On the fIfth day of August in 1603, the mayor of Norwich and “a great multitude of people” crowded into Saint Andrew's parish church to hear John Robinson preach an afternoon sermon celebrating the third anniversary of James I's deliverance from the Gowrie Plot. In the congregation were two of Bishop John Jegon's lay informers, Michaell Peade and Frances Dawes. As Robinson began, the two informants turned a critical ear, intent on sifting the sermon for hints of the kind of ecclesiastical radicalism that establishment prelates recently had found so exasperatingly disruptive to the ministerial machinery. They had good cause for concern since the young Robinson, fresh from Cambridge University where a generation earlier the new wave of religious dissent had first flourished, was now in Norwich seeking a license from Jegon to preach in his diocese.
