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ABSTRACT
Popular preachers frequently attempted to reform the relationship between rich and poor in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. Rather than accepting economic malpractice as part of the divinely ordained social order, many tried to convince their audiences that the extortions of merchants, landlords and creditors were crimes which should be punished severely by England's earthly authorities. This paper demonstrates how the ‘discourse of exhortation’ opened up a space for plebeian action with concrete socioeconomic consequences. By analysing the connotative idiom of social complaint found in homilies and other widely heard sermons, the important but historiographically neglected role of ‘godliness' in the early modern ‘moral economy’ is revealed.