Abstract

We use the full texts of ~26,000 English wills covering the half millennium between 1300 and 1850 to generate quantitative measures of individual religiosity. We distinguish pro forma performative expressions of belief in the preamble, which we term “nominal” religiosity, from “real” religiosity, non-template religious expressions in the substantive body of the will. Informed by the historical literature, we consider the latter to be more sincere than the former. By constructing and validating multiple novel measures of such religious expression, together with information on religious bequests and actions, we estimate a proxy for latent religiosity, and track it over time. We uncover new historical stylized facts about the evolution of religiosity in England over five centuries. We highlight four principal findings. One, traditional Christian language was declining long before the Reformation. Two, the incidence of performative preambles rose after 1400 and came to dominate will making by 1600, thereafter declining. Three, real religious expression rose 1300 to 1450, before a long-run secular decline 1450 to 1850. Four, latent religiosity began declining for the richest will-makers, from high levels, long before Henry VIII's Reformation of the 1530s. The Reformation era is associated with a collapse in this latent religiosity. This evidence points to a two-stage process of cultural change: endogenous changes in religious sentiment preceded, and were subsequently accelerated by, a powerful top-down institutional transformation.