Early Modern History

One of the pleasures of searching databases is the prospect of making unexpected discoveries. Whilst casually searching Google's booksearch facility a few days ago, I came across The Life and Death of that Reverend and Holy Man of God, Mr Thomas Cawton. Cawton is probably best known for his February, 1649 sermon in London acknowledging Charles II as King and for his subsequent involvement in Love's Plot which led to him going to Rotterdam to take up a post as Minister to the English congregation there.

But Cawton was from 1636 to 1643 the Minister of Wivenhoe in Essex, the place in which I live. His biographers, all of them post-Restoration Presbyterian Ministers, described Wivenhoe as a "Town notorious for all manner of vice and wickedness, drunkenness and swearing abounded among them, but especially Sabbath-breaking." The only example of the latter 'sin' given was of fishermen going to sea on Saturdays to catch fish for sale at a market on Mondays. Fish was apparently sold right up almost to the Church door on Sundays. Cawton, however, proved resistant to gifts of fish on Sunday evenings and continued to denounce Sabbath-breaking until he had reformed the habits of his parishioners. He was apparently less successful in persuading sectaries in Colchester to change their views since he was assaulted by Anabaptists on his way home on one occasion. His lasting legacy to Wivenhoe was a new parsonage house with an orchard and fishpond which was constructed at a cost of £300 and which he left to his successor when illness obliged him to leave for a London parish in 1643.

The incidental details of life in Wivenhoe in the late-1630s and early-1640s are of local interest even though the whole work is clearly a piece of hagiography.

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