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By Root 1300 0

this led to the issue of a new Book of Sports. It defined those recreations that were lawful on the Lord’s Day but was seen as far too indulgent by advanced Protestants, among whom there were many with strict sabbatarian views. Although it appears that many ministers had been able to avoid condoning its provisions, the Caroline Book of Sports, first issued in 1634, was much disliked in certain circles. It allowed dancing, May games and archery, but not before the end of divine service, and disallowed more harmful pastimes such as bear- and bull-baiting. However, what was in one sense a measure of discipline – making it clear what forms of recreation were allowable-was in another a measure of licence, and it allied Laudian ceremonial with a relatively relaxed view of popular festive culture.42

Condemnation of the Book of Sports had been added to a Commons order on religion on the eve of the recess in 1641 by Simonds D’Ewes. While a law student D’Ewes had been disgusted by the spectacle of the Lords of Misrule – a ritual of inversion in the Christmas season in which someone was elected to preside over ‘revels’ in a great man’s house. A convinced Puritan hostile to such festive pastimes – not harmless sociability, but a celebration of sinfulness – D’Ewes was naturally opposed to the licence that the Book of Sports offered. The initiative to abolish it ran out of time before the harvest recess, however. In 1643 the Book was unrepealed, but also unenforced. Moves against it were recommenced in February, in the weeks of the crucial measures of financial and administrative reorganization. On 15 February an ordinance had been passed exhorting all good subjects in England and Wales to repent their sins, which were the cause of the war, so that ‘we may obtain a firm and happy peace both with God and Man’. Among the sins enumerated were ‘wicked prophanations of the Lord’s Day, by sports and gamings, formerly encouraged by authority’.43

Burning the Book of Sports was further testimony to the fact that the material and administrative radicalism of the parliamentary cause was in the support of a social and cultural reformation. It may have had a more immediate meaning too: one of the places at which the Book was burnt was the now empty site of Cheapside Cross. The destruction of both the cross and the Book took place in maypole season, and maypoles had become something of a rallying point for anti-Puritanism.44 What was aimed at here was an orderly but zealous reformation, the use of secular power to achieve godly aims. Iconoclasm by committee was allied to a godly reformation of manners, and the promotion of a more sober devotion. It was an assertion of the proper relationship between zeal, law and social order.

Although there seems to be a connection between these reforming impulses and military fortunes in the war, it is difficult to know exactly what the connection was. The day before the order was given for the cross to be demolished the Earl of Essex had captured Reading. To some observers there was a direct connection – reformers had been emboldened by victory. Others thought that recent successes showed God’s favour for earlier measures of purgation – for example, the purging of Henrietta Maria’s chapel and the expulsion of the Capuchins -and hoped that renewed zeal would bring more victories. Robert Harley and Isaac Pennington seem to have thought the cross and similar symbols were an active impediment to victory, and their destruction a means of propitiating and assuaging God. For others orderly reformation like this might help to assure those concerned about social order that reformation could proceed by authority, without sedition.45 These measures might also have been intended to strengthen commitment, win God’s favour or, by the summer of 1643, to woo Scottish opinion by putting the parliamentary cause at the vanguard of advanced Protestantism.46 Among advanced Protestants, ensuring the preaching of the Word by purging the ministry, improving Sabbath observance, restricting the more ungodly elements of festive culture