ABSTRACT
On Sundays in the later 1620s, the village of Eaton Constantine in Shropshire echoed to the sounds of music and dancing. In the mornings the aged parson would say common prayer briefly in the church-often employing a lay reader to read it for him, for his eyesight was failing-and ‘the rest of the day even till dark night almost, except eating-time, was spent in dancing under a maypole and a great tree…where all the town did meet together’. Not quite every inhabitant gathered for this communal merriment, however, for near to the dancing place stood the house of Richard Baxter the elder, a yeoman freeholder of modest prosperity-‘free from the temptations of poverty and riches’, as his son later put it. Baxter did not participate, for he was one of those who suffered ‘the derision of the vulgar rabble under the odious name of a Puritan’. In his youth he had shared some of the ungodly pastimes of the day, being particularly given to gaming, but in later life he had undergone a religious conversion. In this experience he had owed little to the aid of the established church of England, most of the local clergy being ‘poor ignorant readers and most of them of scandalous lives’. He was, however, a literate man and ‘by the bare reading of the Scriptures in private, without either preaching or godly company, or any other books but the Bible’, he had weaned himself from the customary behaviour of the neighbourhood and learned to adopt a stricter course of life. In his house Sundays were spent in reading the Scriptures, a godly exercise rendered difficult by ‘the great disturbance of the tabor and pipe and noise in the street’. His son Richard junior, hearing the sounds of the revellers, often felt his mind ‘inclined to be among them’ and sometimes indeed ‘broke loose from conscience and joined with them’. ‘But when I heard them call my father Puritan,’ he later recalled, ‘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.’1
