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Shepherds, Sheepdogs, and Hirelings: The Pastoral Ministry in Post-Reformation England

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Patrick Collinson*
Affiliation:
Trinity College, Cambridge

Extract

The categories of shepherd and hireling are conventional elements of what may be called biblical and ecclesiastical pastoral, the legacy of John’s Gospel chapter 10 and the basis of a perennial polemical dichotomy. Preaching at Manchester in 1582 on a text redolent of arable husbandry (Luke 10 v. 2—‘the harvest truly is great but the labourers are few’) the vicar of Warrington strayed out of the cornfield into this pastoral vein: ‘Wee must understand that our Savior speaketh not of false Hierlings but of true Pastoures, not of those which beare an ydle name and title of Pastoures.’ John 10 had inspired a literary motif running back to Chaucer and Langland which, in what Sir Philip Sidney called ‘the old rustic language’ of Spenser’s Shepheardes Calendar (1579), revived in the May eclogue. ‘Piers’, a good (and, according to Spenser’s commentator ‘E.K.’, protestant) pastor rebukes ‘Palinode’ (a papist, or at least a traditional clerical type) for condoning the Maytime sports of the country people, and in the person of Palinode all hirelings:

      Well is it seene, theyr sheepe bene not their owne,
      That letten them runne at randon alone.
      But they bene hyred for little pay
      Of other, that caren as little as they,
      What fallen the flocke, so they han the fleece,
      And get all the gayne, paying but a peece.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1989

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References

1 Harward, Simon, Twogodlie and learned sermons, preached at Manchester in Lancashire (London, 1582), Sig. Ciiij.Google Scholar

2 See the categories employed in the puritan ‘Survey of the Ministry’ carried out in various counties in 1584 and 1586. (The Seconde Parte of a Register, ed. Albert Peel (Cambridge, 1915), pp. 88–184).

3 Cathedral Archives and Library Canterbury (hereafter CALC), MSS X. 11.2, fols 218–28, X. 11.9, fol. 103.

4 CoUinson, Patrick, ‘Cranbrook and the Fletchers: Popular and Unpopular Religion in the Kentish Weald’, in Collinson, Godly People: Essays on English Protestantism and Puritanism (London, 1983), p. 415;Google Scholar Christophers, R. A., ‘Social and Educational Background of the Surrey Clergy, 1520–1620’ (unpublished London PhD. thesis, 1975), pp. 867.Google Scholar

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7 Hajzyk, Helena, ‘The Church in Lincolnshire c.1595—c.1640’ (unpublished Cambridge PhD. thesis, 1980), pp. 3012.Google Scholar One of this minority, George Buddie, published A short anil plaine discourse fully containing the whole doctrine of evangelicall fastes (London, 1609), a not conspicuously evangelical work which is concerned with fasting at Lent and other appropriate seasons of the Kalender, and which pays tribute to ‘that good Hooker’, ‘worthy Hooker’ (Sigs. A2v-3).

8 Luther’s Meditations on the Gospels, ed. Roland H. Bainton (London, 1963), pp. 98–9. Luther was preaching on John 10 w. 1—18.

9 (William Turner and John Bale), The huntyng and fynding out of the romyshefaxe (Basyll, 1543, i.e. Antwerp, 1544); William Turner, The huntyng of the Romyshe vuolfe (Emden, 1555(?)); (William Turner), The hunting of the fox and the wolfe, because they make havocke of the sheepe of Christ (London, 1565). Instructing the people that it was not for them to decide whether or not to deliver the fleece (rents, tithes and other duties) to their masters, Thomas Lever said: ‘It is magistrates dutyes, to consyder and note, whether they be theeves, or shepheardes, doggcs, or wolf es that taketh the fleese.’ (A sermon preached before the kynges maiestie (1550), ed. E. Arber, Thomas Lever, M.A., Sermons, English Reprints (London, 1870), p. 86.)

10 For Haydocke, see Höltgen, Karl Josef, ‘The Reformation of Images and Some Jacobean Writers on Art’, in Functions of Literature: Essays Presented to Erwin Wolff on his Sixtieth Birthday (Tubingen, 1984), pp. 13846;Google Scholar Gent, Lucy, Picture and Poetry 1560–1620 (London, 1981).Google Scholar

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18 Bossy, John, ‘Blood and Baptism: Community and Christianity in Western Europe from the Fourteenth to die Sixteenth Centuries’, SCH 10, p. 139;Google Scholar Bossy, John, Christianity in the West 1400–1700 (Oxford, 1985), chapter 4.Google Scholar

19 See my Religion of Protestants, pp. 114–30. See also my ‘Lectures by Combination: Structures and Characteristics of Church Life in 17th-century England’, in Godly People, pp. 467–98 and Ann Hughes, ‘Thomas Dugard and his Circle in the 1630s—a "Parliamentary-Puritan" Connexion?’, HJ 29 (1986), pp. 771–93.

20 McManners, J., Death and the Enlightenment: Changing Attitudes to Death in Eighteenth-Century France (Oxford, 1981),Google Scholar chapter 8. I am indebted to Dr Houlbrooke for an unpublished seminar paper on deathbeds, part of a study in progress on death in early modern England; and to Mr Christopher Marsh of Churchill College, Cambridge for sight of a so far unpublished paper on will-making.

21 CALC, MSS X. 10. 19, fols 229v-44v X. 11. 1, fols 225v-31v

22 This reflects a mass of evidence in the series of deposition books from the Canterbury courts in CALC. This material has been extensively investigated in work so far unpublished by Miss Diana O’Hara.

23 CALC, MS X. 10.17, fols. 185–8'.

24 The Presbyterian Movement in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth as Illustrated by the Minute Book of the Dedham Classis, 1582–1589, ed. R. G. Usher, C3Ser 8 (1905), pp. 27, 29, 39, 41, 47, 48, 49-50, 55–6, 71, 72, 73.

25 This is still a neglected topic. But see my Religion of Protestants, pp. 118–19.

26 Pantin, W. A., The English Church in the Fourteenth Century (Cambridge, 1955),Google Scholar chapter 9, ‘Manuals of Instruction for Parish Priests'; see above, pp. 00–00.

27 Collinson, Patrick, ‘The Protestant Family’ in my The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (London, 1988);Google Scholar Davies, Kathleen M., ‘Continuity and Change in Literary Advice on Marriage’, in Marriage and Society: Studies in the Social History of Marriage, ed. Outhwaite, R. B. (London, 1981), pp. 5880.Google Scholar

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30 Hieron, Samuel, The spirituali fishing. A sermon preached in Cambridge (London, 1618), pp. 14-16, 22.Google Scholar See also Phillips, Jerome, The fisher-man. A sermon preached at a synode held at Southwell in Nottinghamshire (London, 1623).Google Scholar

31 Downame, Twosermons, p. 27; Dering quoted in Collinson, Patrick, ‘A Mirror of Elizabethan Puritanism: The Life and Letters of "Godly Master Dering"’, in Godly People, p. 299.Google Scholar

32 Pantin, , The English Church in the Fourteenth Century, pp. 1989.Google Scholar

33 Collinson, , Religion of Protestants, pp. 856,1334.Google Scholar

34 Bernard, Richard, The faith full shepherd: wholy in a manner transposed and made anew, and very much inlarged both with precepts and examples, to further young divines in the studie of divinitie. With the shepherds practise in the end (London, 1621), pp. 3, 35–6, 98 seq, 131–2, 159-355.Google Scholar

35 The Works of George Herbert, ed. F. E. Hutchinson (Oxford, 1941), pp. 244–5, 247–9, 236, 249–50, 257–9, 285–6.

36 I am indebted to Dr Eamon Duffy for making this point quite forcefully in discussion. The antagonism of Bolton and Bentham for commonplace neighbourly values (which may be less familiar than Gifford’s writings) can be sampled in Bolton’s Some general directions for a comfortable walking with God (London, 1638) and Bentham’s The saints societie (London, 1636). This piece of Bentham’s invective (pp. 167–8) is not untypical: ‘The pretty lispings and stammerings, the falls and stumblings, the unmannerly roguing, or whoring this man, that woman: the pretty pronunciation of this or that oath of their children shall not be forgotten: and then from these merrie Colloquies rake into the dunghill puddles of the true, or faincd miscarriage of their neighbours, good or bad …’

37 Works of Herbert, p. 228.

38 However Benjamin Boyce in The Theophrastan Character in England to 1642 (London, 1967), describes Herbert’s treatise as a conduct book rather than a ‘character’ and suggests that the word in the title was intended to have ‘the ordinary, non-technical meaning’ (p. 197). See also Heinz Bcrgner, ed., English Character Writing (Tubingen, 1971) and J. W. Smecd, The Theophrastan Character: the History of a Literary Genre (Oxford, 1985).

39 Collinson, , Religion of Protestants, p. 110.Google Scholar

40 Lake, Peter, Anglicans and Puritans? Presbyterian and English Conformist Thought from Whitgift to Hooker (London, 1988), chapter 4, ‘Richard Hooker’.Google Scholar

41 Fish, Stanley, The Living Temple: George Herbert and Catechising (Berkeley, 1978);Google Scholar Summers, Joseph H., George Herbert, His Religion and Art (London and Cambridge, Mass., 1954);Google Scholar Lewalski, Barbara K., Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (Princeton, 1979);Google Scholar Coolidge, John S., Tlie Pauline Renaissance in England: Puritanism and the Bible (Oxford, 1970).Google Scholar

42 This view is explicit in the writings of Dr Christopher Haigh and implicit in the work of a number of other recent historians. The ultimate indebtedness of this negative assessment of the protestant ministry to the rich and subtle learning of Keith Thomas in Religion and the Decline of Magic (London, 1071) is, of course, very considerable. See Haigh, ‘Introduction’, ‘The Recent Historiography of the English Reformation’ and ‘Anticlericalism and the English Reformation’, all in The English Reformation Revised, ed. Christopher Haigh (Cambridge, 1987).

43 Haigh, Christopher, ‘The Church of England, the Catholics and the People’, in The Reign of Elizabeth I, ed. Haigh, Christopher (London, 1984), p. 213.Google Scholar

44 Clarke, Samuel, The Lives of Thirty-Two English Divines (London, 1677), p. 15.Google Scholar

45 Dr Parker is preparing an edition of John Rylands University Library Manchester, Rylands English MS 524, containing a collection of Greenham’s casuistry compiled by Arthur Hildcrsham (?). Mr Carlson is engaged in a reconstitution of the population and society of Dry Drayton.

46 Settle, Thomas, A catéchisme (London, 1585), Epistle.Google Scholar

47 Greenham, Richard, Grave counsels and godly observations in Worltes (London, 1612), p. 24.Google Scholar

48 Gifford, George, A sermon on the parable of the sower (London, 1582);Google Scholar Harrison, William, The difference of hearers. Oran exposition of the parable of the sower. Delivered in certaine sermons at Hyton in Lancashire (London, 1614). On Harrison’s sermon, sec Christopher Haigh, ‘Puritan Evangelism in the Reign of Elizabeth I’, EHR 92 (1977), pp. 3058.Google Scholar

49 Sermons by Latimer, Hugh, ed. Corric, G. E. (Cambridge, 1844), p. 155.Google Scholar

50 Dod quoted in Collinson, , Religion of Protestants, p. 231 Google Scholar; Bernard, , The faithfull shepherd, pp. 98, 107.Google Scholar

51 Jensen, Peter F., ‘The Life of Faith in the Teaching of Elizabethan Protestants’ (unpublished Oxford D.Phil, thesis, 1979), p. 29.Google Scholar

52 Works of Herbert, p. 256.

53 Bernard, Richard, Two twinnes or two parts of one portion of Scripture. I is of catechising. II of the Ministers maintenance (London, 1613);Google Scholar A double catéchisme (Cambridge, 1607); The common catéchisme (London, 1630); Good Christian loolie to thy creede (London, 1630).

54 Bernard, , The failhfull shepherd, p. 100.Google Scholar Perkins’s editor William Crashawe expressed himself in similar terms in what was evidently a commonplace, declaring that catechizing was ‘the life of preaching and such a meanes of knowledge as without it all preaching is to little purpose’. (Quoted, Ian Green, “For Children in Yeeres and Children in Understanding”: the Emergence of the English Catechism under Elizabeth and the Early Stuarts’, JEH 37(1986), p. 417)

55 Kilby, Richard, Hallclu-iah: Praise ye the Lord for the unburthening of a loaden conscience (Cambridge, 1618), pp. 823.Google Scholar For more about Kilby, see pp. 00–00.

56 Jensen, , ‘The Life of Faith’, pp. 174228;Google Scholar Green, , ‘The Emergence of the English Catechism’, pp. 397425.Google Scholar

57 See as examples of pessimistic pastoral perception Corderoy, Jeremy, A short dialogue, wherein is proved that no man can he saved without good workes (Oxford, 1604)Google Scholar and Rogers, Timothy, The righteous mans evidence for Heaven. Or, A treatise shewing how every one while he lives here may certainly know what shall become of him after his departure out of this life (London, 1619).Google Scholar

58 Inman, Francis, A light unto the unlearned (London, 1622), Epistle;Google Scholar Crashawe, William, Milke for babes. Or, a North-country catéchisme made plaine and easie, to the capacity of the simplest (London, 1628);Google Scholar Hicron, Samuel, The doctrine of the beginning of Christ (13 edn., London, 1626).Google Scholar

59 Preface by John Conant to Bernard’s posthumously published Thesaurus BiUicus (London, 1644), Sig. A3v.

60 Bernard, , The faithfull shepherd, pp. 1023;Google Scholar Lyford quoted by Green, , ‘The Emergence of the English Catechism’, p. 415.Google Scholar

61 Collinson, Patrick, ‘The English Conventicle’, SCH 23, pp. 2404.Google Scholar

62 CALC, MS X. 11.1, fols 229r, 230v.

63 Hajzyk, , ‘The Church in Lincolnshire’, pp. 22542.Google Scholar The episcopal hearings into the Williams case are documented in Lincoln Archives Office, MS Cj/12 (Episcopal Court Book 1598—1600) with the cause papers in Box 80/7.

64 Hajzyk, , ‘The Church in Lincolnshire’, pp. 2701.Google Scholar For the report of Bishop Neile’s visitors, see my ‘Lectures by Combination’, p. 483, and references there. How exceptional the doctrinal storm in the little pays of Sleaford may have been remains uncertain. In 1595 Bishop Fletcher of London reported the clergy of Colchester and Maldon as ‘at war with themselves, as well in matter of popular quarrels as points of doctrine’. (HM.C. Cal. Hatfield MSS 5, p. 394.) See also Peter Gunter’s A sermon preached in the countie of Suffolke before the clergie and laytie for the discoverie and confutation of certaine strange, pernicious and hereticall positions publickly delivered herd and mainteyned touching justification by a certaine factious preacher of Wickham Market in the said countie, by which divers, especially of the vulgar, fane and neare, were greatly seduced (London, 1615). Dr Freeman writes of the diocese of Durham in the 1620s and 1630s: ‘The unity in which they had previously lived… was destroyed by doctrinal argument.’ (‘The Parish Ministry’, pp. 408–17.)

65 This was affirmed by Nicholas Estwick in Bolton’s funeral sermon. See The life and death of M, Bolton, published with Mr Boitons last and learned worke of the foure last things (London, 1639), pp. 18–19.

66 Cade, Anthony, Saint Paules agonie. A sermon preached al Leicester at the ordinary monthly lecture (London, 1618), Epistle.Google Scholar

67 For some evidence of Egcrton’s religious environment, sec Acheson, R. J., ‘Sion’s Saint: John Turner of Sutton Valence’, Archaeologia Canliana, 99 (1983), pp. 18397.Google Scholar

68 CALC, MS X. 10. 20, fols 148v-02v, 211v-20r. However Mr Hudson’s sermon was perhaps not such an incoherent rigmarole as it was represented by his hearers. He seems to have been quoting from Sir Thomas Mote’s Dialogue Concerning Heresies which includes the story of St Francis reacting to the sight of a young man kissing a girl by going down on his knees to thank God ‘that charyte was not yet gone out of this wretched worlde’. Or did More and Hudson share a common source? (The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, 6, pt. ii, ed. Thomas M. C. Lawler, Germain Marc’Hadour and Richard C. Marius (New Haven, 1981), p. 287.)

69 CALC, MS X. 10.11, fols 185v-8v

70 Paupers and Pig Killers: the Diary of William Holland A Somerset Parson 1799–1818, ed. Jack Ayres (London, 1986 edn,), p. 118.

71 ‘Articles presented by a preacher of London called John Feld’, PRO SP 12/164/11; another version in Dr Williams’s Library, MS Morrice B II, fols. 94–6, calendared in The Seconde Parte of a Register, 1, pp. 284–6 as ‘Mr Feilde and Mr Egerton their tolleration’.

72 A parte of a register (Middelburg, 1593?), p. 317. Sec my The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (London and Berkeley, 1967), pp. 356–71 and, more fully, my unpublished London PhD. thesis, ‘The Puritan Classical Movement in the Reign of Elizabeth I’ (1957), pp. 716–54.

73 John Browne vicar of Loughborough to the chancellor of Lincoln Diocese, 22 July 1605; Lincoln Archives Office, MS COR/M/2, no. 8.

74 Miss Judith Maltby has investigated a number of these cases from East Anglia and Hunting donshire, evidently favouring the ‘Prayer Book Anglican’ thesis. (Information communicated in Oxford at a Colloquium for Local Reformation Studies, April 1980.) The case of Mr Gulliforde vicar of Wye in Kent, referred to twice above (pp. 192, 203) appears to have been of the same order, with parishioners objecting to various pieces of ‘puritan’ practice, especially in the administration of the occasional offices. Since Wye probably had more recusants than any other parish in East Kent 1 tend to be strengthened in a rather different estimate of these complaints as indicative of the habits of church papists.

75 Lake, , Anglicans and Puritans, p. 164.Google Scholar

76 Freeman, , ‘The Parish Ministry’, p. 55.Google Scholar

77 Lake, , Anglicans and Puritans? chapter 4, ‘Richard Hooker’.Google Scholar

78 Howson, , A second sermon, pp. 39, 43-4;Google Scholar Balcanquall, , The honour of christian churches, p. 22.Google Scholar

79 This was said in Barnstaple in the early 1580s by one of the supporters and offsiders of the radical minister Euscbius Paget, and in defiance of a faction of the town who had demanded the communion on Christmas Day. (Dr Williams’s Library, MS Morrice B II, fol. 69v.)

80 Boulton, Jeremy, ‘The Limits of Formal Religion: Administration of Holy Communion in Late Elizabethan and Early Stuart London’, London Journal, 10 (1984), pp. 13554.Google Scholar

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83 CALC, MS X. 10.13, fols 24 seq.

84 Collinson, , Religion of Protestants, p. ix n. 2.Google Scholar

85 Gracia Johnson, household servant of Henry Hayward, butcher of Hcrne in Kent, gave evidence in July 1606 in the case of Butler contra Crumpc of how on a certain Sunday she ‘made bold’ to sit at the end of the pew in Heme church where Mother Crumpe and Butler’s wife usually sat when Mother Crumpc came into church (late!) ‘and sat her downe uppon her knees in the same pewe… and when she arose from her kneeling she the said Susan Crompc set her selfe downe uppon the seat…’ (CALC, MS X. 11. 10, fol. 8r.)

86 Angier, John, An helpe to better hearts, for better times. Indeavoured in severall sermons preached in the year, 1638 (London, 1647), p. 75.Google Scholar

87 Mark Byford’s paper on William Sheppard of Heydon was communicated at the Colloquium for Local Reformation Studies held at Sheffield in April 1988 and will form part of his forthcoming Oxford doctoral dissertation on the Church and religion in Elizabethan Essex. I am most grateful to Mr Byford for allowing me to use his material on Sheppard.

88 Sheppard’s ‘Epitome’ occupies fols 100r-3r of the parish register of Heydon, Essex Record Office, MS D/P 135/1/1.

89 A similar pattern of charity is inferred in the will of John Gylderde, parson of Runwell, Essex, another celibate, made on 5 June 1551. The residue of Gylderdc’s estate was left to provide dowries for the poor maidens of the village and for ‘mending of the most noisome highways about Runwell”. (Greater London Central Record Office, MS DL/C/3 57, fols 36–7.1 owe this reference to Mr Brett Usher.)

90 This sermon, also entered in the parish register (fol. 57) proved a calamity for Sheppard, since in it he was moved by the occasion of the festival of Christ’s circumcision and naming as Jesus to exhort his parishioners, in 1581 of all years, to ‘studyc to be … true jesuytts’.

91 Carleton, George, The Life and Death of Bernard Gilpin (London, 1727 edn.), pp. 2031, 43–4, 912.Google Scholar Gilpin’s confessional ambivalence, of which there is some evidence in the Lift, is discussed by David Marcombe, ‘Bernard Gilpin: Anatomy of an Elizabethan Legend’, Northern History, 16 (1980).

92 Haigh, , ‘Anticlericalism and the English Reformation’, The English Reformation Revised, pp. 734.Google Scholar

93 Freeman, , ‘The Parish Ministry’, pp. 429, 438-9.Google Scholar

94 Ibid., pp. 418–19.

95 Collinson, , ‘Cranbrook and the Fletchers’, p. 427.Google Scholar

96 Thomas Ballow rector of Belleau (‘alias Helloe’) to the surrogate of Stamford, 24 August 1609; Lincoln Archives Office MS COR/M/2, no. 39.

97 For example, the godly Richard Rothwell’s daily routine was said to have consisted of morn ings spent in study and afternoons ‘going through his Parish and conferring with his people’. ( Clarke, , Lives of Thirty-Two English Divines, p. 70.)Google Scholar

98 Collinson, , Religion of Protestants, p. 106;Google Scholar Collinson, , Birthpangs of Protestant England, pp. 678.Google Scholar

99 Freeman, , ‘The Parish Ministry’, p. 384.Google Scholar

100 CALC.MSX. 11. 9, fol. 18’.

101 Collinson, Patrick, “A Magazine of Religious Patterns”: An Erasmian Topic Transposed in English Protestantism’, in Godly People, pp. 499526.Google Scholar

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103 The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F. N. Robinson (Oxford, 1957 cdn.), pp. 21–2.

104 Ex inf. Mark Byford.

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106 Ibid., p. 377.

107 Sharpe, J., Defamation and Sexual Slander in Early Modem England: the Church Courts at York, Borthwick Papers 58 (York, 1980);Google Scholar Sharpe, J., ‘“Such Disagreement berwyx Neighbours”: Litigation and Human Relations in Early Modern England’, in Disputes and Settlements: Law and Human Relations in the West, ed. Bossy, John (Cambridge, 1983);Google Scholar Ingram, Martin, Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England, 1570–1640 (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 292319.Google Scholar

108 This follows the suggestions of Ingram, Church Courts.

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110 Collinson, Patrick, ‘The Role of Women in the English Reformation Illustrated by the Life and Friendships of Anne Locke’, in Godly People, pp. 27387.Google Scholar I hope to publish more extensively on this theme under the title ‘“Not Sexual in the Ordinary Sense”: Women, Men and Religious Transactions’.

111 John Rylands University Library of Manchester, Rylands English MS 524.

112 Pantin, , English Church in the Fourteenth Century, pp. 197, 209.Google Scholar

113 Sermons and Remains of Hugh Latimer, ed. G.E. Come, PS (Cambridge, 1845), p. 180.

114 Cartwright, Thomas, Two very godly and comfortable letters (1589), in Cartwrightiana, eds Peel, Albert and Leland, H. Carlson, Elizabethan Nonconformist Texts 1 (London, 1951), pp. 88105.Google Scholar

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117 Sparrow, Anthony, A sermon concerning confession of sinnes, and the power of absolution (London, 1637), p. 17.Google Scholar Sparrow’s sermon was reprinted in 1704.

118 Spaeth, , ‘Common Prayer?’, pp. 12551.Google Scholar

119 How polemical is shown by the judicious Hooker’s autograph notes on the margins of the book written against him, A christian letter: ‘How this asse runneth kicking up his heels as if a summerfly had stung him.’ (Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity: Attack and Response, ed. John E. Booty, Folger Library Edition of the Work of Richard Hooker, 4 (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), p. 42.)