'At that time,' he said, 'the holy Sabbaths of the Lord were wholly spent, in all places about us, in May-games and May-poles, pipings and dancings, for it was a rare thing to hear of a preacher, or to have one sermon in a year.'
[3] He left the university in 1579, and in the following year was married by his parents to a widow named Elizabeth Cowper,[4] whose father was Mr. Hardware, who had been twice mayor of Chester.
One of these, Robert Pashfield, had a leathern girdle, which served him as a memoria technica for the Bible, marked into portions for the books, with points and knots for the smaller divisions.
William Perkins, the puritan divine, called Bruen Stapleford, 'for the practice and power of religion, the very topsail of all England.
Ann died after ten years of married life,[5] and as widower he broke up his household with its twenty-one boarders and retired to Chester.
There he cleared the debt of his estate, saw some of his children settled, and maintained the poor of his parish by the produce of two mills in Stapleford, where he returned with his third wife, Margaret.
The views that led Bruen to iconoclasm in his local church were described by William Hinde, curate at Bunbury, Cheshire.
[3] Bruen’s life has attracted attention from historians, being included in Urwick’s Historical Sketches of Nonconformity in the County Palatine of Chester (1864) and in George Ormerod’s History of the County Palatine and City of Chester (1882), and being noted as a model puritan by Robert Halley in Lancashire: its Puritanism and Nonconformity (1869).
is a compilation by him entitled 'A godly profitable collection of divers sentences out of Holy Scripture, and variety of matter out of several divine authors.'