[THE ULSTER PLANTATION (1609).]
Source.—State Papers; Ireland, 1608-1610. No. 455.
Lords of the Council to Sir Arthur Chichester.
The City of London being willing to undertake such a part as might befit them in the project of the Plantation of Ulster, and to be a means to reduce that savage and rebellious people to civility, peace, religion, and obedience, and having commissioned the bearers John Brode Goldsmill, John Monroes, Robert Treswell, painter, and John Rowley, draper, to view of the country, and make report on their return, Sir Arthur Chichester is to direct a supply of all necessaries in their travel into those countries, and to aid them in every way. And they (the Lords) have directed Sir Thomas Philips to accompany them, whose knowledge and residence in those parts and good affection to the cause in general, they assure themselves will be of great use at this time; seeing there is no man that intendeth any plantation or habitation in Ulster that ought not to be most desirous of such neighbours as will bring trade and traffic into the ports.
[RELIGION IN RURAL ENGLAND (circa 1615).]
Source.—The Life of the Rev. Mr. Richard Baxter. Ed. M. Sylvester, 1790. Pp. 1, 2.
Eaton Constantine, near Wrekin Hill.
We lived in a country that had but little preaching at all. In the village where I was born there were four readers successively in six years' time, ignorant men and two of them immoral in their lives, who were all my schoolmasters. In the village where my father lived, there was a reader of about eighty years of age that never preached and had two churches about twenty miles distant; his eyesight failing him he said Common prayer without book, but for the reading of the psalms and chapters he got a common thresher and day labourer one year, and a tailor another year (for the Clerk could not read well). And at last he had a kinsman of his own (the excellentest stage player in all the country and a good gamester and good fellow) that got orders and supplied one of his places. After him, another younger kinsman that could write and read got orders. And at the same time another neighbour's son that had been a while at school turned minister, and who would needs go further than the rest, ventured to preach (and after got a living in Staffordshire), and when he had been a preacher about twelve or sixteen years, he was fain to give over, it being discovered that his orders were forged by the first ingenious stage player. And after him another neighbour's son took orders, when he had been a while an attorney's clerk and a common drunkard and tippled himself into so great poverty that he had no other way to live. These were the schoolmasters of my youth (except two of them) who read Common prayer on Sundays and holidays and taught school and tippled on the weekdays and whipped the boys when they were drunk, so that we changed them very often....
In the village where I lived the reader read the Common prayer briefly, and the rest of the day even till dark night almost, excepting eating time, was spent in dancing under a maypole and a great tree, not far from my father's door, where all the town did meet together. And though one of my father's own tenants was the piper, he could not restrain him nor break the sport, so that we could not read the Scriptures in our family without the great disturbance of the tabor and pipe and noise in the street. Many times my mind was inclined to be among them and sometimes I broke loose from conscience and joined with them, and the more I did it the more I was inclined to it. But when I heard them call my father Puritan, it did much to cure me and alienate me from them, for I considered that my father's exercise of reading the Scriptures was better than theirs and would surely be better thought on by all men at the last. When I heard them speak scornfully of others as Puritans whom I never knew, I was at first apt to believe all the lies and slanders wherewith they loaded them. But when I heard my own Father so reproached and perceived the drunkards were the forwardest in the reproach, I perceived that it was mere malice. For my Father never scrupled Common prayer or Ceremonies, nor spake against Bishops, nor ever so much as prayed but by a book or form, being not ever acquainted then with any that did otherwise. But only for reading Scriptures when the rest were dancing on the Lord's Day, and for praying (by a form out of the end of the Common prayer Book) in his house, and for reproving drunkards and swearers, and for talking sometimes a few words of Scripture and the Life to come, he was reviled commonly by the name of Puritan, Precisian, and Hypocrite, and so were the godly conformable ministers that lived anywhere in the country near us, not only by our neighbours, but by the common talk of the vulgar rabble of all about us. By this experience I was fully convinced that Godly People were the best, those that despised them and lived in sin and pleasure were a malignant unhappy sort of people; and this kept me out of their Company, except now and then when the love of sports and play enticed me.