THOU SHALT NOT

In the 16th and 17th centuries, Puritans followed a strict moral code in order to live a life that was centred around following God’s laws. Thou shalt not…

1. Celebrate Christmas Puritans outlawed Christmas as they said it encouraged excessive drinking, dancing and eating and gave “liberty to carnal and sensual delights”. During the Civil Wars, there were riots in London as a series of shops that had opened on Christmas Day came under attack. Celebrations took place in secret.

2. Ignore the superstitions Witches were part of a wider tapestry of superstition in the Early Modern period. Forgetting to carry a luck bone, getting out of the wrong side of the bed, tripping over, turning back to get something you’ve forgotten when embarking on a journey, and dropping bread and butter with the butter side down were all considered bad luck.

3. Converse with papists After the failed Gunpowder Plot, suspicion and hysteria about Catholics grew to extraordinary heights and an entire industry of anti-Catholic pamphlets, playing cards and poetry sprang up, much of it hinting to the motives of Charles I and his French (and Catholic) wife Henrietta Maria.

4. Take your medicine 17th-century medicine was a risky affair, not only because of a limited knowledge of the body and the risks of being conned by a ‘quack’, but because the boundary between magic and medicine was often conflated. Concocting your own medicine with herbs was enough to see you condemned.

5. Go to the theatre Theatre was closed down at the start of the Civil Wars, perhaps because of its historic role in rebellion – memories of the 1601 failed uprising of the Earl of Essex still lingered. When the Puritans took control, they associated theatre with licentiousness and even prostitution, and thought the theatres were best left closed.

6. Dance around the maypole The tradition of Morris Men dancing around a maypole was deemed too licentious for Puritans, while the ritual of women collecting flowers from the woods to decorate maypoles was particularly problematic, as there was no way of policing what women ‘got up to’ in the woods.

7. Enjoy sports Sports were viewed with the same suspicion as other gatherings – they encouraged debauchery when the emphasis should be on the teachings of God. But there was also a fear that physical exercise and competition might lead to the men committing ‘sodomitical’ acts. Many local ‘Olimpick Games’ in villages were cancelled.

8. Mention Scotland… Scotland would not go quietly into republicanism, and the Presbyterian Covenanters rebelled against Cromwell when he took control of England. They got as far as crowning Charles II ‘King of Scots’ at Scone before Cromwell mounted a successful invasion and took over the country.

9. …or Ireland Ireland was often described as lawless and ungovernable during the Early Modern period. Cromwell mounted a brutal and violent invasion before introducing harsh laws against the majority Catholic population and forcibly indenturing many to go and work on plantations in the Caribbean.

10. Upset the Fifth Monarchists Fifth Monarchists were an apocalyptic sect who believed that Jesus was about to descend and begin a 1,000- year reign, pre-empting the Day of Judgement. They became particularly obsessed with the year 1666 – the ‘year of the beast’ – and were able to secure key positions for themselves in the Puritan regime.