hood, were repeated and made the foundation of a story which spread all over the country-sidehow Sir Kenelm Digby had sent his mother a great store of arms, which was now laid up in her house, and how there was to be a great rising of Papists in Gayhurst grounds as soon as the King and his army were well out of the way in Scotland.[1] It was Lady Digby herself who had the matter sifted to the bottom ; but the story gives some idea of the impression made by the plot on the popular mind.
It was not, however, from the Papists [2] that the Church in Buckinghamshire had most to fear at this time. A visitation of the arch- deaconry in 1612 [3] shows a very different source of danger. Nine [4] churches were seriously out of repair, and in all but two [5] of these cases it was by the default not of the priest but of the people. At Datchet many of the roof tiles were missing, and the rain came in ; at Waven- don the seats were in decay, and the windows wanted glass in many places, so that ' starlings and other fowl ' came in and defiled the church, while even the Bible was torn and defective ; at Iver it rained even upon the communion table, and the pulpit was so ruinous that the steps to it were unsafe ; at Chalfont St. Peter one side of the church was ' so broken that a hog may creep through.' In a few cases it was com- plained that the people were not provided with sermons : more often that the preachers were not licensed. At Chenies the rector refused to wear the surplice and administered the sacrament to seated communi- cants ; at Great Marlow the vicar was said to be a man of evil life and a harbourer of recusants ; he certainly had a difficult parish to deal with.[6] A certain number of people were reported as refusing to come to church, or for working on Sabbaths and holy days. [7] The four churches which were in the archdeaconry of St. Albans were in better condition, being under the supervision of the vicar of Winslow, a
- ↑ S. P. Dom. Chas. I. ccxxxvii. 27-30, 42, 60 ; ccxxxviii. 33, 85. The story reads rather like the fable of the hen's feather. It seems to have arisen from the remark of an ostler that before the king returned there would be ' much hurly burly and many a fatherless child ' : which the boy repeated as ' Supposing men should go over their shoe tops in blood before Whitsuntide next ? ' with dark insinuations of things his father knew about Lady Digby ; and this grew in a short time in the mouths of parsons and attorneys of Northamptonshire into an elaborate and connected story. The last stage of it is pitiful enough : for it ends with a petition from Richard Sawyer, mole catcher, and Robert Johnson, for release from the Fleet prison, where they seem to have been for some long time, on the ground that they were ' miserable poor men, in wonderful distress, with nothing to live by but their labours.' They had starved already unless they had been something relieved by poor men, themselves prisoners in the same room.
- ↑ There are instances just at this time of a new method of dealing with recusants. In 1608 and 1610 the king granted to courtiers and others ' the benefit of the recusancy ' of the Mansfields of Taplow, Alice Penn, Austin Belson and others. There might be reason for compelling recusants to pay fines to the State : there could be no sort of excuse for thus making them a source of profit to their fellow-subjects. Cal. of State Papers, Jas. I. xxi. 48, liii., Ivii.
- ↑ Visitation Reports at Lincoln.
- ↑ Horton, Langley Marish, Twyford, Simpson, Hanslope, as well as those mentioned above.
- ↑ Hanslope and Iver ; the latter served at this time by a man who could not prove his orders, and altogether in bad condition.
- ↑ His accuser was himself accused of having ' married clandestine ' and without the ring : he denied this but owned he had said, ' Thou art more fit to feed swine in the field than people in the church.' There were seven puritan and three Roman recusants in the parish, and it was full of complaints.
- ↑ At Stony Stratford a woman was presented for a ' common scold,' and another for ringing a passing bell by way of a joke.
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