In 1645 the Church of England was radically reformed, its hierarchy abolished, the Book of Common Prayer prohibited and Church lands put up for sale. Conservative clergy were being removed and replaced. For those who considered the Church only half-reformed, these were changes long demanded. Yet what followed was not what was hoped for and the end result one least expected in the early 1640s. Traditionalist Church practice, then so utterly vilified, was restored little changed in 1662, albeit now with a non-conformist minority determined to practise religion outside it.

Different explanations have been offered for this surprising turn of events. Loyalist Hugh Todd, writing in 1704, dismissed the attempts to impose godly religion in Cumberland, saying that the ‘people, generally, had no great likeing’ for ‘New-lights’ and preferred the old ways.¹ But Exeter non-conformist George Trosse remembered interregnum religion with nostalgia:

Historians are equally divided. Derek Hirst contended that godly religion failed to appeal on an emotional level to most people; Christopher Durston concurred, while conceding that efforts towards moral reformation made progress in a few localities.³ Elliot Vernon, in contrast, found evidence of a continuing ‘evangelical spirit’, assessing the ‘puritan gloom’ quoted by Hirst as no more than a conventionalized line of complaint.⁴ John Morrill’s work on churchwardens’ accounts emphasized the continuation of traditional practices; Ronald Hutton’s saw traditionalism as a declining phenomenon, confined to a privileged semi-secret minority.⁵ More recently, Bernard Capp highlighted the vigorous efforts of parliamentary reformers and city leaders towards further godly reformation throughout the 1650s, hardly suggestive of a cause given up for lost.⁶

It is also debatable in what sense the Church as an institution could be said to have continued into the 1640s and 1650s. As Ann Hughes pointed out, many puritan ministers certainly felt that their interregnum ministry operated within a national Church tradition, even if, in practice, she suggested, we should think of Cromwellian churches in the plural.⁷ Alex Craven maintained that there was indeed a ‘functioning, national, established Church’, although he did concede that it had a ‘very different form’ from what preceded it.⁸ Many loyalists considered the Church of England to have been utterly swept away: ‘mangled to death’, according to Christopher Hindle, preaching in 1650, ‘by the sons of her own bowels’.⁹ Presbyterians had a different conception of an institutional Church, but by the late 1640s, their fears for its future matched the loyalists’. ‘The great designe’, warned Vox Norwici, was ‘to take off all the Orthodox Ministers, and fixed Starres of the Church of England … and to leave us in a scattered condition’.¹⁰ References to the ‘Church of England’ are uncommon in contemporary legal records. The period from 1648 to 1660 has been described as a period of ecclesiastical confusion.¹¹ Yet there were considerable elements of stability in religious practice, for example in the way the church was served and paid for. Parish churches remained, served by clergy of varying persuasions: closet traditionalists, Presbyterians who sought a national form of Church government, and Independents or Baptists who did not.

In practice, an Erastian form of Church government evolved, with central initiatives and ultimate authority resting with the state.¹² In this era, the idea of state control over the Church was not seen as problematic: ‘One and the selfsame people are the Church and the Commonwealth’, wrote Richard Hooker.¹³ Even those whose chief aim was to defend the godly ministry against tithe-defaulters were careful to state that they ‘own’d’ ‘the power of the Magistrate in matters of Religion’.¹⁴ More at issue was who was meant by the ‘Civil Magistrate’, and the precise nature of their remit; under the monarchy the supreme governor had not claimed the powers of a priest, but only the power of jurisdiction.¹⁵ But ideas concerning legal jurisdiction were themselves subject to change and debate during the 1640s, from the exclusion of many MPs from parliamentary law-making, to the abolition of several major courts of law including all the ecclesiastical courts and overturning of legal decisions by the Committee of Indemnity.¹⁶ Sometimes adverse comment was made on the pace of change. ‘Bootes over Bookes’; there was ‘noe law’ now, cried those who evicted Mary Swanne from her messuage in Carley, Cheshire in 1649.¹⁷ Military influence on the state was powerful, legal jurisdiction unclear, and magistrates and ministers often in disagreement over Church organization, yet they found more in common around the goal of effecting a godly reformation of morals and manners. With the Church hierarchy and ecclesiastical courts gone, this programme had to be driven forward by secular authorities. Many changes to religious practice were implemented via acts or ordinances of parliament, and an expanded role emerged for judges and justices in interpreting and enforcing them. This chapter explores their work.

Study of legal records offers a means to deepen our understanding of how new religious practices and an accompanying godly reformation of manners and morals were received at ground level, by moving beyond the stereotypical sources frequently cited as evidence. This chapter considers the priorities of local justice with regard to religion from the end of the First Civil War to the Restoration and the patterns of prosecution observed, based on a large-scale study of over 2,500 extant assize and quarter sessions records for this period, from several counties. Although these records have previously been cited by historians, most notably Christopher Durston and Bernard Capp, such a systematic investigation of these records has never previously been attempted. They include over 400 assize records, mainly indictments giving only summary information about each case, plus some depositions from the Northern Circuit. The remainder are taken from quarter sessions order books and rolls from several counties (see Table 6.1) and include presentments and indictments, warrants and orders, with around thirty per cent including detailed petitions, examinations, informations or witness depositions. Capp reminds us that these statistics can tell us little or nothing about the ‘dark’ figure of summary punishments imposed by magistrates or officers on their own authority which went unrecorded, or whose records have not survived.¹⁸ Thus, what is presented and discussed here is more indicative of the regime’s religious priorities than a definitive record of all its actions, some of which we only know about through other sources, contemporary publications, state papers or accounts of religious suffering, for example.

The cases looked at here all relate to religious practice or belief in its broadest definition. These were usually only a small proportion of the sessions’ business, much of whose efforts were occupied with crimes relating to property or secular violence, dealing with vagabonds, illegally erected cottages, apprentices, unlicensed artificers, maintaining highways and bridges, along with the administration of assessments, payments to maimed soldiers and poor relief. Particularly at assizes and at times of heightened political uncertainty, they also include reports of disaffection to the state. Cases relating to sexual activity, alehouse regulation or drinking were numerous, too much so for the scope of this chapter, so these are considered only where they relate to religion: adultery, an offence against the Decalogue, or sexual misbehaviour or drinking in churches, on the Sabbath or involving clergy or church officers, for example. Individual appeals for poor relief are not incorporated, only wider concerns expressed about church officers’ practices or probity.

This chapter examines the most common types of offences prosecuted over the fifteen-year period from the Church’s disestablishment in 1645 to Charles II’s Restoration in 1660. As shown in Table 6.2, prosecution rates varied considerably, reflecting the increasing activity and security of legal process year on year up to 1658, the number of surviving records of religious cases for each year in the mid–late 1650s being more than four times that in 1645–6 when the legal process was recovering from civil war.

It was mainly the laity who used the law as a mechanism for dealing with religious concerns: in only around a quarter of cases were clergy involved in any way, and in less than four per cent were they prosecuting or informing against others. Yet there was no lack of godly mission in evidence, based on assumptions that the ‘laws of God and man’ were intertwined. ‘The Captaine of our Salvacion is highly dishonord’ by the number of alehouses, claimed fifty-four male petitioners to the Cheshire magistrates in 1645, ‘The nurseries of all ryott …and idleness’, the thrones of Satan, ‘a growing evill’, a ‘Gangrene’ endangering the ‘whole body’.¹⁹ The possibility of establishing a Christian Commonwealth seemed at hand: ‘I beseech you to consider wee in this nation have long prayed for reformation, and complained for want of it, and most of our talke hath beene about it,’ wrote Major-General James Berry to the Welsh Commissioners in December 1655. Paralleling God’s final judgement to contemporary legal process, he argued that those who were neglectful now would ‘have cause to blush’ when they came before God ‘with their petition’. He prayed that God would stir their hearts to be zealouse for him’ as a ‘terrour to evill doers’.²⁰ This belief that current religious policy represented God’s mission articulated via the state meant that although much of it was enforced via new regulations, there was consistency in what was prosecuted across the country, although particular offences were not always pursed with equivalent vigour everywhere.

Profaning the Sabbath

The need for strict observance of the Lord’s day had been one of the ‘core beliefs’ of puritans since the early seventeenth century.²¹ Thus, profanation of the Sabbath – drinking, visiting alehouses, sexual misbehaviour, working or travelling – became one of the most commonly prosecuted religious offences between 1645 and 1660 (see Table 6.3). Parliamentary success in the field in the autumn of 1645 galvanized hopes for parallel success in an accompanying moral crusade. Puritan ministers in Essex demanded constables and churchwardens make monthly presentments of profane swearers, those who did not ‘sanctify the Lords day’ and ‘religiously observe’ days of fasting or thanksgiving, who absented themselves from ‘publick ordinances’ or were disorderly therein.²²

Prosecutions peaked in 1648 and then again in 1654–8, although the former represented a higher proportion of the religious-related offences for that year (see Figure 6.1). Yet their very frequency attests to the impossibility of the undertaking. A 1647–8 petition from Hale in Cheshire complained bitterly that the ‘worke of reformacion’ had made little progress, due to continuing profaneness: ‘the Actors’ ‘grow more audacious every day’.²³ Alehouses were said to be ‘excessive’ and ‘increasing’ in an April 1649 Hampshire petition, corrupting youth and encouraging the poor to idleness.²⁴ Attempts to prevent Sabbath-day drinking encountered acts of resistance varying from the immediately verbal or physical to the more calculated. Presented in 1648 for keeping a disorderly alehouse at Alvanley in Cheshire on Sabbath days and fast days ‘when Ministers have beene in Exercise’, Ellen Collier expressed defiance; a few months later, Dorothy Bradbury of Mobberley was in trouble for striking Simon Stewarte after he rebuked her for being in an alehouse at sermon time.²⁵ At Overton in 1647, Robert Cockhill had lately come to town and sold ale without a licence, causing disorder, fighting and gaming on the Sabbath. But no-one would complain after he stabbed one of them.²⁶

Although attempts were made to pull people out of alehouses in many areas, this could prove counter-productive when those targeted intermixed with church-goers. In Tedburn St Mary in Devon in January 1650, people reportedly drank between the morning and afternoon services at Walter Berry’s alehouse, then came in drunk and full of ‘spleen’ to the afternoon service, ‘defiling’ the church and treading down the churchyard fences.²⁷ In Cheshire in October 1649, there were complaints that people either stayed at home, went to alehouses or stayed talking in the churchyard rather than paying any regard to the church service. Constables were ordered to note down offenders.²⁸ But not a lot appeared to have changed by 1651, when drunken individuals spewing in a chapel and churchyard were reported at Church Hulme and Clive, respectively.²⁹

In September 1648, the Cheshire bench ordered constables to give strict account of alehouses, seeking advice from the minister, churchwardens or ‘the most religious and discreet Inhabitants’.³⁰ Initially, puritan clergy keenly monitored Sabbath-day drinking. In July 1649, a group of ‘painful and Laborious Ministers’ complained of the ‘great prophanacion of the Lords Day’ throughout Yorkshire’s North Riding.³¹ In October the same year Benjamin Barnard, intruded rector of Warnford, petitioned the Hampshire bench to close two out of the three inns he claimed were causing Sabbath-day disorders there.³² But such efforts could backfire. After Thomas Gilbert, parson of Cheadle in Cheshire, certified in 1647 that Hugh and Anne Hooley were unfit to run an alehouse, the Gilberts found themselves arrested twice over. On the second occasion the charges were grave, with Gilbert ordered in mid-1650 to London to give satisfaction touching his affection to the present government, after some ill-advised remarks about the Scots got reported to the authorities, requiring the intervention of local JP Colonel Robert Duckenfield to extricate him.³³ When in 1652 William Prytherch, minister of Aber in Caernarfonshire, reported an unlawful assembly on the Lord’s day, the response was more physical: those charged, he claimed, with ‘staves and fists and feet fell upon him with effusion of blood and bruises’.³⁴

Clergy learned to conduct themselves more gingerly. In the summer of 1655, John Salter reportedly came into the church at Wraxall in Somerset drunk during an afternoon service and made ‘strange ugly, mimicall faces and gestures’ at the preacher Thomas Gorges, ‘pointing’ with his finger and raising his fist at him. But it took a second incident several months later, when Salter and his wife disrupted the choosing of churchwardens and overseers on Easter Monday, to make Gorges resort to the higher authorities.³⁵ One reason for caution was the lack of certainty that parish officers would endorse prosecutions. At Heathfield in Sussex in 1653, the officers were said to have connived at allowing five alehouses to continue profaning the Sabbath. Alehouses ‘were again sett up as often as they were pulled downe’.³⁶ In 1656, Chester churchwardens circumvented the regulations, reportedly disposing of fines paid by Sabbath-breakers to their own children’s use.³⁷ The constable Randle Whitakers was one of the men found drinking at Hugh Brotter’s disorderly alehouse at Hunsterson in Cheshire on a Sunday in June 1655, all of whom wore in their hats hairs pulled from Brotter’s wife Joane’s ‘privy parts’. Joane herself was described as ‘very drunke’.³⁸

Some parishioners were openly antagonistic towards sabbatarianism. At Wiveliscombe in Somerset in 1654, William Davye apparently ran through the streets on the Sabbath, crying out against ‘Independent rouges’ reading chapters of the Bible in their houses, ‘that the divell will have them all’.³⁹ There was much fun to be had in subverting the new religious imperatives. At Hurdsfield in Cheshire in 1649, gentleman Edward Morecroft was cited for dancing to music on the Lord’s day. Knocking his knees together, he ‘cutt the Stroke with his foot, and said a Curse a god on the Parliament, a pox a god upon the Parliament’, at least thirty times, according to the husbandman and collier’s wife who reported him.⁴⁰ Complaint was made in Somerset in 1650 that several persons gathered at Winsham church on Sabbath days to ‘ringe in peale for pleasure and pastime’, pretending to call people to church, contrary to the laws of the Sabbath.⁴¹ A similar practice was used two years later at Wookey to drown out a soldier who attempted to preach in the absence of the minister.⁴²

In Hampshire in 1656, Sabbath-day ‘helpe Ales and merry meetings’ were reported, with barrels of beer in private houses.⁴³ ‘Merry nights’ were denounced in Lancashire in 1647; ‘private clubbing for ale’ in West Yorkshire in 1656.⁴⁴ One of these meetings apparently took place in October 1657 at an alehouse in Soughton, where John Caulverley esquire led revellers from Chester twelve miles away in fiddling, piping, dancing and shouting at James Dunne’s alehouse from Saturday night until after sunrise on Sunday morning, disquieting the neighbours. When one complained, he was badly beaten, and the offenders continued playing music ‘as ever’ they had done, profaning ‘the lords holy day’.⁴⁵

Along with the many presentments for Sabbath-day drinking were numerous presentations for Sabbath-day travelling or working. Reported in particularly tedious detail were the exact circumstances in which John Prichard David Lloyd of Gwernor and Eline wife of Owen ap Richard on 18 April 1655 drove a mare bearing two ‘winchesters’ of corn a mile to Elizabeth John Prichard’s house in Llanllyfni.⁴⁶ Many of those prosecuted were ordinary people trying to earn a livelihood: by baking bread in Devon and Kent, loading a barge with stones at Topsham in Devon in 1648, selling tobacco at Weare in Somerset in 1650, working at a lime kiln in Pitminster in Somerset in 1651, selling boots and shoes at Chiltington in Sussex in October 1654, trimming hair in Exeter the same year, walking in the fields in Middlewich and sweeping the streets in Nantwich in Cheshire in 1655, selling cloth in Drewsteignton in Devon in 1651, and dressing it in West Bergholt in Essex in 1657. Even in the spring of 1660, as Charles II looked set to return, there were presentments for selling mutton on the Sabbath at Basing in Hampshire and of two Essex men for being drunk and travelling.⁴⁷

The highest prosecution rate for Sabbath-day offences was in Cheshire; rates in Devon were much lower, although the Exeter quarter sessions order book reveals a particularly determined battle to detect any illicit Sunday behaviour there. In March 1657, an Exeter constable discovered a pair of weavers working behind the locked doors at Wilmott Mather’s house in Castle Lane. Entry had been at first denied, ‘not withstanding they often knockt’. A couple of months earlier another weaver was fined £10 for being found at ‘sermon tyme’ hiding ‘uppon the barr’ of a chimney, presumably attempting to escape detection for not being in church.⁴⁸ Prosecutions in the peak years of 1655–8 ran at around twice the rate of those in 1649–54. But they continued to meet spirited opposition. The ‘crying noyce’ of wickedness was now ‘rendring our parts’ like ‘Sodome’, urged a petition to the Cheshire bench in 1657; it was ‘high time for all … that would have peace here and glory hereafter to bend their bow against it’.⁴⁹

Along with drinking, some took the opportunity of others’ absence at church for illicit sex or opportunistic thefts from neighbours’ empty houses. In May 1652, labourer Peter Mudge of Whitchurch in Devon, ‘haveing lost many small thinges out of his house’, stayed away from church purposely during the morning service to see if he could discover the thief. Concealed in his chamber and looking through a hole, he saw his neighbour, widow Dorothy Spiller, unlock his house door and take away ‘a dish of gerts’, using a key she later surrendered to the constable.⁵⁰ Outdoor theft and poaching was particularly reported in Sussex. In 1655, Sabbath-day hare hunting was investigated at Caulfield in July, at snowy Barcombe in November, Sabbath-day evening rabbit hunting with dogs in the grounds of Mr Conert at Slaugham in October, and in September 1656 ‘searching for ferrets in the howse of John Rease gent’.⁵¹

Servants, teenagers and adults often found the time on the Sabbath when other people were at church useful for other purposes than religious devotion. Quaife found that forty per cent of illicit conceptions in Somerset for 1600–60 were claimed to have taken place on a Sunday.⁵² Examined in September 1647 about her pregnancy, Anne Lande admitted that she had had sex with James Smith, fellow-servant to Henry Howell of Balsdean in Sussex on a Sunday evening, in her master’s malthouse, and again on a Sunday morning, in his house.⁵³ At Stockport in August 1652, alderman Francis Harpur accused labourer John Wood of visiting his house on the Sabbath at ‘the tyme of devine Service’, on purpose to abuse a teenage girl’s chastity. Wood countered that he had been ‘fetched by Anna Harpur … in Sermon tyme’, ‘to get forth mucke forth of the Stable’, and that she had then encouraged him to touch and kiss her.⁵⁴ In an adultery case from Rothstherne in Cheshire in 1655, John Warburton testified that Thomas Finlowe did not attend church but ‘almost every Sunday’ went instead ‘about Church tymes’ to Margery Blackburne’s house until ‘church was donne’ and then returned home, ‘but what he did there’, Warburton commented darkly, he could not say.⁵⁵ Not everyone was so ready to use the Sabbath to contravene the seventh commandment. In a 1648 Cheshire case, Martha Malmeck testified that Randle Grafton had suggested she go with him to the stable ‘and hee would give her content’ but she ‘bade him goe into the Church for his wife’.⁵⁶

Because of swearing, the land mourneth

The degree of effort by local authorities in prosecuting swearing, with 281 recorded cases here, seems extraordinary to modern eyes, and it seems some contemporaries agreed. When John Witcombe was set in the stocks at Barton (St) David in Somerset in July 1657 for swearing, the minister Mr Horsey brought him a pot of beer and, referring to a statute book in his hand, told his weeping mother not to fret, ‘for by the statute no justice can punish him after twenty daies, and the statute will allow him Five pounds for every hower and I will see that he shall have it’.⁵⁷ Yet our modern insensitivity to bad language, explained by the eighteenth-century philosopher Giambattista Vico as a natural tendency for language to transform from the sacred to the conventional, obscures our understanding of how much such words troubled contemporary auditors.⁵⁸ In a largely oral society, anxieties about speech lay in its power to promote action, and its unpredictable, uncontrollable, shape-shifting path beyond the first thoughtless utterance. Reprobation of ‘sins of the tongue’ was commonplace, dating back to the fourteenth century; and ‘substantially unchanged’, argued Bodden, through to the seventeenth century, although the increasing inclination to apply legal sanctions was a newer development.⁵⁹ Laws against it were first enacted in England in James I’s Act of 1624, with a fine of twelve pence or three hours in the stocks for anyone over twelve and unable to pay, or whipping for the under-aged.⁶⁰

Charles I ratified his father’s legislation: there was a fair degree of consensus against the offence, with tracts denouncing it across all sides of the religious spectrum.⁶¹ Objections rested on three counts. First, it did injury to sacred things. ‘The oyle wherewith the tabernacle and the arke of the testament … was holy’ wrote William Perkins, ‘no man might put it to any other uses … we much more ought to tremble at the word of God, not to make our selves merrie with it.’⁶² Second, swearing offended others: ‘His words are but so many vomitings cast up to the loathsomenesse of the hearers,’ wrote John Earle in his ‘Character of a profane man’ in 1628.⁶³ But most importantly, the tongue was a ‘two-edged sword’, harming the offender most of all, alienating him from God, to become, in Perkins’s view, a ‘child of the devill’.⁶⁴ ‘Because of swearing, the land mourneth,’ preached John Parker at Bovingdon in Hertfordshire in February 1654, following a popular choice of biblical text on the subject, albeit one which suggests a somewhat different interpretation in modern translation.⁶⁵ Stories abounded of the divine punishments inflicted upon swearers and blasphemers, affecting the whole wider community.⁶⁶ On 19 May 1644, royalist Edward Symmons blamed the failure at building ramparts at Shrewsbury on ‘such cursing and such swearing’, even by women and children, ‘as did I never heare’. Did they but reform their habits, their works ‘would stand the better’.⁶⁷

During the First Civil War, royalist clergy attempted to stem the tide of swearing among royalist soldiers, while a parliamentary army formulating its own self-identity in opposition to the habits of the ‘goddamee’ ‘cavaliers’, ‘Irish rogues and English monsters’ sometimes inflicted severe punishments on swearers, condemning one impious quartermaster to have his tongue bored with a red-hot iron, according to Bulstrode Whitelocke.⁶⁸ In 1645, the Scottish parliament made cursing punishable by death.⁶⁹ In this context, the English penalties for swearing enacted in 1650 appear comparatively mild, if of questionable deterrent value given the spirited responses from those denounced. The statutory fine had been increased three-fold to 3s 4d for a first offence for those of ordinary estate or three hours in the stocks for those unable to pay.⁷⁰ But at Wincanton in Somerset in July 1653 when John Lane was set in the stocks for swearing six oaths, the bystanders, who included the tithingman and churchwarden, defiantly celebrated and toasted him.⁷¹ Perhaps perceiving his household honour besmirched on being fined for his wife’s swearing, in 1655 Robert Lincole of Chard in Somerset gave the constables a brass half-crown as payment, berating the parish overseers as knaves and fools when, in the churchyard on a Sunday morning, they attempted to get him to exchange this for legal tender.⁷² Bernard Capp has noted the tendency for those accused of swearing to retaliate with counter-accusations against their accusers.⁷³ In the summer of 1656 officious puritan Nathaniel Durant, minister of Cheriton Fitzpaine, took issue with Christopher Gill of Cadbury for swearing ‘god’s lie’ on the public highway, repeating the words twice in reproof. Gill informed local justices that Durant himself had used the oath.⁷⁴ This ruse was well travelled: it was also employed at Rowton in Cheshire in May 1659 against a puritan constable in a dispute over a maypole.⁷⁵

Swearing prosecutions, prosecuted not just at quarter sessions but sometimes at assizes too, rose year on year through the interregnum towards a peak in 1656, dropping by half as soon as the rule of the Major-Generals was over (see Figure 6.2). They reduced again by 1659, although some maintained their enthusiasm: long lists of swearers were made by Presbyterian Thomas Bampfield in Devon in July 1658, January 1659 and March 1660, while in Somerset, Major Henry Bonner was also vigilant and, along with other military JPs Colonel John Pyne and Captain John Barker, contributed to a ‘Certificate of Convictions for Swearing’ in 1650 and 1655.⁷⁶ At Ilchester in late 1658 and early 1659, several people were charged with swearing multiple oaths, each on the evidence of a single accuser.⁷⁷

A late-medieval wall-painting at St Lawrence, Broughton in Buckinghamshire ‘represents the injury done to the Body of Christ by those who swear by God’s wounds, God’s bones, etc., a common medieval habit’, wrote M. R. James.⁷⁸ William Lambarde’s Eirenarcha (1579), a set of instructions for JPs, also condemned the practice, for similar reasons.⁷⁹ Catholic-type oaths relating to the body of Christ such as God’s wounds, blood or flesh, either singly or in combination, abounded in Cheshire; but were less commonly reported elsewhere. Use of ‘by God’ was commonly reported everywhere, but ‘by Christ’ only three times. There was a significant category of reported oaths relating to judgement or vengeance: ‘upon my soul’, ‘God judge me’ or ‘damn me’. Oaths of ‘upon my life’ were reported six times in Devon, but nowhere else, hinting at specific knowledge of what was taken as actionable by this county’s commissioners.⁸⁰ Interestingly, ‘By faith’ and ‘by troth’, which Charles I considered an ‘asservation’ not an oath, use of which had however commonly been considered a cause to remove clergy in the early 1640s, only appear in a handful of prosecutions of the laity.⁸¹ Diseases were wished on others, the pox or the plague, ‘of God’ in some cases, and perhaps the reason these were considered actionable. Likewise, as the terms of the legislation were against blasphemous swearing, scatological oaths were sometimes reported but were not generally the focus of prosecution.

Witnesses keenly noted when and where the offence took place, and counted the number of oaths. Multiple offenders included Wynfrid Coles, set in the stocks for three hours at Bridgwater in 1650 for swearing thirty oaths by God’s wounds and blood, and Peter Harrar, indicted at assizes for swearing sixty oaths in Midsummer 1654 in an alehouse at Acton Common in Cheshire.⁸² But when in July 1655 constable Ambrose Hare came to Robert Chedzoy’s house at Curland in Somerset to demand payment of his fine for swearing twenty oaths, Chedzoy refused to pay, followed Hare for a quarter of a mile and used ‘uncivill language’, that Hare ‘should kisse his [ ]’,⁸³ ‘hee did not care a turd’ for him, ‘Nor the justice of the peace neither’.⁸⁴ Other ‘common swearers’ seemed oblivious to the offence caused. In 1658, William Turner, constable of Matley in Cheshire, was prosecuted for swearing repeatedly in praise of his horse, ‘by God this is a good horse, as god judge mee, by my faith and troth, yes by the masse’, ‘and so continued all along his discourse’, twenty-four oaths in total, reported the witness.⁸⁵

The charge of swearing often acted as mere corroborative detail in an overall pattern of misdemeanour, with violent language mirroring claims of physical aggression. Reports of violence and swearing also commonly accompanied claims of political disaffection, usually intended to ramp up the perceived seriousness of the offence and invite official notice. ‘Even mundane quarrels could become charged with political tensions that individuals exploited to shape their authority within communities and amidst personal squabbles,’ wrote Caroline Boswell.⁸⁶ An argument between Mrs Mary Barrett and her neighbour John Johnson at Withinlee in Cheshire on 7 February 1659 illustrates both tendencies clearly. It centred on Johnson’s taking impertinent advantage of Barrett’s husband’s absence at church to water his two horses in a hole in the ice used by Mary to fetch water for cooking and drinking. Mary’s account reformulated the offence as sedition. ‘God blesse my Lord Protector hee should water noe horses there,’ she claimed to have cried, Johnson responding, ‘by God hee did not care if the Lord Protector were hanged’, ‘for hee would water his Horses there’. ‘Noe trator should water his horses there,’ Mary unwisely continued, before Johnson brought the argument to a swift conclusion by breaking her head with a shovel.⁸⁷

Swearers were also frequently cited in the process of resisting arrest or remonstrating at legal process. Watching John Spooner replevining a cow her husband had taken at Stockport in April 1656, Anne Hooley was said to have sworn six oaths ‘by Gods wounds that she would stone him’.⁸⁸ Told to be quiet in the Protector’s name, she said she would stone the Protector.⁸⁹ Placed in the stocks in September 1654 for drunkenness while pregnant, Anne Jeyeson cursed the whole town of Nantwich, wishing the ‘pocks of god’ on the lot them.⁹⁰ Although around three-quarters of those convicted of swearing were male, eighty-four female swearers were listed; cursing was more of a women’s crime; although men still formed the majority of the accused, around forty per cent were women.

Accusations of swearing were surprisingly skewed towards the elite, who paid higher fines according to the schedule in the statute. Where status was given, over forty per cent were described as gentleman, esquire or mister, yeomen, clergy (or their wives) or office-holders such as constables or overseers, far out of proportion to their numbers among the population. In 1653, Robert Dacy, interregnum incumbent at Offwell in Devon, recklessly denounced the son and heir of royalist baronet Sir Richard Grenville for swearing five oaths, despite (or perhaps in retaliation for) all the intimidation Dacy and his wife had already faced from royalists in the parish.⁹¹ Grenville was fined fifty shillings. But Dacy could take small comfort for he was soon forced out of the parish.⁹² Several clergy were listed among the swearers, including the sequestered rector of Forscote in Somerset, William Parsons, convicted of swearing eight profane oaths by Major Henry Bonner in October 1655.⁹³ In January 1660, Thomas Hanson, rector of Llanllyfni, was accused of swearing five profane oaths at Caernarfon, and ‘provoking words’ for calling ‘all good people of the Commonwealth’ ‘knaves and assess and puppies’.⁹⁴

Keeping a close eye on adulterers

Another frequently cited offence was adultery, with 173 cases, suggesting a need for a reassessment of historical arguments downplaying the significance of the Adultery Act of 1650.⁹⁵ True, as has been argued, female offenders were rarely executed, but this did not prevent their neighbours from reporting their misbehaviour in prurient detail. The fact that there was so much other sexual crime being prosecuted may have something to do with it, although few cases related to bastardy claims as was often the case with other sexual offences.

The highest number of cases recorded was in Cheshire (sixty-two cases), where the rich survival of depositions means we hear about reported cases that never went beyond an accusation, followed by Yorkshire (thirty-five cases) and Devon (thirty cases). This supports the work of Bernard Capp on Middlesex, who also found many more accusations than trials, suggesting these in themselves were used as tools by authorities to exert lower-level pressure on reported offenders.⁹⁶ Despite the statutory capital penalty for female offenders after 1650, only forty-five cases come from assize records. As expected, accusations of adultery rose significantly after the passing of the Adultery Act, in 1651–2, but actually peaked in 1656 and did not significantly reduce until 1659.

Only in three cases did clergy (half-heartedly) endorse accusations.⁹⁷ At Prestbury in Cheshire in 1653, it was only after parishioners pressurized him that minister John Brereton took action against Elizabeth Upton, a married woman said to be committing adultery with her employer. He refused to baptize her child, and reported her to the authorities.⁹⁸ At Siddington in Cheshire in July 1658, there were rumours about George Lowe’s behaviour towards his daughter-in-law Sarah. Lowe tried to persuade the minister Edmund Burtinshaw to quash them, but Burtinshaw demurred: ‘His Judgement and Conscience tould him hee might not doe it.’⁹⁹

Around thirty per cent of accusers or witnesses were women, higher than their participation levels for other religious offences. Accusers came from across the social spectrum: gentry, yeomen, husbandmen, labourers, a constable, a cutler, a carpenter, a blacksmith and a servant included. The middling sort, yeomen and craftsmen, were disproportionately targeted, accounting for nearly half of all those accused. Gentry were rarely denounced, suggesting accusers feared the ramifications of accusing their social superiors for something that was by its nature more doubtful than the public offence of swearing.

Such persons as refuse to pay their dues

Parochial financial disputes were another ubiquitous cause at quarter sessions: refusal to pay church leys, clergy stipends or tithes or irregularities in church accounting. These represented over a fifth of religious-related complaints to quarter sessions or assizes during 1647–9, when there was widespread resistance to paying dues in the wake of clergy ejections and many churches needing repair, dropping dramatically in 1650, but thereafter returning to around twenty to thirty complaints per year between 1651 and 1659 (see Figure 6.3). Resistance to paying tithes was widely reported and wages of clergy, schoolmasters and parish clerks often difficult to extract. At Barking in April 1649, the parish clerk Richard Hutchinson complained that despite being chosen by ‘joint consent’ five years ago, with an agreed yearly allowance from the minister, ‘chief inhabitants’ and ‘several house holders’, ‘divers people takeinge advantage of the present distracions and aimeinge att theire owne ends doe refuse and delay’ to pay him because there was no longer any commissary to recover them by ‘Ecclesiasticall proceedings’ as formerly.¹⁰⁰ At Flixton in Lancashire in 1651, the parish clerk John Loe, describing himself as a ‘poor labouring Man’ with a wife and six children, complained that ten of the fifty parishioners with plough lands refused to pay him but ‘Can alledge No Just or reasonable Cause’.¹⁰¹ In 1655, parishioners at Congresbury in Somerset even contested the pitiful sum of four pence yearly due to Edmond Watts after twenty years as parish clerk.¹⁰²

The motivations for such behaviour were often clear enough. Economic conditions were difficult and the financial demands on the populace unprecedented. Aware that parishioners were finding it difficult to meet the sums demanded, Cheshire clergy sometimes tried to alleviate demands on parishes. In 1653, the minister and churchwardens of Wybunbury complained of the ‘almost Constant Collections in our Congregations’, claiming that some of the so-called poor were not in need.¹⁰³ But others thought rate-payers were taking advantage: the churchwardens of Lower Peover complained in 1651 that ‘the burthen is layd on some few, and the rest will not contribute’.¹⁰⁴ Assault was an occupational hazard for those collecting arrears or distraining goods on the orders of justices or assize judges to pay for them. In 1654 when the churchwardens attempted to collect a sixpence church ley from a Nantwich shoemaker, he attacked them with a ‘great log of wood’.¹⁰⁵ This was a parish suffering severe social problems. In 1650 the churchwardens claimed that over 800 people sought poor relief, ‘much augmented’ by the soldiers in the ‘late wars’ ‘at which tyme the Statute Lawes were not at all put in Execucion’.¹⁰⁶ So many collections were held that many avoided church services or ‘Came not till after the … Colleccions’. In 1651 when Anne Bowry, widow of the town’s minister, petitioned Cheshire quarter sessions for arrears of her husband’s stipend, all the churchwarden could extract from the parishioners was seven pounds in ‘Course clipped money’.¹⁰⁷

In North Petherton in Somerset, the continuing presence in the parish of the sequestered incumbent John Morley and his family perhaps discouraged compliance: a John Morley was bound over in both 1651 and 1654.¹⁰⁸ In July 1649, the tithingman was assaulted and robbed by two men who threatened to sink his body in a ditch.¹⁰⁹ Tattenhall in Cheshire, sequestered from Dr Edward Morton, had similar problems. Intruded ‘by force’, his first replacement Francis Smyth was reportedly ‘disliked’ in the parish; his successor Josias Clarke fared little better.¹¹⁰ In 1651, Clarke complained to quarter sessions that the churchwarden George Edge neglected his office, neither attending church for twelve months, making collections for the poor nor doing anything to repair the ‘much broken’ church, leaving it ‘exposed to unseasonable weather’.¹¹¹

To loyalists refusing to pay tithes to disliked new ministers were added those refusing them on self-interest proclaimed as principle. At harvest time at Stanton Drew in Somerset in 1650, Richard Addames was said to have ordered his servant to fetch back forty-two sheaves laid out for the parson, saying that the parson had no right to them.¹¹² Complaints about parish finances peaked in 1654 after a year of anti-tithe agitation; assize depositions reveal serious problems in Yorkshire around this time, detailing at length a conspiracy in the North Riding in July 1653 led by Thomas Elsylott Esquire, with Richard Bickerdike acting as his agent, to gather people to resist paying tithes and assessments, claiming authority from the army. At Knottingley in the West Riding, the constable William Sykes signed a petition against tithes, describing them as robberies.¹¹³

Necessary repairs to church or churchyard were often contested. In areas like Cheshire, fought over during the Civil Wars, there were many damaged churches, requiring additional rates from a population little inclined or able to pay. At Pulford, ‘8 bayes of building’ ‘and all other combustible matter’ about the parsonage and church had been burnt by parliamentary soldiers. Describing the parishioners as ‘verie few’ and the incumbent’s means as ‘verie small’, in 1646 the minister, Richard Houlford, pleaded for sequestration money to provide glass and slate for the chancel and to make the house ‘habitable with glasse and doors and stayres’.¹¹⁴ At Audlem in 1646, the issue of church repairs provoked physical violence: the churchwardens reported ‘many severall abuses dayly Comitted both in the said Church and Steple … the fflores pulled up the belropes and wheles broken in peeces and the clocke in great decay’. For mending what was broken, John Turnor incurred the ‘hatred and malice’ of ‘one Jane Pickstocke’, who bit him on the ear and sung ‘a lybell or Ryme’ against him, while William Gilbert threatened to stab him.¹¹⁵

Requests for orders to secure funds for church repairs peaked around 1648, following the parliamentary ordinance for the repair of churches.¹¹⁶ The Cheshire quarter sessions minuted on 11 January 1649 ‘divers’ petitions complaining of parishioners refusing to contribute towards repairing churches ‘ruinde and decayed’ ‘in the time of the warres’ on ‘Pretence that there is nowe noe lawes’ to compel them.¹¹⁷ At Tarvin, although it was understood that the parishioners’ vicinity to Chester and Beeston Castle had made them ‘greater sufferers in the tyme of warre by quarter and plunder’, repeated petitions in 1649 and 1651 demanded action against those who refused to fund repairs to a church in which a ‘great parte of the Roofe’ had fallen down. As at Barking, there was nostalgia for the old ecclesiastical regime, the ‘Concestory Courte … wherein such persones as refused to pay theire Church dues, where [sic] punished for theire neclecte [sic] and Compelled to pay’. The bench was now ‘the onely place as wee conceave for the present to releeve us’.¹¹⁸

The situation was similarly dire in other former war zones. At Poulton in Lancashire, 1646–7, the ‘fower and twenty’ avoided meeting to avoid paying for repairs to a church, decayed since these ‘troublesome times’, needing new glass and repairs to a badly damaged roof.¹¹⁹ But at Kirkham in July 1653, it was the ‘30 men’ who petitioned, saying that all the things there were in a ‘posture of confusion’, with churchwardens elected at Easter refusing to take office, no poor rates, communions or registering of infants, and both church and school facing ‘utter ruen’ because of disrepair.¹²⁰ Churches in the south and south-west also suffered. Bedminster church in Bristol had been burnt down by Prince Rupert’s soldiers in 1645 and become ‘unserviceable’. But the inhabitants could never bear the 3,500 pounds cost to repair it: many of their own houses had also been burnt down.¹²¹ According to Thomas Holdsworth, a later rector at North Stoneham in Hampshire, Lewis Alcock, the octogenarian rector sequestered after the Civil War, had contributed £400 towards the rebuilding of the church earlier in his incumbency.¹²² But by 1649 the church required rebuilding anew at a cost of £700. The cruel treatment of the charitable Alcock, described by Holdsworth, could hardly have cultivated warm feelings within the parish; disputes persisted throughout the interregnum, with churchwardens at one stage arrested and forced to request the intervention of House of Commons speaker William Lenthall.¹²³

Particular individuals were often blamed for their neglect of church maintenance. Most commonly complained about were ways or paths leading to churches, followed by chancels, which it was the responsibility of the minister or impropriator to maintain and which were thus more likely to be impacted by lay or clerical sequestrations. One of the most flagrant cases was that of Middlesex resident Colonel Edmund Harvey, who bought the fee farm of Bromborough church in Cheshire and in 1656 stubbornly resisted paying the four pounds per annum due for repairing the chancel and the preacher’s stipend.¹²⁴ Deficient churchyard fencing was also commonly reported. At Hillfarrance in Somerset, the churchyard had been maintained by ‘particular persons’, but, decayed since the ‘late wars’, in 1655 lay as ‘open common’. The justices ordered the matter to be settled by amicable mediation, ‘if they can’.¹²⁵

Unrepaired civil war damage was still being dealt with well into the 1650s, with the highest number of cases recorded in 1658. As late as 1657, the chapel at Exmouth was described as having rotten timberwork and seats ‘burnt and destroyed’ ‘during the late wars’.¹²⁶ The same year, the private chapel at Manchester belonging to the royalist earls of Derby was evidently open to the street, making it ‘liable to Defilementt by the poorer sort of people and other Rude men who in the night time Creepe and Lodg therein’. Roofs, steeples and towers naturally caused the greatest concern. Royalist soldiers under Sir Ralph Hopton had been quartered at Crondall in Hampshire during the siege of Farnham in 1643.¹²⁷ In 1658, the justices, having consulted with ‘experienced artyficers’, concluded that the tower and bell loft were ‘exceedingly ruinous’ and dangerous; at a previous Sunday morning service, the congregation had been ‘soe terrified and amazed’ with fear of the tower falling ‘upon their heads’ ‘that they all ran out of the Church to avoid the danger’.¹²⁸

Disorders in church

At Bedminster in July 1655, the minister John Moon was driven away by local youths throwing stones, a disorder directly connected with the deplorable state of the church fabric there, which had made such projectiles available.¹²⁹ Disruptions to church services and conflicts in church or churchyard, sometimes violent, were regularly prosecuted by the secular authorities throughout the 1640s and 1650s. Earlier on, these might relate to opposition to new ministers: at Paignton in Devon, the sequestered incumbent David Davies was presented to the grand jury, but found ignoramus, for disturbing new minister Nathaniel Terry on 28 Februrary 1647.¹³⁰ Or they might be politically motivated: at Ingleton in Yorkshire on 27 February 1652, gentleman Thomas Baynes used the church as a forum to protest at his own sequestration for delinquency and recusancy.¹³¹ At Kirby Usborne in Yorkshire in March 1653, former royalist Robert Watters, ‘on purpose to picke a quarrell’ with parliamentarian Thomas Dickinson, climbed over and sat in the Dickinson’s pew, and had to be removed by a constable.¹³² At Goostrey chapel in Cheshire, political factionalism continued into the mid-1650s. When the names of the churchwardens previously chosen at a meeting of the minister and chief inhabitants were read out on the Sabbath day 13 May 1656, certain members of the congregation, ‘who by their notorious delinquencie and vicious Course of Life are rendered uncapable of haveinge any votes … in the election’, objected ‘in a riotous and turbulent manner’ ‘pretending’ an order from two JPs to the contrary.¹³³

The number of reported disturbances was higher from 1652 onwards, as Quakers became the main agents of disruption. In 1655, Christopher Bramley was presented to assizes for repeatedly disrupting the services at Ouseburn in Yorkshire, challenging people in the church porch as they came in, and the preacher Josiah Hunter during the service, and for creating an hour-long disturbance in the churchyard, ‘deteining many people about him as it had been a place of marketing’, ‘to the Great abuse of the Lords-day’.¹³⁴ However, while many Quaker interjections follow a set format in the nature and timing of the interruption, by no means were all reported disturbances caused by Quakers. An incident during a church service at Folkington in Sussex in June 1656, caused by Thomas Lashmer the younger, described as drunk and swearing, was presumably not.¹³⁵ Likewise with a riot in the church at Buckland Dinham in Somerset in April 1653 for which six men were presented to quarter sessions, although ‘tumults’ or ‘mutinies’ sometimes ensued after Quakers had their say.¹³⁶ Often the evidence is ambiguous. Tobyas Gullocke was presented on 26 December 1658 for coming into Midsomer Norton church in Somerset the previous day, the Lord’s day, and calling out to the preacher Mr Thurlby during his sermon ‘Come downe Rogue’ and saying that ‘Christ was a bastard’. Gullocke had denounced another man as ‘a Lyer and the author of Lyes’, the sort of remark commonly made by Quakers; but the fact that the service was conducted by a visiting preacher on Christmas Day, a festival officially banned, was perhaps the issue.¹³⁷

Women were involved in around thirty per cent of incidents, sometimes boldly challenging ministers. In Yorkshire in July 1652, Mary Fisher reportedly called out to the preacher at Selby, ‘Come downe, thou painted beast,’ while in July 1656 Agnes Wilson apparently called Thomas Danby, the minister at Keighley, the Antichrist.¹³⁸ At Elsted in Sussex in April 1652, spinster Barbara Osborne was cited for disturbing the minister by quarrelling with Katherine Farrell.¹³⁹ Around half of disputes relating to church seating involved women, but officials soon became exasperated when the contesting parties were women. In October 1652, the Devonshire quarter sessions minuted a ‘Controversie’ over church seats at Ashprington between Alice Westcott and Mistress Susan Perrott involving the presence of counsel for both sides. The two women were ordered to ‘sitt in the same seate together peaceablye’ or else take their cases to law.¹⁴⁰ Similarly, on 13 July 1658 at Sidmouth, Sibilla Carter was ordered to sit where the church officers appointed and ‘therein to demeane herselfe peaceably’ or be bound over.¹⁴¹

Pew disputes were a perennial problem; during the interregnum they never became a huge part of the secular courts’ business, a mere one or two cases a year in the late 1640s, becoming slightly more frequent in the 1650s. Usually they were dealt with at quarter sessions, only transferring to assizes where there was serious obstruction or evidence of political disaffection or where disputes had become protracted. Disagreements at Mottisfont church in Hampshire, sequestered from Dr Edward Stanley, headmaster of Winchester College, sometimes involving his son-in-law Giles Coles, rumbled on for several years. At Michaelmas quarter sessions 1651, two husbandmen, John Poore and Richard Canterton, were found guilty of trespass in disturbing the minister. At Michaelmas 1653, carpenter Edward Crowder and mason David Briant were presented for a trespass in pulling down the seat of widow Clemence Hutchins and John and Mary Poore. In 1654, differences regarding the ‘pulling up of the seates’ of Mr Richard Kent, once again involving Hutchins, Poore and Crowder, were referred to the assizes.¹⁴²

For some reason, pew disputes were disproportionately reported in Devon, with just under half the cases. No similar problems were observed in nearby Somerset, where the existence of several surviving pew plans for the 1650s suggests matters were more in order.¹⁴³ At Bishopsteignton in 1657, the churchwardens were poorly rewarded for their efforts to erect, at their own cost, new seats ‘in vacant places’ for sixty parishioners coming from a distance. Parishioners had not suffered as a result, they argued, either keeping their old pew or gaining a more ‘eminent’ one and all were now ‘fully now in sight and hearing of the Minister both in his Pew and Pulpitt’. Nevertheless, the ‘plucking downe … seats of new ereccion’ was threatened ‘by some few hasty persons’.¹⁴⁴ The motivations for the protests were unclear, although the loyalist from whom the parish had been sequestered, Henry Westlake, was still alive, and according to his daughter, sometimes ‘by stealth’ still preaching at the church, which may have prompted resistance to puritan efforts to refashion the church layout.¹⁴⁵

Interregnum pew disputes predominantly involved those of genteel pretensions. Yet they were not always conducted with civility; around half involved physical challenges, individuals taking someone else’s seat or blocking other people’s access. Assaults and affrays relating to seating were reported in January 1648 at Llandwrog in Caernarfonshire, in April 1648 at Witton Chapel in Cheshire and in July 1652 at Widecombe in Devon; a weapon was drawn during a dispute at Mary Tavy in Devon the same year.¹⁴⁶ At Rostherne in Cheshire in 1659, female parishioners attested to the rude behaviour of young Thomas Wilkinson, thrusting and pinching others with feet, shoulder and knees in order to claim a pew assigned to others for forty years.¹⁴⁷

Verbal and physical abuse of clergy and clergy wives, as well as anti-clericalist comment, were reported to secular authorities throughout the interregnum. At Melling in Lancashire in July 1647, Mr Cuthbert Halsall rebuked Robert Woolfall for speaking ‘some scandalous words against some ministers’; Woolfall replied that ‘he would speake what hee pleased’.¹⁴⁸ People were now ‘buried like dogs’, commented Laurence Coxley from Malpas in Cheshire in 1647; Mr Mainwaring’s preaching ‘was base and naught’, and ‘not worth a turd’.¹⁴⁹ In 1652, Henry Penny of Charlton Horethorne was presented to Somerset quarter sessions for ‘bidding the minister kisse his breech’.¹⁵⁰

Quakers and other sectarians were responsible for much verbal anticlericalism, terming ministers ‘Baal’s priests’, ‘blasphemers’, ‘son of perdition’, ‘Caine’, ‘swine’, a ‘raveninge wolfe in sheepes cloathing’ or murderers.¹⁵¹ But abuse came from the opposite quarter as well. At Hartlebury in Worcestershire, the former seat of the bishop, at Midsummer 1656, Michael and Katherine Cooke were accused of abusing and cursing the minister Mr Wright, and vilifying his new ‘laudable’ practices of ‘Catechizing and personal instruction’ as ‘rantizing’.¹⁵² At Mobberley in Cheshire in April 1656, gentleman Richard Brutch was cited for loudly calling Robert Barlow, minister there, ‘a drunken Rascall’, ‘a Cavalier Rascall and a Malignant’ who ‘came to putt out a Cavalier and are a worse yourselfe’; ‘you … have cozened yor owne father, and the whole Parish’.¹⁵³ The intruded incumbent at Modbury, William Collins, was detested by his parishioners, according to a later account in the John Walker archive.¹⁵⁴ In August 1655, one of them was cited to quarter sessions for claiming Collins had a ‘neck as big as a bull’ and was ‘fed like a hog’.¹⁵⁵ A similar bovine nickname of ‘Eaton Bull’ was apparently used in 1657 against Samuel Eaton, the third interregnum minister at Stockport since its sequestration from Edmund Shalcrosse in 1644; parishioners called him a ‘sacrilegious thief’, claiming he sent his congregation to the devil and had embezzled money intended for the church’s poor.¹⁵⁶

Prosecutions for non-conformity

With all its potential as an arena for disputes and disquiet, opting out of church altogether may have seemed like an attractive option. Non-attendance, punishable since the Tudor period, was now relatively lightly pursued, even before the statute requiring attendance at the local parish church was repealed in 1650. Very few people at all were cited anywhere for non-attendance between 1653 and 1655. Often complaints only arose in association with other offences such as political disaffection, scolding, haunting or running disorderly alehouses, or witchcraft. The statute required attendance at some place of worship, so those failing to worship anywhere could still be prosecuted for their failure to attend their parish church, ‘privat plase of meeting for the worship of God’ (Northamptonshire, 1657), ‘other place for exercising holy devotion’ (Cheshire, 1657) or to attend ‘public ordinances’ (Devon, 1656, 1658), leading to a late rise in prosecution in an effort to reassert religious order in 1658.¹⁵⁷

The campaign against non-attendance was linked to that against recusancy, both most enthusiastically and regularly prosecuted in Cheshire, at quarter sessions and assizes. In other counties, despite the intense anti-Catholicism of the early 1640s, prosecution of recusants was sporadic before the 1650s, with lists of recusants made in some years but not others, or only specific individuals or families denounced. Yet of all types of divergent religious practice, recusancy was prosecuted the most during the interregnum. Systematic presentment stepped up a gear in Hampshire and Sussex and Northamptonshire, counties with known recusant populations, from 1655 onwards following central orders from the Council of State.¹⁵⁸ Enthusiasm for persecuting Catholics was less pronounced in Devon and Somerset.

Other types of religious non-conformity were not so systematically targeted at quarter sessions (see Figure 6.4). Despite the emergence of divergent religious beliefs and the 1650 statute against blasphemy, this charge appears infrequently, with only twenty-five cases, including accusations of blasphemous swearing, charges of blasphemy or quoted statements that could be interpreted as such. The sample includes sixty-eight recorded cases against Quakers, less than half the number involving Catholics.¹⁵⁹ Large Quaker gatherings in 1655 and 1657 clearly alarmed authorities, but it seems significant that there are very few records of the regime closing down private meetings of any type not seen as posing a threat to public order.¹⁶⁰ Although use of the prayer book was not officially permitted, and was listed as an offence to be investigated by clerical ejectors, set up in 1654, prosecutions for ritual use of the prayer book at quarter sessions or assizes were fewer than those of Catholics or Quakers.¹⁶¹ However, the prayer book had been officially ‘abolished’; those found guilty could be treated severely, sometimes tried at assizes, as a warning to others, and if still beneficed, often lost their living as a result.¹⁶² Such prosecutions most commonly related to prayer-book marriages. Beneficed clergy living dangerously, ejected loyalists and schoolmasters all dabbled in clandestine old-style marriages. Cheshire schoolmaster Thomas Wilson conducted prayer-book weddings at night to avoid detection. But in January 1655, he was arrested at the behest of Colonel Thomas Croxon and imprisoned. Eight months later, he petitioned for release to support his wife and five children, saying that what he did ‘was for mere necessitye, and hee is very sorrye for his offence’.¹⁶³ Wedding couples were said be ‘pretending’ to be married, questioned about whether they had slept together, and treated as if they had fornicated.¹⁶⁴ On the other hand, there were some bizarre ideas about marriage circulating: a Somerset man persuaded a girl to sleep with him on Lammas Day 1649 by reading chapter 2 verse 15 of Malachi, and a seventy-six-year-old man from New Malton in Yorkshire, accused of incontinency in 1653 after marrying a fifteen-year-old using the ‘words of the old marriage according to the former manner’, conceived that as a ‘papist’ the marriage laws need not apply to him.¹⁶⁵ A rash of bigamy cases in Essex between 1647 and 1652 included a Colchester man who claimed scriptural justification from Timothy, saying that because it said a bishop should have only one wife, this implied laymen were permitted more.¹⁶⁶

Prosecutions relating to burials or baptisms are rare in official records, suggesting either a reluctance to stir up unnecessary controversy at sensitive times, or an ambivalence towards traditional practice apparent in the legal records themselves, where witnesses regularly dated events to Christmas, Candlemas, ‘our ladye daye’, Easter, Whitsun, Michaelmas, Lammas, Alhollandtide or Saint James tide.¹⁶⁷ Others, more mindful of their phraseology, preferred ‘Christide’ instead, or the ‘tyme Commonly called Christmas’. New habits of dropping the saint from church names were adopted by some.¹⁶⁸ In the Exeter quarter sessions order book, most refer to the cathedral as ‘Saint Peter’s’ until 1654, when ‘Peter’s’ begins to predominate.¹⁶⁹ Sometimes the very idea of church or cathedral was in question. A 1654 Exeter record refers to the Sabbath ‘morning exercise’ in ‘publique meeting places’, ‘commonly called’ churches; a 1655 Yorkshire assize deposition to the ‘place Commonly Called the Parish Church of Barton’.¹⁷⁰ Choice of language was meaningful, its variability a token of a confused mental outlook. Opinions seemed more polarized in the final years of the interregnum, with authorities struggling to repress church revels in Devon and Cheshire and the ‘unwarrantable custom’ of the ‘tyde or feast’ day at Bingley in Yorkshire. Heated arguments occurred over a maypole at Rowton in May 1659; a bullbaiting during Cheadle Wakes in September 1658 was denounced as an unwelcome revival of a ‘Currupt observacion’ ‘now almost forgotten’, but a ‘great concourse’ of people reportedly attended.¹⁷¹

The legal records investigated here demonstrate much activity around the public performance of religion and Christian morality. Many categories of offences did not decline, indeed they were often prosecuted with increasing vigour under the Major-Generals and/or in the last years before Cromwell’s death. Psychologically this might be interpreted as the fetishizing of a particular type of order to counter the social and economic effects of civil war and to spare those self-identifying as God’s creatures from providential punishment. But employing a mechanism for implementing outward religious order was not the same thing as effecting true and widespread spiritual reformation, if this was indeed ever thought possible, and probably as counter-productive as the earlier Laudian approach to order focused on church layout and ceremonial decorum. Although the pattern of prosecutions for swearing and Sabbath-day misbehaviour probably tell us more about the relative priorities of authorities than the scale of actual misbehaviour, their very frequency suggests they instead provoked widespread antipathy, often materializing in imaginative, humorous and indirect ways.

Writing in 1652, Thomas Cobbet had argued that though it was the duty of the civil magistrate to punish corruption, there was a clear distinction between the ecclesiastical and civil spheres. Civil sovereignty did not extend over religious belief: rooting out error had traditionally been the preserve of the Church.¹⁷² But the Church and its clergy were both conceptually and practically weak, and divided. The secular courts could be effective against offences like assault which were actionable at common law, and to enforce parliamentary statutes. It is also notable that two frequently prosecuted offences, Sabbath breach and swearing, had considerable weight of moral consensus against them, as secular offences which pre-dated the Civil Wars, and were merely prosecuted with increased vigilance after them. The renewed prosecution of Catholics in the mid–late 1650s was likewise building on long-established prejudices and secular practices. The authorities’ success in assuming the disciplinary functions of the disestablished Church, for example in acting against dilapidated churches or pew disputes, seems to have been more mixed. Secular prosecution was a blunt and ineffective tool at best for enforcing religious discipline and of little purpose against divergent religious ideas. Cases appearing in the official records of secular authorities were those where passions and factionalism had got too far out of hand to be contained by informal means, and were probably indicative of many more occasions of bad feeling that never got reported to secular courts not designed to deal with them, and also of lower-level summary reactions, by justices, constables or the military, which went unrecorded. The secular authorities, while often including among them individuals driven by a powerful sense that the prosecution of religious misbehaviour served both God and the state, found it difficult to organize themselves collectively to act against it. They busied themselves with relatively incontestable offences against public religious order. Divergence from the broad mainstream of godly puritan doctrine bothered them intensely, but they lacked corporate resolution in dealing with it, with the result that private beliefs and behaviour, if they did not offend against the appearance of outward order and conformity, were usually left to softer forms of persuasion, and often, in practice, alone.

F. McCall, ‘“Breaching the laws of God and man”: secular prosecutions of religious offences in the interregnum parish, 1645– 60’, in Church and people in interregnum Britain, ed. F. McCall (London, 2021), pp. 137–170. License: CC BY-NC-ND.