The dissolution of the monasteries in England during the 1530s began a turbulent period of religious restructuring. Focusing on the counties of Wiltshire and Cheshire, Guinn-Chipman looks at the changing nature of religion over the next two centuries. She places particular emphasis on those who were resistant to change and argues for the development of a national identity created from local memories of pre-Reformation religious spaces and the formation of a historicized 'sense of the past' during the Civil War.