The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain, and Other Tales

In the wind-scoured vastness of Salisbury Plain, an eighteenth-century shepherd named David Sanders tends his flock with the same devotion his biblical forebears showed in Bethlehem. A man of almost nothing in material terms, Sanders possesses something far rarer: a mind at peace with its place in the universe. When a traveling gentleman stops to speak with him, their conversation unfolds into something far more profound than mere pleasantry. Sanders speaks of faith as warmth in the coldest night, of contentment that no amount of wealth could purchase, of the dignity hidden in humble labor. Hannah More, the celebrated religious writer and reformer, captured these conversations in the 1790s, basing her tale on a real shepherd she and her circle knew. The result is neither sermon nor lecture, but something rarer: a portrait of radical contentment drawn from actual rural English life, where poverty is not shamed and faith is not performed but simply lived. This edition preserves the full text along with biographical materials that illuminate both the shepherd and the remarkable woman who told his story.