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. 275
