RECREATIONS.
Different ideas respecting amusements are marked badges of religious denominations, and one of the dangers of all Puritanism is a tendency to separate between recreation and religion, and to regard them as if antagonistic, from mistaken views of the condition and necessities of human nature; views which ignore one side of the mind of man, and narrow the range of social sympathies. Some good men of the Puritan class did, in consequence, look sourly on several very innocent sorts of pleasure; but the morbid, ungenial restriction of feeling, ascribed to the Puritans in general, has been greatly exaggerated, and to some extent, so far as it really existed, an excuse may be found for it in the persecuting treatment which they, as a body, received from those who were foremost in promoting the revival of old English customs. The distinctive amusements of the Church festivals the Puritan disliked, condemned, and opposed. Indeed, many disliked, condemned, and opposed the festivals themselves, from a strong conviction that they were superstitious in their origin, their character, and their tendency. They devoutly believed in the events which those festivals commemorated, and thought that they should be remembered, not at particular seasons, but all the year round. Their idea of the festivals was not such as to redeem the recreations which had clustered round them; and the recreations themselves were, to their religious and moral tastes, exceedingly offensive.
After all which has been said to the contrary, however, numbers of the Puritans—under the later Stuarts, under the earlier ones, and under the Commonwealth—were genial and even “facetious”—to use a word applied to some of their best men—full of pleasantness, and by no means averse to certain English amusements. Many demonstrations of joy they made in common with their neighbours. Feasting and sending gifts to one another, the ringing of bells, making bonfires, and sounding trumpets, with thundering of ordnance on great national occasions, had been recommended in so many words from the chief pulpit of Manchester, by the chief Presbyterian minister of that City. If Puritans objected to drinking healths, some had no objections to see the street-conduits running with claret. Anti-prelatists, like prelatists before, and Nonconformists, like Conformists after the Restoration, indulged in the sports of fishing and shooting; they followed the hounds, and they went a hawking.
Cock-fighting is an old English amusement, especially at Shrove-tide, and, strange as it may seem, an eminent Puritan minister, Henry Newcome, allowed his boys, when that season came round, to “shoot at the cock.” He amusingly expresses in his diary a fear lest the youngsters should come to mischief in so dangerous a game, and therefore prayed to God that He would preserve them, as he thankfully acknowledges God was pleased to do; and he mentions that on one occasion he had particular reason to be alarmed, since what was meant for the cock threatened danger to the boy, for “Daniel’s hat on his head was shot through with an arrow.” Yet the careful and devout father never indicates an apprehension of there being anything wrong in the game itself.[353] Nonconformists condemned card-playing, and other games of chance, but if the late Nonconformists resembled their Presbyterian predecessors, they amused themselves with balls and billiards. The game of shuffle-board was a Royal amusement, and a board for playing the game is mentioned in an inventory of the goods belonging to Charles I., which were seized at Ludlow Castle. Boards of this description had lines drawn across them at one end, and the players stood at the other, the object being to push or shove flat pieces of metal across the lines, without causing them to fall off the board. Newcome liked to play this game, as appears from his diary, only he was afraid of taking “too great a latitude in such mirth,” and thought it his duty to let some “savoury thing” fall at the time, and if he cracked a jest, he considered himself as thereby incurring a debt for an equal amount of serious discourse. The Presbyterian minister, who tells these stories of himself, was a young man at the time to which he thus refers, and he lived beyond the Revolution, but it is very probable that in after years he continued cautiously to practise his early favourite amusement. There is, however, no reason to believe that his taste in this respect, and his habit of indulging in it, is to be taken as a specimen of Nonconformists’ recreation in general.
CHARITIES.
XII. The charities revived or established after the Restoration, springing from the benevolent spirit of Christianity, call for some notice. Visiting the venerable hospital of St. Mary, in the City of Chichester, with its spacious hall, spanned by an arched roof, and its rows of tiny rooms built on either side, as if in a covered street, with its chapel and altar table, and other provisions for Episcopalian worship on Sundays and week-days, and with its old-fashioned men and women finding rest in their declining days, after the toils and troubles of life; or visiting the like venerable hospital of Bishopgate, in the City of Norwich, with somewhat similar arrangements, we see the kind of place in which benevolent people loved to shelter the aged and the infirm in the days of Charles II. After the banishment—during the Commonwealth—of the ancient religious services, and of the old spirit of these quaint retreats—not, however, to the violation of the charitable purposes of the foundation—those services took possession of them again at the Restoration. The same may be said of numerous almshouses in different parts of the country.
New ones of a similar description were established. Bishop Ward’s College of Matrons, for the maintenance of ten widows of orthodox clergymen, may be mentioned as an instance. He disliked it to be called an hospital, it being intended for those who were well descended, and had lived in good reputation. He purchased land in the Close at Salisbury, on which to erect the buildings, and the Cathedral being so near, they were required to attend worship there, both morning and evening. The same prelate endowed an hospital at Buntingford, in Hertfordshire, the place of his birth, for ten aged men, each to receive ten pounds a year.
Some persons, in founding almshouses, required that all the inmates should “be conformed to the Church of England, according to the Thirty-Nine Articles,” and placed under the ban of exclusion all such as should not profess, or follow the Protestant religion, or should absent themselves from the parish or castle church without cause.[354] Others devised bequests in a more catholic spirit, providing “that poor boys may be instructed in the principles of the Protestant religion, and in the fear of the Lord, and also to read and to write, and to cast up accounts, that so they may be blessed in their souls as well as in their bodies, and may be a blessing to their masters, and may for ever have cause to bless God for the fatherly care” of the Mayor on their behalf.[355]
CHARITIES.
The name of a singular kind of person, who signalized himself by his beneficence, may also be introduced.