"Your brother's name is Ebenezer.
(Addressed) "To John Willingham, living at Mr. Herring's, at Duddinghurst, deliver these."
There are also letters, &c., endorsed, "Intercepted, 1641, to Willingham." Probably it was suspected they were letters of political significance.
[404] As to Lancashire, Dr. Hibbert observes, in his History of the Collegiate Church of Manchester, i. 272:—"The greatest discontent was excited at the mode of solemnizing marriages, which was no longer before the altar, or accompanied with the pledge of the ring, which had been hitherto considered essential to the contract. This meanness of ceremony was so ill relished, that many clandestine marriages were celebrated by unauthorized persons, or ejected clergymen." The author mentions the case of a woman who refused to submit to Presbyterian rites, but asserted herself a "wife before God."
[405] Many Independents, it should be remembered, treated marriage as a civil contract, and had no religious service.
[406] These particulars are gleaned from Brand's Popular Antiquities.
[407] Hunter's Life of Heywood, 33.
[408] Autobiography of Joseph Lister.
[409] According to Archbishop Islep's Constitutions (1362), the observance of the Lord's Day was to begin at Saturday vespers, like the feasts that have vigils.—Johnson's English Canons, ii. 426.
Eustace, abbot of Flay (1201), went beyond the Puritans in his Sabbatarianism, and sought to terrify people into a cessation of labour from three o'clock on Saturday afternoon until Monday sunrise, by relating all sorts of miracles. A woman, for weaving on Saturday afternoon, was struck dead with palsy; another woman, who kept her paste wrapped up in a cloth until Monday morning, found it then ready baked.—Johnson, ii. 95.