In the prolonged run-up to the outbreak of civil war in 1640s England, the issues that divided Charles I from a significant number of his subjects and made each side unwilling to compromise included the observance of Sunday. Everyone agreed that, on this day, people should attend religious services in the morning and the afternoon. Disagreement arose over the rest of the day. Was it permissible for young men to engage in sports such as archery, which might make them better prepared for military action? Could parishes needing extra funds to repair a building use the festive event known as a “church ale” to do so? Could people dance and otherwise make merry, perhaps by watching the spectator sport of bear-baiting? Was the Fourth Commandment as binding on Christians as it was on Jews, and did it proscribe all of these possibilities? What in fact did it mean to “keep the Sabbath holy”? And what if some group insisted that no festivities of any kind should take place on that day?

Aistair Dougall revisits these questions via a book that focuses on a contentious text known as the “Book of Sports,” although its formal title was The Kings Majesties Declaration to his Subjects, Concerning Lawful Sports to Be Used. Addressed to the county of Lancashire when James I issued it in 1617, the document embraced all of England when the king reissued it in 1618. Fifteen years later, his son Charles I published the text anew. On both occasions, but especially in 1633, the “Book of Sports” became a bone of contention in a politics of religion that, for Dougall, pitted “puritans” against a diverse coalition that included two kings and a handful of clergy and bishops. Dougall's purpose is three fold: to explain why James I issued the “Book of Sports” and his son re-issued it; how it was enforced by county magistrates and local authorities, a topic that opens a broad survey of local efforts dating from the second half of the sixteenth century to curtail disorder; and why Sabbath observance became so politicized in the early seventeenth century. For him, the short answer to this last question is puritanism, an argument resting in part on the publication of a single book, Nicholas Bownd's The Doctrine of the Sabbath (1595), that condemned all forms of recreation on Sundays. There is, of course, other evidence that some in England and Scotland had adopted a high view of the Sabbath, as happened in the Directory of Worship issued by the Westminster Assembly, which called for “resting all that day, from all necessary labours; and an abstaining, not only from all sports and pastimes, but also from all worldly words and thoughts.” But on the basis of evidence provided by this book and by other studies of the politics that emerged around Sunday, a short answer will not do.

Reviewing this politics some years ago in The English Sabbath: A Study of Doctrine and Discipline from the Reformation to the Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), Kenneth L. Parker downplayed the narrowly “puritan” aspects of the controversy, pointing out, for example, that the 1617 Declaration was prompted by local circumstances James had unexpectedly encountered and that his goal was to resolve what counted as “lawful recreation” on Sundays, a question the king answered by censoring events such as bear-baiting and bowling, but permitting church ales, may games, morris dances, and May-poles. Impressed by the moderation of a text that he judged adequately Sabbatarian, Parker downplayed the singularity of puritanism. So did Patrick Collinson in a 1964 essay (reprinted in Godly People: Essays on English Protestantism and Puritanism [London: Hambledon, 1983]). There he called attention to Continental Reformed assertions, a number of them cited by Bownd, that the Fourth Commandment was “eternal” and that Sundays must be kept free of recreation. But the more important point he made was to trace the genealogy of “Sabbatarianism as Puritanism” to polemicists of the late sixteenth century eager to tar the English “Presbyterians” with extremism of every possible kind. The same kind of tar was being splayed about during the regime of Charles I and in more limited ways during the reign of his father. But let me change the question. Is it plausible that a single book (or two or three, if we add a couple of other texts of the 1590s) persuaded a large number of English Protestants to adopt a particular construction of “Sunday”? That evidence is scant of Bownd's influence other than responses by more moderate Churchmen and his being cited by William Prynne in the 1630s. The case for his book is also weakened by Ian Green's description of the Fourth Commandment as it was described in a great variety of English catechisms, some ostensibly “puritan,” others not (The Christian's ABC: Catechisms and Catechizing in England c.1530–1740 [Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1996]).

In other respects Dougall is enlightening. He points out that James I never tried to enforce the “Book of Sports,” whereas Charles I did. He questions another bit of mud slinging, Prynne's attempt to blame William Laud for initiating the 1633 reissue. What may interest some readers is the substantial amount of evidence about action and inaction at the local level, for example, bishops asking the parishes to curtail the disorders that everyone in authority found distasteful, the bishops in particular because they wanted people to focus on Sunday services. Meanwhile, county magistrates and justices of peace were complaining that Sunday sports and church ales led to brawls and sexual misbehavior. Wanting what is sometimes described as a “reformation of manners,” local officials tried to limit the extent of “lawful recreations” without paying much heed to the distinctions James made in the “Book of Sports.” At least this is how I read the evidence Dougall has carefully quarried out of local records. Methodologically, this evidence makes me wonder about the local significance of the missiles being hurled back and forth at the turn of the century and again during the reign of Charles as extremist Sabbatarians clashed with those who argued for latitude. We have learned from Collinson to liberate the term puritanism from extremism, be it of rhetoric or of social practice. Here, it regains some of the narrowness to which he and other students of Tudor-Stuart England objected.