A HISTORY OF GLOUCESTERSHIRE 



if there were any who wrongfully took advantage of the king's Declaration of 

 Sports, indulging in recreation without having attended church. He bade 

 every incumbent or curate endeavour, if possible, especially in market towns, 

 to read short morning prayers at six o'clock ' before men go to their work,' 

 and advised preachers to set store not so much on ' long preaching or often 

 preaching ' as on ' painful and profitable preaching,' and to labour not ' to 

 nourish and increase controversies in religion but rather to reconcile 

 them ' . . . and to instruct their people ' in points of devotion, piety, 

 charity, mortification, and such like necessary principles and articles of our 

 faith wherein all Christians agree.' In the report of the diocese which he 

 sent to Laud in 1634, he certified that he had put down some lecturers and 

 set up others, but he neither knew nor could conjecture that there was any one 

 ' unconformable man in all his diocese.' * ' If it be true,' commented Laud, 

 * it is a great clearing of those parts which have been so much suspected.' 



Goodman also stated that he had been obliged to ordain ' some very 

 mean ministers to supply cures as mean,' and in 1635 he informed Laud that 

 the county was very full of impropriations, which made the ministers poor, 

 and their poverty made them 'fall upon popular and factious courses.' 2 

 Referring to the appropriations of Berkeley, Wotton, Almondsbury, and 

 Ashleworth, Smyth, the steward of the Berkeleys, wrote : ' Three of the cures 

 in those great and populous parishes are now served by poor hirelings with 

 beggarly stipends.' 8 ' Appropriations are yet suffered to live in this daylight 

 of the Gospel to the great hindrance of learning, the impoverishment of the 

 ministry, the decay of hospitality and infamy of our religion and profession.'* 

 Among the Puritan preachers who had been deprived for nonconformity was 

 Humphrey Fox, who lost the cure of Forthampton about 1630, and lived at 

 Tewkesbury until 1640." John Geering, the minister of Tewkesbury, was 

 summoned before the High Commission Court in 1631, and was suspended 

 and deprived by Goodman.' John Workman, who had held the corporation 

 lectureship in St. Michael's, Gloucester, for thirteen years, was tried by the 

 High Commission Court for sermons in which he had not only preached 

 rabidly against pictures and images in churches and the crime of dancing, but 

 had attacked the clergy with great violence, and prayed from the pulpit for 

 the States of Holland and the king of Sweden before the king's majesty. 7 He 

 was suspended, excommunicated, ordered to recant his * erroneous and scan- 

 dalous doctrine,' condemned in costs and imprisoned. The corporation, in 

 defiance of the court's decision, granted him an annuity of 20, and accord- 

 ingly the mayor and aldermen were summoned as delinquents, their deed was 

 cancelled, and two of the defendants were fined 10 each. There is some 

 evidence of opposition to the king's Declaration of Sports. In 1633 

 Richard Capel, who had held the rich living of Eastington for twenty years and 

 was a noted preacher, resigned on the plea that he could not first read God's 

 command to keep holy the Sabbath day, and then King Charles's command 

 to break it. 8 The preacher of the afternoon sermon at Ashton-under-hill in 

 1635 inveighed against the profanation of the Sabbath by sports. 9 



1 Laud's Works, v, pt. ii, 330. ' Ibid. 336. * Smyth, Lives of the Berkeley: (ed. Maclean), i, 68. 



4 Ibid, iii, 88. Glow. N. and Q. i, 412. 



6 Ibid. 431 ; Rep. of Cases in Courts of Star Chamber and High Com. (Camd. Soc.), 244. 



' Laud's Works, iv, 236 ; Lloyd, State of Religion in Gloue. 32. 



6 Gloue. N. and Q. ii, 522. Ibid. 449. 



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