Many of Batman’s comments reflect his concerns as a married cleric responsible for a family as well as a parish, in difficult times of war and taxes. Bartholomew had implied in Book 6 that the sacred properties of spiritual birth, nurture and death are manifested in our experience of the times of day, food and drink, processes of growth and nurture, waking, moving, eating, exercising and sleeping. The glosses show that readers could understand the growth of the foetus and nurturing of the infant as the growth of the soul in the womb of the church and its nurturing by the clergy on the milk of the gospel. For the married Protestant minister of the 1580s — struggling to feed his family on an inadequate stipend, with responsibility for the actual upbringing and disposal of children, for care of the parish and control of dissidents, contending with bad harvests and economic exactions — the vision of heavenly peace and plenty and harmonious family life conjured up by Bartholomew in Book 6, De cena and De prandia, might have seemed ironic rather than consoling.[64] The entries in Batman’s Table of Principall Matters under the heading ‘Liber 6’ point to practical rather than allegorical concerns with domestic life and Batman's urge to control and restrain it:
Of conception
Of chusing wholsome Nurses
Of taking heede of matching with an uncleane Stocke
Against dronkennesse
Of modest Musike
A disquet minde is enemie to digestion
Batman’s marginal comments similarly show a practical concern with child rearing, discipline of servants, household economy, diet, health, and clean living: ‘A slowe horse must have a quicke spur: & a malepart servaunt meate, drinke, lodging, counsel worke, & stripes.’[65]
How does Batman deal with the sensuous imagery that permeates Books 6, 17 and 19, where Bartholomew conveys the delights of spiritual marriage and of the Lord’s familia and vineyard? Batman seems to call from the margins for restraint and denial: ‘Greedye apetite is hurtfull’, he notes in the chapter on the throat and swallowing.[66] At the end of Book 5’s chapter on the genital organs, he adds a long passage warning against ‘Carnall lust’. This ‘tourneth prosperitie into beggerye, health into sicknesse, the soule into sinne: to the bodies covering, the Leprosie, Podegra, the Poxe … griefe of conscience, and contempt of lyfe’. He goes on to say that ‘The love of the world consist in these 3 things, The lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, The pride of life’.[67] From Batman’s point of view salvation appears to lie not in voluntary poverty or celibacy, but in self-discipline within marriage and family life.
The care of family and parishioners required knowledge of remedies. Batman himself was evidently, from his many marginal comments, an expert in plants and their medicinal uses, noting for example: ‘The common elder is hot and dry in the third degree, especially in the bark, the leaves and buddes, the tender crops or buddes sodden in broath: or Potage, doth open the belly, purgeth flegma and cholarike humours’; and ‘Garden Parsely is hot in the second degree, and drye in the third, it s good against the cough’.[68] His comments and additions in Book 19 suggest that he chose to ignore the medieval Catholic resonances of useful and familiar items such as, for example, honey — a potent symbol of the ‘sweetness’ of God for the earlier compilers — in favour of its practical healing properties: ‘Hunny is of great quantitie in north regions, as Plinie writeth … Honnie as well in meate as in drinke, is of incomperable efficacie . . . Sir Tho. Eliot. chap.22 fo.35 in his booke, The Castle of Health.'[69]
One way in which Batman anglicises Bartholomew and his work is to draw topics of particular interest to himself, and his supposed readers, into the domain of the local and immediate. For example, Batman annotates Bartholomew’s chapter on the sheep purely from his own experience and opinions. He appears more interested in sheep as a mainstay of the English economy than as a symbol of his pastoral role in the parish:
Of sheepe, their Wooll is a singular benefit in a common wealth, especially the Cotfell wooll for finenesse. And in Bartholmes time, the Staple for Wooll, was not so well husbanded as it hath bene since. The increase of pasture for sheepe, hath so much decreased the tillage of corne, that untill it be restored againe, there wil grow a poore common wealth.[70]
Batman's many allusions to local points of interest, geography, recent surveys and documentation of the economy and state of the nation accord with the historical evidence we have for such projects during the century. Batman alludes to the work of John Stow (d.1605), whose Survey of London was published in 1598, and William Lambert’s Perambulation of Kent:
in the booke intituled, The Perambulation of Kent, is sufficiently set downe the fertilitie of the soile, the good disposition of the inhabitants, and their modestie: the onelye platforme and beautie of Englande, whose customes and manners are of greatest antiquitie, libertie, and service: Kent lieng in the Southeast region of this realme, hath on the North the river of Thamise, now called Temmes … it extendeth in length from Wicombe in the frontiers of Surrey, to Dele, at the sea side, 50 miles.[71]
Batman was not only a scholar, a parish rector, a family man and a herbalist, but also a draughtsman or ‘limner’.[72] He makes a significant alteration to Bartholomew’s Book 19 by inserting a long passage on ‘limning’ into the sequence of chapters on colours, altering the focus from the properties of light and its spiritual significance, to the properties of pigments and the techniques of applying them to surfaces. As Batman notes, the old skill was necessary to the new map-makers, including Ortelius, who developed the method of colouring engravings for his Theatrum Orbis Terrarum. It was also a technique used by heralds for designing and recording coats of arms. From Batman’s addition to Book 19’s chapters on colour, one can infer that he saw ignorance about limning as part of the general cultural and moral decline of his country. This is a far cry from the Franciscan’s belief in colour and light as signs of divine grace. For Batman, the elements themselves are, for users of colour, salutary reminders of human virtues: ‘in studieng for coulours to please the eye, they forget those coulours that beautifie the soule, which are, for fire, love: for aire, faith: for water, hope: for earth, charitie: for voyce, truth: for person, chastitie.'[73]