ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY 



Matthew Hamount, a plowright of Hethersett, was burnt in the Castle 

 Ditch at Norwich, 20 May, 1579 ; he was condemned and sentenced by the 

 bishop on the Tuesday before Easter, 14 April, for having said that 



the New Testament and Gospel of Christ is but mere foolishness, a mere fable ; that Christ 

 is not God or the Saviour of the world, but a mere man, a shameful man, and an abominable 

 idol ; that he did not rise again from death or ascend unto Heaven ; that the Holy Ghost is 

 not God ; and that baptism is not necessary, nor the sacrament of the body and blood of 

 Christ ; 



and because he said the Queen's Majesty was of his opinion, he was also con- 

 demned by the recorder and mayor to lose both his ears, which were cut off 

 13 May.^ 



In 1580 the bishop received directions for the suppression and examina- 

 tion of the sect of the Family of Love, ' of whom divers had been discovered 

 in Norfolk.'* In 158 i he committed to custody Robert Browne,' the founder 

 of the sect called the Brownists, who has been claimed as the father of 

 Congregationalism. He was a kinsman of Cecil, Lord Burghley, to whose 

 powerful protection he appealed more than once, and never found it fail him. 

 He had been before the archbishop in 1571, and was then censured bv him. 

 The whole story of his career was one of inconformity with whatever religious 

 body his lot for the time was cast among, and the epithet Strype applied to 

 him of ' very freakish' is perhaps the best description of him.* On leaving 

 Cambridge he had at once begun to preach without the bishop's licence. A 

 licence was procured for him, but he was finally inhibited from preaching. 

 Eventually he came to Norwich, where he and Robert Harrison, a former 

 fellow-collegian, who had been dismissed from the mastership of Aylsham 

 School, gathered a small company of believers, who called themselves ' the 

 Church,' and came to be known as 'Brownists.' He was the subject of endless 

 complaints to the bishop, and, in 1581, migrated with many of his followers 

 to Middelburg, where he entered into a fierce controversy with the 

 accredited ministers of the English Puritan Colony there. At last his con- 

 gregation was broken up and he returned to England. In 1589 he con- 

 formed, and perhaps the last phase of his nonconformity may be discovered 

 in this final repudiation of his own previously adopted principles. His 

 sect and tenets remained long after he himself had renounced them, and 

 Sir Walter Raleigh computed the number of Brownists or Separatists in 

 Norfolk and Suffolk at not less than twenty thousand. 



According to a manuscript register in Dr. Williams's Library, Archbishop 

 Whitgift's call for a return of the clergy and a report as to their conformity, 

 in 1583, shows that sixty-four ministers in Norfolk were not resolved to 

 subscribe. ° 



In 1584 Bishop Freake was transferred to Worcester," and the following 

 year Bishop Scambler was removed from Peterborough to Norwich. 

 Wharton suggests that Scambler ruined both sees, and he was notorious as a 



' Harl. MS. 537, fol. 113. ' J(ts P. C. xii, 233,317. 



' Strype, Life of Archb'uhcp Parker, ii, 6g. * Ibid. 



5 John Browne, Hist, of Congregatknalism in Korf. 29. 



* In 1580 he had proposed a very notable scheme for the revival of the office of rural dean, 

 by which many abuses of the bishop's court would have been checked. Strype, Annals of the Reformation, 

 ii, pt. ii, 695. 



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