If you thinke I goe
about to defend Church-ales, with all their faults, you wrong your
iudgement, & your iudgement wrongeth mee. I would rather (as a
Burgesse of this ale-parliament) enact certaine lawes, by which such
assemblies should be gouerned: namely, that the drinke should neither
be too strong in taste, nor too often tasted: that the ghests should
be enterlarded, after the Persian custome, by ages, yong and old,
distinguished by degrees of the better and meaner: and seuered into
sexes, the men from the women: that the meats should be sawced with
pleasant, but honest talke: that their songs should be of their
auncestours honourable actions: the principall time of the morning,
I would haue hallowed to Gods seruice: the after-noones applied to
manlike actiuities: and yet I would not altogether barre sober and
open dauncing, vntill it were first thoroughly banished from mariages,
Christmas reuels, and (our Countries patterne) the court: all which
should be concluded, with a reasonable and seasonable portion of the
night: and so (sayd hee) will I conclude this part of my speech, with
adding onely one word more for my better iustification: that in
defending feasts, I maintayne neither Paradox, nor conceite in
nubibus, but a matter practised amongst vs from our eldest
auncestours, with profitable and well pleasing fruit, and not onely
by our nation, but, both in former ages, by the best and strictest
disciplined common wealth of the Lacedemonians, who had their
ordinary Sissitia, and now in our dayes, as well by the reformed,
as Catholike Switzers, who place therein a principal Arcanum imperij.
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