The Blazing World
Metadata
- Author: Jonathan Healey
- ASIN: B0B5ZSGM58
- ISBN: 0593318358
- Reference: https://amazon.co.uk/dp/B0B5ZSGM58
- Kindle link
Highlights
A watershed had been reached in 1588−9, when a pamphlet war exploded in which scabrous publications under the pseudonym of Martin Marprelate (‘Martin Bash-bishop’) made noisy calls for the abolition of the episcopacy. — location: 270
Here, social change was having a significant impact on the way people thought. As the economy became more complicated and prosperous, the law became more thoroughly embedded in life. — location: 758
economic growth had rapidly outpaced the supply of coins. So more and more transactions were undertaken using credit, meaning this was fertile territory for battles over who owed what to whom. — location: 760
‘Honest mirth is not only tolerable but praise-worthy and the prohibition of it likely to breed discontent.’ — location: 972
In August 1628, John Felton bid farewell to his family in London. He had lived in a lodging house in Fleet Street for some nine months. Fallen on difficult times, Felton was troubled with recurrent bad dreams, of fighting and war. For he was a survivor of both Cadiz and Île de Ré. He was, his brother later said, a man ‘sad and heavy and of few words’.35 Elizabeth Josselyn, with whom he shared lodgings, agreed that he had few words, but noted that he did like reading. More to the point, Felton was overdue wages, and, he said, he should have been promoted. To push his cause, in July he had visited a scrivener in Holborn to procure petitions for the Privy Council. In the shop, he saw copies of the Commons’s remonstrance against Buckingham. He took one away and pored over it in the Windmill Inn on Shoe Lane. He had heard rhymes and gossip about the duke, a man whose incompetence he had experienced first-hand. Some of those rhymes predicted Buckingham would shortly be dead. — location: 1594
It was a set of principles that, for example, allowed him to countenance projects like vast schemes to drain the eastern fens because, despite the hardship they obviously caused to many poor families, they not only brought public gains in the shape of improved food production, but also brought order to a previously unruly, untamed landscape. ‘It is better the subject suffer a little’, ran one of his maxims, ‘than all lie out of order.’20 — location: 1758