I'll go back for a moment to my research on 'The Wild Rover', which I've already discussed far above:

Original, unsingable 13-verse C17 broadside is subject to a major edit, resulting in a much more singable 5-verse C19 broadside.

The original may have been unsingable to an audience possessed of a flabby modern bum, but if you were used to six-hour sermons while seated on a hard pew, a song that kept the moralizing under ten minutes would have come as light relief.


it may not be wholly right to say that 'the churches' 'viciously resisted' the temperance movement, even if the 'viciously' was omitted. Especially not when coupled with the statement that the early movement was 'entirely within secular social radicalism'.

In many cases the churches were closely tied to the big brewers. They not only refused the temperance campaigners the use of church halls (so they had to rally outdoors like the Covenanters), they preached against temperance as an anti-Christian ideology. Maybe not everywhere, but certainly in the big industrial cities where the temperance movement first took off. Churchmen needed guts to take a stand for temperance, though of course some always did.

This continues to the present day, with the Coors family contributing to the American religious right.