This investigation of the transformative religious changes of the 16th and 17th centuries in England, arise from Patrick Collinson's 1986 Anstey Memorial Lectures at the University of Kent. The book examines the effects of these changes on the nation, the town and family and their culture. It is about the birth of a new and in some ways different England, the one that we know and about the painful complications attending that birth, including the English Civil War. It looks at the implications of the Protestant Reformation for English national self-consciousness. Patrick Collinson is author of "The Elizabethan Puritan Movement", "Archbishop Grindal 1519-1583", "The Religion of Protestants" and "Godly People - Essays in English Protestantism and Puritanism".