Note 279 — Chapter VIII · THE PRINTED ENGLISH BIBLE

The assertion and defence of the Sacrament of the Altar (1546), f. 3. The amateur theologians and teachers who sprung up so plentifully with the growth of Lutheran ideas in England seem to have been a source of trouble to the clergy. There was no difficulty in Scripture so hard which these “barkers, gnawers, and railers,” as Roger Edgworth calls them, were not ready to explain, and even women were ready to become teachers of God’s Word, “and openly to dispute with men.” Speaking in Bristol, in Mary’s reign, he advises his audience to stick to their own occupations and leave theology and Scripture alone, “for when a tailor forsaking his own occupation will be a merchant venturer, or a shoemaker will become a grocer, God send him help. I have known,” he says, “many in this town that studying divinity has killed a merchant, and some of other occupations by their busy labours in the Scripture hath shut up the shop windows, and were fain to take sanctuary, or else for mercery and grocery hath been fain to sell godderds, steaves, pitchers, and such other trumpery.”