The seed beds of schism: scholarship boys, or the perils of upward social mobility

Barker, the tract tells us, was the son of a yeoman farmer recruited to the puritan ministry by way of Oundle School and Cambridge University. The tract used this entirely conventional progress of a towardly young lad from a plebian and unlettered background into the ministry as the launching pad for an extended disquisition on what we might term the social origins or causes of puritan religion. As things stood, the universities and church were being flooded by far too many young from humble backgrounds, desperate to make their way as scholars and clergymen. At the same time, even the humblest gentleman was determined to have his own chaplain, dancing attendance on him at all times. The result was a synergy of disorder and dysfunction, as the pretensions to various sorts of social and spiritual power and status of both the puritan gentry and the clergy came together to produce the debased and disorderly religious forms and social connections that constituted puritan religion. What linked both the lay and clerical sides of the equation was social mobility; the aspiration of the plebian and ill-educated young men entering the ministry and of their patrons amongst the provincial gentry to forms of social, religious and, ultimately, political status and authority to which they had no just claim and of which they could have no legitimate expectation.

Thus Markwell lamented that ‘the foolish father, many times, is found to be a fighter against nature … fondly endeavouring to make’ his son ‘a scholar, whom nature intended for a carpenter, locksmith or a wheelwright and had he been put to any of these trades, peradventure he would have proved an excellent workman and have thriven in the world, whereas, for all the cost and pains his father hath been at for his education, all the Latin he has lies in the dripping pan which his mother hath bequeathed to him after her death, and for Greek he hath none but what his breeches speak between the legs.’ All of which had egregious social and political effects; not only was ‘the commonwealth’ robbed ‘of the benefit she should have received by the work of an excellent shoemaker or a cloth worker’, the church was ‘also wronged’ by ‘having such unworthy members … put upon her’.