Stuart England
Growing-up in Shropshire
Richard Baxter, Reliquiae Baxterianae, 1664
In the village, where I lived the reader read the Common-Prayer briefly, and the rest of the day even till dark night almost, except eating time, was spent in dancing under a May-pole 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 Scripture 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 Scripture, was better than theirs, and would surely be better thought on by all men at the last; and I considered what it was for that he and others were thus derided. 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 even so much as prayed but by a book or form, being not ever acquainted then with any that did otherwise: But only for reading Scripture 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 any where 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, and 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 sport and play enticed me.