On his return from a visit to Scotland in 1617, James I was presented with a petition by people in Lancashire who resented attempts by magistrates there to stop them playing their traditional sports on Sundays. The king responded by issuing a declaration licensing the playing of certain sports on Sundays and published this declaration nationally the following year. It met with opposition, particularly from puritans who were actively engaged in a campaign to reform both the Church and society. As part of that campaign, they wanted the Lord’s Day to be strictly observed and devoted wholly to religious duties....

Long before the Reformation and the later emergence of English puritanism, the perceived dangers and evils of idleness, drinking and traditional Sunday revels were the focus of condemnation from some English moralists. Writing in the early fifteenth century, the anonymous author ofJacob’s Wellcondemned as guilty of the sin of sloth those people who spent their leisure time hunting, wrestling, going to wakes, dancing, drinking in taverns, and revelling and rioting on holy days and who neglected attending church and giving proper service to God.¹ He asserted that ‘idleness’ such as this led to the vices of pride, gluttony...

The concerns voiced by late medieval moralists over how the sabbath should be observed found considerably greater expression during the course of the sixteenth century. This was due, in large part, to the emergence of English puritanism in the final decades of the century when a new, fundamentalist form of sabbatarianism emerged. To understand these developments and the impact of puritan sabbatarianism it is important to first examine the impact of the break with Rome and the early English Reformation, and the changing attitudes to the Sabbath and holy days and to traditional festivity. The mid-Tudor period was a time...

Traditional attitudes to popular festivity and to Sunday observance both came under severe attack during the reign of Elizabeth I, when the very nature of the Sabbath and the question of any form of recreation on Sundays became the focus of an increasing number of radical Protestant polemics. Kenneth Parker has argued that the doctrine of a morally binding Sabbath was well established in England long before the Reformation and that the strident sabbatarianism of many puritans in the 1580s and 1590s was not an innovation but merely an elaboration of established, orthodox thinking regarding the Sabbath.¹ The early Christian...

Under James I there was a dramatic change in royal policy, with the publication of the King’sDeclaration to his Subjects, Concerning Lawful Sports to be Usedand the licensing of Sunday recreation by the Crown that the Declaration represented. During his reign, Sunday sports became more and more politicised, increasing polarisation and divisions in early Stuart society.

In 1607 Thomas Rogers renewed his attack on puritan sabbatarianism. In his preface to a revised edition of hisCatholic Doctrine of the Church of England, Rogers accused puritans of using the printed word to disseminate ‘their sabbath speculations’, and warned that...

Looking back at the bloody civil wars that had torn England apart in the 1640s, Richard Baxter claimed that: ‘The Warre was begun in our streets before the King or Parliament had any Armies’, adding that: ‘The hatred of the Puritans, and the Parliament Reformation, inflamed the ignorant, drunken, and ungodly rout … even before the Warres.’¹ There is no doubt that, long before the country descended into physical conflict, tensions in Caroline society increased between the ‘godly’ puritans and those who they viewed as ‘ungodly’ people resistant to reformation. It is now widely accepted that arguments over religion and...

James I’s Declaration of Sports had been unpopular, both with puritans and with many more moderate Protestants, and he had wisely decided not to press its enforcement. By the time that Charles I issued his revised Declaration in 1633, political, social and religious tensions had increased considerably and the reaction was correspondingly more intense. Moreover, Charles fully intended to enforce his Declaration and the reading of it became a test of loyalty to the Crown.¹ As early as December 1633, Strafford, the Lord Deputy of Ireland, was informed by a source in England that: ‘Here begins to be much difference...

Although the royalists lost the Civil War, the execution of Charles I and the establishment of the Commonwealth did not settle the issue of Sunday observance. Nor did it represent the comprehensive defeat of popular revelry that Charles’ puritan opponents had hoped for. Indeed, the godly found it necessary to continue to call for the suppression of wakes, May games and sports ‘which trained up People to Vanity and Loosness long after the king’s death’.¹ Reacting to continued revelry in parts of the country, Parliament – which had already enacted sabbatarian legislation during the 1640s – passed two further laws...