Patterns of Dissent: The Social and Religious Geography of Nonconformity in Three Counties

ABSTRACT This study combines personal, community, regional and national perspectives to identify patterns of Dissent and discuss their character and causes in relation to varying local environments. It demonstrates how the approaches of earlier historians may be further developed and debated. The study area- the three counties of Oxford diocese, Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire- shows many factors at work using linked evidence, including both overall data and detail from original 1851 religious census returns. Significant determinants of the Dissenting experience and its locations were: response to disruptive change; the strength and continuity of earlier cultures of Dissent; the condition and attitudes of Anglicanism; the impact of the Evangelical Revival; the status, material resources and personalities of chapel activists; the surrounding social and physical environment of landscape, settlement, ownership and social structure; and local cultures of dependency or diversity and independency. Many of these determinants can only to be fully assessed by looking beyond a single chapel or denomination or settlement. Dissenting patterns were commonly organic and locally rooted, examples of an environmental religious fit recoverable through local and regional studies.