“1683, Oct. 11. Buried Mr. Inward Ansloe.”—Cant. Cath.
V. A Scoffing World.
While these strange pranks were being played, the world was not asleep. Calamy seems to have discovered a source of melancholy satisfaction in the fact that the quaint names of his brethren were subjected to the raillery of a wicked world. One of the ejected ministers was Sabbath Clark, minister of Tarvin, Cheshire. Of him he writes:
“He had been constant minister of the parish for nigh upon sixty years. He carried Puritanism in his very name, by which his good father intended he should bear the memorial of God’s Holy Day. This was a course that some in those times affected, baptizing their children Reformation, Discipline, etc., as the affections of their parents stood engaged. For this they have sufficiently suffered from Profane Wits, and this worthy person did so in particular. Yet his name was not a greater offence to such persons than his holy life.”
Probably Calamy was referring to the “profane wit” Dr. Cosin, Bishop of Chester, who, in a visitation held at Warrington about the year 1643, is said to have acted as follows:—
“A minister, called Sabbaith Clerke, the Doctor re-baptized, took’s marke, and call’d him Saturday.”
That this was a deliberate insult, and not a pleasantry, Calamy, of course, would stoutly maintain. Hence the above sample of holy ire.
Many of the names in the list I have recorded must have met with the good-humoured raillery of the every-day folk the strangely stigmatized bearer might meet. I suppose in good time, however, the owner, and the people he was accustomed to mix with, got used to it. It is true they must have resorted, not unfrequently, to curter forms, much after the fashion of the now almost forgotten nick forms of the Plantagenet days. Fight-the-good-fight-of-faith is a very large mouthful, if you come to try it, and I dare say Mr. White or Brown, whoever he might be, did not so strongly urge as he ought to have done the gross impropriety of his friends recognizing him by the simple style of “Faith” or “Fight.” Fancy at a dinner, in a day that had not invented the convenient practice of calling a man by his surname, having to address a friend across the table, “Please, Fight-the-good-fight-of-faith, pass the pepper!” The thing was impossible. Even Help-on-high was found cumbersome, and, as we have seen, the Rector of Lydney curtailed it.
A curious instance of waggery anent this matter of length will be found in the register of St. Helen, Bishopgate. The entry is dated 1611, just the time when the dramatists were making fun of this Puritanic innovation, and when the custom was most popular:
“Sept. 1, 1611. Job-rakt-out-of-the-asshes, being borne the last of August in the lane going to Sir John Spencer’s back-gate, and there laide in a heape of seacole asshes, was baptized the ffirst day of September following, and dyed the next day after.”