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The Beginnings of English Sabbatarianism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Patrick Collinson*
Affiliation:
University of London King’s College

Extract

This communication summarises the findings of an enquiry into the origins of English Sabbatarianism at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Two aspects of this movement have seemed to merit fresh investigation: the sources of English Sabbatarian notions and the circumstances in which the Sabbath became a major controversial issue in the Church of England, dividing the puritan Nonconformists from the representatives of authority.

Sabbatarianism, for the purpose of this discussion, is defined as something more than a certain ethical and social attitude to the use of Sunday: it implies the doctrinal assertion that the fourth commandment is not an obsolete ceremonial law of the Jews but a perpetual, moral law, binding on Christians; in other words, that the Christian observance of Sunday has its basis not in ecclesiastical tradition but in the decalogue.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1964

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References

Page 207 of note 1 I am indebted to Mr Ian Breward of Manchester University who has read this communication since it was delivered at Cambridge and has made some useful suggestions which I have incorporated. I have also benefitted from the comments of Mr Basil Hall on the occasion when the communication was read.

Page 208 of note 1 Stockwood, A sermon preached at Paules Crosse on Barthelmew day, being the 24 of August 1578 and A very fruitefull sermon preached at Paules Cross the tenth of May last, 1579; White, A sermon preached at Panules Crosse on Sunday the thirde of November in the time of t he plague, 1578.

Page 208 of note 2 W.B. Whitaker, Sunday in Tudor and Stuart Times, 1933, 37-44, collects some of the evidence.

Page 208 of note 3 J. E. Neale, Elizabeth I and her Parliaments, 1584-1601, 1957, 58-60.

Page 208 of note 4 The writer is Richard Fletcher (later bishop of London and father of the dramatist) attacking John Stroud, schoolmaster, hedge-priest and printer of Cranbrook; (Dr Williams’s Library, MS Morrice B II, f. 9 υ ).

Page 209 of note 1 An answer to Sir Thomas More’s dialogue, the supper of the Lord, Parker Soc. Cambridge 1850, 97-8.

Page 209 of note 2 Dr Williams’s Library, MS Morrice B I, p. 339.

Page 209 of note 3 A second, expanded edition appeared in 1606 under the title Sabbathum veteris et novi testamenti; or the true doctrine of the Sabbath.

Page 209 of note 4 Richard Greenham, A treatise of the Sabbath, first printed 1599; George Estey, An exposition uppon the tenne commaundements, 1603; John Dod and Robert Qeaver, A treatise or exposition upon the ten commandements, 1603; George Widley, The doctrine of the Sabbath, 1604; Three posicions concerninge the aucthoritie of the Lordes daye, printed 1606 but not extant, see Arber’s Stationers’ Register, 111, 146; John Sprint, Propositions tending to proove the necessarie use of the Christian Sabbaoth or Lords day, 1607; Master Bonner upon the Sabaoth, 1608 but not extant, see Arber, 111, 172. In the same period a more conservative point of view was represented by Robert Lowe’s Effigatio veri Sabbathismi, 1605.

Page 210 of note 1 Edition of 1603, ff. 62 υ , 78 υ , 90 υ , 91 γ .

Page 210 of note 2 Tudor Puritanism, Chicago 1939, 442.

Page 210 of note 3 See his Von dem Sabbat und gebotten Feyertagen, Jena 1524; discussed by Professor Gordon Rupp in ‘Andreas Karlstadt and Reformation Puritanism,’ JTS, n.s. x (1959), 308-26.

Page 210 of note 4 There are useful extracts and summaries of the teaching of the reformers in Robert, Cox, The Literature of the Sabbath Question, 2 vols. Edinburgh 1865 Google Scholar.

Page 211 of note 1 Møller, Jens G., ‘The Beginnings of Puritan Covenant Theology,’ in JEH, XIV (1963), 4667 Google Scholar.

Page 211 of note 2 Decades, Parker Soc. Cambridge 1849, 1, 253-67.

Page 211 of note 3 ‘A declaration of the x holie commaundements’ in Early Writings, Parker Soc. Cambridge 1843, 337-51.

Page 211 of note 4 Lambeth Palace, Registrum Whitgift, 1, f. 131.

Page 212 of note 1 De Regno Christi, lib. I cap. xi; in Opera Latina, XV, ed. François, Wendel, Paris 1955, 80-4Google Scholar.

Page 212 of note 2 The common places of the most famous and renowned divine Doctor Peter Martyr, tr. Anthony Marten, 1583, 374-7; In primum librum Mosis . . . commentarii, Zurich 1569, ff. 8 υ -9. For a contrary, anti-Sabbatarian point of view, see the Common places of Wolfgang Musculus, tr. John Man, 1563, ff. 60-70.

Page 212 of note 3 See the annotations to his New Testament. These notes (for example on such texts as 1 Cor. xvi, 2 and Rev. i, 10) were familiar to English Puritans in Laurence Tomson’s translation and were cited by Bownd.

Page 212 of note 4 The summe of Christian religion, 1645, 575-81.

Page 212 of note 5 A verie profitable and necessarie discourse concerning the observation and keeping of the Sabboth day, 1584.

Page 212 of note 6 See A. S. Thelwall’s 1850 edn., 86.

Page 212 of note 7 McLelland, Joseph C., The Visible Words of God, Edinburgh 1957, 267-71Google Scholar.

Page 213 of note 1 Testamenti veteris Biblia Sacra sive libri canonici...Latini recens ex Hebraeo facti...quibus etiam adjunximus novi Testamenti libros ex sermone Syriaco...in Latinum conversos.

Page 213 of note 2 Will of Frances Jermyn, Bury and West Suffolk Record Office, Register of Sudbury Wills, vol. 34.

Page 213 of note 3 John Rylands Library, Rylands English MS 874 (papers of the Dedham puritan conference) f. 240: ‘Therefore the word here doth not signify anie type but a common signe as Tremellius also speaketh of it, Exodus 31.’

Page 213 of note 4 $$IIρωτοκτισιο, seu creationis a Deo factae . . . praelectiones Francisci Iunii, Heidelberg 1589,64; in Opera theologica Francisci Iunii Biturigis, Geneva 1613, 1, col. 28.

Page 213 of note 5 The fourth commandment takes up 206 of the 641 columns devoted to the decalogue in the Geneva edition of the Opera.

Page 214 of note 1 De decalogo’ in Operum theologicorum D. Hieronymi Zanchii, tomus quartus, Geneva 1613, col. 855. See also a number of passages tending to confirm the pre-Mosaic status of the sabbath in Zanchius’s voluminous De operibus Dei intra spacium sex dierum creatis opus, 2nd. ed., Hanover 1597.

Page 214 of note 2 Chronologia, sive de tempore et eins mutationibus ecclesiasticis tractatio theologica, Zurich 1585, 91-7.

Page 214 of note 3 Ethices christianae libri tres: in quitus . . . algue etiam legis divinae sive decalagi explicatio, Geneva 1577; see Paul, de Felice, Lambert Daneau, Paris 1881, 173 ffGoogle Scholar. I have been unable to consult the Ethices at first hand, but I have deduced its teaching on the Sabbath from the English Sabbatarian writers.

Page 214 of note 4 These ‘principles upon the fourth commandement’ include the statements that the fourth commandment was established ‘in the verie creation of the world’; that it was placed by our Lord Himself among the number of those that are moral and perpetual and that the apostles appointed the new Sabbath in place of the old in memory of the resurrection; ‘the observance therefore of this Lord’s day is not to be accounted as an indifferent thing, but as an Apostolical tradition to be perpetually observed.’ (Propositions and principles, 78-82.)

Page 215 of note 1 See 217, below.

Page 216 of note 1 See my unpublished London Ph.D. thesis ‘The Puritan Classical Movement in the Reign of Elizabeth I’, 1957, 126.

Page 216 of note 2 John, Strype, Annals, Oxford 1824, 111, pt i. 496-7Google Scholar.

Page 216 of note 3 Knappen, M. M., ‘The Early Puritanism of Lancelot Andrewes,’ Church History, 11 (1933), 95104 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

Page 216 of note 4 Printed in garbled form in The pattern of catechisticall doctrine, 1630; in John Jackson’s improved ed., The morall law expounded, 1642; and in a further ed. under that title prepared from Andrewes’s own notes but ‘doctored’ to conform to Laudian doctrine, 1650.

Page 216 of note 5 Isaacson’s ‘Life of Andrewes’ in Two Answers to Cardinal Perron, ed. Bliss, J., Lib. of Anglo-Catholic Theology, Oxford 1854, vi Google Scholar; Jackson’s preface to The morali law expounded, Sig. A 3 υ .

Page 217 of note 1 Life of Carter in Samuel Clarke, A collection of the lives often eminent divines, 1662.

Page 217 of note 2 Church History of Britain, ed. Brewer, J. S., Oxford 1845, V, 191 Google Scholar.

Page 217 of note 3 Knappen, Tudor Puritanism, 450.

Page 217 of note 4 See Bownd’s preface (1595), Sig. A 3.

Page 217 of note 5 Church History of Britain, V, 193.

Page 217 of note 6 John Rylands Library, Rylands English MS 874; the minutes and some of the other papers were edited by R. G. Usher, The Presbyterian Movement in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth, Camden Soc. 3rd. ser. VIII, 1905.

Page 217 of note 7 Presbyterian Movement, 27-8, 30-3, 35, 47.

Page 217 of note 8 In a dedicatory epistle to his ‘Christian Readers’, dated 27 June 1595, Bownd explained that ‘about nine yeeres since I was solicited to publish my sermons upon the tenne commaundements by certaine of my godly brethren, auditors then of the same.’ (Sig. A 3.) Other references in the work suggest that the whole course of sermons was not handled by Bownd: e.g. ‘surely to speake of the true manner of worshiping God doth not properly belong to this place, it was sufficiently opened unto us in the second commandement’ (165).

Page 218 of note 1 Doctrine of the Sabbath, 30.

Page 218 of note 2 Sandes’s and Crick’s arguments are lengthy and occupy ff. 15 (235)-25 (247) of Rylands English MS 874; they have not been printed.

Page 219 of note 1 See his Daungerous positions and Survay of the pretended holy discipline, 1593.

Page 219 of note 2 The letter, dated 8 June (1590?) survives on the fly-leaf of Roger’s own annotated copy of his pamphlet against Miles Moss, Miles Christianus, 1590 (B.M., press-mark 4103.bbb.26).

Page 219 of note 3 The catalogue of Dawson Turner’s MSS, sold by Messrs Puttick and Simpson on 6 June 1859, describes (p. 61) a volume of ‘Ecclesiastical Miscellanies’ (originally a Selden MS) which included ‘articles drawen according to the verie thoughts of the classical brethren for the wel-managing of theire Mondaie exercise at Burie’ and ‘a Narrative of an Exercise or Disputation, held, apparently, amongst certain ministers assembled at Bury St. Edmunds, 1st April 1590.’ I am indebted to Dr A. H. Smith of Homerton Training College for this reference.

Page 219 of note 4 A sermon upon the 6.7. and 8. verses of the 12 chapter of S. Paules Epistle unto the Romanes...made to the confutation of another sermon, 1590.

Page 219 of note 5 Miles Christianus, or a just apologie of all necessarie writings and writers, 1590.

Page 219 of note 6 Roger’s translation of the Imitatio Christi had fourteen editions between 1580 and 1640. He translated mystical works ascribed to St Augustine and several works by contemporary Lutheran divines.

Page 220 of note 1 The English Creede, consenting with the true, auncient, catholique and apostolique Church, 1585.

Page 220 of note 2 Sykes, Norman F., Old Priest, Nem Presbyter, Cambridge 1956, 5960 Google Scholar.

Page 220 of note 3 Besides his acknowledged patrons, Hatton and Bancroft, Rogers dedicated his works at various times to the queen, Dr Thomas Wilson, Sir Francis Walsingham, Sir Thomas Bromley, the countess of Sussex, Archbishop Grindal, Bishops Aylmer and Ravis of London, Bishop Scambler of Norwich and Henry Blagge and Thomas Poley esquires, two Suffolk justices.

Page 220 of note 4 The faith, doctrine and religion...of England, 1607, edited by the Parker Society as The Catholic Doctrine of the Church of England, Cambridge 1854, 20.

Page 220 of note 5 Brief notes of the sermon survive among the papers of Sir Edward Lewkenor of Denham, Suffolk; B.M. Add. MS 38492, f. 104.

Page 221 of note 1 The Catholic Doctrine, 20.

Page 221 of note 2 Ibid. 18.

Page 221 of note 3 Ibid. ix.

Page 221 of note 4 Church History of Britain, V, 218-19.

Page 221 of note 5 Ibid, V, 216-17; Heylyn, , History of the Sabbath, 1636, 11, 249-56Google Scholar; Collier, An Ecclesiastical History of Great Britain, ed. Thomas Lathbury, 1852, VII, 190-2.