Citations:abbey-lubber

1532 "How think you by the manner used with our bishops, abbots and priors, touching the nourishing also of a great stock of idle abbey-lubbers which are apt to nothing but (as the bishops and abbots be) to eat and drink? Think you this a laudable custom, and to be admitted in any good policy?" Thomas Starkey, A dialogue between Pole and Lupset (aka Starkey's England), pg 125.

1622 "But my desire is now to have leisure without loitering, and not to become an abbey-lubber, as the old proverb was, but to yield some fruit of my private life." Francis Bacon, The Works of Francis Bacon, pg. 431.

1732 "...for I had soon attained to more Skill in the Rubric, than every Shaveling is ordinarily accustomed to have, and could readily (a) find out any Mass by the great Letter at the Beginning of it; and mor than that, I could sing Ave Regina, & Salve Sancta Parens, which is Learning enough in Conscience for any Abbey-Lubber, unless he be too unreasonable." Phoenix Britannicus vol. 1, pg. 328.

1808 "The deprivation of abbacy reduced the auld abbey-lubber to an aberrant state, devoid of adjument; and sad reverse! from the soft iudulgence [sic] of accubation, his feet were daily abraded, in arenulous situations, in aberuncating roots for his sustenance, on aeclivous mountains." John MacDonald, A treatise on talegraphic communication, navel, military, and political..., pg. 58.