Richard Field (theologian)

Richard Field (1561–1616) was an English ecclesiological theologian associated with the work of Richard Hooker. Whereas Hooker, eight years Field's senior, had written his Lawes of Ecclesiastical Polity to defend conformity against non-conformity, Field's major work, Of the Church (1606/10), was a defence of the Protestant Church of England under its Elizabethan settlement against the charge of Romanist opponents that it was no church at all.

Field maintained that Anglican piety and polity continued the pre-Tridentine Catholic conciliar tradition. He argued that all the essential doctrinal points of Protestantism had been averred and defended constantly by certain theologians of the Roman Church throughout the preceding centuries, but that this fact had been increasingly overshadowed by the influence of the prevailing papist faction. Thus in essence, when viewed according to its roots in the apostolic gospel as defended by the decreasing minority of faithful spokesmen, the Church of Rome had always been a Protestant church – but that this had been overwhelmed by the ever-worsening papist/Romanist (Field used both terms) errors.

Although in his personality he was known as having an amiable and peacable disposition, his writings against the papists, particularly Robert Bellarmine and Stapleton, rose to heights of implacable polemicism.

Field was born 15 October 1561, at Hemel Hempstead in Hertfordshire, where his father had an estate. He was educated at Berkhamsted School and was sent by his father to Oxford at the age of sixteen (1577). There is one piece of flimsy evidence that he matriculated at Magdalen College, Oxford, but Magdalen Hall, Oxford is more likely. Here he certainly took his B.A. degree, 18 November 1581, and M.A., 2 June 1584, and was appointed as catechism lecturer, where his reputation was such that John Rainolds and many others came to hear him. He was considered one of the best disputants in the university. His father wanted him to marry and not be ordained. But Field returned to Oxford, and after a residence of seven years, and until he took his degree of B.D. 14 January 1592, he was made divinity reader of Winchester Cathedral.

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