Case Studies in Research

I was really glad that Professor Galey mentioned case studies in class last night when discussing the methods in common to both Adrian Johns and Matthew Kirschenbaum. I found in my own research of the Lollards many historians who have access to the primary sources use case studies to illustrate connections between Lollards and the later Reformers of the 16^th century. Historian Nesta Evans has conducted extensive research of Lollard communities in the Chiltern Hundreds (an ancient administrative area in Buckinghamshire, England), and found links between Lollards and later Baptists and Quakers. Evans looked through judicial records focusing on surname distribution, marriage records, and family lineage, noting that Lollards did not move very far for the period, staying primarily close to home within an eight to sixteen kilometre radius. She had to first demonstrate that there was greater continuity among Lollard and Baptist or Quaker surnames than the population at large and secondly had to show whether it was possible to connect dissenting families from the Lollards up to the Reformers.
 In her investigation, Evans compared 521 surnames found in the 1524 Subsidy returns for the twenty-one parishes to those listed in the Hearth Tax returns for 1662 and 1664, and in the Free and Voluntary Present of 1661, finding that 29% of the 1524 names recurred in the 1660s. Fifty-nine known Lollards persecuted in the early 16^th century were identified in the 1524 Subsidy and compared to Baptist and Quakers found in church lists or presentations to the ecclesiastical courts in the 1660s. Out of the fifty-nine Lollard surnames, forty-eight, or 81%, recurred in the 1660s as Baptists or Quakers. However, she found that her methods for linking heretical families were limited in that there was an inability to trace the passing of radical religious beliefs through female lines, and traceable families were more likely to be more prosperous and therefore established with land, giving them a reason to remain immobile. Evans was able to somewhat trace the transmission of dissent through women by reviewing marriage records. For this, she chose women from five Lollard families she traced to 17^th century heretics. Twenty-one of these women chose men from other Lollard families as their husbands while the remaining thirty-eight married into families that eventually became Baptists or Quakers. Evans concluded that the “surnames of these families who were both Lollards and post-Restoration dissenters in the Chilterns demonstrated that these families were outstandingly and entirely abnormally stable in the area” (Evans, 308). Her findings show that Lollards established strong familial ties in their communities and continued to live in these areas for generations. It also shows that dissent typically ran down family lines changing to suit the social climate and heretical influences. Family was extremely important to Lollards in transferring their ideas to others in their community, as well as the texts that supported their textual studies of religion. Evans fully demonstrates the links between Lollards and Early Reformers that strengthens my argument that Lollards influenced the ideologies of the latter group and the movement of texts before the printing press.

Works Referenced
Evans, Nesta. "The descent of dissenters in the Chiltern Hundreds." In The World of Rural Dissenters, 1520-1725, edited by Margaret Spufford, 288-308. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.