The Elizabethan Reformation in Staffordshire had a shallow seedbed. The radical reformers of the 1540s had greeted the conversion of the county with a mixture of high hopes and hyperbole. The East Anglian preacher and disciple of Latimer, Thomas Becon, wrote a treatise The Iewel of Ioye urging that itinerant preaching missions be sent to the provinces. He depicted his mission field as "so barbarouse and rude a country ... where Christe I thynke as yet was neuer trulye preached" and where "the Papistes and Antichristes thynke their kyngdome most strongest and most lyke to continue."

He claimed miraculous success in his mission, yet Protestantism failed to take root in the Staffordshire...