A HISTORY OF LEICESTERSHIRE on information received ; and the names of some of the priests here men- tioned show that it was possible to continue such ministrations for ten or fifteen years without arrest ; but everyone who had mass said in his house knew well that at any time of alarm at home or abroad he might wake at midnight to find his house surrounded by soldiers, and himself called to stand trial for his life. The crisis was real, the danger and the plots were real ; yet at this distance of time we can surely afford a little sympathy for those who were innocent of all plots and clung to their religion at such heavy cost. The author of the Anatomy of Melancholy was born at Lindley in 1576, and died rector of Seagrave, in this county, in 1640 ; but though he speaks with impartial scorn both of Papists and Brownists, it would not be fair to reckon him as a representative churchman of his day. His testimony is of some value, however, when he discourses on the distressed and miserable condition to which many of the Elizabethan clergy were reduced by the covetousness of ' griping patrons.' He says that it was almost impossible to obtain a benefice without some ' simoniacal compact,' by which the incumbent agreed to pay the patron an annual pension, sometimes amounting to half his income. He declares that no profession was so ill rewarded as this. 165 A visitation of 1585 shows several churches of this archdeaconry in decay, and many other unsatisfactory features besides. There were unseemly brawls in church at Medbourne and Ratcliffe Culey, and cases of immorality were presented very frequently everywhere. The vicars of Stoughton, Barkby- cum-Thurnby, Frolesworth, and St. Martin's, Leicester, refused to wear the surplice at service time ; the homilies and injunctions were also evaded. 166 Nonconformity of the latter type was evidently on the increase in the county ; it had, indeed, some sort of organization as early as i58a. 167 And besides the clergy who held benefices in the Church without conforming to the rubrics of the Prayer Book and the injunctions of their bishops there were in 1590 also some sectaries, probably Brownists or Anabaptists, who were at the next assizes to receive ' such punishment as was due to their deserts in open professing of such dangerous errors.' 168 Ashby de la Zouch was still a stronghold of Puritanism ; Gilby had been succeeded by Arthur Hildersham, a divine much admired by Fuller, in spite of his persistent refusal of conformity. He was suspended from preach- ing by the High Commission Court in June, 1590, for six months; by Bishop Chaderton in 1605 for more than two years ; by Bishop Neile in 1 6 1 1 for more than ten years ; and, finally, for a short time by the Eccle- siastical Court at Leicester in 1631. His difficulties were the same as those of the ordinary Puritan clergy of the day : the use of the surplice and the cross in baptism, and the order for kneeling at communion. 169 A notable schoolmaster called Brinsley kept school in the same town for many years and brought up his scholars to the same opinions until he was deprived. 1 170 u Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, pt. i, sec. 2, m. 3, sub-sec. 15. 66 From MS. Visit. Rep. Alnwick Tower, Lincoln. 17 Hist. AfSS. Com. Rep. xii (9), 149. (Minute bk. of meetings of Puritan mins. divers cos.)
- Acts ofP.C. xx, 85.
69 Fuller, Eccl. Hist.xi, 142. Hildersham was leader of a Puritan deputation to King James I in 1604, and was imprisoned in consequence. Frere, Hut. of the Engl. Ch. 317.
- o William Lilly, Hut. of his own Life and Times (ed. 171 5), 4.
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