In those days of slow communication opinions travelled on the beaten roads of commerce.

As late as Mary's reign there is proof that Protestantism was confined to the south, east, and midlands,--roughly speaking to a circle with London as its center and a radius of one hundred miles.

In these earlier years, Protestant opinion was probably even more confined; London was both royalist and anti-Roman Catholic; the ports on the south-eastern coast, including Calais, at that time an English station in France, and the university towns had strong Lutheran and still stronger anti-clerical parties.
But in the wilds of the north and west it was different.

There, hardly any bourgeois class of traders existed to adopt "the religion of merchants" as Protestantism has been called.

Perhaps more important was the mere slowness of the diffusion of ideas.