‘Fasting and Prayer’ has been a constant refrain in our examination of clerical sociability. We began with a fast at Hatfield Broad Oak and have noticed fasting in the context of the settlement of ministers and in other decision-making meetings. The ambiguities of clerical association are perhaps strongest in this field, and for this reason the practice deserves particular attention. Unlike the activities discussed earlier, fasting and prayer had a set place within the public worship of the church in addition to its place in voluntaristic religious life.

Fasting is also, to an extent greater than the rituals of sociability already discussed, an aspect of voluntary religion that is at least as likely to occur in mixed groups of laity and ministers as among strictly clerical groups. John Stalham was attracted to his Terling congregation in 1632 by ‘that inviting support which was given of you that you were a fasting and praying people’. A letter from their former pastor, Thomas Weld, written upon his arrival in New England backs this up. After celebrating the Congregational government of the colony, the very next thing he celebrated was that ‘Fast days & holy days & holy fest days and all such things by A[u]thority Commanded & performed according to the precise rule’. Fasting had been an important part of pre-Tridentine Catholicism and remained a practice that characterised post-Tridentine English Catholicism. It has been argued that enthusiastic Protestant fasting was partly a response to this continued example, and there may be an element of truth in this, but the Protestant fast, with all its familiar features, had been described as early as the middle of the sixteenth century.