Curiosities of Puritan NomenclatureBardsley, Charles Wareing Endell
History
Curiosities of Puritan Nomenclature
Bardsley, Charles Wareing Endell
Names, Personal -- English
While these strange pranks were being played, the world was not asleep.
Calamy seems to have discovered a source of melancholy satisfaction in the
fact that the quaint names of his brethren were subjected to the raillery
of a wicked world. One of the ejected ministers was Sabbath Clark,
minister of Tarvin, Cheshire. Of him he writes:
"He had been constant minister of the parish for nigh upon sixty
years. He carried Puritanism in his very name, by which his good
father intended he should bear the memorial of God's Holy Day. This
was a course that some in those times affected, baptizing their
children Reformation, Discipline, etc., as the affections of their
parents stood engaged. For this they have sufficiently suffered from
Profane Wits, and this worthy person did so in particular. Yet his
name was not a greater offence to such persons than his holy life."
Probably Calamy was referring to the "profane wit" Dr. Cosin, Bishop of
Chester, who, in a visitation held at Warrington about the year 1643, is
said to have acted as follows:--
"A minister, called Sabbaith Clerke, the Doctor re-baptized, took's
marke, and call'd him Saturday."
That this was a deliberate insult, and not a pleasantry, Calamy, of
course, would stoutly maintain. Hence the above sample of holy ire.
Many of the names in the list I have recorded must have met with the
good-humoured raillery of the every-day folk the strangely stigmatized
bearer might meet. I suppose in good time, however, the owner, and the
people he was accustomed to mix with, got used to it. It is true they must
have resorted, not unfrequently, to curter forms, much after the fashion
of the now almost forgotten nick forms of the Plantagenet days.
Fight-the-good-fight-of-faith is a very large mouthful, if you come to try
it, and I dare say Mr. White or Brown, whoever he might be, did not so
strongly urge as he ought to have done the gross impropriety of his
friends recognizing him by the simple style of "Faith" or "Fight." Fancy
at a dinner, in a day that had not invented the convenient practice of
calling a man by his surname, having to address a friend across the table,
"Please, Fight-the-good-fight-of-faith, pass the pepper!" The thing was
impossible. Even Help-on-high was found cumbersome, and, as we have seen,
the Rector of Lydney curtailed it.
A curious instance of waggery anent this matter of length will be found in
the register of St. Helen, Bishopgate. The entry is dated 1611, just the
time when the dramatists were making fun of this Puritanic innovation, and
when the custom was most popular:
"Sept. 1, 1611. Job-rakt-out-of-the-asshes, being borne the last of
August in the lane going to Sir John Spencer's back-gate, and there
laide in a heape of seacole asshes, was baptized the ffirst day of
September following, and dyed the next day after."
This is confirmed by the burial records:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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