Contrary to popular impression, the Puritan was no ascetic. If he continually warned against the vanity of the creatures as misused by fallen man, he never praised hair shirts or dry crusts. He liked good food, good drink and homely comforts; and while he laughed at mosquitoes, he found it a real hardship to drink water when the beer ran out.1 Bluntly, any attempt to say what ‘all Puritans’ were like is going to be misleading, given what a large, and often diverse, group they were. So, of course, some were quite dour: William Prynne, for instance, could write that ‘Christ Jesus our pattern . .
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