'When radical weaver Samuel Bamford first discovered Pilgrim's Progress, it impressed him as a thrilling illustrated romance: woodcuts of Christian's fight with Apollyon and his escape from Giant Despair encouraged "the exercise of my feeling and my imagination". Then The New Testament became "my story book and I read it all through and through, but more for the interest the marvellous passages excited, than from any religious impression which they created". At a bookshop he picked up stories about witches, Robin Hood, Jack the Giant Killer, St George and the Dragon and the History of the Seven Champions, all with the same deliciously garish woodcuts he had found in Bunyan. Since these stories followed the same narrative conventions, there was no reason to doubt them. "For my part I implicitly believed them all, and when told by my father or others that they were 'trash' or 'nonsense', and 'could not be true', I, innocently enough contrasted their probability with that of other wondrous things which I had read in books that 'it were a sin to disbelieve'."'
Century: 1700-1799 Reader/Listener/Group: Samuel Bamford Print: Book
Henry Cooke, in evidence to the Commissioners on Education in Ireland in 1825 [regarding books available in Irish schools]:
"'I recollect reading a book, called the Seven Champions of Christendom and Destruction of Troy; I recollect reading Hero and Leander, Gesta Romanorum, and Seven wise masters; I recollect having read the Chinese tales; I recollect having read the romance called Parismos and Parismenes, and Don Belianis of Greece; another extravagant tale I recollect having read, the History of Captain Freney, a robber ...'"
Century: 1700-1799 / 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Henry Cooke Print: Book
Henry Cooke, in evidence to the Commissioners on Education in Ireland in 1825 [regarding books available in Irish schools]:
"'I recollect reading a book, called the Seven champions of Christendom and Destruction of Troy; I recollect reading Hero and Leander, Gesta Romanorum, and Seven wise masters; I recollect having read the Chinese tales; I recollect having read the romance called Parismos and Parismenes, and Don Belianis of Greece; another extravagant tale I recollect having read, the History of Captain Freney, a robber ...'"
Century: 1700-1799 / 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Henry Cooke Print: Book
'At four and a half my great delight was poring over fairy phenomenons and the actions of
necromancers -- & the seven champions of Christendom in "Popular tales" has beguiled many a
weary hour.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Barrett Print: Book
