Books in English Parishes

It is well known that with the development of the royal supremacy in the church in the 1530s and the growth of Protestantism in England, all parishes in England and Wales were ordered by the Crown to purchase certain books. The most famous of these injunctions was the Henrician order of 1536 for every parish to purchase a copy of the English Bible. By this time, and especially in London, parish ownership of books that were kept in the nave, or more commonly the chancel, of the parish church was not unknown, but the order of 1536 marked the beginning of what would become a common if ambitious policy on the part of the Crown in requiring more than nine thousand parishes to purchase certain texts that were to be made available to the body of parishioners within the parish church. This database gathers the surviving evidence concerning the printed texts owned by the parish churches of England between 1536 and 1642