In the summer of 1554, the English exile community in Frankfurt was sharing a church with the congregation of Valérand Poullain, and was led by the expatriate William Whittingham.
Grindal then wrote about the situation to Nicholas Ridley in England; who found the local compromise, in line with what happened for other exile groups, quite reasonable, but had some criticism of Knox's approach.
[4] A compromise order, really a version of the prayerbook service that retained much of it, was nearly accepted by 13 March 1555, just as a new group of English refugees, including John Jewel, was brought in by Cox.
Some of Knox's detractors felt that such radical language offended even sympathetic rulers and encouraged Roman Catholic persecution of Protestants in England and elsewhere.
[2] The extended conflicts are documented in a single printed source: the narrative and reprinted correspondence that comprise A Brieff discours off the troubles begonne at Franckford ... A.D. 1554.
It may have been issued in response to a sermon delivered at St Paul's Cross on the subject of the Genevan form of church discipline then advocated by John Field.
Patrick Collinson has made a case for Thomas Wood as the editor, and M. A. Simpson has questioned the assumption that there was a single author behind A Brief Discourse who was part of the debates it concerns.
Much of its material must have come to its compiler(s) from other hands, the letters it contains vary in apparent authenticity, and the documentary sources behind it are no longer extant except, in adapted form, parts of John Knox's account of his time in Frankfurt.
The title page advertises A Brief Discourse as an explanation of the nature and origins of the conflicts in the Church of England then taking place and the emergence of separatism and Presbyterianism.