The Re-Establishment of the Church of England, 1660–1663
After a period of comparative neglect, the ecclesiastical history of the Restoration has recently again attracted the attention of historians. Dr.Bosher's Making of the Restoration Settlement has luminously exposed the politics by which the Church of England recaptured the establishment, and Mr. A. G. Matthews, by tracing the biographies of the Anglicans displaced during the Interregnum and the Non-Anglicans ejected after the king's return, has shown how changes in doctrine and discipline affected the ministry during these years. Here an attempt will be made to discuss another aspect of the re-establishment: its administrative reconstruction. Dr.Bosher has shown how the exigencies of politics led to the piecemeal restoration of Anglicanism, instead of the immediate ecclesiastical revolution which, from a legal point of view, could have been attempted. That the traditional episcopal administration was thereby eventually reconstructed is of course well known, but it seems worth asking what light the administrative records of certain dioceses can throw not only on the details of how this took place, but also on the structure and character of the revived system.