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By Root 1435 0

was ambiguous – the criticism might have predated knowledge of the Queen’s participation – but the implication was a damaging one. However, Histrio-Mastix was dangerous as much for its tone – highly intemperate and disrespectful – as its content and this earned it special treatment. Lord Cottington, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, ordered it to be ‘burnt in the most public manner that can be. The manner in other countries is… to be burnt by the hangman, though not used in England. Yet I wish it may, in respect of the strangeness and heinousness of the matter contained in it, to have a strange manner of burning, therefore I shall desire it may be so burnt by the hand of the hangman’. It was on this occasion that Prynne lost the first parts of his ears: set in a pillory at Westminster and Cheapside, one of his ears cropped in each place and copies of his book burned before him. It was said that he nearly suffocated from the smoke.38

Burnings characteristically took place in large public spaces – Westminster, St Paul’s Churchyard (heart of the book trade), Smithfield, Cheapside. A pamphlet of 1642 describes one such ritual. Scottish texts were burned in 1640, presumably some of those that cultivated support for the Covenanters and thereby encouraged the King to issue a proclamation declaring it treason to assist them. If it was these texts, the point was reinforced with some dramatic theatre:

the common hangman,… came in great state, as if he had been to bishop or brand Bastwick or Burton again, to the palace yard (alias the prelates purgatory) with a halter in each hand and with two trumpeters before him, and two men with a few loose papers following him; where after reading of the proclamation, Gregory very ceremoniously put fire to the faggots, and so the poor innocent papers paid for it. When he had done he cried, ‘God save the king’, and flourished his ropes, [adding] ‘if any man conceal any such papers, he shall be hanged in these halters’; with which words I was so afraid, that I ran home and burnt all my papers, and so saved him a labour.39

During the 1640s book-burning took off, alongside publishing: perhaps with greater freedoms came greater anxiety and increased severity at the margins. Certainly books were burned in far greater numbers in these years: thirteen in 1642 alone, another nine during 1646. Alongside three newsbooks, sixty pamphlets, books and broadsheets were condemned between 1640 and 1660. It was now separated from the physical punishment of the author, and was much more clearly a dramatic statement of anathema. Sir Edward Dering, John Milton, Richard Overton and John Lilburne (the latter the most burned author of the period) all saw their books burned without suffering any physical mutilation themselves. This could not serve to censor, either: Dering noted that 4,500 copies of his speeches had already been printed, and more were on the way. The fires did not consume them all and, in fact, a number of contemporaries noted that a book-burning was good for sales.40 Burning the Book of Sports was political theatre as much as an act of censorship, and it made a very clear point.

Hostility to the Book of Sports was another touchstone of reformers, and another point at which concerns about religious decency intersected with questions of social order. ‘This book’, according to Certaine informations, was ‘first made and allowed in the reign of King James, and since his decease, it hath been pressed by the Bishops with such rigour, that many ministers, which refused only to read it in their Churches, have been [?] and deprived of their benefices, contrary to all laws both civil and ecclesiastical’.41

In 1635 controversy had broken out over church ales (a kind of fund-raising knees-up) in Somerset. An assize judge, motivated as much by personal animosity as religious conviction, had banned the ales on the grounds that they promoted disorder, but Charles and Laud took a different view. Enquiries made locally found evidence that they were harmless affairs, and that they encouraged attendance at church, and