poor than by setting their parents to work; and reconstructs the attitudes of children, parents, parish officers, magistrates, and employers to this often controversial project.

Reformed parishes wanted married and educated clergy, but the capacity to support a manse, with a pastor and his family, could be quite beyond the resources of rural communities. Pastors often had difficulty obtaining books for the preparations of sermons. The customs and orders surrounding services, burials, the churchyard, and other parish affairs varied widely in different regions and are illustrated here with evidence from six more distant countrysides: the peasant republic of Dithmarschen in the marshlands of south‐west Jutland; the broad lands with few towns in eastern Germany, mostly in the duchy of Prussia; the mountain region of western Switzerland; the countryside of France and Navarre; the churches of Iceland, distantly governed from Denmark; and the attempt to reform Moldavia, nominally under Ottoman sovereignty.

This chapter adopts a different focus, examining the success or failure of reformation in specific communities, mainly urban. Progress depended on the presence and co-operation of reform-minded magistrates and ministers, and their readiness to pursue civic reformation despite any reservations about the regime at Whitehall. The chapter examines Richard Baxter's Kidderminster as an admired model, and Baxter's own analysis of its success. It then surveys a range of urban communities, some of which displayed almost no interest in reformation while others achieved moderate and in some cases very substantial progress. Those considered include Chester, Southampton, York, Scarborough, King's Lynn and Gloucester, as well as several smaller towns. Finally, the chapter examines how far reformation might progress in rural parishes.

Alistair Mutch examines administrative practices in eighteenth century rural parishes, using the evidence of churchwardens’ records from the Deanery of Bingham, Nottinghamshire, complemented by details of parish life from contemporary diaries. Churchwardens were part of the ‘middling sort’, elite parish office holders whose freedom in devising their own administrative practices meant patterns of accountability often varied considerably between parishes. These practices depended much on the personal character of the office holder, whose degree of local autonomy reproduced a very ‘Anglican form of authority’. Churchwardens’ stewardship of money and conduct of accounts meetings had a personal, sociable dimension which contrasted with the rigorous, disciplined ‘forms of accountability’ associated with kirk sessions in Scotland during the same period, and these distinctive patterns of administrative order deserve greater attention, because of their potential to offer new perspectives on emerging notions of national identity and difference.

This chapter explores and analyzes the ecclesial identity of a local parish church in a rural context. Deploying the concept of implicit theology, a subgenre of ethnographic theology, it argues that the character of the church is composed through core and cherished values that are seldom explicitly articulated. What emerges from the study is that the character of rural Anglicanism in the Church of England can be understood as primarily but not exclusively temperate, mild, aesthetic, and rational. Moreover, there may be a link between the grammar and timbre of worship and the kind of God individuals and congregations subsequently believe they experience. The study also notes a broader sociological significance of selecting to study a rural church. That said, it pointedly avoids reductionism, but does recognize the formation of an alloy in need of attention in the emergent social and theological construction of reality.