Two Calvinist Funeral Sermons

Read my most recent academic article, published just a few weeks before I was doxxed...

As many of you may know, I have a doctorate in medieval history from the University of Oxford. I wrote my DPhil (2015-2018) on the Reformation—the great schism that split Christianity in Western Europe about 500 years ago—and, in particular, the effects of the Reformation on a town in my native Dorset called Wimborne Minster, which is interesting for a number of different reasons.

Although I did a DPhil, I didn’t really want to be an academic. Nevertheless, I published quite extensively during the three years of my doctorate, including in the most prestigious journal of early-modern history, The Sixteenth Century Journal.

A few weeks before I was doxxed in July of last year, I published another academic article after a long hiatus—six years. I’d been sitting on it for some time, and I thought it was worth publishing rather than being left to languish in my Dropbox account.

During my DPhil research, I came across an obscure Puritan preacher in Dorset called Francis Frampton, whose book of manuscript sermons—sermons he had written out in a book, probably in draft form—had, by some strange twist of archival fate, ended up in the Folger-Shakespeare Library in Washington DC. I was initially due to fly out there to read the sermons, but then one of the librarians photographed the whole thing for me, which I transcribed in full on my computer from the comfort of my dressing-gown. Such is the life of an Oxford scholar.

Anyway, the article I produced based on the book of sermons is about Frampton himself, his life and milieu, but also more generally about what it was like being a Puritan preacher in the sixteenth century. The article also contains transcriptions of two of the short funeral sermons contained in the book, which are quite interesting and illustrative of his views, as a fairly typical Puritan of the time.

Here is that article, in full. I may also publish here some more of my academic work.

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of this deceased I say not much; to dispraise him befits not this place, and to praise him befits not my person; yet since this is my last office, since he is now to inherit wormes and goinge downe into the silence, I will not altogether let him goe in silence; his life was private and we must proceed by Amesius his rule, Quia consilia Dei occulta sunt caritate adsentandum est de singulis optime iudicare, because the counsell of God is secrett it is most agreeable ^^of Christian charity^^ to thinke the best of all men. Congregare nostrum, disgregare Christi. Ber. We make a congregacion, Christ a disgregacion twixt sheep & goates and who art thou that iudgest another mans servant Thou art inexcusable man whosoever thou art that iudgest another Ro. 2.1. his death, philosophically taken, pro via et pro termino, as well for his dyinge, as the act of dissolucion, exceeded not 2 howres, neither tedious nor sudden, like that that Oct. Caesar would alwaies wish might befall him and his friends, not longe enough enough [sic] to change panic into torment, nor so sudden to cut off hope of mercy & remission which after death be it never so sudden is impossible Heb. 9. 27 wherefore our church teaches us to pray against sudden death; To let passe his life or death Rethinke beinge dead hees now turnd preacher his coffin his pulpit, and his text that of Esais. All flesh his grasse, tellinge us, for there is no sermon to example; that it is appointed to men once to die; which of us shall be next we know not onely this we know the next is happiest for the good man is taken from the evill to come and made partaker of everlastinge blessedness with God grant us all ἀμήν [Amen]

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Concerning our departed brother whose ashes lie before us I have not much to say; my time in his company hath not bin past 4 howres in divided portions as I have visited him; but I am perswaded that he hath approved himselfe to every mans conscience in the sight of God, and needs not any examinacion from me; I have alwaies found him faithfull and patient, readily submittinge himselfe unto Gods purpose in all thinges & have as well received comfort from him as endeavoured to give it. That comforter I am perswaded had abundantly prevented me, by filling his hart with ioy in the holy Ghost and faith unfained; he did receive the crowne of old age, as Solomon calls them prov. 17. 6 Children children are the crowne of old age, and I am hartily perswaded that as he hath ceast from his labors so his workes follow him. Let those in charity bury his errors that are privy to them; no man lives and sins not; and let us tread in his holy steps so far as he followed Christ, that we may meet him with ioy in the resurrection and be partakers with him and the whole Church Triumphant in glory. Even so come Lord Jesus come quickly

Cui cum patre et spiritu sancto sit gloria in aeternum [For whom, with the Father and the Holy Spirit, let there be glory in eternity]

These two rather perfunctory funeral sermons are from the manuscript notebook of Francis Frampton, a minister who spent his entire career in his ancestral county of Dorset, from the beginning of the 1630s until his death in the mid-1640s. The notebook offers fascinating insight into the intellectual and religious world of a Calvinist minister of the time, as well as the practicalities of sermon-production and the more mundane tasks expected of the role. All of the sermons were clearly works in progress – heavily annotated, edited, emended and sometimes resumed at a later point or left completely unfinished. Alongside the sermons, which number almost 20, are lists of all his parishioners subdivided into families, persons, communicants and ‘catechists’ – those who were to be catechised; crosses against the names of certain of the communicants appear to indicate those who had failed to receive communion in a given year.[i]

Little about Frampton himself is known.[ii] The Framptons of Moreton had been an important Dorset family since the fourteenth century at least, when the manor of Frampton was acquired by Walter de Frampton through marriage. Over the centuries, the family played a more considerable part in local than national politics and life, representing boroughs such as Dorchester, and Weymouth and Melcombe Regis, and occasionally the shire, in Parliament, and also inter-marrying with other important Dorset families – the Trenchards, Binghams, Deverells and de la Lyndes.

Francis Frampton was born the son of Robert Frampton, of the Upwey branch of the Framptons. According to the records of Oxford University, he was born not at Upwey, in Dorset, but in Wiltshire. He matriculated in December 1628 at the age of 20, placing his birth in 1608 or perhaps late 1607. He received his BA in 1631 from Magdalen Hall, which was ‘regarded as having a strong Puritan element in [its] character before the civil war’, and his MA from St Mary Hall in 1633.[iii] The contents of the notebook itself were apparently written during the early years of his first cure, at East Holme, to which he was appointed in 1632, upon his ordination as a minister; the first page records that the book was bought in that year for a price (pretium) of 20 d. During his four years at East Holme, he may also have served as one of the three ministers at nearby Wimborne Minster.[iv] In 1636, he was appointed to the rectory of Studland. According to the parish registers, he was buried there on 7 April 1646, almost ten years after his wife Maria. He was survived by his wife Catherine – presumably his second – whose name appears in the institution record of his successor, John Beaumont. The Francis Frampton who later served at Milton Abbas, and is commemorated there with a floor slab, is likely to have been his son.[v]

By contrast with its author, the notebook has quite spectacularly broken the bounds of Dorset. In a classic archival twist of fate, it is now housed in the Folger-Shakespeare Library, Washington D.C., far beyond the reach of most amateur and even would-be professional students of Dorset’s religious history. Other important Dorset documents have wandered as far: a fifteenth-century book of hours containing a special set of devotions to St Cuthburga, the patron-saint of medieval Wimborne Minster, was once owned by a devout and literate layman of that parish, but is now part of the collection of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.[vi] Thanks to some persistence on this author’s part, however, and the generosity of Lincoln College, Oxford, Frampton’s notebook is now available to view in its entirety, for free, on LUNA, the Folger’s online catalogue of digital manuscripts.[vii]

The notebook comes bound together with a copy of Sternhold and Hopkins’ metrical settings of the Psalms of David; this format was not unusual.[viii] The Whole Book of Psalms was, with the vernacular Bible, one of the great successes of popular printing in early modern England – one of the ‘Elizabethan top ten’, as Beth Quitslund has put it. Vernacular psalm-singing was brought over from the Continental Reformed churches in the reign of the boy-king Edward VI; and after the brief hiatus of Mary’s reign and the restoration of the full medieval Latin liturgy, the practice was taken up again in the parish churches of Elizabethan England, where the psalms might be sung by the congregation with the support of the parish clerk, and in the cathedrals, where they might also be sung by a choir of men and boys, with the accompaniment of an organ.[ix] The virtue of these simple vernacular tunes was their intelligibility: unlike the elaborate Latin polyphony and organ-music of the late medieval church, the meaning of the psalms in English could be readily understood and the devotional and didactic elements were far more obvious. The vigour and popularity of this practice can easily be forgotten now that it is extinct in the Church of England – already the narrator of George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859) was able to lament ‘those lively psalm-tunes which died out with the last generation of rectors and choral parish clerks’ – but echoes of Elizabethan psalmody may still be heard north of the border, where the practice has never gone away.[x] To own a copy of the book in the sixteenth or early seventeenth century was, it would appear, an especial marker of piety. It was a frequent complaint of those rightly or wrongly labelled ‘Puritans’, such as the prominent Sabbatarian Nicholas Bownde, that only the most pious ever considered it a ‘matter of duty’ to sing the psalms at home.

Frampton’s sole addition to the printed psalms is a marginal annotation on the final page, written in his most elegant hand – unlike the rest of the notebook: ‘it is better to put trust in the Lord, than to put confidence in princes’. Could this quotation from Psalm 118 reveal a discomfort at policies in the Caroline church, under the direction of Archbishop Laud? Perhaps. In this regard, there may be a correspondence with another standalone quotation, on page three of the notebook itself: ‘quicquid delirant reges’, the first half of a famous sententia by Horace, the Roman poet. The full quotation, translated, is ‘Howsoever their kings rage, the Greeks suffer’.

Classical quotations and allusions are an integral part of the sermons as a whole. Aristotle, Plutarch, Euripides, Diogenes the Cynic, Ovid, Seneca, Tacitus – in Latin, Greek and English. It is difficult to resist the conclusion that the 23- or 24-year-old Frampton may have been out to impress the parishioners of East Holme; at times, the depth of reading on display stands in marked contrast to the quality and elegance of expression. A worthwhile comparison would be with the sermons of another godly Dorset minister, William Chubb, who preached in Dorset in the 1580s; he had a much better grasp of the need to tailor content and style to audience, no doubt as a result of greater experience in the parochial ministry. In two sermons delivered in one of Dorchester’s three parish churches, Chubb used simple language and popular metaphors to explain doctrine such as sola fide (justification by faith alone), and refrained from using the sort of classical allusions and quotations that he used so liberally when delivering sermons to his learned patrons, including William Paulet, the 3^rd marquess of Winchester.