"Famous for twanging ale, zeal, cakes, and cheese."
Better remembered are the lines in his Journey through England:
"To Banbury came I, O profane one!
Where I saw a puritane one
Hanging of his cat on Monday
For killing of a mouse on Sunday."
Early in the seventeenth century, the Puritans were very strong in Banbury. In Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair, Zeal-of-the-Land Busy, the Puritanical Rabbi, is called a Banbury man, and described as one who was a baker—"but he does dream now, and sees visions; he has given over his trade out of a scruple that he took, that it spiced conscience, those cakes he made were served to bridales, May-poles, morrises, and such profane feasts and meetings:" in other words, he had been a baker, but left off that trade to set up for a prophet; and one of the characters in Bartholomew Fair says: "I have known divers of these Banburians when I was at Oxford." And Sir William D'Avenant, in his play of The Wits, illustrates this Puritanical character, in
"A weaver of Banbury, that hopes
To entice heaven by singing, to make him lord of twenty looms."
Old Thomas Fuller personifies the zeal in the Rev. William Whately, who was Vicar of Banbury in the reign of James I., and was called "The Roaring Boy." Fuller adds: "Only let them (the Banbury folks) adde knowledge to their zeal, and then the more zeal the better their condition." The Vicar was a zealous and popular preacher, according to his monument:
"It's William Whately that here lies,
Who swam to's tomb in's people's eyes."
In the Tatler, No. 220, in describing his "Ecclesiastical Thermometer," to indicate the changes and revolutions in the Church, the Essayist writes, "That facetious divine, Dr. Fuller, speaking of the town of Banbury, near a hundred years ago, tells us, 'it was a place famous for cakes and zeal,' which I find by my glass is true to this day, as to the latter part of this description, though I must confess it is not in the same reputation for cakes that it was in the time of that learned author."
The Banburians, however, maintained their character for zeal in a grand demonstration made by them in favour of Dr. Sacheverell, whose trial had just terminated in his acquittal; and in the same year, this High Church champion made a triumphal passage through Banbury, on his journey to take possession of the living of Salatin, in Shropshire, which was ridiculed in a pamphlet, with a woodcut illustrative of the procession; and there appeared another pamphlet on the same lively subject.