Abstract
Traditionally, puritanism and culture have been seen as polar opposites, so that an essay on puritan culture might seem to merit no more space than the topic of snakes in that book on Iceland which, according to Dr Samuel Johnson, contained a chapter consisting of the single sentence: ‘There are no snakes to be found anywhere in the island.’ Puritanism, it is assumed, had to do not with culture but with sermons and the sabbath, a bleak day of unalienated religion, punctuating a week otherwise filled by unrelenting toil. On the subject of holy days, or holidays, where Elizabethan culture is mostly to be sought, the puritan ‘Book of Discipline’ of the 1580s did indeed include a chapter of one sentence: ‘Holidays are conveniently to be abolished.’
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Notes and References
Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (1975), Part III, Ch. 4, ‘Religion as a Cultural System’.
David Underdown, Revel, Riot, and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England 1603–1660 (Oxford, 1985), especially ch. 3, ‘Cultural Conflict’;
David Underdown, Fire from Heaven: Life in an English Town in the Seventeenth Century (1992);
Patrick Collinson, The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1988), especially chs 4 and 5, ‘Protestant Culture and the Cultural Revolution’ and ‘Wars of Religion’.
Kenneth Parker, The English Sabbath: A study of doctrine and discipline from the Reformation to the Civil War (Cambridge, 1988), p. 158.
The Commission for Ecclesiastical Causes Within the Dioceses of Bristol and Gloucester, ed. F. D. Price, Publications of the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society: Records Section 10 (1972), pp. 49, 52, 60, 62, 78, 84, 101–2. The liberal use of the word ‘puritan’, and the application of the term ‘recusant’ to ‘puritans’, is unusual in a formal act book, and is probably indicative of the conservative, even crypto-Catholic, views of Bishop Richard Cheyney of Gloucester and Bristol. See Caroline Litzenberger, ‘Responses of the Laity to Changes in Official Religious Policy in Gloucestershire (1541–1580)’, unpublished Cambridge PhD thesis (1993), pp. 154–61, 197–205. I am grateful to Caroline Litzenberger for a copy of her dissertation and for permission to cite it.
M. S. Byford, ‘The Price of Protestantism: Assessing the Impact of Religious Change on Elizabethan Essex: the Cases of Heydon and Colchester, 1558–1594’, unpublished Oxford DPhil thesis (1988), p. 5. I am grateful to M. S. Byford for a copy of his dissertation and for permission to cite and quote from it.
See, most recently, Underdown, Revel, Riot, and Rebellion, p. 48: ‘the Puritan Philip Stubbes’.
‘I beseech the Lord that we may all agree together in one truth, and not to divide our selves, one from another, for trifles, making schisms, ruptures, breaches and factions in the Church of God…’ (The second part, Sigs P6V–7I).
The devil’s advocate in Stubbes’s dialogue complains: ‘You will be deemed too stoical, if you should restrain men from these exercises upon the Sabbath …’ (The Anatomie of Abuses, Sig. L2V.)
See my two forthcoming essays: ‘Ecclesiastical Vitriol: Religious Satire in the 1590s and the Invention of Puritanism’, in The Reign of Elizabeth I, ed. John Guy (Cambridge); and ‘Bartholomew Fair: Theatre Invents Puritans’, in The Theatrical City: London’s Culture, Theatre and Literature, 1576–1649, ed. David Bevington, David Smith and Richard Strier (Cambridge, 1995).
Records of Early English Drama (Toronto): Chester, ed. Lawrence M. Clopper (1979);
York, 2 vols, ed. Alexander F. Johnston and Margaret Rogerson (1979);
Coventry, ed. R.W. Ingram (1981);
Norwich 1540–1642, ed. David Galloway (1984);
Cumberland, Westmorland, Gloucestershire, ed. Audrey Douglas and Peter Greenfield (1986);
Devon, ed. John M. Wasson (1986);
Cambridge, 2 vols, ed. Alan H. Nelson (1989);
Herefordshire, Worcestershire, ed. David N. Klauser (1990).
Humphrey Roberts, An earnest complaint of divers vain, wicked and abused exercises, practised on the Sabbath day (1572), Sigs Div–2r D5v–6r. In 1564–5, the Norwich magistrates licensed ‘certain games of silver’ to be ‘showed’ at Pulham Market, south of Norwich. In 1576, ‘certain silver games’, to be shown and played within the liberties of Norwich itself, were licensed, ‘so that it be not on the Sabbath day’ (REED, Norwich 1540–1642, pp. 52, 57, 393). Cf. payments at Carlisle ‘for silver playgames upon shrovetuesday’ (REED, Cumberland, Westmorland, Gloucestershire, pp. 65, 115).
In addition to the writers quoted here, see the anonymously published A treatise of daunses, wherein it is shewed, that they are accessories to whoredome (1581), Thomas Lovell, A dialogue between custom and veritie concerning the use and abuse of dauncing and minstrelsie (1581), and Christopher Fetherston, A dialogue agaynst light, lewde, and lascivious dauncing (1582). This crescendo of anxiety about dancing in 1581–2 is very striking.
Roberts, An earnest complaint, Sig. E8.
Stubbes, Anatomie of Abuses, Sigs. Pvir–Viir There was nothing especially ‘puritan’ about the objection to football. The conservatively minded Sir John Elyot had written of the game in 1531: ‘Wherein is nothing but beastly fury and extreme violence: whereon proceedeth hurt…’ (The boke named the governor, fol. 99). Elyot’s review of ‘sundry forms of exercise necessary for every gentilman’ (fols 62v–03r) was rather less ‘stoical’ than that of Stubbes (‘I am not of that opinion that all dancing generally is repugnant unto virtue’, fol. 74r) but was written in a similar literary tradition and spirit, which it is misleading to call ‘puritan’.
Stubbes, Anatomie of Abuses, Sigs Mviiv–Niir.
John Northbrooke, Spiritus, est vicarius Christi in terra: a treatise wherein dicing, dauncing, vaine playes or enterludes with other idle pastimes etc. commonly used on the Sabboth day, are reproved (1577?) (1579 edn), p. 171.
Patrick Collinson, The Religion of Protestants: the Church in English Society 1559–1625 (Oxford, 1982), pp. 205–7, 224–30.
Stubbes, Anatomie of Abuses, Sigs. M3r–4V; T. F. Thistleton Dyer, Popular Customs, Present and Past (1876), pp. 217–18.
The report of 17 Lancashire preachers, 1587; Bodleian Library, MS Tanner 144, fol. 28, printed REED, Lancashire, p. 219. In 1589, 16 Lancashire JPs headed certain orders for sabbath observance with ‘The Enormities of the Sabbath are these’: ‘Wakes, fairs, markets, bearbait, Bullbait, Ales, maygames, Resorting to Alehouses in time of divine service, Piping and dancing, Hunting and all manner of unlawful gaming.’ (Huntington Library, MS EL 6299, 6300; REED, Lancashire, p. 220.) A letter of Edward Fleetwood, vicar of Wigan, which can be dated between 7 September and 10 December 1589, gives a slightly different list (ibid., p. 226).
Ibid., pp. 27–8, 228.
Ibid., p. 228; Proceedings of the Lancashire Justices of the Peace at the Sheriff’s Table During Assizes Week, 1578–1694, ed. B. W. Quintrell, Record Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, cxxi (1981), 41–2, 72–3; Parker, The English Sabbath, pp. 139–49; REED, Devon, pp. 293–300.
Parker, The English Sabbath, pp. 128–33; Proceedings of the Lancashire Justices, 41–2, 72–3; REED, Lancashire, pp. xxiv–xxv, 229–34, 369; Visitation Articles and Injunctions of the Early Stuart Church, 1, ed. Kenneth Fincham, Church of England Record Society, i (1994), 149–51;
L. A. Govatt, The King’s Book of Sports (1890);
James Tait, ‘The Declaration of Sports for Lancashire (1617)’, English Historical Review, XXXII (1917), 561–8.
Parker, The English Sabbath, pp. 178–216; Collinson, Religion of Protestants, p. 147.
Parker, The English Sabbath, pp. 129–33, 154–60.
Ibid., pp. 117, 62, 118; Visitation Articles and Injunctions, 1, 11, 35, 70, 195, 165, 207, 152. For an example of a minister unseasonably prolonging evening prayer until it was too dark to dance, see Underdown, Revel, Riot and Rebellion, p. 67.
Jacqueline Eales, Puritans and Roundheads: the Harleys of Brampton Bryan and the Outbreak of the English Civil War (Cambridge, 1990). For a penetrating and evocative account of this region in the seventeenth century, emphasising its significance as a crucible of modernising rather than those conservative cultural tendencies (and with nothing at all about sport and dances),
see David Rollinson, The Origins of Modern Society: Gloucestershire 1500–1700 (1992).
REED, Herefordshire, Worcestershire, pp. 125–36, 280–2.
Old Meg of Herefordshire, and a Mayd-Marian (STC 12032) was published anonymously in 1609. According to Archbishop Sancroft’s notes on the pamphlet (see n. 30 below), the author was ‘Old Hopkins’, by whom ‘this Morris ‘tis said was contrived’. If so, Hopkins, presumably a local, was a man of some wit and erudition.
Kemps nine daies wonder. Performed in a daunce from London to Norwich (STC 14923) (1600). See REED, Norwich 1540–1642, pp. 331–8.
Bodleian Library, MS Sancroft 28, pp. 28–31. Old Meg had a lengthy afterlife. The event was noted by Francis Bacon in his Historia vitae et mortis (1623), English edn, History naturall and experimentall of life and death (1638), p. 135; and by James Easton in Human Longevity (1799), p. 6. I owe these references to Peter Laslett.
REED, Herefordshire, Worcestershire, pp. 125–6, 150, 157, 168, 169, 174, 175–7, 180.
Ibid., pp. 382–3.
Ibid., pp. 74–94. Defendants in the case denied that the plaintiff, Philpot, held the office of constable in the township of the parish where the affray occurred. Cf. a Star Chamber case from the village of Rangeworthy, north of Bristol. In this 1611 case it was the parish constable, John Parker, who took the puritan part, opposing a revel and standing accused of ‘arrogating to himself a singularity of sanctity and religion’ (Underdown, Revel, Riot, and Rebellion, pp. 61–2).
REED, Cumberland, Westmorland, Gloucestershire, pp. 368–86 (Latin text), 402–19 (translation). Note this footnote to Windle’s treatise (p. 386): ‘Remember at the pulling down of 2. poles in Barkley so 1. in St Nicolas parish in Gloucester. some say at the Judges commandment, at the Instigation of the Mayor & prior that puritan Minister. & thomas cherics a precisian.’
Robert Dover and the Cotswold Games: Annalia Dubrensia, ed. Christopher Whitfield (1962); REED, Cumberland, Westmorland, Gloucestershire, p. 257.
Drayton’s accompanying map of Gloucestershire shows a group of dancers around a flag (or maypole?) on a Cotswold hilltop. Since this portion of Poly-Olbion was published in 1612, the year in which Dover seems to have taken over the games, the representation may precede his intervention.
G. O. and P.Jones (eds) (Exeter, 1845).
REED, Cambridge, pp. 269–72, 291–3, 395–7, 570–2.
J. H. Marsden, College Life in the Time of James the First As Illustrated by an Unpublished Diary of Sir Symonds D’Ewes (1851), pp. 109–10.
Robert Dover and the Cotswold Games, pp. 105–6. ‘Whirlings’ refers to the custom of distributing ‘whirlin-cakes’ on the fifth Sunday in Lent.
Robert Dover and the Cotswold Games, p. 134.
Pasquils Palinodia, and his progresse to the taverne (1619), Sig. B3.
This paragraph is based on first-hand observation at Bolsover. But see Timothy Mowl, Elizabethan-Jacobean Style (1993), pp. 117–23. There are clear references to the decorative scheme of the castle, including the mechanical music of ‘Heaven’, in Loves Wei-Come, Ben Jonson’s masque performed before the king and queen at Bolsover in 1634. See also Patricia Fumerton, ‘Consuming the Void: Jacobean Banquets and Masques’, in her Cultural Aesthetics: Renaissance Literature and the Practice of Social Ornament (Chicago and London, 1991). I owe these latter references to Jeremy Maule.
Collinson, Birthpangs of Protestant England, especially chs 2 and 4, ‘The Protestant Town’ and ‘Protestant Culture and the Cultural Revolution’.
For some late references to the Kendal play, one of the last survivors, see REED, Cumberland, Westmorland, Gloucestershire, pp. 171–213, 218–19.
REED, Devon, pp. 51–2, 265.
REED, Chester, p. 184.
REED, Norwich 1540–1642, pp. 198–9.
Collinson, Birthpangs of Protestant England, p. 137.
Edgar I. Fripp, Shakespeare, Man and Artist (Oxford, 1938), II, 838–45. For the widespread use of libellous ballads in the political culture of the early-modern town,
see C.J. Sisson, Lost Plays of Shakespeare’s Age (1936),
and Adam Fox, ‘Aspects of Oral Culture and its Development in Early Modern England’, unpublished Cambridge PhD thesis, 1993.
Byford, ‘The Price of Protestantism’, especially ch. 5, ‘Windows Into Men’s Souls: Popular Culture, Protestant Piety, and the Punishment of Sin in Colchester 1569–94’. The best accounts of the English skimmington and related cultural forms are Martin Ingram’s two essays, ‘Ridings, Rough Music and the “Reform of Popular Culture” in Early Modern England’, Past and Present, 105 (1984), 79–113, ‘Ridings, Rough Music and Mocking Rhymes in Early Modern England’, in Popular Culture in Seventeenth-Century England, ed. Barry Reay (1985), pp. 166–97.
The fullest account of this ‘symbiosis’ will be found in Alexandra Walsham’s forthcoming Cambridge doctoral thesis on aspects of ‘providentialism’ in late sixteenth-and early seventeenth-century England. See also Peter Lake, ‘Deeds Against Nature: Cheap Print, Protestantism and Murder in Early Seventeenth-Century England’, in Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England, ed. Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake (1994), pp. 257–83;
and Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (Cambridge, 1991).
REED, Norwich 1540–1642, pp. 15, 47. The best and most tangible evidence of the afterlife of ‘Old Snap’ will be found in the Castle Museum, Norwich.
REED, Newcastle Upon Tyne, p. xv. At Plymouth, ‘Gogmagog’ was cut out on the turf of the Hoe (REED, Devon, pp. 221–2).
REED, Chester, pp. 198, 234–6, 251–3, 354, 434–5, 526.
REED, Cumberland, Westmorland, Gloucestershire, pp. 91–2, 112, 115, 158.
REED, Devon, pp. 245, 261, 262, 264, 268, 451.
REED, Coventry, pp. 364–5.
Underdown, Revel, Riot, and Rebellion, p. 51.
REED, York, pp. 407, 434–5, 441, 445, 452–3, 458–9, 468–9.
Collinson, ‘Bartholomew Fair. Theatre Invents Puritans’.
David Cressy, Bonfires and Bells: National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1989), pp. xi–xii.
Cressy, Bonfires and Bells, passim; Thomas Cogswell, The Blessed Revolution: English Politics and the Coming of War, 1621–1624 (Cambridge, 1989);
Thomas Cogswell, ‘England and the Spanish Match’, in Conflict in Early Stuart England, ed. Richard Cust and Ann Hughes (1989), pp. 107–33;
Alexandra Walsham, ‘“The Fatali Vesper”: Providentialism and Anti-Popery in Late Jacobean London’, Past and Present, 144 (1994).
Cressy, Bonfires and Bells, p. 97.
Ibid., p. xiii.
Christopher Haigh, English Reformations: Religion, Politics and Society Under the Tudors (Oxford, 1993), pp. 279–81.
A good example is the sermons preached at the Kettering combination lecture by Robert Bolton, conventionally regarded as a Puritan, but, within the locality of the Mountagus’ Northamptonshire, an establishment figure. See his Workes (1641), and especially Some generali directions for a comfortable walking with God (1624) and Mr Boitons last and learned worke of the foure last things (1632). See Patrick Collinson, ‘The Cohabitation of the Faithful with the Unfaithful’, in From Persecution to Toleration: the Glorious Revolution and Religion in England, ed. O. P. Grell, J. I. Israel and N. Tyacke (Oxford, 1991), pp. 66–7.
Collinson, Birthpangs of Protestant England, especially chs 1 and 5, ‘The Protestant Nation’ and ‘Wars of Religion’; Patrick Collinson, ‘Biblical Rhetoric: the English Nation in the Prophetic Mode’, in Books in Chains, Bodies in Flames: Religion and Culture in the English Renaissance, ed. Debora Shuger and Claire McEachern (forthcoming).
Rich was the father of Nathaniel Rich, a leading figure in the Virginia Company and the Providence Island Company, and himself (in all probability) a member of the Virginia voyage of 1609, one of the victims of the famous shipwreck in the Bermudas (without which there would have been no Tempest), and the very same Richard Rich who wrote Newes from Virginia, the lost flock triumphant (1610).
Cambridgeshire Record Office, MS M32/8/13/15.
I refer, by implication, to the forthcoming Cambridge doctoral thesis of Arnold Hunt, which will address these issues.
Christopher Haigh, ‘Puritan Evangelism in the Reign of Elizabeth I’, English Historical Review, XCII (1977), 30–58;
Christopher Haigh, ‘The Church of England, the Catholics and the People’, in The Reign of Elizabeth I, ed. C. Haigh (1984), pp. 195–219. In ‘Evangelists in Action’, ch. 16 of English Reformations, Haigh is more willing to concede that Protestant reformers had their successes, while still insisting (p. 282) that they set ‘awesome, and perhaps unachievable standards’.
Collinson, Religion of Protestants, pp. 243–5.
Here, again, I refer to the forthcoming work of Arnold Hunt.
Quoted in Jeffrey Knapp, ‘Preachers and Players in Shakespeare’s England’, Representations, 44 (1993), 31.
Ibid., 29–59.
REED, Cumberland, Westmorland, Gloucestershire, pp. 415–16.
Ibid., p. 365.
Collinson, Religion of Protestants, pp. 201–2.
See, for example, the case of the three sermon-goers of Canterbury who (in the 1560s) dropped into the pub for a pot of beer, only to be asked by the company: ‘Where have you been you three good husbands, not at the sermon I trust?’ (Collinson, Birihpangs of Protestant England, p. 38). The Suffolk preacher Bartimaeus Andrewes admitted that the godly man who courteously invited his neighbours to accompany him to the sermon risked ‘intolerable contempt’. ‘Oh say the scorning railers, now this holy man will go to heaven in a hay barn, now these Puritans flocke together …’ (Collinson, Religion of Protestants, p. 242).
Byford, ‘The Price of Protestantism’, p. 413.
Mrs Whetcombe and Mrs Grace Brewer of Sherborne are coming away from a sermon in the Dorset parish of Lillingstone in about 1593. Mrs Brewer says ‘that they were happy that they had so good a minister’. When a drunken serving man who had attached himself to their company suggests that the preacher might have made his sermon shorter, Mrs Whetcombe replies: ‘If you love to hear the word of God you cannot be weary hearing it’ (BL, MS Harl. 6849, fol. 189v).
Patrick Collinson, ‘The English Conventicle’, in Voluntary Religion, Studies in Church History, vol. 23, ed. W.J. Sheils and Diana Wood (Oxford, 1986), 223–59.
Patrick Collinson, ‘Towards a Broader Understanding of the Early Dissenting Tradition’, in Patrick Collinson, Godly People: Essays on English Protestantism and Puritanism (1983), pp. 547–8.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 521 n. 98; Collinson, ‘The English Conventicle’, 234–5.
The Rev. Oliver Heywood, B. A. 1630–1702: His Autobiography Diaries, Anecdotes and Event-Books, ed. J. Horsfall Turner, 4 vols (Brighouse, 1881–5); W. J. Sheils, ‘Oliver Heywood and his Congregation’, in Voluntary Religion, 261–77.
John Earle, The Autograph Manuscript of the Microcosmographie (Leeds, 1966), pp. 115–21. The character identified in Earle’s MS as the ‘She-Puritan’ is renamed ‘A She-precise Hypocrite’ in the published Microcosmographie (1628).
Cressy, Bonfires and Bells, p. 22. But see Underdown, Revel, Riot, and Rebellion, ch. 4, ‘Regional Cultures’ and the somewhat less broad brush of D. P. Dymond in ‘Place-Names as Evidence for Recreation’, The English Place-Name Society Journal 25 (1992–3), 12–18, and ‘A Lost Social Institution: the Camping Close’, Rural History, 1 (1990), 165–92.
John Fielding, ‘Conformists, Puritans and the Church Courts: the Diocese of Peterborough, 1603–1642’, unpublished Birmingham PhD thesis (1989), Map 2 (between pp. 147 and 148). The seven combination lectures were held at Brackley, Daventry, Kettering, Northampton, Oakham, Peterborough and Wellingborough, adding two (Northampton and Peterborough) to my ‘Gazetteer of Combination Lectures’, Collinson, Godly People, p. 563. I am grateful to John Fielding for the loan of his dissertation.
The interlocutor Atheos in George Gifford’s Essex dialogue The Countrie Divinitie (1581) complained: ‘I could like the better if the preaching might be only upon the Sabbath day, but now they run in the week days and leave their business and beggar themselves. They go to other towns also, which is a pity that it is suffered; it is a great disorder.’ In the same county, a group of sermon gadders was told by the archdeacon’s official: ‘If you can trot to sermons, we will make you trot to the courts’ (Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (1967), p. 373).
‘Necessary causes of humiliation at this present’ (1587/88?), BL, MS Add. 38492 (papers of Edward Lewkenor, JP, MP, of Denham, Suffolk), no. 55, fol. 98.
The Holy Exercise of a True Fast (1580), ascribed to Thomas Cartwright, and included in Cartwrightiana, ed. Albert Peel and Leland H. Carlson, Elizabethan Nonconformist Texts, I (1951), 127–42.
A full account of the Stamford fast will be found in my unpublished London PhD thesis (1957), ‘The Puritan Classical Movement in the Reign of Elizabeth I’ , pp. 330–7; and a shorter account in my Elizabethan Puritan Movement, pp. 216–17.
Norfolk and Norwich Record Office, Norfolk and Norwich Archaeological Society, MS Frere, Box K.12a.
At a fast held at Erwarton in Suffolk in 1589, 20s was collected for the French Church (in France, or the French congregation in London?) (The Presbyterian Movement in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth, as Illustrated by the Minute Book of the Dedham Classis, 1582–1589, ed. R. G. Usher, Camden 3rd ser. VIII (1905), 59). The future Archbishop Bancroft reported that collections were made at puritan fasts ‘for their brethren that travel for them beyond the seas’, the proceeds being sent to the preacher John Field in London (Tracts Ascribed to Richard Bancroft, ed. Albert Peel (Cambridge, 1953), p. xxix).
BL, MS Lansdowne 83, no. 34, fol. 98.
Archbishop Edwain Sandys to Bishop William Chaderton of Chester, 2 May 1581; Francis Peck, Desiderata Curiosa (1732), I, Book III, 29.
The State of the Church in the Reigns of Elizabeth and James I as Illustrated by Documents Relating to the Diocese of Lincoln, I, ed. C. W. Foster, Lincoln Record Society, XXIII (Horncastle, 1926), cxvi.
Hertfordshire Record Office, ASA 5/5/291.
Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971), pp. 483–6; Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, pp. 437–8.
Witchcraft and Hysteria in Elizabethan London: Edward Jorden and the Mary Glover Case, ed. Michael MacDonald (1990).
Canon 72, with its particular and somewhat bizarre reference to exorcism, was regularly made the basis of an article of enquiry in the early-Stuart church (Fincham, Visitation Articles and Injunctions).
Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, pp. 373–4.
Robert Whiting, The Blind Devotion of the People: Popular Religion and the English Reformation (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 54, 66.
George M. Doe, ‘North Devon in Elizabethan Times’, Transactions of the Devonshire Association, LVIII (Plymouth, 1927), 241. This account of the Pilton fast is not without its problems. ‘They called it an exercise or holy fast’ has a puritan ring to it. But ‘to the admiration [scil., ‘surprise’] of all Protestants’ may seem to imply that the participants were Catholics, which is David Cressy’s impression (Bonfires and Bells, p. 9). ‘Trental’ is a Catholic term, but the Barnstaple town clerk may have used it parodically.
Leigh Eric Schmidt, Holy Fairs: Scottish Communions and American Revivals in the Early Modern Period (Princeton, NJ, 1989).
The correspondence of Anthony Gilby, preacher of Ashby-de-la-Zouch; Cambridge University Library, MS Mm. 1.43, pp. 436–7.
Acts of the Privy Council, ed. J. R. Dasent, XI, 74, 77, 132.
The Life of William Weston, S. J., in The Troubles of Our Catholic Forefathers Related by Themselves, ed. John Morris, SJ (2nd ser. 1875), I, 240–1. Another translation will be found in The Autobiography of an Elizabethan, tr. Philip Caraman (1955), pp. 164–5. There were ‘walking communions’ at Northampton in the early 1570s, part of the regime of the radical preacher Percival Wiburn, a protégé of Carleton (Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, p. 369). In support of Weston’s allegations about ‘discussions’, ‘quarrels’ and ‘fights’, see the remarks of the anti-puritan Suffolk preacher Thomas Rogers about the reception of a sermon he had preached at Bury St Edmunds: ‘Are all the people of one mind? And are the people, think we, so ignorant that they perceive not unto what side the discreetest among you do incline? Do all the people favour that part? Assure your selves so many of their auditors as in the matter of discipline dissented from them were their adversaries, and moved questions about discipline …’ (Chicago University Library, MS Codex 109, fol. 266v. I owe this reference to the kindness of Dr John Craig).
Schmidt, Holy Fairs, p. 218.
The Diary of Roger Lowe of Ashton-in-Makerfield, Lancashire 1603–1674, ed. William L. Sachse (1938), pp. 1, 16, 26, 52.
Schmidt, Holy Fairs, p. 3.
David Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (Cambridge, Mass., 1990).
Schmidt, Holy Fairs, pp. 23, 28–9.
The reference is to a pejorative account of a sermon at Bury St Edmunds in 1636: ‘The deep, passionate, trembling, quavering, singultive twang, which crept into the breasts of the thirsty auditory and was received bibulis auribus; the womens sighs and the mens hawkings showed it’ (quoted, Collinson, Godly People, p. 493).
Oliver Heywood’s Life of John Angier of Denton, ed. Ernest Axon, Chetham Society n.s. XCVII (1937), 50–1.
Schmidt, Holy Fairs, p. 97.
State of the Church, p. cxvi. Richard Rich, the second Lord Rich’s bastard brother, was accused in 1582 of having organised unauthorised fasts in Essex which included ‘at these feasts’ the singing of psalms, ‘not set out as allowed by the said book of common prayer’; and with having insisted that psalms must be sung, not read antiphonally by minister and people, which may have been common practice in parish churches which had no choir and where there was no puritanical, congregational spirit present to express itself in metrical psalm singing.
Levin L. Schüeking, The Puritan Family: A Social Study from the Literary Sources, tr. B. Battershaw (1969). Die Puritanische Familie was published in Leipzig in 1929.
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Collinson, P. (1996). Elizabethan and Jacobean Puritanism as Forms of Popular Religious Culture. In: Durston, C., Eales, J. (eds) The Culture of English Puritanism, 1560–1700. Themes in Focus. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-24437-9_2
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