A petition, which was presented here (some say at Meyerscough) to King James, by a great number of Lancashire peasants, tradesmen, and servants, requesting that they might be allowed to take their diversions (as of old accustomed) after divine service on Sundays, is said to have been the origin of the Book of Sports, soon after promulgated by royal authority.  James being persuaded those were Puritans who forbade such diversions, and that they were Jewishly inclined, because they affected to call Sunday the Sabbath, recommended that diverting exercises should be used after evening prayer, and ordered the book to be read publicly in all churches; and such ministers as refused to obey the injunction were threatened with severe punishment in the High Commission Court.  This legal violation of the day which is unequivocally the Christian Sabbath, roused at the time the indignation of the seriously disposed, and has been frequently reprobated by historians.  Foremost of its opposers, and eminent in example, stands the virtuous and firm Archbishop Abbot, who, being at Croydon the day it was ordered to be read in churches, flatly forbade it to be read there; which the King was pleased to wink at, notwithstanding the daily endeavours that were used to irritate the King against him.  The Book of Sports is not, however, without its apologists among modern writers.  The following are Mr D’Israeli’s remarks on the subject:—­“The King found the people in Lancashire discontented, from the unusual deprivation of their popular recreations on Sundays and holidays after the church service:  ’With our own ears we heard the general complaint of our people.’  The Catholic priests were busily insinuating among the lower orders that the Reformed religion was a sullen deprivation of all mirth and social amusements, and thus ‘turning the people’s hearts.’  But while they were denied what the King terms ‘lawful recreations’ (which are enumerated to consist of dancing, archery, leaping, vaulting, May-games, Whitsun-ales, morris-dances, and the setting up of Maypoles, and other manly sports), they had substituted some vicious ones.  Alehouses were more frequented, drunkenness more general, tale-mongery and sedition, the vices of sedentary idleness, prevailed, while a fanatical gloom was spreading over the country.  The King, whose gaiety of temper instantly sympathised with the multitude, being perhaps alarmed at this new shape which Puritanism was assuming, published the Book of Sports, which soon obtained the contemptuous name of ‘The Dancing Book’” (Life of James, p. 135).  In reply to this view of the subject we shall, for the present, conclude with Dr Whitaker’s remark, that “The King was little aware of the effects which the ill-judged licence was likely to produce on the common people.  The relics of it are hardly worn out to this day; and there is scarcely a Sunday evening in any village of the county of Lancaster which does not exhibit symptoms of obedience to the injunction of honest ‘recreation.’”—­Royal Progresses of James I.