Clerical Discipline was an incentive by church authorities to regulate the behaviour of local clergy in early modern England. Following the sixteenth-century religious reformations, see Reformation, there was an increasing concern over the educational background and behaviour of local clergy in England. Many in authority held the view that the Catholic Church had left an inheritance of ministers that shared far too many cultural traits with their parishioners and were, therefore, unfit to provide pastoral care and spiritual instruction in a godly community.