'The Seventh-day Men' - this name was given by contemporaries in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to an emerging and increasingly widespread body of Christians who observed Saturday, not Sunday, as the divinely appointed day of rest and worship. This book is the first fully documented history of the Sabbatarian movement in England and Wales in the two centuries following the Reformation.

Drawing on many rare manuscripts and printed works, Dr Ball provides clear evidence that the movement was much more extensive than has so far been recognized, appearing in more than thirty counties, and that in its heyday in the seventeenth century it attracted the attention of many influential writers and controversialists. Dr Ball suggests that the origins of the movement can be traced back through the medieval Lollards as far, perhaps, as the Celtic tradition, and shows that the first 'modern' Sabbatarian appeared as early as 1402. He also looks at the reasons for the movement's decline in the eighteenth century.

As the first comprehensive study of the subject, this book establishes the Sabbatarian movement as a significant strand of thought in the history of English Nonconformity, with considerable influence on the religious life of the period. This will be a book of value and interest to all historians of the church and of the religious developments of the early modern period in England and Wales.