Popular Culture and Political Agency in Early Modern England and Ireland: Essays in Honour of John Walter (Studies in Early Modern Cultural, Political and Social History, 26) 9781783271719

Table of contents :
Frontcover
Contents
List of Illustrations
List of Contributors
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
1 John Walter and the social history of early modern England
2 Contrasting susceptibility to famine in early fourteenth- and late sixteenth-century England: the significance of late medieval rural social structural and village governmental changes
3 The politics of English political economy in the 1620s
4 Provision, household management and the moral authority of wives and mothers in early modern England
5 Popular senses of past time: dating events in the North Country, 1615–1631
6 Spectral lordship, popular memory and the boggart of Towneley Hall
7 Self-image and public image in the career of a Jacobean magistrate: Sir John Newdigate in the Court of Star Chamber
8 Gender, agency and religious change in early Stuart England
9 ‘A Standard which can never fail us’: the Golden Rule and the construction of a public transcript in early modern England
10 Religion, anti-popery and corruption
11 An ‘Aristotelian moment’: democracy in early modern England
12 John Lilburne and political agency in revolutionary England
13 An Irish Protestation? Oaths and the Confederation of Kilkenny
14 ‘Whereat his wife tooke great greef & died’: dying of sorrow and killing in anger in seventeenth-century Ireland
Bibliography for John Walter
Index
Tabula Gratulatoria

Citation preview

O

MICHAEL J. BRADDICK is professor of history at the University of Sheffield. PHIL WITHINGTON is professor of history at the University of Sheffield.

POPULAR CULTURE AND POLITICAL AGENCY IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND AND IRELAND ESSAYS IN HONOUR OF JOHN WALTER

ne of the most notable currents in social, cultural and political historiography is the interrogation of the categories of ‘elite’ and ‘popular’ politics and their relationship to each other, as well as the exploration of why and how different sorts of people engaged with politics and behaved politically. While such issues are timeless, they hold a special importance for a society experiencing rapid political and social change, like early modern England. No one has done more to define these agendas for early modern historians than John Walter. His work has been hugely influential, and at its heart has been the analysis of the political agency of ordinary people. The essays in this volume engage with the central issues of Walter’s work, ranging across the politics of poverty, dearth and household, popular political consciousness and practice more broadly, and religion and politics during the English revolution. This outstanding collection, bringing together some of the leading historians of this period with some of the field’s rising stars, will appeal to anyone interested in the social, cultural and political history of early modern England or issues of popular political consciousness and behaviour more generally.

CONTRIBUTORS: Michael J. Braddick, J. C. Davis, Amanda Flather, Steve Hindle,

Cover image: The cover shows the portrait of a scullion of Christ Church College, Oxford who, according to later (possibly apocryphal) report, had been employed to sing satirical and political ballads against James II’s party prior to 1689. The editors are grateful to Jacqueline Thalmann, curator of the Picture Gallery, Christ Church, for discussing the portrait with them. It is reproduced by permission of the Governing Body of Christ Church, Oxford.

Studies in Early Modern Cultural, Political and Social History

Edited by Michael J. Braddick and Phil Withington

Mark Knights, John Morrill, Alexandra Shepard, Paul Slack, Richard M. Smith, Clodagh Tait, Keith Thomas, Phil Withington, Andy Wood, Keith Wrightson.

POPULAR CULTURE AND POLITICAL AGENCY IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND AND IRELAND ESSAYS

IN

HONOUR

JOHN WALTER

∂ OF

Edited by Michael J. Braddick and Phil Withington

STUDIES IN EARLY MODERN CULTURAL, POLITICAL AND SOCIAL HISTORY Volume 26

POPULAR CULTURE AND POLITICAL AGENCY IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND AND IRELAND

Studies in Early Modern Cultural, Political and Social History ISSN: 1476–9107 Series editors Tim Harris – Brown University Stephen Taylor – Durham University Andy Wood – Durham University

Previously published titles in the series are listed at the back of this volume

John Walter (photograph by Bronwen Walter)

popular culture and political agency in early modern england and ireland Essays in Honour of John Walter

Edited by

Michael J. Braddick and Phil Withington

THE BOYDELL PRESS

© Contributors 2017 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner First published 2017 The Boydell Press, Woodbridge ISBN 978–1–78327–171–9 The Boydell Press is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620–2731, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate This publication is printed on acid-free paper

Contents List of Illustrations List of Contributors Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations

ix x xiii xiv

Introduction Michael J. Braddick and Phil Withington

1

1 John Walter and the social history of early modern England Keith Thomas 2 Contrasting susceptibility to famine in early fourteenth- and late sixteenth-century England: the significance of late medieval rural social structural and village governmental changes Richard M. Smith 3 The politics of English political economy in the 1620s    Paul Slack 4 Provision, household management and the moral authority of wives and mothers in early modern England    Alexandra Shepard 5 Popular senses of past time: dating events in the North Country, 1615–1631    Keith Wrightson 6 Spectral lordship, popular memory and the boggart of Towneley Hall    Andy Wood 7 Self-image and public image in the career of a Jacobean magistrate: Sir John Newdigate in the Court of Star Chamber    Steve Hindle 8 Gender, agency and religious change in early Stuart England    Amanda Flather 9 ‘A Standard which can never fail us’: the Golden Rule and the construction of a public transcript in early modern England    J. C. Davis 10 Religion, anti-popery and corruption    Mark Knights 11 An ‘Aristotelian moment’: democracy in early modern England    Phil Withington vii

15 35

55 73

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145 165

181 203

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12 John Lilburne and political agency in revolutionary England 223    Michael J. Braddick 243 13 An Irish Protestation? Oaths and the Confederation of Kilkenny    John Morrill 14 ‘Whereat his wife tooke great greef & died’: dying of sorrow and killing  267 in anger in seventeenth-century Ireland    Clodagh Tait Bibliography for John Walter Index Tabula Gratulatoria

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285 291 311

Illustrations Figures

Frontispiece photograph by Bronwen Walter iii 11.1 Number of appearances of ‘democracy’, ‘aristocracy’ and variants     208 in English printed texts, 1500–1680 256 13.1 Seal of the Confederation of Kilkenny Tables

5.1 Referents used in dating statements 5.2 Dating referents used by gender 5.3 Dating referents used by age

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102 103 104

Contributors Michael J. Braddick is Professor of History at the University of Sheffield. He has written extensively on the social, economic and political history of early modern England as well as on the Atlantic world. Titles include State Formation in Early Modern England (2000) and God’s Fury, England’s Fire: A New History of the English Civil Wars (2008). He also co-edited, with John Walter: Negotiating Power in Early Modern Society (2001). His next book, John Lilburne and the English Revolution, will be published in 2017. J. C. Davis is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of East Anglia. He has published extensively on utopian and radical thought and is currently working on a collection of essays relating the two themes under the title Alternative Worlds Imagined 1500–1700. He also plans a revised edition of his study of Cromwell: Oliver Cromwell (2001). Amanda Flather is Lecturer in History at the University of Essex. She has broad interests in the social and cultural history of early modern England and her research focuses principally on gender relations, with particular emphasis on the history of the organisation of social space in England between the mid-sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. She is the author of Gender and Space in Early Modern England (2007) and a number of articles and essays on the influence of gender on the organisation and use of social and sacred space. Steve Hindle is W. M. Keck Foundation Director of Research at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. He is the author of The State and Social Change in Early Modern England, 1550–1640 (2000) and On the Parish? The Micro-Politics of Poor Relief in Rural England 1550–1750 (2004), and co-editor with (Alexandra Shepard and John Walter) of Remaking English Society: Social Change and Social Relations in Early Modern England (2013). His most recent essay, published in the journal Critical Inquiry, is an analysis of the representation of harvest labour in an English landscape painting. He is currently working on the social topography of the Warwickshire parish of Chilvers Coton in the late seventeenth century. Mark Knights is Professor of History at the University of Warwick. He has worked on early modern political culture, with a focus on the later Stuart period. His most recent book is The Devil in Disguise: Deception, Delusion and Fanaticism in the Early English Enlightenment (2015). He is currently writing a book about corruption and anti-corruption in Britain and its colonies, from the sixteenth-century Reformation to nineteenth-century reform. John Morrill is Emeritus Professor of British and Irish History at the University of Cambridge and a Life Fellow of Selwyn College. His recent work includes an edited volume on state formation, essays on English Catholic responses to the penal laws and a series of historiographical essays about early modern history and historians. He is the general editor of a new five-volume (and online) collection of x

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all the recorded words of Oliver Cromwell to be published by Oxford University Press and his next project is a full-length biography of Cromwell written out of this new edition. Alexandra Shepard is Professor of Gender History at the University of Glasgow and author of Accounting for Oneself: Worth, Status and the Social Order in Early Modern England (2015) and Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (2003). She is also co-editor, with John Walter and Steve Hindle, of Remaking English Society: Social Relations and Social Change in Early Modern England (2013). She is currently researching a book entitled, ‘Childcare, Family and Economy in Britain, 1650–1850’. Paul Slack is Emeritus Professor of Early Modern Social History at Oxford University and was Principal of Linacre College, Oxford until 2010. His books include The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England (1985), Poverty and Policy in Tudor and Stuart England (1988), From Reformation to Improvement: Public Welfare in Early Modern England (1999), and most recently, The Invention of Improvement: Information and Material Progress in Seventeenth-Century England (2015). He has been editor of Past and Present, and is a Fellow of the British Academy. Richard Smith is Emeritus Professor of Historical Demography and Geography at the University of Cambridge and former Director of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure. His has edited Land, Kinship and Life-cycle (1984), co-edited Bastardy and its Comparative History (1981), The World We Have Gained (1986), Life, Death and the Elderly (1991), and Medieval Society and the Manor Court (1996). He has recently completed A Population History of England 1000–1550 and leads a research project on urbanisation, migration and mortality change in England, 1600–1945. Clodagh Tait is a lecturer in the Department of History, Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick. She is the author of Death, Burial and Commemoration in Ireland 1550–1650 (1999) and co-editor of Age of Atrocity: Violence and Political Conflict in Early Modern Ireland (2007) and Religion and Politics in Urban Ireland (2016). She has also published articles on a variety of topics relating to death, violence, riot, commemoration, Catholic devotion, martyrdom, childbirth, baptism and naming in early modern Ireland. Keith Thomas is an Honorary Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and also of Balliol, Corpus Christi and St John’s. He was formerly President of Corpus Christi College and is a past President of the British Academy. He is the author of many articles on the ethnography of early modern England and his books include Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971), Man and the Natural World (1983), and The Ends of Life (2009). Phil Withington is Professor of History at Sheffield. He has published widely on the social and cultural history of early modern England. His books include The Politics of Commonwealth (2005), Society in Early Modern England (2010); edited volumes: (with Alexandra Shepard), Communities in Early Modern England (2000); xi

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(with Jonathan Herring et al.), Intoxication and Society (2013); and (with Angela McShane), Cultures of Intoxication (2014). He was editor of Cultural and Social History between 2010 and 2013 and is currently editor of The Historical Journal. Andy Wood is Professor of Social History at Durham University. His research interests include popular politics, rebellion, memory, customary law, and local society. His last book, The Memory of the People: Customs and Popular Senses of the Past (2013) won the Leo Gershoy Prize from the American Historical Society. He is currently writing a study of social relations in England between 1500 and 1640. Keith Wrightson is the Randolph W. Townsend Professor of History at Yale University and previously taught at St Andrews (1975–84), and Cambridge (1984–99). He is a Fellow of the British Academy (from 1996) and an Honorary Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge. His publications include English Society, 1580–1680 (1982); Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain (2000); Ralph Tailor’s Summer: A Scrivener, His City, and the Plague (2011), and (with David Levine) Poverty and Piety in an English Village. Terling 1525–1700 (1979) and The Making of an Industrial Society: Whickham, 1560–1765 (1991).

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Acknowledgements This collection arises from a conference held to mark John Walter’s 65th birthday at Christ’s College Cambridge, in March 2013. The editors are grateful to Christ’s College, the University of Sheffield and the ESRC for financial support; to Jennifer Bishop, Sue Hubbard, Frank Kelly and Gary Rivett for their help in organising it; and to the audience and participants for the discussions which gave rise to this book.

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Abbreviations AgHR Agricultural History Review American Historical Review AHR BL British Library C&C Continuity and Change CSHist Cultural and Social History Economic History Review EcHR EHR English Historical Review Historical Journal HJ HWJ History Workshop Journal Journal of British Studies JBS Journal of Modern History JMH JSocHist Journal of Social History ODNB The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Past and Present P&P SocHist Social History TNA The National Archives Times Literary Supplement TLS TRHS Transactions of the Royal Historical Society

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Introduction Michael J. Braddick and Phil Withington

One of the perennial concerns of social, cultural and political historiography is the interrogation of the categories of ‘elite’ and ‘popular’ politics and their relationship to each other.1 This has gone hand-in-glove with the exploration of why and how different sorts of people engaged with politics and behaved politically. Historians have been particularly concerned with understanding how ordinary people framed political questions (for example, the languages they deployed and the ways in which they arrived at their understanding of the issues) and the actions available to them to act on that understanding (for example, the repertoires of individual and collective action, the legal and other means of asserting political agency).2 While such issues are timeless, they hold especial importance for a society like early modern England experiencing rapid political and social change. In English historiography in the 1970s and 1980s, however, the concurrent development of political revisionism and of the ‘new social history’ made the connections between these questions at once less clear but also more open to creative reinterpretation. On the one hand, historians of early modern English politics became very suspicious of accounts of political change which ‘reduced’ politics to a consequence of economic and social change, searching instead for explanations which placed greater weight on contingency and the logic of institutional procedures, and on the effects of religious and political

1   For some useful discussions see Roger Chartier, The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France, trans. Lydia C. Cochrane (Princeton, 1987); Martin Ingram, ‘From Reformation to Toleration: Popular Religious Cultures in England’, Popular Culture in England, ed. Tim Harris (Basingstoke, 1995), pp. 95–123; Robert Scribner, ‘Is a history of popular culture possible?’, History of European Ideas 10 (1989), 175–91; Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (Cambridge, 1991). 2   Examples include Ethan Shagan, Popular Politics and the English Reformation (Cambridge, 2003); John Walter, Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution: the Colchester Plunderers (Cambridge, 1999); Phil Withington, The Politics of Commonwealth: Citizens and Freemen in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2005); Andy Wood, The Politics of Social Conflict: the Peak Country, 1520–1770 (Cambridge, 1999).

MICHAEL J. BRADDICK AND PHIL WITHINGTON

ideas.3 On the other hand, social historians turned their attention away from the conflicts which dominated standard political narratives to the politics of everyday life: social relations in the household and the village.4 As a result, connections that had previously been made between the political and social history of early modern England were severed. More recently, new connections have been found between these realms of experience. The deep roots of English governance and its reliance on broad voluntary participation meant that the actual exercise of power was relatively open to influence.5 Rumour, news and print, as well as official channels of communication such as assize sermons and royal proclamations, made the discourses of politics, and of particular political and religious debates, widely available.6 Historians are now much more confident about the social depth of political engagement in early modern England, and there has been an associated emphasis placed on the agency that ordinary people could achieve in navigating the politics of local social relations: how governing institutions and discourses provided resources with which to pursue the politics of subsistence, neighbourhood and

  For an introduction to these points see Ann Hughes, The Causes of the English Civil War, 2nd edn (Basingstoke, 1998), chap. 3; Glenn Burgess ‘On Revisionism: an Analysis of Early Stuart Historiography in the 1970s and 1980s’, HJ 33 (1990), 609–27; Michael J. Braddick and David L. Smith, ‘Introduction: John Morrill and the Experience of Revolution’, The Experience of Revolution in Stuart Britain and Ireland: Essays for John Morrill, ed. Braddick and Smith (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 1–13. 4   Steve Hindle, Alexandra Shepard and John Walter, ‘The Making and Remaking of Early Modern English Social History’, Remaking English Society: Social relations and Social Change in Early Modern England, ed. Steve Hindle, Alexandra Shepard and John Walter (Woodbridge, 2013), pp. 1–41; Keith Wrightson, English Society 1580–1680 (London, 1982); Wrightson, ‘The Politics of the Parish in Early Modern England’, The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England, ed. Paul Griffiths, Adam Fox and Steve Hindle (Basingstoke, 1996), pp. 10–46. 5   Patrick Collinson, ‘The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 69 (1987), 394–424; Michael J. Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England, c. 1550–1700 (Cambridge, 2000); Mark Goldie, ‘The Unacknowledged Republic: Office-holding in Early Modern England’, The Politics of the Excluded, c. 1500–1850, ed. Tim Harris (Basingstoke, 2001), pp. 153–94; Steve Hindle, ‘Hierarchy and Community in the Elizabethan parish: the Swallowfield Articles of 1596’, HJ 42 (1999), 835–51; Phil Withington, ‘Public Discourse, Corporate Citizenship and State–Formation in Early Modern England’, AHR 112:4 (2007), 1016–38. 6   Examples include Alastair J. Bellany, ‘Libels in Action: Ritual, Subversion and the English Literary Underground, 1603–42’, The Politics of the Excluded, ed. Harris, pp. 99–124; Bellany ‘“Raylinge rymes and vaunting verse”: Libellous Politics in Early Stuart England, 1603– 1628’, Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England, ed. Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake (London, 1994), pp. 285–310, 367–71; Richard Cust, ‘News and Politics in Early Seventeenth-Century England’, P&P 112 (1986), 60–90; Cust, Politics and the Electorate in the 1620s’, Conflict in Early Stuart England: Studies in Politics and Religion, 1603–1642, ed. Richard Cust and Ann Hughes (Harlow, 1989), pp. 134–67; Joad Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge, 2003); Jason Peacey, Print and Public Politics in the English Revolution (Cambridge, 2013). 3

2

INTRODUCTION

household.7 At the same time, these approaches have provided a means to begin to reconnect aspects of this social history with explanations of the course of national politics, revealing how the political engagement and agency of ordinary people helped to shape the origins, course and consequences of the mid-century crisis.8 An understanding of the relationship between high and low politics is now seen as crucial to an understanding of popular culture and of the political agency of ordinary people. No one has done more to interrogate the categories of ‘popular’ and ‘elite’ politics in these ways, or to explain the political motivations and actions of early modern English men and women, than John Walter. Throughout his writing he has sought to understand the beliefs of the poor and obscure, how people tried to act on their beliefs, the circumstances in which they were able to do so, and the effects of their actions. Walter’s place in the field is fully considered by Keith Thomas in this volume, but we can note here that Walter’s earliest publications, from the 1970s, dealt with plebeian riot, using the actions and organisation of rioters as a means of access to the relationship between ‘popular’ and ‘elite’ political consciousness and to the rationality that shaped crowd behaviour. A series of seminal articles followed on grain and enclosure rioting, leading to work of fundamental importance on the politics of subsistence. This work, on the politics of the household economy and subsistence, offered crucial insights into gender relations and gave a lead in the field of gender history too. His richly researched work on Essex had also begun to reveal the religious and political culture of those outside the charmed circles of formal government, underpinning a second broad phase of work examining popular engagement with the politics of the Civil War and revolution. This has been important for our understanding of England’s social history, by demonstrating that there is no clear distinction to be drawn between the languages of high and low politics, and is

  See, for example, Andy Wood, The Memory of the People: Custom and Popular Senses of the Past in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2013); Steve Hindle, The State and Social Change in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, 2000); Hindle, On the Parish? The Micro-Politics of Poor Relief in rural England c. 1550–1750 (Oxford, 2004); Alexandra Shepard, Accounting for Oneself: Worth, Status, and the Social Order in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2015); Jonathan Healey, The First Century of Welfare: Poverty and Poor Relief in Lancashire, 1620–1730 (Woodbridge, 2014); Identity and Agency in England, 1500–1800, ed. Jonathan Barry and Henry French (Basingstoke, 2004). 8   For accounts from the perspective of political historiography see Michael Braddick, God’s Fury, England’s Fire: A New History of the English Civil Wars (London, 2008); Ann Hughes, Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution (Oxford, 2004); Peter Lake, ‘PostReformation Politics, or on not Looking for the Causes of the English Civil War’, The Oxford Handbook of the English Revolution, ed. Michael J. Braddick (Oxford, 2015), pp. 21–39. From the perspective of social historiography see Phil Withington, ‘Two Renaissances: Urban Political Culture in Post-Reformation England Reconsidered’, HJ 44:1 (2001), 239–67; Andy Wood, ‘Beyond Post-Revisionism? The Civil War Allegiances of the Miners of the Derbyshire “Peak Country”’, HJ 40:1 (1997), 23–40. 7

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also absolutely fundamental to a new round of work on the popular politics of the English Revolution. This work contributed significantly to the development of the new social history and, like much of that writing, was comparative in inspiration if not explicitly so in practice. Research on social structure drew inspiration from the Annales, while key articles were conceived as contributions to peasant studies or agrarian history: as a way of thinking about ordinary lives outside the national narrative and the grand story of the doings of the powerful.9 The work of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure was fundamental to much of the social history of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s.10 The field has also been strongly marked by an interest in anthropology since the 1960s, not least through the example of Keith Thomas.11 The influence of J. C. Scott’s work on south-east Asian society, of Clifford Geertz on Bali or of Robert Darnton on France has also been profound.12 Pierre Bourdieu’s work on habitus has also had growing influence on work on early modern England.13 Much of Walter’s early work was of this kind, engaged in the analysis of popular politics outside the national story, and around these issues in social structural and comparative history. As a graduate student he was closely associated with the Cambridge Group, and he published a co-edited volume with Roger Schofield, one of its directors. His more recent work, in returning to the politics of the revolution, has been based on a subtle grasp of the relationship between the politics of the nation and of the parish developed in these other contexts. The essays in this volume engage with these central issues in early modern history, often prompted by John Walter’s work. They range across the politics of poverty, dearth and household, popular political consciousness and practice more broadly, and their interconnections with religion and politics during the English Revolution. They do so without toeing a single historiographical, conceptual or methodological line regarding consciousness and agency; rather, contributors have been encouraged to develop their own perspective on the subject. The result is a range of approaches that, taken together, illustrate the range and stimulus of Walter’s work.   Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost (London, 1965); Keith Wrightson and David Levine, Poverty and Piety in an English Village: Terling, 1525–1700, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1995). 10   E. A. Wrigley and Roger Schofield, The Population History of England 1541–1871: a Reconstruction (Cambridge, 1989). 11   Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England (London, 1971). 12   For the influence of Scott in particular see Negotiating Power in Early Modern Society: Order, Hierarchy and Subordination in Britain and Ireland, ed. Michael J. Braddick and John Walter (Cambridge, 2001); Braddick, ‘Introduction: the Politics of Gesture’, The Politics of Gesture: Historical Perspectives, ed. Braddick, P&P 203, supplement 4 (2009), 9–35. 13   Phil Withington, ‘Company and Sociability in Early Modern England’, SocHist 32:3 (2007), 291–307; Withington, Society in Early Modern England: The Vernacular Origins of Some Powerful Ideas (Cambridge, Polity, 2010), 171–202. 9 

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INTRODUCTION I

Richard Smith contrasts the impact of harvest failure in 1315–17 and 1595–7, when similar natural causes acted on a population of roughly the same size. In the earlier period, harvest failure resulted in mortality of far more devastating proportions – perhaps ten times as great as that in the later period – and the reasons for the contrast lie in the increased capacity for collective action to mitigate the effects of harvest failure. Smith argues that an important element of that capacity was the potential for popular political action to affect the behaviour of parish elites acting as local governors. During the fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century developments in the social and political structure of local communities led to the emergence of village elites who were responsive to pressure from below but were also taking advantage of central government initiatives aimed at managing the social problem represented by those below them. The activism of local elites created a realm in which the politics of subsistence could be contested, as the poor and those threatened with poverty were able to deploy the languages of government to claim protection and support. In the late sixteenth century popular political consciousness and action, in dialogue with elite politics, helped foster forms of intervention that greatly limited the impact of harvest failure: the social economy of dearth, about which John Walter has written so illuminatingly, was a product of forms of human agency with origins in the two preceding centuries.14 During the seventeenth century, however, there was a shift in political economy, examined here by Paul Slack, in which the virtue and effectiveness of such intervention came to be questioned. Slack argues that there was a gathering lack of confidence in the power of sovereign authority to regulate the economy – primarily in the area of foreign trade and exchange, but that scepticism was also evident in other areas of government action. The crisis of the 1620s required immediate political interventions, and the key writings were intended to shape government action, not as theoretical tracts: Thomas Mun and Gerard Malynes were taking positions on immediate problems, against the backdrop of frequent parliaments and indecision in the royal council. The result was not a wholesale rejection of government intervention, since Companies continued to be protected or created where that seemed important and effective, but the arguments about trade and exchange were nonetheless applied to other areas of economic life: interest rates, agricultural enclosure and dearth orders. Cumulatively, much of the apparatus of economic regulation assembled over centuries was dismantled in a single decade, a response to the crisis that was highly distinctive in early modern Europe. The retreat from regulation of the grain market was of direct relevance to the lives of the poor. Dearth orders were

  John Walter, ‘The Social Economy of Dearth in Early Modern England’, reprinted in Crowds and Popular Politics in Early Modern England, ed. John Walter (Manchester, 2006), pp. 124–80.

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never again enforced by Royal Proclamation after the 1620s, although they had an afterlife in local responses to dearth. Poor petitioners and food rioters calling for the implementation of market regulations were in one sense probing an area of political sensitivity, calling local governors back to well-established discourses and practices which were being questioned in the broader debate in national government about political economy. This dialogic relationship between the languages of high and low politics has been at the heart of the literature on the ‘negotiation’ of power in early modern England, a key topic in recent work on social relations. But these negotiations did not just take place between governors and governed: they were inflected and shaped by the politics of household, gender and neighbourliness. Alex Shepard demonstrates how ordinary Englishwomen lent meaning and dignity to their lives, drawing on influential discourses about neighbourliness and family, and on the repertoire of respectable self-presentations. Pioneering work on attitudes to female agency used riot as a point of entry to the question, emphasising how it was shaped by assumptions about a woman’s responsibility for the family, and their relatively protected legal status. The richness of female associational life and their working cultures have also been seen as crucial to a distinctive capacity for political action. Shepard’s close analysis of women’s self-description in legal proceedings greatly extends our understanding of contemporary notions of female agency and worth, revealing much ‘broader foundations of women’s moral authority as providers’. Women positioned themselves within a gendered division of labour as providers within a household economy, and among the labouring population were able to lay claim to near-parity with their husbands. Their moveable property was an important component of household credit too. As protesters they ‘shared grievances with men [and] common modes of asserting entitlement to official remedy and intervention’ but also took action as dual supporters of a household economy as well as, potentially, mothers. These notions were not simply appropriations of official discourse, but genuinely shared languages with which to lend meaning to, contest, and seek to shape daily life. We can therefore uncover a distinctly female version of the politics of subsistence which legitimated protest and women’s participation in it. ‘Female protesters had good cause to feel aggrieved, as women, as mothers and as laboring people, and invested their efforts in upholding their claims to resources with assertions of moral authority and foundations for grievance that were comparable in significance, if not always identical in substance, to men’s’.15 Practical agency is in this sense a product of underlying assumptions about individual and collective identity, and about the structuring of social life. Awareness of time is a central element of many constructions of this kind of meaning – giving narrative shape to the past, present and future is fundamental to the conception of individual and collective identities. The study of temporal

  See below, pp. 76, 89.

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INTRODUCTION

awareness has tended to be dominated by very strong accounts of modernisation, and durable teleologies, not least the rise of clock time. As Keith Wrightson shows, however, time was fixed against a number of referents in early modern England: the ritual cycles of the Church; the agricultural and seasonal cycles; against specific dates; and in relation to notable events. Timings were in practice approximate and placed by association with a calendrical high point or notable event, but in very varied and flexible ways. These practices were patterned, for example, by gender: women tended to make fuller reference to the liturgical calendar. The result was the creation of multiple ‘communities of practice’ with shared understandings of timings, often geographically based. Networks with no geographical basis tended, by contrast, to share instead a sense of time based around day, month and year. These complex practices bear on the issue of political agency because they shaped the consciousness from which daily action proceeded – narrative practices of this kind were crucial to individual and collective identity – and also impacted, more directly, on the politics of custom. As Wrightson suggests, as customary politics were eroded new possibilities for agency existed in a shared national narrative, championed, for example by Sexby (or, we might add, John Lilburne). As Andy Wood has previously argued, customary consciousness and social memory provided rich resources with which to assert political agency.16 His article here draws attention to some of the other resources available in this context – he looks at how folkloric tradition could be used to understand the shape and direction of affairs, and to lend meaning to them, or as a vehicle in communicating and absorbing the lessons of local histories. According to Wood, the story of the boggart of Townley Hall informed the plebian critique of elite power in nineteenth-century Lancashire, and was a warning to that elite to moderate their greed and rapaciousness. Sir John Townley had asserted his authority over local society in the sixteenth century, aggressively enforcing his power to allot seats in the parish Church, for example. He had also, and more dramatically, forced through enclosure schemes in the second decade of the sixteenth century which were remembered and contested over the following three generations – notably in 1554 and 1572. That resistance was shaped by popular consciousness of space, resources and skills – the kind of taskscape which enshrined an individual’s sense of their place in the world, and of threats to that place. The story of Townley’s ghost, condemned for centuries thereafter to cry in the night for the laying open of the enclosed lands, gave lasting power to the critique of Townley, and to this popular political consciousness, even after resistance to his enclosures had finally been defeated. Steve Hindle’s essay reveals in rich detail this encounter between the world of captain pouch and that of Sir John Newdigate, demonstrating how that encounter could be mediated through official discourses and official structures.

  See especially, Custom and Memory.

16

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MICHAEL J. BRADDICK AND PHIL WITHINGTON

Newdigate’s presentation of himself as a model magistrate offered a set of ideals against which to measure his actual conduct as a landlord: in embracing a social role defined by collective values and shared languages, he offered a means by which he could be held to account. In the light of the Midlands Rising of 1607, he appeared not as the father of his country, but as an aggressive landlord, fiercely opposed by his tenants. They responded with a libel and Newdigate felt moved to take this before the Star Chamber. This kind of public criticism generated pressure on office holders, not only by holding them to account, but also, perhaps, by forcing them to examine their own conscience. These tensions may have informed Newdigate’s acts of charity, which can be seen as an attempt to make a reality of his self-image. The presentation of self by the powerful, and its critical appraisal by the audiences for that self-presentation, was central to the negotiation of power in early modern society. In that negotiation there were ways of challenging the self-presentation which avoided open confrontation – weapons of the weak as James C. Scott terms them – such as, for example, the circulation of a libel. Early modern social order was frequently defined as an interaction order, setting out the behavioural expectations attending each place in the social hierarchy. Fundamental to this view was inequality – people were born to a particular social role, and the problem of social order to regulate relationships between unequal elements so as to produce harmony rather than discord. That depended on every person performing their social duties appropriately. This was a powerfully conservative conception of social life, and these behavioural expectations acted as a strong constraint on the weak, coercing them to be deferential and obedient. In some circumstances, however, they could also be a means to restrain the strong.17 Official discourses of various kinds provided resources for the negotiation of power, offering a means by which to hold the powerful to account, or to challenge their actions. This has been a central element of Walter’s work, initially in the realm of the politics of subsistence, but more recently in more conventionally ‘political’ contexts: those of parish religion and the politics of the nation.18 Amanda Flather follows this lead, exploring how Laudian Church policies impinged on the quotidian lives of relatively humble women. The Laudian reforms emphasised a patriarchal order which imposed limits on the visibility and participation of women, through, for example, the spatial reorgan-

  For further reflections on this in relation to magistrates’ public roles see Braddick, State Formation, pp. 71–85. 18   John Walter, ‘Confessional Politics in Pre-Civil War Essex: Prayer Books, Profanations, and Petitions’, HJ 44 (2001), 677–701; Walter, ‘Popular Iconoclasm and the Politics of the Parish in Eastern England, 1640–1642’, HJ 47 (2004), 261–90; Walter, ‘“Abolishing Superstition with Sedition”? The Politics of Popular Iconoclasm in England 1640–1642’, P&P 183 (2004), 79–123; Walter ‘“Affronts & Insolencies”: The Voices of Radwinter and Popular Opposition to Laudianism’, EHR 122 (2007), 35–60; Walter, Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution: the Colchester Plunderers (Cambridge, 1999). 17

8

INTRODUCTION

isation of the Church and changes to life-cycle ceremonies. Reactions to this in Essex parishes, revealed by the papers of the Committee of Scandalous Ministers, reveal how women opposed these changes, or helped to overturn them once the Laudian regime had fallen. In doing so, like Shepard and Wrightson, Flather is able to uncover distinct elements of female identity and self-understanding that provided grounds for action. Godly women were especially prominent in denouncing the Laudian changes, but there is also evidence of a more moderate religiosity that was offended by aspects of the policies. Women were particularly associated with tensions over vestments, christening and burial, but also seem to have had a particular authority in relation to perceptions of the respectability of ministers. Family was a cornerstone of spiritual discipline and women were prominent in denouncing ministers whose own family lives fell short of these ideals. These features of resistance to Laudianism therefore help to reveal the gendered experience of Laudian religion. Women were affected in particular ways by liturgical changes in official religion, and took distinctive steps to try to shape it in ways that mattered to them: ‘Laudianism increased and altered the power, authority and the ability to influence of women in their own religious lives as well as those of others’.19 An important element of this agency was official languages that lent themselves to helpful interpretation. The pervasive idea of the Golden Rule, explored by Colin Davis, carried within it a very flexible potential for insisting on restraint, or the moderation of political action. The injunction to do unto others as you would have them do unto you was simple and apparently almost universally applicable as a way to cut through complex practical or moral problems. As is the way with such terms, its precise meaning varied according to context and in the writing of different authors, but its flexibility and apparently self-evident truth made it a powerful tool with which to think about political life. The Golden Rule was conventionally interpreted as a moderating idea – not the basis of Old Testament justice but as grounds for moderation and civil peace. It was deployed in varying ways across sectarian and political differences and was a key resource in political argument across the whole period. So pervasive was it, in fact, that it can be traced in Hobbes, not an obvious place to look for the language of moderation and balance. As Davis puts it, these contested discourses provided the arena in which unequal social relations of various kinds were negotiated – between rich and poor, men and women, adults and children and so on. The injunction to moderation could be a powerful means to restrain the power of social superiors and governors, and it provides further evidence of the ways in which political languages were shared between elite and popular politics. The language of corruption was another weapon of this kind. Mark Knights explores how the concept was closely linked to popery, providing a rich resource

19

  See below, p. 163.

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MICHAEL J. BRADDICK AND PHIL WITHINGTON

for both political and religious critique, for the delegitimisation of particular individuals or practices. In early modern Europe it was religious difference that gave life to the discourse of corruption, rather than the perception of a faith in and of itself, and the critique of popery drew on the many associations of the term. At its core, the concept of corruption was linked to sin, but it was applied to legal abuse, bribery and textual errors or emendations. As such, it provided a multi-purpose tool against popery, serving to associate popery with a wide range of illegitimate ideas and practices. In fact, its centrality to the critique of early modern popery may have an echo in twentieth- and twenty-first century perception surveys that continue to show an association between Catholicism and corruption. Because protean, it was inherently political in application – what was identified as corruption varied according to the political context and political relationships in play. But it was certainly a powerful and commonly deployed resource in the negotiation of power: this broad potential was manifest in the actions of the Colchester plunderers, for example, and was enacted in the popular iconoclasm of the early 1640s. Crucially, though, popular agency depended not just on these languages, but also on specific, practical skills and knowledge – tactics and repertoires that mobilised concrete action. Withington’s essay explores how these practical skills interacted with political ideals to create a kind of practical encounter with democracy – political participation as a social practice whereby contemporary discourses and requisite skills shaped the way in which people viewed the world and behaved in it. Withington argues that Aristotelian notions of democracy were vernacularised during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – the emergence of modern English was intimately connected with the ‘social redistribution’ of a conceptual vocabulary previously available only to readers of Latin and Greek. The vernacular renaissance informed the development of urban commonwealths in a period in which charters of incorporation, by which urban inhabitants acquired significant powers of communal and national government, were granted in much greater numbers. Urban citizens acquired skills of political participation that constituted them as citizens – both for themselves and in the eyes of others, and in the whole network of social relations. The skills required of urban citizenship intersected with the greater availability of Aristotelian concepts, constituting what Withington terms an ‘Aristotelian moment’. This was the terrain in which actual disputes were fought out – over the relative virtues and vices of aristocracy and democracy in a mixed and balanced polity, for example. This offers a means to rehabilitate the study of democracy in this period, a concept which has fallen almost completely out of favour as a result of the strong aversion to anachronism and teleology which is one of the key legacies of revisionism. Withington argues that democracy is not an anachronistic term, nor a practice alien to early modern society, but was rather a faithful rendition of increasingly widely available language, which was closely tied to developing political practices and consciousness.

10

INTRODUCTION

Such political skills were a means to political agency in revolutionary England. The taking of the Protestation or the mobilisation of petitions drew on tactical sophistication about the workings of government, creating the possibility of turning words into action. Petitions became a means not just of representing established and respectable interests, but also of fostering and articulating partisan solidarities. Beyond that, printed petitions might become a semi-respectable means to libel and slander, or a way of promoting position papers on the politics of the day. Braddick’s essay examines these shifting possibilities for political engagement in the 1640s through the career of the John Lilburne. Lacking secure gentry status or an established trade, Lilburne never held any public office (although he was an army officer). Nonetheless he became a significant public figure, twice facing death in trials that seemed a direct test of the legitimacy of the government. This public prominence derived from his mastery of the arts of mobilisation. His facility in using the presses and in navigating and manipulating parliament’s committees made him a powerful advocate for commoners in the Lincolnshire fens; his serial prosecutions in the course of this public life made him a figurehead and focus for the Leveller campaigns. It was also the context in which his particular appropriation of established political languages took shape – in particular a demotic version of common law thinking tied to the rights enjoyed by all Englishmen. Lilburne was exceptional in his courage (or bullheadedness), and the way in which he confronted every regime under which he lived. But the opportunities of which he took advantage were exploited in less spectacular, or less effective and sustained ways, by many others: they reveal the shifting possibilities for political engagement and political agency opened up by the revolution. The power to denounce scandalous ministers, to eject malignants from local office, to sequester land or commandeer resources, all gave partisans the potential to override the normal requirements of deference. It was these possibilities, for example, which give us access to the responses of relatively humble women to Laudian reforms and which allowed one of Lilburne’s own tenants to take a dispute with him before parliament and a print audience. To that extent, understanding the conditions in which Lilburne exercised his agency points to a longer-term history of agency. Keith Wrightson alludes to this in his essay – the new possibility for solidarity created by a shared awareness of time. Restoration historians of the public sphere or popular politics describe a world in which many of Lilburne’s practices were entirely commonplace – something much less true of the parliament time of the 1620s, for example. As Braddick suggests, figures like Lilburne, lacking land, trade or office, could now enjoy public influence ‘without a peasant army at their backs’.20 Recent writing on the English Revolution has paid considerable attention to events in Ireland and their interaction with English affairs. Walter has been

  See below p. 242.

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active in this development too, as an adviser on the 1641 depositions project, and taking the comparative and contextual implications of Ireland very seriously in his own writing, not least on Ireland and English anti-popery. The turn to British or Three Kingdoms history was initially an attempt to write an integrated history of a shared crisis, but it has increasingly also provided an entry point to a comparative history of the varied trajectories through that crisis taken by each of the Three Kingdoms.21 John Morrill’s essay can be read in this spirit, as an interpretation of a key episode in Irish history which demonstrates the potential for this shared, but also comparative, history. Morrill shows how multiple versions of the Catholic Oath of Association aimed to create a coalition from a diverse set of Catholic interests. The result was an unstable text, but one which rested on organised citizen mobilisation which reached out to a ‘general’ population. There are close parallels with the aims and organisation of the English Protestation, and between the texts themselves, both of which sought to deploy elements of familiar political discourse for quite particular purposes. But if comparison reveals similarities, and ones that should give us pause for thought both about the nature of the conflict in Ireland and the apparent exceptionalism of the political argument in England, they also reveal contrasts and some irony. While ‘[t]he English Protestation was one of highly conditional loyalty to a Catholicising King; the Irish Catholic Oath was one of completely unconditional loyalty to a Protestant King’. Thus ‘the Irish Oath both looked to overlay the ethnic, social fissures within Irish Catholicism – and to contain very different politics of memory – and to reach out to a distant King who would not allow them personal access to him. We really are a united people, they pleaded, and we really want a Protestant King in our Catholic kingdom’.22 The irony is that what looks like a citizen mobilisation to achieve this, drawing on claims about political inclusivity that resonated with (and were in some ways more radical than) those made by radical parliamentarians in England, was eventually to be crushed by those who campaigned in England for an Agreement of the People. John Walter has also written on violence in Ireland in 164123 and Clodagh Tait takes that as her starting point in trying to analyse how emotions drove and legitimated violent collective action. In understanding what people actually do when exercising violence, it is important to understand their emotional state, which fundamentally shapes the logic of such situations. Grief was a commonly reported emotional state among victims, embracing what we might call depression and post-traumatic stress. But victims were much less associated with accounts of more ‘active’ emotions, such as anger or rage. In fact, the emotional

  Michael J. Braddick, ‘Civil War and Revolution in England, Scotland, and Ireland’, Oxford Handbook of the English Revolution, in Braddick, pp. 3–20. 22   See below, pp. 248, 265. 23   John Walter, ‘Performative Violence and the Politics of Violence in the 1641 depositions’, Ireland, 1641: Contexts and Reactions, ed. Micheál Ó Siochrú and Jane Ohlmeyer (Manchester, 2013), 134–152. 21

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INTRODUCTION

state of victims while they were actually under attack is rarely discussed directly, sometimes approaching something like a martyrological account of a calm that transcends a moment of intense suffering. Attackers, by contrast, were very frequently described as being in the grip of strong and active emotions, suggesting sometimes consciously that passion had driven them beyond reason. The reports seem to confirm patterns of emotional experience that have been observed elsewhere, of the calm of victims actually provoking greater anger, and serving to escalate violence beyond what the individuals involved could have anticipated (or perhaps intended). Of course, the extent to which these depositions, and their use in print, gives us access to the actual experience of those involved is very questionable, but as a cultural construct, this emotional othering of the Irish was very powerful for English audiences, and of lasting significance. Overlain by the conventional account of Irish incivility, this representation was a powerful means by which these conflicts were perpetuated. The rebels appeared ‘not as rational agents of legitimate grievance, but as passion-ridden blasphemers, incapable of appropriate human empathy and compassion’. As a result, ‘It was unnecessary to bother interpreting the motives of those so afflicted by emotional incoherence’.24 These constructions therefore had long-term consequences. These essays consider, from a variety of perspectives, the relationship between popular political consciousness and political agency: between the languages of national politics and of the everyday negotiation of power; and how political action by those outside the charmed circles of elite power was shaped by languages about the just ordering of society which were widely shared between governors and governed. These analytic concerns intertwine in complex ways, of course, but as presented here these essays follow a trajectory like John Walter’s own, from the politics of household and subsistence, through the study of political culture and towards the engagement of ordinary people with national religious and political issues. In doing so, they traverse much of the terrain which has been at the heart of academic work on these societies, and thereby reveal the importance of John Walter’s work to the mapping of that territory.

24

  See below, p. 284.

13

1 John Walter and the Social History of Early Modern England Keith Thomas

My qualifications for appraising John Walter’s distinguished contributions to the history of early modern England are very limited. I have never made a detailed study of a riot or a popular demonstration, let alone attempted a piece of microhistory based on that exceptional range and depth of archival investigation which characterises everything that John undertakes. Moreover, his work, though intensely individual, is also recognisably part of a larger common enterprise in which the other contributors to this book have played a notable part, not just in their own publications, but in frequent meetings at conferences and collaborations in collective volumes. Together, they have, as has been rightly said, created ‘a uniquely subtle body of work on social relations’ in early modern England.1 So I feel something of an outsider, intruding upon an intense discussion between close colleagues. Like all of us, John Walter is a creature of his time and place. In one of his articles, he describes himself as a ‘fresh-off-the-council-estate eleven-plus scholarship boy’.2 This shameless bid for street credibility is also a reminder that the enormous wave of ‘history from below’, which has been so prominent in the last fifty years, is closely connected to a marked change during the same period in the social origins of the historical profession. When Charles Firth, in his inaugural lecture in 1904 as Oxford’s Regius professor of history, proposed that the syllabus should be revised in order to make it better fitted for the production of professional historians, the Oxford history tutors protested that most of their pupils had no desire to become historians and that anyway they lacked the

  Andy Wood, ‘Fear, Hatred and the Hidden Injuries of Class’, JSocHist 39 (2006), 803–26, p. 808. 2   ‘Gesturing at Authority: Deciphering the Gestural Code of Early Modern England’, The Politics of Gesture: Historical Perspectives, ed. Michael J. Braddick, P&P 203, supplement 4 (2009), p. 97. 1

KEITH THOMAS

necessary private means.3 It was assumed in those days that historians had to be well-to-do persons, capable of meeting out of their own pockets the costs of travel and of employing devils to transcribe documents. A hundred years later the situation is very different. In the mid twentieth century, the flourishing of the grammar schools, the public funding of university fees and maintenance, and the greater readiness of Oxford and Cambridge to broaden their social intake opened up academic careers to a much wider range of talents, female as well as male. Although the initial impulse to study the history of the common people came from left-wing, public-school rebels like R. H. Tawney, G. D. H. Cole, Christopher Hill, and E. P. Thompson, it was above all scholars of more modest social origins who turned away from the courts and cabinets of traditional political and diplomatic history, with which they felt little affinity, and chose to identify with the lives and struggles of what politicians nowadays like to call ‘ordinary hard-working families’. This social change accounts as much as any left-wing political sympathies for the vastly increased interest in the history of what used to be called the lower classes, but are nowadays referred to in neo-Roman fashion as ‘plebeians’, even though in early modern usage that usually meant everyone below the gentry. John went to Cambridge from Warwick School (of whose official code of behaviour he would later make devastating use in one of his sharply observant essays on gesture).4 After graduating, he spent a year in the United States studying American history, thereby missing the Garden House disturbances in Cambridge, which would have given him an opportunity to see what a real riot looked like. He returned to Cambridge in 1971 to start doctoral research on what would prove to be a lifetime’s assignment: the study of radical movements in the English Revolution and the tradition of popular protest in early modern England. His original intention, he tells us, was to produce a historical sociology of the Levellers.5 If so, he has been taking a very long run up to bowl, because although he has sketched out some of his views on the radical movements of the later 1640s, the really deep studies for which he is famous have not yet gone beyond 1642. John’s Cambridge affiliations were crucial to his development as an historian. It was there that he encountered the ferment of intellectual energy which enabled that university to challenge and, some might say, supersede, Oxford as the leading centre of seventeenth-century British history. For this, the messianic enthusiasm of Peter Laslett, the tireless propagandist for the Cambridge Group

3   C. H. Firth, A Plea for the Historical Teaching of History: An Inaugural Lecture delivered on November 9, 1904, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1905); (E. Armstrong and 22 others), A Letter to the Regius Professor of Modern History on the Teaching and Study of History at Oxford (Oxford, 1905), p. 4. 4   ‘The Politics of Gesture’, pp. 96–7. On gesture see also his ‘Body Politics in the English Revolution’, The Nature of the English Revolution Revisited: Essays in Honour of John Morrill, ed. Stephen Taylor and Grant Tapsell (Woodbridge, 2013), pp. 81–102. 5   Crowds and Popular Politics in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2006), pp. 5–6.

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JOHN WALTER AND SOCIAL HISTORY

for the History of Population and Social Structure, bore some responsibility. So did the eloquence of Quentin Skinner, who revivified the intellectual history of the period. But the key figures were John Morrill, whose move in 1975 from Oxford to Cambridge via Stirling was a truly decisive event, as his innumerable graduate pupils and the publications of the Cambridge University Press abundantly testify; and Keith Wrightson, whose return to Cambridge from St Andrews in 1984 generated a brilliant succession of doctoral students in early modern social history.6 Much of John Walter’s early work evolved out of his Cambridge collaborations. As graduate students, he and Keith Wrightson read papers to the King’s College seminar in 1973–4, and out of that came their jointly written, pioneering article of 1976 on ‘Dearth and the social order in early modern England’.7 Wrightson’s subsequent influence on John’s early work is easily discernible. John was still in Cambridge when John Morrill arrived, though only for a year, but they subsequently wrote an article together on violence during the 1640s and 1650s and John contributed a chapter on the same subject to a book on the impact of the English Civil War which John Morrill edited in 1991.8 In his early years, John was also close to the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure. It was Peter Laslett’s question, ‘Did the peasants really starve?’, which he and Roger Schofield took as their starting point for the book they edited, called Famine, Disease and the Social Order in Early Modern Society.9 In 1976 John became a lecturer at the University of Essex; and, despite his Warwickshire roots and Cambridge residence, he has been Essex man ever since. It was a fortunate posting. The political tone of the university in those days made it a congenial home for students of radicalism and social protest; and its encouragement of interdisciplinarity and comparative history fitted in well with John’s interests in rural sociology, peasant studies and anthropology. Moreover, Colchester was near London and the PRO, and even nearer that great arsenal of early modern social history, the Essex Record Office. One of the first county record offices to be organised on modern lines, it set the standard for other

6   On Morrill see the contributions by Mark A. Kishlansky, Michael J. Braddick and David L. Smith in The Experience of Revolution in Stuart Britain and Ireland, ed. Braddick and Smith (Cambridge, 2011) and The Nature of the English Revolution Revisited, ed. Tapsell and Taylor, pp. vii–ix; and on Keith Wrightson see Steve Hindle, Alexandra Shepard and John Walter, ‘The Making and Remaking of Early Modern English Social History’, Remaking English Society: Social Relations and Social Change in Early Modern England, ed. Steve Hindle, Alexandra Shepard and John Walter (Woodbridge, 2013), pp. 1–40. 7   P&P 71 (1976), pp. 22–42. 8   Morrill and Walter, ‘Order and Disorder in the English Revolution’, Order and Disorder in Early Modern England. ed. Anthony Fletcher and John Stevenson (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 137–65; Walter, ‘The Impact on Society: a World Turned Upside Down?’, The Impact of the English Civil War, ed. John Morrill (London, 1991), pp. 104–22, reprinted in Crowds and Popular Politics, chap. 6. 9   (Cambridge, 1989), p. 1.

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counties and it was on the Essex records that many subsequently famous historians cut their teeth. Influential studies of such varied subjects as rural society, village government, crime, witchcraft, riots, poor relief, the middling sort, Puritanism and Quakerism all originated there; and otherwise obscure Essex villages, like Terling and Earls Colne, have become familiar to all historians of the period. At times, the history of Essex has become dangerously close to being equated with the history of England. Once installed at Essex, John set about producing a continuous sequence of meticulously researched studies of crowd behaviour. It was already a very popular topic. As he explains in the Introduction to Crowds and Popular Politics (2006), his collection of reprinted articles, he was following in the wake of previous work on later periods by Charles Tilly, George Rudé, Eric Hobsbawm, Richard Cobb, and, above all, E. P. Thompson. The latter’s celebrated article of 1971 on ‘The moral economy of the English crowd in the eighteenth century’ had the unintended consequence of flooding Past & Present and its supplements ever after with a torrent of articles on popular protest in every shape and form.10 No fewer than five of them were by John. Like his predecessors, he portrayed crowd actions not as outbursts of mindless frenzy, but as disciplined and self-controlled, and animated by a strong sense of legitimacy. For him, the attraction of studying riots was that they provided a privileged point of access to the attitudes and beliefs of otherwise silent groups. He wanted ‘a social history that restored an identity to the majority that was not dependent on the (mis)perceptions of their elite contemporaries’.11 His joint article with Keith Wrightson on ‘Dearth and the Social Order’ set the agenda for much of his future work. It showed that acute food shortages could occasionally lead to serious riots, especially in grain-producing areas, which, in normal years, exported their surpluses to London or large towns. But dearth was not usually followed by widespread rioting. Instead, national and local authorities intervened to prohibit the movement of grain at times of shortage and to prosecute middlemen exploiting the scarcity. When riots did occur, they were essentially petitions for help; and they were invariably successful in stimulating the authorities into preventative action, because they were merely requesting the effective implementation of what was already known to be official government policy.12 This early article opened up the question of how it was that order and subordination were maintained in what was a brutally unequal society. The implicit answer its authors gave was that ‘the ruling class’ (they had not yet come to refer to it as ‘the elite’) lacked the coercive powers of a standing army and police force,   E. P. Thompson, ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century’, P&P, 50 (1971), 76–136. 11   Crowds and Popular Politics, p. 6. 12   John Walter and Keith Wrightson, ‘Dearth and the Social Order in Early Modern England’, P&P, 71 (1976), p. 41. 10

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and therefore had to derive its authority from its ability to protect those below it at times of need. This paternalism derived from medieval notions of ‘good lordship’. It also reflected the conception of economic life as a moral arena in which so-called ‘covetousness’ had to be kept in check. This gave the smallholder, the clothworker and the landless poor the opening they needed. When their means of subsistence were threatened, their protests took the form of demanding not social nor political change, but the performance by their superiors of the duties that they themselves had proclaimed. This argument was developed in John’s next published piece, a study of the Maldon grain riots of 1629, a work of ‘painstaking research’ (his own words) in which he continued his project of using legal records as a ‘point of entry into the mental world of the seventeenth-century poor’.13 A crowd of poor women, exasperated by the government’s failure to prevent the export of corn at a time of scarcity, boarded a ship laden with grain and helped themselves. This action led the Maldon authorities to buy the ship’s cargo for resale locally. Unfortunately, a deepening depression in the textile industry provoked a second, much larger and more violent riot, when the crowd seized grain from a ship bound for Hull. This, says John, ‘challenged the convention whereby crowds expressed contrition in exchange for conciliation by the authorities’.14 The government reacted severely and four of the rioters, including their ‘captain’ Ann Carter, were hanged, a unique occurrence in the history of early seventeenth-century food riots. For John, an important feature of this episode was that it showed that crowds were knowledgeable about the law; they knew that the government prohibited the export of grain at such time, and they were conscious of the limits imposed by the criminal law on what people could or could not do during a riot. John’s minute investigation of these events was a self-conscious appropriation of Clifford Geertz’s notion that to understand the meaning of an action it is essential to appreciate the full context in which it occurred. His next exercise in thick description was a marvellously deflationary account of the so-called Oxfordshire rising of 1596, a tour de force of patient contextual reconstruction. This projected protest occurred after a third successive year of harvest failure with no sign that the authorities would take any remedial action. Its leader, the carpenter Bartholomew Steer, drew on ‘a plebeian tradition of riot’, declaring that it would never be well ‘till gentlemen were knocked downe’. But his plan to assassinate enclosing landlords did not appeal to a populace accustomed to the notion of riot as something directed against property rather than persons. The would-be rising ended with a whimper: four young men shivering on a hillside waiting vainly for others to join them.15 Despite its failure, the rising was promptly followed by government prosecutions of enclosers and inquiries into   ‘Grain Riots and Popular Attitudes to the Law’ (1980), Crowds and Popular Politics, pp. 34, 28.   John Walter, ‘Carter [formerly Barrington], Ann (d.1629)’, ODNB 10, p. 337. 15   John Walter, ‘A “Rising of the People”? The Oxfordshire Rising of 1596’ (1985), Crowds and Popular Politics, p. 5, and chap. 4. 13 14

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the grain trade. The gentry were ordered to return from London to their estates, to disburse hospitality, relieve the poor and keep their eyes open for signs of discontent. On this occasion, as on others, an exaggerated fear of popular rebellion forced the government into taking active steps to alleviate poverty and the threat of dearth. Charity, John argued, was given out of fear as much as moral obligation. So long as the ruling elite discharged its responsibilities, it had no reason to be alarmed. This theme would reappear in John’s dissection of an anonymous Lincolnshire libel composed in the wake of the Midlands rising of 1607. Studded with arcane classical allusions, the document was a menacing attack on gentlemen who engaged in engrossing, rent-racking and depopulating enclosure. By contrasting these oppressors with other local landowners who were continuing to perform their traditional obligations to the poor, it reiterated the values which the gentry purported to uphold.16 Nowadays, John backs up his interpretation of popular protest with extensive reference to the writings of the American anthropologist James C. Scott. It is easy to understand why Scott’s mordantly incisive studies of the twentieth-century peasantry of South East Asia should have had such an influence on historians of early modern England. But the situation of the peasants he studied differed considerably from that of English copyholders and clothworkers, and his simple bipolar model of a dominant group confronted by a subordinate one is illadapted to fit the social complexities of the English village, where the presence of a ‘middling sort’ has rightly been emphasised in recent historical writing.17 In a bizarre piece of linguistic invention, Scott called the official version of the relationship that should obtain between the rulers and their inferiors ‘the public transcript’, as opposed to ‘the hidden transcript’, which, he argued, expressed

  John Walter, ‘“The pooremans joy and the gentlemans plague”: a Lincolnshire Libel and the Politics of Sedition in Early Modern England’, P&P 203 (2009), 29–67. 17   C. Holmes, ‘Drainers and Fenmen: the Problem of Popular Political Consciousness in the Seventeenth Century’, Order and Disorder in Early Modern England, pp. 166–95; Peter King, ‘Edward Thompson’s Contribution to Eighteenth-Century Studies: the Patrician-Plebeian Model Re-examined’, SocHist, 21 (1996), 215–28; The Middling Sort of People: Culture, Society and Politics in England, 1650–1800, ed. Jonathan Barry and Christopher Brooks (Basingstoke, 1994); Steve Hindle, ‘The Political Culture of the Middling Sort in English Rural Communities, c. 1550–1700’, The Politics of the Excluded, c. 1500–1850, ed. Tim Harris (Basingstoke, 2001), pp. 125–52; H. R. French, The Middle Sort of People in Provincial England 1600–1750 (Oxford, 2007). For criticisms of Scott see the comments of E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common (London, 1991), pp. 342–3; Andy Wood, Riot, Rebellion and Popular Politics in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, 2002), p. 19, and ‘“A lyttull worde ys tresson”: loyalty, denunciation and popular politics in Tudor England’, JBS 48 (2009), 837–47, p. 839; and, especially, Matthew Clark, ‘Resistance, Collaboration and the Early Modern “Public Transcript”: the River Lea Disputes and Popular Politics in England, 1571–1603’, CultSocHist 8 (2011), 293–313. 16

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the subordinates’ private feelings of resentment.18 Scott explained that he used the word transcript ‘almost in its juridical sense (procès verbal) of a complete record of what was said’, though in practice his ‘transcripts’ have been taken to include printed documents and unstated assumptions as well as spoken words. The widespread adoption by early modern historians of this obfuscating terminology (and by none more enthusiastically than John) is to be regretted. No lay reader would have the faintest idea of what is meant in this context by a ‘transcript’, whether ‘public’ or ‘hidden’, and recourse to a dictionary would be of no avail. Historians do not need to create a private language in order to express their thoughts, and John was conveying his central argument very effectively long before he encountered Scott’s book. Nevertheless, Scott’s insights have reinforced John’s view that the official ideology of Tudor and early Stuart governments (aka ‘the public transcript’) opened up the possibility of legitimate resistance from below when its tenets were disregarded by the very authorities who had formulated them. As he has pointed out, the publicity given to government policy helped to provide the people with a political education.19 He could add to his dossier the revealing case in 1551 of John Higgens, a Hereford mason, who called his neighbour ‘white lyvered’, because he refused to join him in destroying some local enclosures, ‘affirming that it was the kyngs comaundement by his p(ro)clamacons that they should brake upp all inclosures’.20 Parallel with his studies of popular protest was John’s collaboration with Roger Schofield in the study of food shortages. In their edited volume of 1989, the two argued that by the mid seventeenth century England had, to use one of John’s favourite phrases, ‘slipped the shadow of famine’.21 This was the result of increased agricultural productivity, greater market integration, and the slackening of population pressure. Yet a growing proportion of the population remained vulnerable to the effects of harvest failure, especially in the areas of monoculture. John drew attention to the complex social relationships which prevented these unfortunate people from starving. Not only was the poor law supplemented by a host of informal means of relief, ranging from urban granaries and concessionary pricing to the provision of credit, but, as he would repeatedly emphasise, it was an accepted moral obligation of landlords and employers to help their dependants at times of difficulty, and of richer neighbours to assist poorer ones.

  James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, 1990), pp. 2, 4–5. 19   ‘Politicising the Popular? The “Tradition of Riot” and Popular Political Culture in the English Revolution’, in The English Revolution c. 1590–1720: Politics, Religion and Communities, ed. Nicholas Tyacke (Manchester, 2007), p. 108. 20   Hereford City Records, transcribed by F. C. Morgan (in Herefordshire Archives and Records Centre), I, fo. 293. 21   John Walter and Roger Schofield, ‘Famine, Disease and Crisis Mortality in Early Modern Society’, Famine, Disease and the Social Order, p. 36. 18

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He also pointed to the many stratagems by which local communities protected themselves against grain shortages: gleaning, share-cropping, substituting other foods, selling locally at lower prices and allowing some customary begging.22 In the long run, however, these reciprocities would steadily decay. The national poor law became the primary mode of relief and its administration was controlled by local elites, who determined which indigent persons were or were not eligible to receive it. The poor ceased to be vulnerable to crises of subsistence, but, in John’s words, only at the price of becoming ‘further enmeshed in a web of deference and dependence’ – a theme later given magisterial treatment by Steve Hindle.23 John’s picture of the motives for government intervention at times of popular hardship is rather unforgiving. He repeatedly suggests that it was only the fear of rebellion that forced the nobility and gentry to concern themselves with the people’s welfare.24 This notion that the social policies of the Tudor and early Stuart state were concessions wrung from a reluctant government by an importunate populace seems to underrate the strength of a genuinely paternalistic sense of obligation to their tenants and employees among many of the nobility and gentry to which John had elsewhere drawn attention.25 Obituaries of aristocratic womenfolk regularly emphasise their charitable good works. Generations of Christian teaching had spread the notion that charitable giving was necessary for human solidarity, as well as a key that might open the gates of heaven. That teaching reflected more than mere fear of rebellion from below; and so did the influential contemporary notions of ‘the common weal’, ‘the public good’ and ‘public welfare’, which Paul Slack described in his Ford lectures.26 When writing about popular protest modern historians usually give more attention and sympathy to the rioters than to those in authority. Their belated attempt to redress the balance is wholly understandable. But to recover the past in all its dimensions, we have to be even-handed. We must rescue not just the poor and desperate, but also the rich and privileged from the condescension of

  Walter, ‘The Social Economy of Dearth in Early Modern England’, Famine, Disease and the Social Order, pp. 91–2, 96–101, 111–12. 23   Walter and Schofield, ‘Famine, Disease and Crisis Mortality’, p. 48; Steve Hindle, On the Parish? The Micro-Politics of Poor Relief in Rural England c. 1550–1750 (Oxford, 2004). 24   E.g. John Walter, ‘Subsistence Strategies, Social Economy and the Politics of Subsistence in Early Modern England’, Just a Sack of Potatoes? Crisis Experiences in European Societies, Past and Present, ed. Anti Häkkinen (Helsinki, 1992), pp. 53–85, p. 78; ‘Crown and Crowd: Popular Culture and Popular Protest in Early Modern England’ (1994), in Crowds and Popular Politics, p. 15; ‘Public Transcripts, Popular Agency and the Politics of Subsistence’ (2001), Crowds and Popular Politics, pp. 197–200; ‘“The pooremans joy and the gentlemans plague”, pp. 64–5. 25   See e.g. Lawrence Stone’s review of W. K. Jordan, Philanthropy in England, History, new ser., 44 (1959), p. 259; Felicity Heal and Clive Holmes, The Gentry in England and Wales, 1500–1700 (Basingstoke, 1994), pp. 371–2. Cf. Walter, ‘The social economy of dearth in early modern England’, pp. 105–13. 26   Paul Slack, From Reformation to Improvement: Public Welfare in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1999). 22

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posterity. Much revealing contemporary evidence waits to be exploited about the attitudes of landlords and employers to their subordinates. Of course, many aristocrats despised and feared ‘the vulgar’; they were horrified by the thought of the populace being involved in national politics, and they would have agreed with Sir Thomas Smith’s suggestion in 1549 that, at the first hint of popular discontent, sixty or a hundred horses should come ‘suddenly in the night’ and take away the ‘stirrers’ before others joined them. As the Royalist Earl of Derby remarked a century later, it was not good that the common people should know their own strength: ‘soe it is safest to keep them ignorant of what they may doe, and give them dayly occasion to admire the power of their lord’.27 Yet letters of advice to young gentlemen regularly stressed the importance of making their rule as palatable as possible by behaving amiably to those below them. The Yorkshire Royalist Sir Henry Slingsby was one of many who urged his sons to ‘cherish affability: there is nothing that purchaseth more love with less cost’. As Thomas Hobbes informed his readers, ‘Affability of men already in power is increase of power because it gaineth love.’28 There may also be more to be said about the ideology of the grain rioters. John Bohstedt, though apparently relying entirely on secondary sources for his knowledge of the early seventeenth century, has made some acute criticisms of the interpretations offered by E. P. Thompson and by John. Bohstedt argues that those who engaged in food riots only rarely invoked the notion of what Thompson called a ‘moral economy’. The rioters, he says, seldom criticised forestallers, engrossers and regraters or invoked the government’s Book of Orders. ‘Their “right” not to starve,’ he maintains, ‘seemed to furnish all the moral justification they needed.’ Bohstedt was following Buchanan Sharp, who pointed to the increase in thefts by the poor at times of hardship and the recurring use of the slogan ‘necessity hath no law’.29 He could have mentioned the medieval doctrine, still alive in the seventeenth century, according to which theft was permissible when starvation was the alternative. Only in the Restoration period did legal opinion turn against this view, on the not wholly convincing grounds that the existence of the national poor law made such desperate acts unnecessary.30 As James C. Scott might say, the public transcript was rewritten at this point. Yet John Locke could still assert in 1689 that ‘charity gives every man a title to so   Patrick Fraser Tytler, England under the Reigns of Edward VI and Mary (London, 1839), I, p. 187; Desiderata Curiosa: or a Collection of Divers Scarce and Curious Pieces relating chiefly to Matters of English History, ed. Francis Peck (new edn 1779), p. 434. 28   The Diary of Sir Henry Slingsby, of Scriven, Bart., ed. Daniel Parsons (1836), p. 226 (following William Cecil’s much-copied advice to his son); Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Noel Malcolm (Oxford, 2012), II, p. 134 (chap. x). 29   John Bohstedt, The Politics of Provisions: Food Riots, Moral Economy, and Market Transition in England, c. 1550–1850 (Farnham, 2010), pp. 9–11, 14, 49–53, 68, 117–19; Buchanan Sharp, In Contempt of All Authority: Rural Artisans and Riot in the West of England, 1586–1660 (Berkeley, LA, 1980), pp. 33–5. 30  Hindle, On the Parish?, pp. 87–91. 27

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much out of another’s plenty, as will keep him from extreme want, where he has no means to subsist otherwise’.31 John’s numerous contributions to the study of popular protest include informative contributions to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography on such key figures as John Reynolds, who as ‘Captain Pouch’ led the Midland Revolt in 1607; John Williams, alias ‘Skimmington’, prominent in the Forest of Dean disturbances of 1631–2; Ann Carter of the Maldon riots; Bartholomew Steer, architect of the Oxfordshire fiasco of 1596; and Robert Kett, whose rebellion John crisply analysed for The Encyclopedia of Political Revolutions, arguing that its anti-seigneurial character had the subsequent effect of forging an alliance between the landed class and the rising yeomen farmers, both committed to agrarian capitalism. It thus ‘played a major part in robbing later English rural protest of the leadership that could have turned village riot into provincial rebellion’. The fine work of Andy Wood confirms this insight.32 John has also illuminated the role of women in popular protest, showing how they exploited ‘the licence given them by their marginal political and legal positions and responsibility for feeding their families’ and how they were capable of real violence, like the Yorkshirewoman, ‘Captaine’ Dorothy Dawson, in 1608, whose shoes were ‘of purpose tacked with iron nayles’. He also points out that for poor men, whose sense of masculinity, as Alexandra Shepard has shown, was threatened by their inability to support their wives and children, active participation in popular protest could be a way of proving their manhood and recovering their self-respect.33 John’s conclusions are consistent with the numerous studies of sixteenth-century rebels which emphasise their strong concern with legitimacy, their desire to negotiate with the royal government rather than overthrow it, and their underlying commitment to the notions of justice and good government. Rioting crowds implicitly subscribed to a hierarchical model of society and made no serious attempt to alter the prevailing social structure. They attacked individuals, not institutions nor classes nor structural inequalities.34 John’s distinctive contribution to this familiar story is his emphasis on the protesters’ assumption that society was made up of interdependent social groupings, bound together by mutual rights and obligations. It was only when those obligations were neglected that trouble began.

31   John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge, 1960), p. 188 (I, para 42). 32   Walter, ‘English Kett’s rebellion’, in The Encyclopedia of Political Revolutions, ed. Jack A. Goldstone (Chicago, 1998), pp. 155–6; Andy Wood, The 1549 Rebellions and the Making of Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2007), esp. pp. 197–202. 33   Walter, ‘Carter, Ann’, p. 337, and ‘Faces in the Crowd: Gender and Age in the early Modern English Crowd’, The Family in Early Modern England, ed. Helen Berry and Elizabeth Foyster (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 100–1, 117. 34   ‘Crown and Crowd’, p. 25.

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‘In a culture of obedience which proscribed independent popular action,’ John argued, crowd actions “were necessarily political”.’35 Just as sixteenth-century rebels employed a language of injustice and misgovernment, so protesting crowds ‘claimed an agency to police the worlds in which they lived and to interrogate the exercise of power’.36 John has done more than most to put the politics back into social history. Of course, not even G. M. Trevelyan, who coined the phrase, really believed that social history was ‘history with the politics left out’.37 But the vehemence with which some social historians of the 1960s challenged the then-prevailing dominance of political history, narrowly understood, gave the impression that social history was losing all connection with power and public life; and it generated an inevitable reaction. The inseparability of politics and society was implicit in the writings of Michel Foucault, who saw repressive power lurking behind all social institutions. It was also articulated by the contributors (John among them) to the collection edited in 1980 by John Brewer and John Styles, An Ungovernable People;38 and it was given wider circulation by Patrick Collinson in his Cambridge inaugural lecture of 1989, with its celebrated subtitle ‘History with the politics put back’.39 But what is meant by ‘politics’? In 1933 the American political scientist Harold D. Lasswell famously defined it as ‘Who gets what, when, how?’.40 In that sense politics is universal. There is a politics of marriage, of the family, of the school, of the workplace, and indeed of every social formation and every personal relationship. Alan Macfarlane drew attention to the ‘micro-politics’ of the localities in 1977. Keith Wrightson’s influential essay of 1996 on ‘the politics of the parish’ defined politics as ‘the social distribution and use of power’ and cited Joan Scott’s view that all processes which involve different actors and different meanings contending with one another for control are intrinsically ‘political’. It followed that negotiations between husbands and wives, children and parents, rich and poor, were all forms of politics, and that historians should direct their attention to ‘the parochial struggles through which mostly obscure people tried to make their own history’.41 Two years earlier, John had similarly defined politics as the process by which power was exercised, maintained and   ‘Politicising the Popular?’, p. 98. Also ‘The English People and the English Revolution Revisited’, HWJ 61 (2006), 171–82, pp. 171, 175. 36   Crowds and Popular Politics, p. 11. 37   David Cannadine, G.M.Trevelyan: a Life in History (London, 1992), p. 224. 38   John Styles kindly tells me that the editors originally intended there to be a question mark in the title of this book, but that a last-minute decision was taken to drop it. 39   Patrick Collinson, De Republica Anglorum or, History with the Politics Put Back (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 14–16. 40   The subtitle of his book, Politics (New York and London, 1936). 41   Alan Macfarlane, Reconstructing Historical Communities (Cambridge, 1977), p. 187; Keith Wrightson, ‘The Politics of the Parish in Early Modern England’, The Experience of Authority, ed. Paul Griffiths, Adam Fox and Steve Hindle (Basingstoke, 1996), pp. 10–46, pp. 10–11, 37 and passim; Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York, 1988), p. 49. 35

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contested.42 This very broad notion of politics as extending far beyond courts, parliaments and political parties is now standard among historians of all periods. A typical product is a recent volume on The Politics of Domestic Authority in Britain since 1800, which is devoted to the micropolitics of the household.43 Riots and crowd protests, therefore, have come to be seen nowadays as only one, rather exceptional aspect of the ‘infra-politics’ of the subordinate classes. In his later essays, John has much to say about other weapons of the weak (to use one of James C. Scott’s more felicitous coinages). In early modern England they included grumbling, cursing, gossiping, staging shaming rituals, telling tales of divine judgements on the oppressors of the poor, disseminating anonymous libels, singing subversive ballads and, in extreme cases, engaging in arson.44 Particularly interesting is John’s account of the role of gesture in the maintenance of a hierarchical society. Lower-class compliance with the gestural code can be seen as evidence of their rulers’ hegemony, whereas a refusal by subordinates to bow or kneel or remove their hats in the presence of superiors could be an eloquent form of social protest.45 John evokes ‘a politics of sly gestures and modulated voices … less dramatic and more continuous everyday politics … in which subtle manipulations of speech and gesture might allow inferiors quietly to signal dissent’.46 Of course, these symbolic weapons of the weak did little to improve their condition, whereas explicit protest could lead to remedial action: John adduces some striking examples of gentlemen ending up before the Star Chamber as a result of popular complaint.47 My memory from national service in the army is that winking, blinking, farting and all the other gestures of ‘dumb insolence’, as it was called, never got its perpetrators anywhere, other than a military prison. John concedes that the same was probably the case in the early modern period: he could have cited the Elizabethan author who advised gentlemen to learn boxing so that, if one of their household servants proved ‘a saucy lout’, they could deal him a hearty blow three or four times on both cheeks.48 In the army of the 1950s dumb insolence was a much less effective form of resistance than the numerous petty thefts from the stores and the constant ‘skiving’ by which private soldiers managed not to be there when something needed to be done. Among the early modern weapons of the weak, John might have included, along with poaching, pilfering and wood stealing, the insistence of contemporary labourers   ‘Crown and Crowd’, p. 17. For a stricter definition see Andy Wood, Riot, Rebellion and Popular Politics in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, 2002), p. 16. 43   Ed. Lucy Delap, Ben Griffin and Abigail Wills (Basingstoke, 2009). 44   Bernard Capp, ‘Arson, Threats of Arson, and Incivility in Early Modern England’, Civil Histories: Essays presented to Sir Keith Thomas, ed. Peter Burke, Brian Harrison and Paul Slack (Oxford, 2000), pp. 197–213. 45   ‘Gesturing at Authority’, pp.116–20. 46   Walter, ‘“The pooremans joy and the gentlemans plague”’, p. 63. 47   Walter, ‘Public Transcripts, Popular Agency and the Politics of Subsistence’, pp. 213–14. 48   William Bullein, ‘The booke of the use of sicke men, and medicines’, fol. 20v, in Bulleins Bukwarke of Defence (1579). 42

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on numerous breaks for rest and refreshment,49 the aggressive and importunate begging on the streets,50 the high incidence of theft by domestic employees,51 the delinquent sub-culture of urban apprentices52 and the tyranny of the servants in grand households, extracting compulsory tips or ‘vails’ from every visitor.53 The smallest service performed by porters, coachmen, postboys, clerks, gaolers or bailiffs required an appropriate reward. Every craft and industry had its recognised perquisites; and just as gleaning could shade off into downright theft,54 so the line separating legitimate perquisites from pilfering and embezzlement was often unclear. Employers and property owners drew it on one place, employees and the landless in another.55 John’s overall conclusion is that although the common people in the century before the Civil War lacked formal political power, they were able to get a hearing for their grievances, and to do so on a regular basis.56 Moreover, they were not simply concerned with bread-and-butter issues, for disputes about access to grain or land could lead to larger questions about the basis of custom, the nature of rights, and the exercise and even the provenance of authority.57 When one recalls that no less an authority than Samuel Rawson Gardiner believed that ‘the labourers and the small handicraftsmen of the countryside cared very little’ about Laudian innovations and unparliamentary exactions, one can see just how radical a reinterpretation John is propounding.58

  The Oxford Book of Work, ed. Keith Thomas (Oxford, 1999), p. 62.   Paul Griffiths, Lost Londons: Change, Crime and Control in the Capital City (Cambridge, 2008), pp. 116–18. 51   R. C. Richardson, Household Servants in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2010), pp. 198–9, 203. 52   ‘If it happens to be on som holly daye, som brake windowes of houses, some carry with them a fidle to make up their sport’; Shrewsbury Assembly Minutes, 30 Oct., 1665, cit. Michael Peele, ‘Shrewsbury Drapers’ Apprentices’, Trans. Shropshire. Archaeol. Soc., 50 (1939–40), p. 5. 53   J. Jean Hecht, The Domestic Servant Class in Eighteenth-Century England (London, 1956), 158–68; Bridget Hill, Servants: English Domestics in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1996), chap. 4. 54   See, e.g., William Ellis, The Modern Husbandman (1750), III (2nd pagination), p. 36; IV, p. 27–8; Kenneth Woodbridge, Landscape and Antiquity: Aspects of English Culture at Stourhead 1718 to 1838 (Oxford, 1970), p. 72 ; J. A. Sharpe, Crime in Seventeenth-Century England: a County Study (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 169–71; Peter King, ‘Customary Rights and Women’s Earnings: the Importance of Gleaning to the Rural Labouring Poor, 1750–1850’, EcHR, 2nd ser. 44 (1991), 461–76. 55   John Styles, ‘Embezzlement, Industry and the Law in England, 1500–1800’, Manufacture in Town and Country before the Factory, ed. Maxine Berg, Pat Hudson and Michael Sonenscher (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 173–210. 56   ‘Public Transcripts, Popular Agency and the Politics of Subsistence’, pp. 216–7. 57   Crowds and Popular Politics, p. 11. 58   Samuel R. Gardiner, History of England from the Accession of James I. to the Outbreak of the Civil War 1603–1642 (1904–5), IX, p. 158. 49 50

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The Civil War showed that there was no single politics of the people, because the people took different sides. But there may have been a shared ‘political culture’, if by that we mean the rules and underlying assumptions governing their political actions. Like other students of the subject, John shows that the political culture of the common people involved appeals to law, to local custom, and to notions of fairness and justice: it embodied ‘a set of expectations about the proper exercise of authority’.59 It also involved regular engagement with the political and religious policies of the English crown. John says little about this in the years before 1640, but it is a topic on which medieval historians have shed considerable light. In the later Middle Ages it was quite usual for the doings of Kings and their advisers to be the subject of rumour, speculation and uninhibited comment at a very humble level. Evil counsellors, unreasonable taxation and the denial of justice all provoked regular complaint. The memory of the Revolt in 1381 remained very much alive, but the ruling ideas of medieval peasants seem, as Rodney Hilton remarked, ‘to have been the ideas of the rulers of society’. John Watts similarly observes that by 1400 the commonplaces of contemporary thinking about law and taxation were widely diffused throughout society; the people and their rulers spoke the same language.60 An even greater degree of popular engagement with high politics is revealed by studies of the Henrician Reformation61 and by David Cressy’s compendious, though often uncontextualised, anthology of subversive comments about public figures and government policies, made in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by people of a social status as low as that of ‘assistant mole-catcher’. A quarter of these critics were women.62 A full analysis of popular political culture before 1640 would need to do justice not only to its legalism, but also its patriarchal assumptions, its ‘intense   John Walter, Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution: The Colchester Plunderers (Cambridge, 1999), p. 5. 60   R. H. Hilton, The English Peasantry in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford, 1975), p. 16; John Watts, ‘The Pressure of the Public on Later Medieval Politics’, The Fifteenth Century, IV: Political Culture in Late Medieval Britain, ed. Linda Clark and Christine Carpenter (Woodbridge, 2004), pp. 159–80, and ‘Popular Voices in England’s Wars of the Roses, c. 1445–c.1485’, The Voices of the People in Late Medieval Europe: Communication and Popular Politics, ed. Jan Dumolyn et al. (Turnhout, 2014), pp. 107–22. See also I. M. W. Harvey, ‘Was there a Popular Politics in Fifteenth-Century England?’, The McFarlane Legacy: Studies in Late Medieval Politics and Society, ed. R. H. Britnell and A. J. Pollard (Stroud, 1995), pp. 155–74; Simon Walker, Political Culture in Later Medieval England, ed. Michael J. Braddick (Manchester, 2006), chaps. 7 and 11; Jane Whittle and S. H. Rigby, ‘England: Popular Politics and Social Conflict’, A Companion to Britain in the Middle Ages, ed. S. H. Rigby (Oxford, 2003), pp. 65–86; Christopher Dyer, ‘The Political Life of the Fifteenth-Century English village’, The Fifteenth Century, IV, ed. Clark and Carpenter, pp. 135–58. 61   For example, Ethan H. Shagan, Popular Politics of the English Reformation (Cambridge, 2003). 62   David Cressy, Dangerous Talk: Scandalous, Seditious, and Treasonable Speech in Pre-Modern England (Oxford, 2010). See p. 163 for the mole-catcher. 59

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localism’,63 its xenophobic suspicion of outsiders, and its sometimes paranoid susceptibility to rumours and panics. Other ingredients also wait to be explored: for example, the survival of the medieval notion that when the monarch died, the law died too.64 This belief was not without substance: in the Middle Ages the King’s death had been followed by a brief interregnum during which the laws were suspended until the coronation of his successor. The House of Lords declared in 1563 that ‘upon the death of the prince the lawe dieth; all the officers of iustice wherby lawes are to be executed do cease, all writtes and commandementes to all parties do hang in suspence, all commissions for keping of commen peace and for the punishment of offendrs do determin and loose their force’.65 There is room for a good study of the countrywide disorders which followed the deaths of both Elizabeth and James I, when it was claimed that no law was in force until the new monarch was crowned.66 In 2006, John could assert that there was in England a ‘robust pre-revolutionary popular political culture’, which would fuel the upheavals of the 1640s.67 This represents something of a change of mind on his part. When he and John Morrill asked themselves in 1983 whether the subversive codes of the Civil War sects and army radicals were ‘responses to the events of the 1640s or the surfacing of subterranean traditions from previous decades and centuries’, they replied, with wonderful insouciance, ‘It hardly matters.’68 In fact, of course, the onus is on the historians of the early 1640s to establish whether or not the popular culture of those years was different in kind from that which had existed since at least the fifteenth century. In his home territory of Essex, John finds the core of popular political culture in ‘religion and history’.69 The religion was Protestantism, often Puritanical and always strongly anti-Popish. The history was the long tradition of village involvement in legal, military and administrative responsibilities.70 The experience of

 Wood, Riot, Rebellion and Popular Politics, p. 65.   Mentioned by Morrill and Walter, ‘Order and Disorder’, p. 137. 65   Percy Ernst Schramm, A History of the English Coronation, trans. Leopold G. Wickham Legg (Oxford, 1937), pp. 165–7; Proceedings in the Parliaments of Elizabeth I, ed. T. E. Hartley (Leicester, 1981–95), I, p. 60. 66   See e.g. Quarter Sessions Records, ed. J. C. Atkinson (North Riding Record Soc., 1884–92), III, pp. 233–4; Hist. MSS Cssn, Reports, Salisbury, XVI, p. 38; Exchequer Proceedings concerning Wales in Tempore James I, compiled by T. I. Jeffreys Jones (Cardiff, 1955), p. 318. 67   Crowds and Popular Politics, p. 11; ‘The English people and the English Revolution Revisited’, p. 181. 68   Morrill and Walter, ‘Order and Disorder’, p. 159. 69   Understanding Popular Violence, pp. 350–1. 70   On which see R. B. Goheen, ‘Peasant Politics? Village Community and the Crown in Fifteenth-Century England’, AHR 96 (1991), 42–62; Dyer, ‘Political Life of the FifteenthCentury English village’; Andy Wood, ‘Collective Violence, Social Drama and Rituals of Rebellion in Late Medieval and Early Modern England’, Cultures of Violence: Interpersonal Violence in Historical Perspective, ed. Stuart Carroll (Basingstoke, 2007), pp. 99–116. 63

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local self-government and office-holding made an incalculable contribution to popular political education. How else, for example, could English pirates have learned to elect their captain and decide by majority vote their rules for dividing up plunder and administering justice?71 The two years, 1640–2, to which John has devoted the most concentrated attention, saw an altogether new level of crowd action, both in London and the provinces, with enclosure riots, acts of iconoclastic destruction and violent attacks on the houses and monuments of the gentry and nobility. The increasing politicisation of the lower classes became apparent as they took part in petitioning and public demonstrations against Laudian and Catholics, poverty and unemployment. This was what David Cressy called England on Edge, though his book of that title makes no reference to what is surely the most thorough and penetrating analysis of any of the disturbances of those years, namely John’s Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution: the Colchester Plunderers.72 This is a truly formidable work, the thickest of thick descriptions. It started as yet another of John’s micro-historical articles contextualising the actions of a crowd, this time the Stour valley riots of the summer of 1642. These physical attacks on the houses and property of Essex and Suffolk nobility and gentry had been regarded by previous historians as an obvious example of class hatred at work. What John showed, in a monograph of 350 closely argued and heavily documented pages, is that the crowds were systematic and selective in their attacks. They targeted not the upper classes as such, but only the Catholics and proto-Royalists among them, whom they assaulted for being papists and malignants, not for being gentlemen.73 They were moved into action by frightening rumours about Popish plots and advancing hordes of Irish arsonists. Their aim was to disarm the Papists before they could turn their weapons against the supporters of Parliament. The crowds also moved against many of the ministers who had introduced Laudian innovations in worship and supported Bishop Wren in his crusade against godly non-conformists. John carefully reconstructs the particular local reasons why Sir John Lucas, though a Protestant, was the first to be attacked. They included his opposition to the dominant local magnate, the Earl of Warwick, the uncrowned ‘King in Essex’. In an earlier study Clive Holmes suggested that Warwick had a crucial influence on the Colchester disorders, whereas John is reluctant to go any further than saying that Warwick ‘allowed’ them to happen and must have welcomed the outcome.74 It is a vital difference, since on it hangs the question as

  Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 261–6.   Presumably because he ends with Charles I’s declaration of war on 22 August, the eve of the first of the Stour Valley riots; England on Edge: Crisis and Revolution 1640–1642 (Oxford, 2006). 73  Walter, Understanding Popular Violence, p. 282. 74   Clive Holmes, The Eastern Association in the English Civil War (Cambridge, 1974), pp. 28, 34–5, 36–40; Walter, Understanding Popular Violence, pp. 149–55; in Walter’s article on Lucas 71

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to whether the rioters really were acting on their own initiative. Unfortunately, there is no direct evidence to resolve the matter. For John, the Stour Valley riots prove the existence of an active citizenry, mobilised by the politics of anti-Popery and popular Parliamentarianism. He sees the years 1640–2 as ‘an extraordinary period of politicization’.75 In the years after the publication of The Colchester Plunderers, John has vigorously pursued this theme of confessional conflict and the politicisation of the populace which, he believes, ‘made the English Revolution possible’.76 In a stream of meticulous micro-studies he has revealed the existence of powerful anti-Laudian sentiment, both in the Essex parishes, where there was resistance to the attempt to enforce bowing and kneeling, and among mutinous troops, who set about pulling down altar rails. John interprets this popular iconoclasm, not as mindless vandalism, but as a religiously inspired repudiation of the Laudian innovations, a ‘God-given duty’ to ‘police sacred space’.77 He documents mounting tension between godly parishioners and aggressive Laudian ministers, well exemplified by the ‘affronts and insolencies’ to which the ceremonialist Richard Drake was subjected by his recalcitrant flock at Radwinter.78 Here John momentarily succumbs to the temptation to romanticise ­seventeenth-century popular culture. When one parishioner throws a dead duck at the unfortunate Master Drake, John rightly hails this as an instance of ‘plebeian humour’. But he goes on to cite, as an example of the ‘depth of cultural creativity’ involved in plebeian humour, the troops who ducked a ‘common whore’ in a holy well, claiming that when the papists came for holy water, they would get whore’s water.79 Quite amusing, no doubt, but in the age of Inigo Jones, George Herbert and Anthony van Dyck, there is a case for using the notion of ‘cultural creativity’ a little more sparingly. Moreover, it is important not to exaggerate the ideological sophistication of mutinous troops.80 The experience of our own time has taught us that rioting crowds usually comprise different elements, some less reputable than others. In his recent article on the Irish rising of 1641 John works hard to extract the

in ODNB, 34, he suggests that Warwick’s attitude to the riots was ‘at least’ one of acceptance (pp. 680–1), and in ‘The English People and the English Revolution Revisited’ he concedes that Parliamentary denunciation of proto-royalists and popish lords may have licensed attacks on unpopular landowners (p. 178). 75  Walter, Understanding Popular Violence, pp. 273–4, 288. 76   Walter, ‘“Affronts & insolencies”: The Voices of Radwinter and Popular Opposition to Laudianism’, EHR 122 (2007), 35–60, p. 60. 77   Walter, ‘The English People and the English Revolution Revisited’, p. 178; ‘“Abolishing superstition with sedition?”: the politics of popular iconoclasm’, P&P 183 (2004), pp. 112, 123 ; ‘Popular Iconoclasm and the Politics of the Parish in Eastern England, 1640–1642’, HJ 47 (2004), p. 290. 78   Walter, ‘“Affronts and insolencies”’. 79   Walter, ‘“Abolishing superstition with sedition?”’, pp. 106, 109, 111, 123. 80   Tim Harris, Rebellion: Britain’s First Stuart Kings, 1567–1642 (Oxford, 2014), p. 386.

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symbolism implicit in the horrific torture and killing of English settlers in order to show that these actions had some quasi-legitimacy in the eyes of the perpetrators.81 But calling the violence ‘performative’ or ‘parodic’ or ‘didactive’ does not rob it of its flagrant incompatibility with the accepted morality of the time. John likes to enliven his footnotes with tantalising announcements of his future plans, not all of which have yet come to fruition. In 1999 he let slip the news that he was ‘currently working’ on the politics of the Protestation Oath of 1641–2.82 He is currently completing a book that will tell the history of that Oath to defend the nation against ‘popery and popish innovations’ and its contribution to the creation of an explicitly Parliamentarian popular political culture. David Underdown, of course, argued thirty years ago that the Protestation was ‘the basic common denominator of popular aspirations’ throughout the Civil War, but he also stressed that its objectives were limited and consequently ‘provided the peace-seeking majority with a programme and a vocabulary’.83 John, by contrast, regards it as revolutionary in intent and radical in its consequences. The Oath radically extended the membership of the political nation by including both eighteen-year-old youths and, to some extent, women. In John’s view, it assisted the ‘disintegration of the culture of obedience under the questionings of politically informed consciences’.84 A provisional synopis of his book suggests that it will confirm everything he has previously written about ‘the existence of an early modern public sphere with greater social depth than has been allowed’, and ‘a popular political culture more formally engaged with the politics of church and state’.85 The Civil War led to the execution of the King, the abolition of the Anglican Church and the confiscation of Royalist lands. But the world was not turned upside down and the social order remained largely intact. At various times, John has offered hints as to why neither the Levellers nor the Diggers succeeded in mobilising popular support. He emphasises the increasing dependence of the poor upon the village elites for employment and relief, the relative indifference of the Levellers to agrarian issues, the Diggers’ hostility to common rights, and the difficulty of mobilising landless labourers and cottagers.86 Perhaps one day   John Walter, ‘Performative Violence and the Politics of Violence in the 1641 Depositions’, Ireland: 1641: Contexts and Reactions, ed. Micheál Ó Siochrú and Jane Ohlmeyer (Manchester, 2013), pp. 134–52. 82  Walter, Understanding Popular Violence, p. 292, n. 19. 83   David Underdown, Revel, Riot, and Rebellion (Oxford, 1985), pp. 286, 158–9. 84   John Walter, talk given to the Early Modern Britain seminar, Oxford University, 6 November 2014; and ‘Politicising the Popular?’, pp.105–6. 85   Unpublished proposal (kindly shown me by John Walter) for the book subsequently published, but unfortunately too late to be discussed here, as Covenanting Citizens: The Protestation Oath and Popular Political Culture in the English Revolution (Oxford, 2016). 86   Morrill and Walter, ‘Order and disorder’, pp. 160–2; Walter, ‘The impact on society’, pp. 191–4. 81

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he will fulfil his youthful ambition and give us the definitive account of radical movements during the English Revolution. Meanwhile, we are profoundly grateful for all he has done to broaden our understanding of crowd behaviour, to probe the mentality of the common people, to reconstruct the politics of social relations, and to produce works of scholarship which are models of archival research and historical craftsmanship. He has inspired and assisted others in the extraordinary flourishing and intellectual sophistication of early modern English social history which has been such a feature of recent decades and which the other contributors to this book are still advancing.

33

2 Contrasting susceptibility to famine in early fourteenth- and late sixteenth-­ century England: the significance of late medieval rural social structural and village ­governmental changes Richard M. Smith The incidence of harvest failure in the seven centuries from the Norman Conquest to the Restoration was particularly heightened in the periods from c.1280 to c.1322 and c.1580 to c.1640. Both were phases when English population levels peaked close to, or were in excess of 5 million. However, a significant contrast can be detected between the two eras when the intensity of crises emanating from harvest failure is measured. Although historians of early modern England have undoubtedly devoted more energy to their analysis of the admittedly more copious evidence relating in particular to crises de subsistence in the Tudor and early Stuart period, indubitably inspired by the examples set by students of the Annales school, research on the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries seems clearly to show that this earlier period was the more famine prone of the two.1 While climatic conditions giving rise to cool wet summers may have been more adverse in their impact in the early fourteenth than the late sixteenth century, it is hard to attribute the differing mortality levels in populations of similar size solely to contrasting degrees of weather extreme: in 1315–17 close to 400,000–500,000 died and 1595–7 when 40,000 died in populations of similar size. Furthermore, in the earlier period there was more likely a lower proportion of landless which a priori would mean that fewer persons were dependent on the market. We might assume that significantly more people were exposed to the vagaries of dietary deficiency in late Tudor and Stuart England since dependence of wage-paid workers on the purchase of grain or bread in the market was more widespread.2   The fullest overview remains John Walter and Roger Schofield, ‘Famine, Disease and Crisis Mortality in Early Modern Society’, Famine, Disease and the Social Order in Early Modern Society, ed. J. Walter and R. Schofield (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 1–73. 2   E. A. Wrigley and Roger Schofield, The Population History of England 1541–1871: A Reconstruction, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 336–40; Cormac Ó’Gráda, ‘Neither Feast nor 1

RICHARD M. SMITH

The greater vulnerability of society to dearth-driven mortality surges in the period c.1280–c.1325 had been noted previously with a stress on the greater intensity of the crises and their broader geographical extent.3 Recent work on the environmental conditions, especially those which gave rise to what has come to be known as the Great European Famine of 1315–22, has resulted in the assembly of data from cores in the Greenland ice sheet correlated with temperature conditions in the North Atlantic and linked especially to dendrochronological evidence of retarded growth of Old and New World trees. Such evidence points to a period of exceptional storminess and very high rainfall totals and, when linked to the information from manorial account rolls revealing yields per acre and seed sown as well as the overall quantity of grain harvested in those years, suggests a fall in output on a scale that cannot be matched in any other years for which such data can be retrieved extending over the last eight centuries.4 However, the physical shortages were exacerbated in their dramatic negative impact on life chances of substantial sections of society by major institutional and political failures to control grain markets and prices, or to effect any significant redistributions from those sections of society whose food intake and income were more than sufficient to meet their daily needs to those who suffered from dietary and material deficiencies.5 In this chapter I first review evidence of non-environmental factors creating high levels of mortality in 1315–22; in section two, I examine those non-environmental factors identified by early modernists as crucial to mitigating the effects of harvest failure in the later period. Following John Walter’s analysis of the ‘politics of subsistence’ and other influential work by early modernists, I emphasise in particular the development of popular politics and village elites, and the incorporation of the latter into the structures of parochial rather than manorial government, and of the links of these local institutions to the state. I then trace the development of these social, political and institutional conditions in the centuries prior to 1550 in sections three and four. This revises the chronology adopted in an earlier account of incorporation in the fourteenth century, but also offers a corrective to the view that these features of English life were very new in 1550. Famine: England Before The Industrial Revolution’, Institutions, Innovations and industrialisation: Essays in Economic History, ed. Avner Grief, Lynne Kiesling and John V. C. Nye (Princeton, 2015), pp. 7–32. 3   Richard M. Smith, ‘Demographic Developments in Rural England 1300–1348’, Before the Black Death: Studies in the ‘Crisis’ of the Early Fourteenth Century, ed. B. M. S. Campbell (Manchester, 1991), pp. 52–8. 4   B. M. S. Campbell, ‘Nature as Historical Protagonist: Environment and Society in Pre– Industrial England: The 2008 Tawney Memorial Lecture’, EcHR 63 (2010), 281–314. 5   Richard M. Smith, ‘Dearth and Local Political Responses: 1280–1325 and 1580–1596/97 Compared’, Peasants and Lords in the Medieval English Economy: Essays in Honour of Bruce M.S. Campbell, ed. Maryanne Kowaleski, John Langdon and Phillipp R. Schofield (Turnhout, 2015), pp. 377–406.

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The inefficiency of grain marketing in the Great Famine has recently been explored by Slavin. He was able to exploit a surprisingly large number of manorial accounts relating to the demesne farms of the larger landlords to show how the unconstrained or unregulated behaviour of those who managed them created the conditions of a malfunctioning market in the principal food supplies between 1315 and 1317. His analysis reveals the looming presence of ‘particularised trust’ in which grain transactions took place principally between affiliates or parties connected by social bonds, and an increase in hoarding and sales of grain loaded heavily on late spring and summer so as to maximise prices at a time when grain reserves were at their lowest. He concludes: ‘The Great Famine would not have been great without man-made complication.’ These inefficiencies occurred notwithstanding abortive attempts by the crown to place embargoes on grain exports and encouragements to bishops to ask priests in their sermons to condemn hoarding.6 Similarly, John Maddicott showed over forty years ago that Edwardian taxation to underwrite military campaigning more generally over the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century pushed sizeable sections of society towards and beyond the subsistence precipice. For example, the need to supply English armies in Scotland following defeat at Bannockburn resulted in much needed grain being diverted to the Anglo-Scottish borders rather than being available to boost supplies to the English market. Purveyancing for military purposes more generally could distort prices, as in 1316 at the height of the Great Famine when the grain-producing countries of Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire (which had been jointly ordered by the crown to supply 1,200 quarters of grain for the King) displayed corn prices considerably higher than those obtaining in other parts of the country.7 Furthermore, in discussing ways in which officials could have reduced the liability for tax by undervaluing movables, Maddicott was keen to stress that sub-taxers ‘were not habitually concerned to keep their neighbours in easy circumstances’ and when referring to the sympathies of village officials, manorial or royal, noted that they did not invariably lie with the men of the localities. Noteworthy too was Maddicott’s view that although Parliament might offer occasional possibilities for redress there were no familiar and accepted procedures for checking the behaviour of avaricious officials. Maddicott made a forceful case for not assuming ‘that the Malthusian checks imposed by sporadic bouts of bad weather necessarily did most to determine the economic fortunes of the peasantry at this time’.8 This was largely, he supposed, because the burdens of taxation and the pressures of

  Philip Slavin, ‘Market Failure during the Great Famine in England and Wales (1315– 1317)’, P&P 222 (2014), 9–49. 7   J. R. Maddicott, ‘The English Peasantry and the Demands of the Crown 1294–1341’, P&P supplement 1 (1975), p. 32. 8   Ibid., p. 75. 6

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purveyancing ‘had increased too sharply and in too short a space of time to allow the development of restrictions which custom and legal process might ultimately have imposed upon a more gradually evolving tax system’.9 More probing attempts to unearth elements of a social economy, admittedly in what remains a small number of local case studies, have also drawn a depressing picture. For example, there is evidence of land sales by indebted tenants to the advantage of the already well-off during years of crisis, while a substantial quantity of land sales between siblings also reveals the ineffectiveness of the kin group as a means of insurance against worsening economic conditions during the years most affected by dearth. Debt cases in manorial courts point to a substantial withdrawal of credit provision which might also have offered a lifeline to the indebted. A rise in property crime and a tendency to punish girls or their families for sexual irregularities suggest a society that was not willing to display tolerance towards behaviour, the source of which might have been found in the intolerable economic conditions.10 II

The above analyses suggest a growing willingness by medievalists to analyse what John Walter has termed the ‘politics of subsistence’, although as an approach it remains a pale shadow of that achieved by early modernists working within such a framework.11 John Walter has given political structures and processes a striking role to play in his assessment of the means by which, in his own words, early modern England ‘slipped the shadow of famine’12. One of Walter’s major contributions to this field has been to seek out those human actions that would substantially confirm Amartya Sen’s classic thesis that famines tend principally to be man-made. While the roles played by protestors have loomed large in Walter’s analyses of popular politics, his investigations certainly never present the relationships between those protestors and elite or higher-order authority in purely binary terms. One significant element now long-present in the study of early modern popular politics has been the desire to probe what Walter terms the ‘inner history’ of political life by a focus upon those below the level of the gentry who assumed community leadership roles facilitated by the offices they also held in various branches of local government.13 Such local governmental roles in part explain the extent to which such persons were well informed politically while their possession of resources that would in   Ibid., p. 74.   This argument is more fully developed and referenced in Smith, ‘Dearth and Local Political Response’, 387–9. 11   Many of the relevant texts are conveniently collected together in John Walter, Crowds and Popular Politics in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2006). 12   Walter and Schofield, ‘Famine, Disease and Crisis Mortality’, p. 36 13  Walter, Crowds and Politics, p. 16. 9 

10

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many cases normally be destined for the market gave them the means to redirect them for welfare purposes. They formed a ‘middling sort’ drawn from the ranks of large farmers, well situated artisans and traders with a key role to play in their relations simultaneously with both those above and below them in the social order. For example, if such individuals held petty offices and served on juries they were well positioned to remind magistrates of their responsibilities and if in league with the church locally could bring to the attention of landlords and gentry with grain surpluses their ‘God-given duty’ to place people before profit in high-price years of dearth. While Walter is willing to give some prominence to the actions of the middling sort, those whom early modern historians now single out as central players in the politics of the parish, he has also emphasised that the lowermost ‘sorts’ were far from primitive in their political perceptions and actions. The political context that encapsulates the actions and negotiations of these ‘sorts’ is frequently seen as the parish community and how membership of it was defined both formally and informally as a setting within which resources were transferred from those in material surplus to those in need. A consensus exists among early modern historians in their emphasis on the importance of central policy initiatives. These concerned, for instance, control and allocation of grain supplies in periods of shortages and high prices, whether directly in the form of the Books of Order or indirectly through efforts to sustain purchasing power by the generation of welfare resources via statutes. The latter had established more than the bare rudiments of parochial poor rates in the 1540s, at least three generations before the well-known legislation of 1598 and 1601. Some would see these later sixteenth-century political responses to these conditions as in part a reaction to the challenge to social order arising from episodes of potentially threatening actions on the parts of the lower orders.14 Others would view the effectiveness of these central policies as in part dependent upon the political responsiveness of local communities.15 For instance, Walter’s sometime co-author and co-editor, Mike Braddick,16 would stress a necessary ingredient in this situation to be the willingness of local communities to invite in the agencies of central government and therefore not to portray that initiative as coming exclusively from the centre. Braddick also encourages us to take seriously the distinction that Michael Mann drew between distributive and collective power in assessing the functioning of political power and the ways in which individuals and groups responded to it. Distributive power is that of one person or one group over another. Collective power reflects the potential power of an

  R. B. Outhwaite, ‘Dearth and Government Intervention in English Grain Markets, 1590– 1700’, EcHR 33 (1981), 389–406; Paul Slack, Poverty and Policy in Tudor and Stuart England (London and New York, 1988), pp. 122–31. 15   Walter and Schofield, ‘Famine, Disease and Crisis Mortality’, pp. 68–69; Michael J. Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England c. 1550–1700 (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 72–9. 16   Negotiating Power in Early Modern Society: Hierarchy and Subordination in Britain and Ireland, ed. Michael J. Braddick and John Walter (Cambridge, 2000). 14

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organised group. ‘Effective administration of power requires that people do things that they would not ordinarily do (distributive power) thereby increasing the collective capacity of groups of people (collective power).’17 These interconnections suggest, as Braddick shows, that the exercise of administrative power was far from being a zero-sum game between competing groups. Braddick gives the example of the establishment of a set of measures by central government in the form of statutory measures to raise and distribute poor relief by the Privy Council. These measures certainly gave to and reflected the power of central authorities but they also enhanced the collective power of groups of people locally, such as churchwardens, vestries and local collectors of the poor to deal with locally perceived consequences of economic and social change. Of course, the existence of such local office holders constituted an essential category, indeed a vital prerequisite, of locally resident personnel who enabled such an effective interaction between centre and locality. It was not the dearth orders per se that enabled communities to be by-passed by starvation but as Braddick has subtly indicated, ‘a local officeholder, legitimating his position with reference to values of patriarchal order, would have had difficulty finding plausible reasons to resist pressure to implement them during bad years’.18 It has also been stressed that developments in the legitimate scope of power in early modern England were not necessarily secured by the centre at the expense of the localities. Officials or office holders in the localities sometimes took up and sometimes ignored administrative innovation generated in the centre as well as generating administrative innovation themselves. As a result, local negotiation and political power were invoked for local as well as general or central purposes. For Braddick, the English state that had emerged after 1550 was a ‘coordinated and territorially bounded network of agencies exercising political power’.19 Those agencies were a product of their territorial and functional bounds, but also of the wider beliefs in terms of which their activities were justified. Agency was given to the state by the way the localities used centrally initiated policy, being a view that accords well with Slack’s observation when considering the English capacity to establish a system of parish-based poor rates. Slack acknowledges that ‘we have an intriguing paradox: state and collectivities flourishing together, neither diminished by the other’.20 Furthermore, Slack acknowledges the historic depth of this durable relationship when he states that ‘even the Henrician and Edwardian dissolutions, the most powerful threat to the corporate fabric ever mounted in England did not upset that reciprocal relationship for long’.21 This statement implies that it was a relationship of some longstanding and certainly

 Braddick, State Formation, p. 93.   Ibid., p. 131. 19   Ibid., p. 94. 20   Paul Slack, From Reformation to Improvement: Public Welfare in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1998), p. 161. 21   Ibid., p.162. 17

18

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not instigated by the Tudor regime – a viewpoint of considerable significance for what follows in the current discussion. How far have medievalists conceived of issues to do with centre and locality relations in such terms and how helpful would efforts to assess such concepts, so important in the analyses of early modernists, be to a better understanding of the medieval politics of subsistence? III

No medieval student of the politics of subsistence can avoid a consideration of lord–tenant and more specifically lord–serf relations in any assessment of the politics surrounding the causes of and reactions to dearth. This is a large subject and limited space precludes a full consideration of these issues as they relate to the situation prevailing in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. Indeed conflict between lords and peasant, amounting to a guerrilla warfare over the appropriation of the surplus product of the peasant holding would be seen by those following Rodney Hilton as a prime mover in the evolution of medieval society as a whole.22 While such a position might be regarded as starkly binary, it has served many scholars in the post-World War II generations with a conceptual basis for consideration of medieval peasant politics as something distinct and certainly recognisable when contrasted with the traditional medieval political history with its focus on formal politics. There is general agreement that the stigma of serfdom was disliked, indeed despised,23and there is no shortage of instances of cases involving the unfree tenants of whole manors straining to justify their claims to ‘ancient demesne’ status that would mean rents, fines and services that were owed could not be altered and indicative of a relatively sophisticated knowledge of legal matters.24 Resistance to labour services could also be effective in the impact that it registered on the positions adopted by landlords. Such resistance and the resulting low labour productivity most likely accounted for a far from inconsequential move towards the commutation of labour rents by landlords into money payments in the first half of the fourteenth century.25 Nonetheless, the absence of any readily detectable signs of large-scale riot, revolt or protest during the most extreme conditions created by harvest

  See two of Hilton’s most influential articles: R. H. Hilton, ‘Peasant Movements in England before 1381’, EcHR 2 (1949), 117–36 ‘Freedom and Villeinage in England’, Peasants, Knights and Heretics, ed. R. H. Hilton (Cambridge, 1976), pp. 174–91. 23   Christopher Dyer, ‘Memories of Freedom, Attitudes Towards Serfdom in England, 1200– 1350’, Serfdom and Slavery: Studies in Legal Bondage, ed. M. L. Bush (Harlow, 1999), pp. 277–96. 24   Paul Vinogradoff, Villainage in England (Oxford, 1892), 89–137; R.S. Hoyt, The Royal demesne in English Constitutional History, 1066–1272 (Ithaca, 1950); M. K. McIntosh, ‘The Privileged Villeins of the English Ancient Demesne’, Viator 7 (1976), 295–328; Elizabeth Hallam, Domesday Book through Nine Centuries (London, 1986), pp. 74–97. 25   David Stone, ‘The Productivity of Hired and Customary Labour’, EcHR 50 (1997), 640–56; Edward Miller and John Hatcher, Medieval England: Rural Society and Economic Change 22

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failures at the close of the thirteenth and beginning of the fourteenth centuries has frequently been contrasted with the popular political actions of 1381 that seemingly occurred within a context of relative material abundance following a massive change in the ratio of land to labour following the first plague pandemic. Revolts on a sizeable, if not as geographically extensive a scale as that of 1381, occurred in 1450, 1489, 1497, 1536–7 and 1549. Even allowing for evidential contrasts in the two periods, they did not occur in a comparable form or scale in the materially far worse conditions of the century prior to 1348–9.The tendency for those engaged in such popular rebellion to term themselves ‘commons’ and the perception of themselves as possessing political agency has acquired prominence among a rising number of historians and literary scholars who are inclined to treat them as an emergent political community of the realm. Michael Bush, for example, views the ‘commons’ in all of the previously mentioned risings from and including that of 1381 as attempting in a decidedly conservative manner to protect the traditional orders of society against innovations of the crown.26 John Watts has argued that ‘commons’ came to denote over the fifteenth century something other than the political community but more akin to a lower class or poor.27 David Rollison has been even more emphatic in arguing for a key role for the commons as the broad mass of the people in conflict with the nobility and thereby energising a ‘long social revolution’ from the thirteenth century via their concerns, above all, with taxation, wages and prices, legal rights, security of employment and defence of the realm.28 Watts and Rollison share views that are part of a body of opinion that sees a polity progressing towards an increasing openness, thereby permitting the entry into a variety of political processes for a variety of social groups over the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.29 However, Watts, in particular, sees the sixteenth century as a phase where the commons became more marginalised and less able to disturb the commonwealth,30 a position that he would share with Wood who regards the

1086–1348 (London, 1978), 223–4; Mark Bailey, The Decline of Serfdom in Late Medieval England (Woodbridge, 2014), pp. 255–6. 26   Michael Bush, ‘The Risings of the Commons in England, 1381–1549’, Orders and Hierarchies in Late Medieval and Renaissance Europe, ed. Jeffrey H. Denton (London, 1999), pp. 109–25. 27   John L. Watts, ‘Public or Plebs: The Changing Meaning of “the Commons”, 1381–1549’, Power and Identity in the Middle Ages: Essays in Memory of Rees Davies, ed. Huw Pryce, John L. Watts and R. R. Davies (Oxford 2007), 242–60; John Watts, ‘The Pressure of the Public on later Medieval Politics’, The Fifteenth Century IV: The Political Culture of Late Medieval Britain, ed. Linda Clark and Christine Carpenter (Woodbridge, 2004). 28   David Rollison, A Commonwealth of the People: Popular Politics and England’s Long Social Revolution, 1066–1649 (Cambridge, 2010). 29   See, for example, I. W. M. Harvey, ‘Was There a Popular Politics in the Fifteenth Century’, in The McFarlane Legacy: Studies in Late Medieval Politics and Society, ed. R. H. Britnell and A. J. Pollard (Stroud, 195) 30   John Watts, review of David Rollison, A Commonwealth of the People, JSocHist 46 (2013), 1101–3.

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rebellion of 1549 as marking a moment of schism in the commons. He argues that those wealthier villagers and townspeople who had previously led popular rebellion after 1549 began aligning themselves more with, or were drawn further into, state structures that resulted in a marginalisation of the poorest social groups. Wood believes that this polarisation led to abandonment of the types of insurrection that had threatened stability at relatively frequent intervals over the previous two centuries.31 This argument retains a particular conceptualisation of a form of collective rural social relations before the mid Tudor years after which a more differentiated ‘commons’ created novel socio-political relations within the parish. Such a view calls for more careful consideration of those who might be viewed as an actual or potential parochial middling sort, in the century and a half before the mid-sixteenth century. Within the increased ‘openness’ of society that some scholars have stressed is detectable in the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, one might find the possibility of identifying local communities where political processes and relationships can be analysed in ways that do not depend on the use of binaries. Furthermore, might we be able to detect in this period the forging of political structures and developing procedures that in various ways formed essential preconditions for mid to late Tudor village-level practices that are seen as an essential link with emerging central government policies for dealing with dearth-related crises and deprivation in a broader sense? Central to these are the parish, and the role of middling sorts in its affairs. The fifteenth-century village or parish, allowing for some obvious regional variation, is certainly a more visible entity in our sources than the thirteenth or early fourteenth-century vill. In the earlier period our sources are heavily weighted towards the records of the manor and inevitably dominated, as already noted, by matters that concern relations between lord and tenant. While this relationship should not be pushed too far to one side in our understanding of what remained a heavily agrarian and unequal fifteenth-century society, our sources, although still dominated after 1400 by what they reveal of administration and actions rather than motives, acquire a more evidently parochial orientation. This allows us to see and contextualise the actions of such individuals as the churchwarden, the tax assessor, the guild or fraternity members and the individual testator in ways that were barely visible before the late fourteenth century. Furthermore, the manorial court records (which lose some of the detail they had at their height between c.1270 and c.1370) become principally concerned with matters to do with property tenure and exchanges, although the leet courts and, in particular, the bye-laws that were frequently created in them, have an increasing focus on matters of community concern that transcend the manor per se. Moreover, it becomes possible to observe individuals, especially local office holders, serving

  Andy Wood, The 1549 Rebellions and the Making of Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 187–207. 31

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in both manorial and parochial roles. In what follows, we will consider three major contexts within which these leading figures in the village community operated, principally over the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. The first concerns their tenurial relations with landlords and their standing as landholders, the second, their relations with the state and, finally, their relations with those economically positioned below them and particularly those who were unambiguously poor. Any overview of the position of the broad mass of landholders after 1400 has to engage with the issue of villeinage and its decline. Recent research on ‘pre-­ decline’ villeinage has convincingly shown that around 1300 a combination of custom and influences, deriving in part from the operation of the common law, limited arbitrary action by landlords in managing the tenurial terms under which land was held by their customary tenants.32 In fact, this helps to explain why customary tenants also often paid sub-economic rent since they were generally protected from excesses of the market. Indeed, it has been argued that unfree tenants at the beginning of the fourteenth century enjoyed a relatively privileged form of tenancy. This state of affairs prevailed, especially among those customary tenants with above average holding sizes of 10 to 15 acres in East Anglia or those in the Midlands or central southern England with 20 to 30 acres. These tenants could benefit from favourable terms of tenure of land held from landlords who appear to have been remarkably passive in their respect for and protection of customary tenure.33 Many of these individuals would have been holders of offices on manors that positioned them as potential intermediaries between the local community and higher tiers on the administrative order – a veritable middling sort. The emphasis in recent research has been on how these local elites at the turn of the thirteenth century exploited the harsh conditions for their own advantage, rather than on how they would have spearheaded protest against deteriorating conditions and high grain prices, or engaged in significant redistributions of resources in their local settings, through charitable acts in times of dearth. They are viewed as basically being left to their own devices by landlords in the Eastern Counties whose income was substantially enhanced from the license fees they were paid when these tenancies or parts of them were bought and sold. Both landlord and larger customary tenant were able to take advantage of hyperactive land markets in these counties that created large-scale morcellation of landholdings as

  For a forceful assessment of these issues before 1348 see John Hatcher, ‘Lordship and Villeinage Before the Black Death: From Karl Marx to the Marxists and Back Again’ Peasants and Lords, ed. Maryanne Kowaleski, John Langdon and Phillip R. Schofield (Turnhout, 2015), pp. 113–45. 33   For a discussion of the legal developments in the thirteenth century that offered customary tenants greater protection in their tenancies see Zvi Razi and Richard M. Smith, ‘The Origins of the Manorial Court Rolls as a Written Record: A Puzzle’, Medieval Society and the Manor Court, ed. Zvi Razi and Richard M. Smith (Oxford, 1996), pp. 50–9. 32

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smallholdings became even smaller while a minority hoovered up these smaller pieces of property from their less fortunate neighbours as they slid towards insolvency. In the Midlands and central southern England, the full virgaters who held 30 acres or more behaved similarly to the larger customary tenants in East Anglia, but did so not through land purchasing but through rack-renting to a sizeable corps of persons holding small-scale and usually short-term leaseholds. In all settings free tenants were often found holding the smallest holdings of all and on account of lack of protection from customary tenure paying relatively high rents per acre.34 In these conditions the economic winners, particularly among the inflation-protected larger customary landholders, were a ‘middling sort’ in more than embryo form who might have offered an effective agency in their protection from famine of their smallholder or landless neighbours. To have done so would have required redistributive behaviour locally as well as collaboration with higher levels in the social and administrative hierarchy to effect transfers of resources to those in critical need during the dearth conditions that were severe and recurrent in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. The contrast with the early modern situation prompts us to ask therefore, whether the higher echelons of government were not engaging effectively with the middling sort in ways that occurred during periods of dearth in the late sixteenth century or were there few precedents of village elites acting regularly to shield by redistributive actions their poorer neighbours from threats to living standards in times of harvest crisis? While the economic disadvantages of villeinage were often softened by custom around 1300 it was still a condition, primarily for social and some legal reasons, that contemporaries wished to eradicate. Villeinage, however, was geographically very uneven in its character as well as incidence, and as Mark Bailey notes ‘there was a multitude of unfreedom in early fourteenth century England’.35 In fact, in around 1300 half, at most, of the total acreage in England was held in villeinage36 but by the early sixteenth century, tenure of most of that land had

  These arguments are best tracked through the following: John Hatcher, ‘English Serfdom and Villeinage: Towards a Reassessment’, P&P 90 (1981), 3–39; Richard M. Smith, ‘Some Thoughts on “Hereditary” and “Proprietary” Rights under Customary Law in Thirteenth and Early Fourteenth Century England’, Law and History Review 1 (1983), 215–241; B. M. S. Campbell, ‘The Agrarian Problem in the Early Fourteenth Century’, P&P 188 (2005), 3–70; Junichi Kanzaka, ‘Villein Rents in Thirteenth-Century England: An Analysis of the Hundred Rolls of 1270–80’, EcHR 55 (2002), 593–618; Christopher Dyer, ‘The ineffectiveness of Lordship in England’, in Rodney Hilton’s Middle Ages: An Exploration of Historical Themes, ed. Christopher Dyer, Peter Coss and Chris Wickham (Oxford, 2007), pp. 69–86. 35   Mark Bailey, The Decline of Serfdom, p. 331. 36   This re-weighting derives from the remarkable database that was created from almost 9,300 inquisitiones post mortem for almost 5,000 places relating to 1,800 lay lords in the first part of the fourteenth century. It showed in striking fashion that historians have over-estimated the land area held in villeinage tenure and its character as a result of their over-dependence on the records of conservative ecclesiastical estates, large (especially Benedictine) estates and large 34

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escaped jurisdiction regarding its proprietorial rights from the landlord’s own court because it could be defended in the common law courts.37 In principle, this implies that formal resolution of landlord–tenant dispute was for the most part taken away from the local manorial court for resolution in external, higher order courts.38 By 1500 customary land was no longer held through a rental arrangement that was based on incidents that could have been unpredictable and irksome to be replaced by one which was fully monetised. The removal of these uncertainties certainly increased the security of those attempting to accumulate capital securely. Landlords converted less secure copyholds for lives into leases which were often beneficial.39 Furthermore, the predominant form of copyhold was of inheritance which was far securer for the tenant. Leases provided flexibility in the acquisition of land, enabling the creation of larger holdings.40 Many abandoned customary holdings in the depressed demographic conditions, when converted into leaseholds, attracted tenants such as town freemen and merchants and prosperous artisans and even gentry who previously would have shunned venture into tenure of customary land.41 The net effect was to introduce a new category of landholders into local communities, as well as to enable substantial engrossment of holdings. Unpopular dues by more conservative landlords were resisted and conflicts occurred around the enclosure of arable land for purposes of pastoral, principally sheep farming. Recent assessments of these matters, such as occurred in evaluations at the time of the centenary of the publication of Tawney’s Agrarian Problem in 2012, have shown that enclosure once supposed by him to have peaked in the period 1547–58 and creating a veritable burst of impoverished migrants was relatively rare at that date. In fact, most enclosure took place earlier in the fifteenth century when the lack of demand for land and low prices resulted in tenants moving away out of choice and selecting to take

manors. The relevant study is B. M. S. Campbell and Ken Bartley, England on the Eve of the Black Death: An Atlas of Lay Lordship, Land and Wealth, 1300–1349 (Manchester, 2006). 37   Richard W. Hoyle, ‘Tenure and the Land Market in Early Modern England: Or a Late Contribution to the Brenner Debate’, EcHR 43 (1990), 1–20; Richard M. Smith, ‘The English Peasantry, 1250–1650’, The Peasantries of Europe From the Fourteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries, ed. Tom Scott (Harlow, 1998), pp. 368–71; Robert C. Allen, Enclosure and the Yeoman: The Agricultural Development of the South Midlands 1450–1850 (Oxford, 1992), p. 69. 38   Charles M. Gray, Copyhold, Equity and the Common Law (Cambridge, Mass., 1963) 39   Jane Whittle, ‘Leasehold Tenure in England c. 1300–c.1600: Its Form and Incidence’, The Development of Leasehold in North-West Europe c.1200–1600, ed. Bas J. P. van Bavel and Phillipp R. Schofield (Turnhout, 2008), pp. 139–54. 40   For impressive data gathering and analysis which charts these processes in detail over a large number of manors see Bailey, Decline of Serfdom, pp. 87–240. 41   Shown in great detail in manorial case studies from N. E. Norfolk by Jane Whittle, The Development of Agrarian Capitalism: Land and Labour in Norfolk 1440–1580 (Oxford, 2000).

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holdings where tenancy terms were more favourable, land quality was higher and, above all, where the market for produce was commercially more favourable.42 The security associated with copyhold created institutional arrangements that were very favourable for a buoyant land market. The quantity of land available for that market was expanded as many males in the very sluggish demographic conditions that lasted into the early sixteenth century lacked heirs of either sex and as a consequence sold ‘family’ land to unrelated persons, thereby facilitating the process of engrossment. With renewed population growth after 1520 more properties passed between family members, making it harder for those with limited resources to establish a toe-hold in land and greatly increasing social differentiation at the expense of the more modest husbandmen, subtenants and smallholders. Long before 1500 a village elite had emerged, occupying properties of a size and held under generally favourable terms of tenancy within village social structures that bore limited comparison with conditions prevailing around 1300. Furthermore, when population growth resumed later in the sixteenth century there was no return to morcellation of holdings of the kind that occurred in the later thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries.43This structural development in the matter of land tenure certainly endowed a village elite with far greater economic security, confidence and perceived political power than they would have possessed 250 years earlier. IV

The most obvious link that connected local communities or vills with the state involved their role as tax-paying and collecting units. From 1334, at each collection of the lay subsidy, central government required them to pay an agreed sum. Each village had to utilise its own local machinery for the levying of the tax. Prior to 1334, from 1275 to 1332, the lay subsidies had operated on the principle that every household’s movable goods should be valued and a proportion of that value was payable in tax. Those whose total eligible movable goods were valued below a certain limit (frequently 10s.) were deemed exempt.44 Clearly a very

  See the essays, Jane Whittle ‘Introduction: Tawney’s Agrarian Problem Revisited’ and Christopher Dyer, ‘The Agrarian Problem, 1440–1520’, Landlords and Tenants in Britain, 1440–1660, ed. Jane Whittle (Woodbridge, 2013), pp. 1–34. 43   Population growth or demographic determinism, however, cannot be deemed a ‘prime mover’ because as Whittle rightly notes, population growth per se was variable in its impact since it caused ‘opposite effects in different circumstances. For instance, population growth lay behind the fragmentation of peasant farms into smaller units in the period 1250–1348, and the engrossment of larger farms in the in the sixteenth century’, Whittle ‘Introduction: Tawney’s Agrarian Problem Revisited’, p. 13. 44   J. F. Willard, Parliamentary Taxes on Personal Property 1290 to 1334. A study in Mediaeval English Financial Administration (Cambridge, Mass., 1934). 42

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substantial proportion of the less prosperous were excluded from the obligation to pay tax, although corruption was rife.45 After 1334 a fixed amount was required of each vill and as a result the detailed name-by-name lists that have survived in significant quantities for the period 1275 to 1331 cease, at least officially. Nonetheless, the tax assessing and collecting procedure appears to have functioned reasonably effectively since, as a method, it was retained into the seventeenth century. Because we have few detailed lists of individual taxpayers between 1332 and 1524, it might be presumed difficult to detect how the fixed amount required from each vill was distributed between those who contributed. However, Dyer has located a small number of relevant lists that suggest that after 1334, communities, freed from procedures such as the exemption of individuals with moveable possessions below a certain value, spread the tax burden far more widely.46 Of those vills with surviving lists, all had moved to the assessment of payments in a form which would have ensured a significant progressive taxation basis to individual liabilities. It is striking that these vills for which we can locate lists of taxpayers come from the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries and reveal far more persons paying taxes than would have most likely before 1334. Furthermore, at the later date a far higher proportion of the tax was being paid by the better-off villagers than their predecessors had done in the early fourteenth century.47 In part, engrossment of holdings and leasing of demesnes and possibly too, the conversion of arable to pasture would have led to a growing concentration of wealth in local communities. However, it is clear that the additional numbers came from those previously exempted, now paying small sums of a few pence at most per capita. Yet, this process of drawing into the tax net a higher share of the local population did not coincide with simultaneous evasion by the wealthiest, who actually carried a far larger burden of the total local tax bill.48While these small nominal sums paid by the least well-off may reflect a desire on the part of the wealthy to tax those who were seen to have been in receipt of higher wages, they also suggest a more clearly defined sense of community and neighbourliness that required some reciprocal contribution on the part of the poorest sections of society in recognition of the larger share of the tax burden that was being carried by the wealthiest. Of course, this might have created a great degree of patronage on the part of those best able to pay and reciprocal deference from those whose recognition of this perceived generosity was measured in the small charge that might have given them a greater claim to be part of that community. What is clear is this manifestation of village self-­government and a far from inconsequential set of

  See Maddicott, ‘English Peasantry’, pp. 45–57.   Christopher Dyer, ‘Taxation and Communities in Late Medieval England’, Progress and Problems in Medieval England, ed. Richard Britnell and John Hatcher (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 168–190. 47   Ibid., p. 179–86. 48   Ibid., p. 182. 45 46

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tax-gathering and assessing tasks undertaken by local office-holders, most likely churchwardens and constables, were part of those forces that engendered an increased level of local responsibility by the village elite. The central government requirement that fell upon local elites to raise and administer taxes in English vills from 1334 certainly enhanced the collective power of that section of local society, just as Braddick has claimed the statutory measures employed by the Privy Council in the sixteenth centuries to raise poor rates, while reflecting the authority of central government, simultaneously increased the collective power of local Collectors of the Poor.49 Village elites assumed a growing prominence in local affairs, not just because of increasing responsibilities arising from outside demands, but as a result of the decay of certain institutions that had provided a basis for law and order locally. This may have required the village leaders to intervene in what might be viewed as an unofficial capacity. Leading villagers had long carried responsibilities for providing information for coroners and courts as well as performing jury duties.50 They were also heavily involved in the responsibility they carried and set by statute for policing themselves and the provision of a watch at night. The View of Frankpledge or leet court was set up to deal with minor crimes and nuisances and the appointment of the constable, which although both state responsibilities, were carried out in the lords’ court. Manorial courts in general reduced the range of their responsibilities, moving to leasing out of manorial demesnes, particularly after 1400, and allowing a fall-off in some of the issues and incidents that had previously been a direct function of the court attenders’ servile status. Litigation between tenants became more rare in those courts and while there was some continuation of the policing of the hue and cry by which the perpetrators of theft, trespass and assault were pursued by a crowd, leet court effectiveness was certainly diminished.51 These courts were still managed by the local elite who held the various offices of tithing-men, jurors, chief pledges, constables and ale-tasters but there is clear evidence of a concern for the control of behaviour reflected in the passing of a growing number of local bye-laws, especially in the period after 1460. McIntosh has made an extensive trawl of local archives, using leet court records, in particular, to chart this development. Many of the bye-laws and associated presentments dealt with such matters as scolding, eavesdropping, night-walking, people who were badly governed, playing illicit games, hedge-breaking and categorised as vagrants.52 Bye-laws also dealt with the control of stray livestock, road maintenance and in some communities, the

 Braddick, State Formation, 93–94.   R. B. Goheen,’ Peasant Politics? Village Community and the Crown in Fifteenth-Century England’, AHR96 (1992), pp. 42–62. 51   An excellent synthesis of these developments is to be found in Mark Bailey, The English Manor c.1200–c.1500 (Manchester, 2002), pp. 178–189. 52   Marjorie K. McIntosh, Controlling Misbehaviour in England 1370–1600 (Cambridge, 1998). See also Warren O. Ault, Open Field Farming in Medieval England (London, 1972). 49 50

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management of common pasture. We gain a sense of the anxieties of the village elite from these bye-laws directed at the poor, youths and illegal incomers to local communities. In the vacuum left by decaying seigneurial forms of manorial administration there emerged, while not an entirely comprehensive a replacement for these older courts, some institutional means by which law and order were being secured for the benefit both of the local community and the state that still lacked effective machinery for their imposition directly from the outside. A third area of activity within which the village elites assumed a significant role and one of growing importance over the course of the fifteenth century was charitable provision for the poor of the parish. It is also an aspect of parish-elite activity that brings into perspective that group’s role as individual charitable donors and through that role their links with other parish-based institutions such as the parish church, fraternities and, in particular, the role it plays in the vill’s liability to provide the funds to furnish tax payments to the state, as previously discussed. There is no space here to pursue this matter in depth, but Dyer has very recently provided the fullest overview of this matter using information that can be derived principally, although not exclusively, from fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century wills and churchwarden’s accounts, along with evidence from early Tudor tax assessments.53 He shows the far from systematically directed, but, in aggregate, substantial quantities of cash, gifts in kind and endowments of landed and residential property that were granted by high-status parishioners directly or through rents deriving from them to the parish poor. Such individuals also came disproportionately from that section of local society who assumed the office of churchwarden. Dyer also grapples with an understanding of the means whereby testators could expect their gifts to be managed after death so as to ensure that their wishes were enacted by a corps of individuals at the top of village society.54Their experience in the sub-leasing of their own landed property gave them the relevant expertise in managing land and rental incomes from it to be dispensed to the poor.55 Similarly, their roles in local tax administration made them aware of those needing subsidies to meet their tax obligations. They made frequent bequests of money to the parish box with the specific request that it be used to meet the subsidy payments of the poor. Tax collections managed   Christopher Dyer, ‘Poverty and its Relief in late Medieval England’, P&P 216 (2012), 41–78. 54   The boxes, stocks, goods and land were not infrequently liable to tax in 1524 and it is noteworthy that 140 Suffolk parishes leave evidence in the tax lists of such assets that were sufficient to be taxed. See Christopher Dyer, ‘The Political Life of the Fifteenth-Century English Village’, The Fifteenth Century IV Political Culture in Late Medieval Britain, ed. Linda Clark and Christine Carpenter, p.157. 55   For examples, drawn mainly from East Anglia, Essex and the Home Counties of the ways in which substantial grants of land were left by villagers as a source of income for the local poor and administered by village notables, see Elaine Clark, ‘Charitable Bequests, Deathbed Land Sales and the Manor Court in Later Medieval England’, in Medieval Society and the Manor Court, ed. Razi and Smith, pp. 143–59. 53

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by the elite could generate sums in excess of amounts needed and these were retained in the parish box to meet future tax demands. Sometimes, testamentary evidence reveals what was clearly a co-ordinated campaign to accumulate and concentrate resources for the purpose of long-term remedies for the poor, a noteworthy tendency to be found in rapidly growing textile-producing parishes experiencing notable proletarianisation. In some places there was a purposeful build-up of grants of land that were managed by feoffees or townwardens, rental income from which was to be used for the provision of welfare and the maintenance of other elements of parish infrastructure such as almshouses, bridges and roads. While such actions appear experimental there is a creative dimension to these developing practices. It is also important to note the ways in which practices in one area, such as the gathering of tax and allocation of tax-paying responsibilities on behalf of the state, extended into and influenced the way that the churchwardens, who were frequently the key office holders administering the lay subsidy, used that experience to raise parish rates. Such rates were employed principally for funding repairs and maintenance of the church fabric and to underwrite elements of parochial ceremonial life, but they fostered notions of compliance both as parish ratepayer and state taxpayer. As Dyer notes, these developments served to blur the distinction conventionally drawn between the compulsory and voluntary elements in welfare provision.56 Kumin has shown that some churchwardens’ accounts in the early sixteenth century reveal those office holders raising annually from parish rates sums that often exceeded those collected in meeting the village’s liability arising from the lay subsidies of the 1520s.57 While the low-pressure character of the later medieval economy, with an abundance of land and relatively high wages, presented opportunities for experimentation in welfare provision and corporate parish life more generally, labour shortages may have increased the propensity of village elites, the principal employers of labour, to fashion a more deferential labour force. Their charitable acts may also have served to sharpen up definitions of those who were seen to be the deserving poor, since there are many signs of discrimination in the definitions of eligibility that will-makers adopted. Furthermore, the scale of the relief provided through the mechanisms revealed primarily in late medieval wills should be judged against the population’s needs which may have been significantly reduced when compared with the situations prevailing both in earlier periods of high pressure conditions in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries and once again as population growth drove down living standards after 1550. Village elites were assuming responsibilities and developing their

  Dyer, ‘Poverty and its Relief’, p. 75.   Beat Kümin, The Shaping of Community. The Rise and Reformation of the English Parish 1400–1560 (Aldershot 1996), pp. 188–95. 56 57

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redistributive capabilities well before the Tudor state came to draw on that experience in a more formal sense later in the sixteenth century.58 V

A village or parish middling sort, while not entirely absent from manorial or vill-based activities in the early fourteenth century, had in the later medieval period significantly changed its relationship to a much diminished, if not entirely atrophied, manorial or seigneurial authority, and had assumed a vitality and growing confidence in overseeing a significant number of links connecting the parish with the pre-Reformation Church, the state and legal system. The underlying purpose of the current discussion has been to tease out some of those factors that may have changed when seeking an explanation of the diminished susceptibility of late Tudor England to dearth-driven mortality crises when comparison is made with late thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century England. The aim has been to identify a role for human agency in this transformation in contrast to explanations that are fundamentally based on differing degrees of extreme climatic events in the two phases. There was a noteworthy shift from redistributions within the family to those within the community as the institutional basis of many sources of provision, partly for reasons linked to the incapacity of families effectively to reproduce themselves in the late medieval demographic regime.59 Simultaneously, a sense of discrimination in late medieval judgements of eligibility for relief in a labour deficient economy, as well as a growing intolerance of country idleness, had emerged. Combine these developments with the formidable evidence marshaled by McIntosh’s interrogation of the records of churchwardens, and there is no difficulty identifying how a shift from 1547 towards parish-based collections of rates for the purposes of poor relief became possible.60 This shift was formalised by the 1552 statute empowering churchwardens to record the names of those capable of contributing to the relief of the poor and to nominate those who were

  Dyer ‘Poverty and its Relief’, p. 78. Dyer makes some challenging estimations of the scale of relief raised in a hypothetical late fifteenth-century village of 300 souls on the basis of likely revenues raised for comparison with the Warwickshire villages in 1639 analysed by Steve Hindle, The Birthpangs of Welfare: Poor Relief and Parish Governance in SeventeenthCentury Warwickshire (Dugdale Society, Occasional Papers, xl Stratford-upon-Avon, 2000) and concludes that the ‘arrangements both before and after the Poor Laws alleviated but did not cure the plight of the indigent’, pp. 77–8. 59   Richard M. Smith, ‘The Manor Court and the Elderly Tenant in Late Medieval England’, in Life, Death and the Elderly: Historical Perspectives, ed. Margaret Pelling and Richard M. Smith (London, 1991), pp. 39–61; Richard M. Smith, ‘Charity, Self-Interest and Welfare: Reflections from Demographic and Family History’, Charity, Self-Interest and Welfare in the English Past, ed. Martin J. Daunton (London, 1996), pp. 31–2. 60   Marjorie K. McIntosh, Poor Relief in England 1350–1600 (Cambridge, 2012), pp. 37–101 58

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to ‘gently ask and demand of every man and women that they of their charity will be contented to give weekly towards the relief of the poor’.61 While this was yet to be a fully compulsory requirement, those who proved uncooperative were to be brought before the Bishop. The Collectors of the Poor, with the responsibility for raising poor rates, were to render quarterly accounts to the parish. It is perhaps no accident that two-thirds of the references that McIntosh collected of such Collectors of the Poor at work were encountered in the sources from East Anglia and the south-east.62 It is these very regions where the three features of the emerging medieval vill with respect to a politically active parish middling sort, discussed above, were most fully formed. Weakly manorialised communities in these regions had for a long time displayed a sizeable overlap between those personnel involved both in the collection of the lay subsidy and with the regular collection of parish rates, as well as the administration of an amalgam of lands, houses and funds that had accumulated through the endowments of well positioned parish worthies. One may ponder the possibility that this long history of involvement in the accumulation and redistribution of parish resources may have given these areas of the country a distinctive set of local political relationships that would offer a degree of protection against the worst effects of dearth-driven food price rises of the kind that began to intensify as the sixteenth century progressed. Wrigley and Schofield show through their analysis of burial records that these areas of the east and south-east had progressed some considerable way in their capacity to slip the shadow of famine in the 1580s and 1590s.63 These same areas had been in no sense protected from such peaks in death rates of tenants, many of whom – because of a combination of inheritance practices and hyperactive land markets – were in possession of particularly small holdings, in the period 1280 to 1322. Our evidence base needs a more secure foundation by carrying out a deeper examination of the village social structure during the period between c.1450 and c.1540, particularly one that engages with archives beyond those which had become a much diminished manorial-court setting. Studies of village office holders and their relationships with those positioned below them and with the world beyond the village, are especially rare, particularly when comparisons are with those made of the parish after c.1550 and the manor before c.1400. Nonetheless, we can confidently see signs of significant incorporation of these office holders who formed a middling sort at dates much earlier than has been supposed. It would be reasonable to claim that the middling sort were already fulfilling important, although in some cases yet to be formalised, roles in the

  Statutes of the Realm, ed. A. Luders, T. E. Tomlins, J. Raithby and others, IV, Pt.1, pp. 131–2 (5 and 6 Edward VI, chap. 2). 62  McIntosh, Poor Relief, pp. 353–4; See too the point made by Dyer, ‘Political Life’ concerning the precocious forms already reached by village administration in East Anglia c.1500, p. 155. 63   Wrigley and Schofield, Population History of England, pp. 670–4. 61

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century prior to 1550.64 By something of a contrast, many early modernists have seen these roles with their outward-looking orientations developing most evidently after 1550. The current discussion does not seek to deny the very real intensification of the incorporation process in the late sixteenth century, but rather to suggest that it would be unwise to see the foundations for that shift being newly built in Elizabethan England. Nonetheless, if we were to apply what could be termed a ‘vulnerability-to-famine test’, I would certainly be required to modify significantly a claim made over thirty years ago for a high level of such incorporation from a much earlier date in the medieval period that pre-dates the Black Death.65 This is particularly true if we are measuring the effectiveness of a middling sort, capable of significant resource redistributions and displaying the required forms of political behaviour: such a social layer possessed of the appropriate political antennae and oriented in their concerns both to their local poor and to central government or its representatives locally, is very hard to detect in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century. The scale of the change in the presence and political outlook of such persons over the two centuries between 1400 and 1550 would seem to have been exceptionally significant and perhaps no less so than that to be observed when the situations in 1500 and 1600 are compared.

64   Dyer, ‘Political Life’, p. 157 makes the point that ‘after 1550, the poor laws, rates, overseers, vestries and the schemes for the reformation of manners were not performing new functions, but creating formal institutions where previously informality had ruled’. 65   Richard M. Smith, ‘”Modernization” and the Corporate Medieval Village Community: Some Sceptical Reflections’, Explorations in Historical Geography: Interpretative Essays, ed. Alan R. H. Baker and Derek Gregory (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 140–79.

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3 The politics of English political economy in the 1620s Paul Slack

It is one of the commonplaces in the history of political economy that the 1620s marked a decisive moment in its evolution. The model of economic activity formulated by Thomas Mun, with its emphasis on the balance of trade, inaugurated a distinctively English style of political economy which helped to shape European economic thought for more than a century afterwards. In recent years, its intellectual foundations and the rhetoric which gave it appeal have been much discussed, and their longer-term epistemological significance carefully analysed.1 My purpose here is not to challenge that familiar narrative of a turning point in economic thinking, but to ask why it happened in England when it did. My aim is to look again at the circumstances in which it occurred, which were first fully explored by Barry Supple fifty years ago,2 to identify what was special about them, and to try to establish what it was that made them intellectually so creative. In the 1620s a new mode of political economy was created with extraordinary speed and in the heat of an economic crisis; and it commanded assent because old styles of thinking turned out to offer no practicable or agreed solutions. Politicians and the merchants who advised them rapidly discovered what could not be done, rather than what could, and learnt about the art of the possible. It is possible to argue further that at much the same time the same political actors were debating other areas of the country’s economy besides the trade flows which preoccupied Mun, and learning similar hard lessons. They were losing faith in the efficacy of forms of economic intervention like the regulation of grain markets which had reflected ideal notions of the paternalistic responsibilities of government; and when they modified or abandoned them, they were 1   For example, Joyce Oldham Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton, 1978), pp. 35–51; Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact. Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago, 1998), pp. 66–91; Thomas Leng, ‘Epistemology: Expertise and Knowledge in the World of Commerce’, Mercantilism Reimagined. Political Economy in Early Modern Britain and its Empire, ed. Philip J. Stern and Carl Wennerlind (Oxford, 2014), pp. 102–4. 2   B. E. Supple, Commercial Crisis and Change in England, 1600–1642 (Cambridge, 1959).

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reinforcing the great divergence between the attitudes of people in authority and participants in the crowd whose consequences in crisis circumstances the work of John Walter has done so much to illuminate.3 New ways of thinking in the 1620s about how the economy functioned and how it could be regulated were therefore much more than intellectual constructs. They were political inventions, with political consequences, and the product of an unusual conjuncture of economic and political circumstances. Since that conjuncture had not occurred before, did not occur in the same form in other countries, and was not to be replicated again in England until 1650, it is well worth further investigation.4 I

The immediate causes of the crisis which afflicted every part of the English economy in the early 1620s were well understood by the merchants and politicians involved in debate about it. They lay, as Supple has demonstrated, in a sudden deterioration in the rate of exchange brought about by currency manipulations and debasements undertaken by other countries in northern Europe between 1617 and 1622. That left sterling undervalued in foreign exchange and turned the terms of trade against England. There was an outflow of silver, a slump in English exports of cloth, and a shortage of money and unemployment at home. The numerous committees set up by the privy council and Parliament between 1621 and 1624 to investigate the country’s ‘want of money’ and the ‘decay of trade’ had no doubt that the two were related to one another – that the fortunes of the domestic economy depended on the export of its manufactures, and that both exports and liquidity at home were affected by fluctuations in exchange rates.5 The importance of foreign exchange and the balance of trade was therefore fully appreciated, and both had been discussed since at least the 1550s.6 They became bones of contention in 1622, however, because two committees, asked by the council to advise on remedies for the depression, took opposing views on which of the two was the more important, and broadcast their arguments in print. The first committee, in which the dominant figure was Gerard Malynes, argued that the essence of the problem lay in the foreign exchanges: once they

3   See e.g. John Walter, ‘Public transcripts, popular agency, and the politics of subsistence in early modern England’, in Negotiating Power in Early Modern Society: Order, Hierarchy and Subordination in Britain and Ireland, ed. Michael J. Braddick and John Walter (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 123–48. 4   I have discussed some of these events more briefly in Paul Slack, The Invention of Improvement: Information and Material Progress in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 2015), pp. 82–9. This chapter is intended to give fuller consideration to their political context and repercussions. 5  Supple, Commercial Crisis, pp. 73–6, 89–96, 185–6, 198–9, 209. 6  Slack, Invention, pp. 79, 84; Supple, Commercial Crisis, p. 181.

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were stabilised, all would be well. The second, dominated by Mun, seized on the balance of trade: only when that improved would the exchanges turn to English advantage and depression be averted. The contest between the two polarised opinion and presented an unpalatable choice to governments facing demands for action. Both committees knew what they were talking about. Malynes had been called on by government for advice on foreign exchange in 1600 and had established a reputation for himself as an expert on the subject through his publications.7 ‘Commodities, money and exchange’ were ‘the essential parts of all trade and traffic’, he asserted in 1603, and ‘exchange for monies’ governed the other two. If the ‘course of exchange’ was abused, it would drive the whole economy to ruin.8 In 1622 he naturally made the same diagnosis. The ‘equity and balance’ which ensured justice in all commercial dealings must be restored to foreign exchange. When foreign currency manipulations pushed exchange rates below parity, so far as England was concerned, ‘the true rule of exchange’ which ‘is par pro pari’ must therefore be restored.9 Other members of Malynes’s committee, like Robert Cotton, the antiquary and great authority on the coinage, and William Sanderson, a merchant financier who farmed the mines royal, were naturally of a similar mind, and so was the youngest of them, Ralph Maddison, an ambitious improving landlord who set out to be as effective a publicist for Malynes’s message as Malynes was himself. In state papers in 1623 and 1626, he saw abuse of foreign exchange as the root cause of economic depression and the ‘canker of the commonwealth’, hindering any increase in bullion;10 and he was still singing the same tune in print in 1640 and 1655, although Malynes had by then lost his battle against Mun. Maddison’s ‘tenet or maxim’ was the need to reduce ‘all foreign coins to a par or equality with our constant coins’ on the exchanges.11 Par remained the panacea, restoring morality, justice and order to the marketplace. Members of the committee led by Mun were equally well versed in the case they had to make about the balance of trade, since two of them were East India Company merchants like him, and would have read his defence of the Company published in 1621 against the charge that they were ruining the nation by

 Supple, Commercial Crisis, p. 179.   Gerard Malynes, Englands View, in the Unmasking of Two Paradoxes (1603), sig A3r; Gerard Malynes, A Treatise of the Canker of Englands Common wealth (1601), pp. 2, 15, 17, 95, 104. 9   BL Add. MS 34324, fols 153, 161v–163r; Gerard Malynes, The Maintenance of Free Trade (1622), ‘Epistle Dedicatory’; Gerard Malynes, The Center of the Circle of Commerce (1623), pp. 68, 76–7. For Malynes’s view of equity see Slack, Invention, pp. 79–81. 10   Seventeenth-Century Economic Documents, ed. Joan Thirsk and J. P. Cooper (Oxford 1972), pp. 25–7; TNA, State Papers Domestic [hereafter SPD], 16/14/19. 11   Ralph Maddison, Englands Looking In and Out (1640), sig. a3, pp. 25–6; Ralph Maddison, Great Britain’s Remembrancer Looking In and Out (1655), pp. 29–31. 7 8

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exporting treasure in return for eastern luxuries.12 It was Mun, however, who single-handedly articulated an argument notable for its deliberately plain style, and one which became more radical in the course of the debate.13 By 1623, the hard line taken by Malynes had led him to minimise the role of the exchanges which he had allowed for in 1621. They were of secondary importance to the balance of trade, and even the balance of trade was not susceptible to any remedial action at the stroke of a royal pen. No attempt to enforce par would reduce the export of coin unless there was a positive balance of trade, and that would come ‘by a necessity of nature beyond all resistance’. When Malynes and his committee reiterated that the abuse of the exchanges by profiteering bankers and merchants was ‘the efficient cause of the overbalancing of foreign commodities in price’, Mun’s response was dismissive: it was ‘necessity’ not private profit-taking which was ‘the efficient cause to carry away our money’.14 Mun’s case was published almost immediately by his neighbour in Hackney, Edward Misselden, a Merchant Adventurer who sometimes acted as agent for the East India Company, and who was as eager for the political limelight as Malynes and Maddison. He too had concluded that trade had ‘a natural liberty’ which would ‘not endure the command of any, but of God alone’, and he lauded the balance in fulsome terms of the kind Mun avoided. It was ‘the beauty, the ornament, the complement, the accomplishment’ at the centre of his Circle of Commerce in 1623, and an ‘excellent and political invention’ and piece of ‘science’ showing, like a pair of scales, ‘the difference of weight in the commerce of one kingdom with another’.15 Presented like that, it is hardly surprising that the balance became a tool deployed in most economic discourse, and it is important to establish what kind of a tool it was, and what it was not. What it was not, and could never be, was that single ‘efficient cause’ determining economic fluctuations which contemporaries persistently looked for. Like an adverse balance of payments which mirrored it, an adverse balance of trade was a symptom of the economic difficulties of a trading nation, and not a cause of them.16 That is far from saying that the concept of the balance and efforts to measure it had no utility. It was a valuable heuristic device, a means of conceptualising the English economy as an abstract and dynamic entity, heavily dependent upon international commerce, and partly for that reason beyond easy   Thomas Mun, A Discourse of Trade from England unto the East-Indies (1621), in Early English Tracts on Commerce, ed. J. R. McCulloch (Cambridge, 1952); Miles Ogborn, Indian Ink, Script and Print in the Making of the English East India Company (Chicago, 2007), p. 136. 13  Ogborn, Indian Ink, Script and Print, p. 137; Poovey, History of the Modern Fact, p. 68; Supple, Commercial Crisis, pp. 213–16. 14   BL Add. MS 34324, fols 157r, 163r, 169r. Mun made the same point about necessity in 1628: [Thomas Mun], The Petition and Remonstrance of the Governor and Company of Merchants of London, Trading to the East Indies (1628), p. 11. 15  Misselden, The Circle of Commerce: Or the Ballance of Trade (1623), sig. A4r, pp. 112, 116, 119–22, 127–30, 142. 16  Supple, Commercial Crisis, pp. 218–19. 12

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control. It could be used, and was very often used, as a barometer measuring the economic health of the nation at a single point in time and pointing to its several strengths and weaknesses, but it explained very little in itself. When Edward Coke told the House of Commons in 1624 that an unfavourable balance was the ‘chief cause’ of the current economic crisis, he had obviously been reading Misselden or Mun, but he had to list a number of separate factors which determined why the balance was as unfavourable as it was.17 For politicians desperately searching for an immediate cure for the current depression, therefore, the balance of trade had nothing to offer. The only option open to them was an effort to correct imbalances in foreign exchange, either by tampering with the English currency – altering its face value or reducing its silver content – or by regulating exchange dealings – enforcing par, as Malynes proposed. Expedients of that kind had the political attraction that they were acknowledged to be a ‘matters of state’, something belonging to ‘the sovereignty of the Prince’.18 Cotton, Malynes and Sanderson, all agreed on that, and Misselden considered it one of the things that made ‘matters of state and of trade … involved and wrapped up together’.19 There was no dispute about where responsibility for action lay. The difficulty was that correcting foreign exchange by whatever means had proved to be far easier said than done in the past and carried little conviction when resorted to in the 1620s. The most obvious solution would have been for England to join other countries in the monetary games which were at the root of the problem, but all informed opinion was wholly against that. The radical debasements of the coin in the 1540s were recent reminders of the disastrous effects of either debasing or ‘enhancing’ the currency, which amounted to the same thing.20 Cotton was vehemently opposed to any such expedient and led a government committee to conclude that it would mean ‘perpetual uncertainty’. Other countries would react in kind and start a vicious downward spiral which would ‘destroy the policy, justice, honour and tranquillity of our state at home for ever’.21 Maddison naturally agreed, and so did Malynes, who accused Misselden with some justice of hinting at the need for enhancement. Its inflationary consequences would hit

  Stephen D. White, Sir Edward Coke and the Grievances of the Commonwealth (Manchester, 1979), pp. 94–5. 18   Cambium Regis (1628), sig. A3r. 19   Robert Cotton, Cottoni Posthuma, ed. James Howell (1651), p. 179; Malynes, Center, sig. A3r, p. 76; BL Lans. MS 768, fol. 2r; Edward Misselden, Free Trade, or The Meanes to Make Trade Florish (1622), sigs A5v, A7r. 20   On the technicalities see Supple, Commercial Crisis, pp. 73–5. 21   Select Tracts and Documents Illustrative of English Monetary History 1626–1730, ed. William A. Shaw (1896), pp. 28–9, 38; Cotton, Posthuma, p. 196. 17

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the revenues of the Crown ‘and the nobility and landed men also’, ‘a remedy worse than the disease’.22 Mun had said precisely the same.23 Expert unanimity did not deter a King as jealous of his prerogatives as James I from embarking on such experiments. In 1618 and 1620 he was determined on a policy of enhancement, and a majority of his council was equally determined to stop him, sending Cranfield to tell him why, and instituting new committees and consultations with the mercantile community in order to postpone any conclusion.24 In 1626, Charles I tried again, to the extent of having new and lighter silver coin ready minted, and councillors had to mobilise outside opinion, led by Cotton, to stop what would have been the first debasement since the 1550s.25 On this occasion Sir Julius Caesar, Master of the Rolls, looked back at previous papers, and drily noted that such proposals had always been ‘resolved against’ at the council table.26 In the early seventeenth century, only the gold coinage was effectively enhanced, in 1611, and since that had simply increased the outflow of silver and proved in fact a remedy worse than the disease, it ought to have been an object lesson.27 Monarchs and ministers were therefore left with few weapons in their armoury. At the beginning of the crisis, in 1621, the council declared that ‘the surest means’ of solving the exchange problem was ‘some firm agreement … between his Majesty and the neighbour princes and states’ to maintain the relative value of their currencies ‘without alteration’, and Mun’s committee suggested the same.28 Since an international disarmament agreement of this kind was never on the cards, the only course left open was the one Malynes had long suggested, an attempt to impose par on exchange dealings in England by prerogative action, by enabling the Royal Exchanger to control all bills of exchange. An attempt at that in which Sanderson was involved failed in 1622, and a second in 1626 ended only in another public retreat by the King.29 Once again, the government might have learned from the past, since the same project had wholly failed in 1576.30

  Seventeenth-Century Economic Documents, pp. 26–7; Maddison, Englands Looking In and Out, pp. 8–11; Malynes, Center, sigs A2v–3r; Supple, Commercial Crisis, p. 199. 23  Mun, Discourse, pp. 41–2. Cf. [Mun] Petition and Remonstrance, p. 12. 24  Supple, Commercial Crisis, pp. 183–5. In Basilikon Doron, however, James had warned against debasement: The Political Works of James I, ed. Charles H. McIlwain (New York, 1965), p. 26. 25  Supple, Commercial Crisis, pp. 190–2; The House of Commons 1604–1629, ed. Andrew Thrush and John P. Ferris (6 vols, Cambridge, 2010), III, p. 700. 26   BL Add. MS 34324, fols 65–68. 27  Supple, Commercial Crisis, p. 167. 28   Acts of the Privy Council of England, ed. J. R. Dasent et al. (1890–1964), 1619–21, p. 400; BL Add. MS 34324, fol. 156v. 29  Supple, Commercial Crisis, pp. 191, 204; Cambium Regis, sigs A2v–3r. 30  Supple, Commercial Crisis, pp. 180, 189; Thomas Wilson, A Discourse upon Usury, ed. R. H. Tawney (1925), pp. 138–40, 150–3. 22

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In the 1620s, when the number of dealers and brokers active in foreign exchange was greater than ever, and Malynes still wanted to repeat the 1576 exercise, any effort to control all foreign exchange was bound to be futile and looked wholly anachronistic.31 The sovereign power had run out of options. Although Maddison subsequently claimed that it was ‘an act of state’ that corrected the exchanges by 1625, in order to get some credit for it, there had been no such act. The exchanges stabilised after 1622 when countries in northern Europe reformed and ceased to tamper with their currencies; and for that and other reasons England’s balance of trade gradually improved.32 The English economy recovered from what was arguably the greatest economic crisis of the century without any assistance from government at all. Early in 1625 James congratulated the members of his standing commission on trade, established in 1622, on their ‘pains and endeavour’ which had led to an increase in customs revenue and cloth exports.33 The commissioners could claim no credit for either development. They had been relieved to be informed in 1623 that ‘the exchange was amended’ and they need no longer ponder the papers from Malynes and Mun which they had been unable to reconcile and had pushed to one side.34 They had already told the council that, in so far as England’s problems were caused by troubles abroad, all that was required was ‘patience’; and patience had paid off.35 On the major economic issues of the moment they had nothing else to offer. That was the political vacuum created by a conspicuous failure of policy which lent credibility to Mun’s conclusions, and made his England’s Treasure by Forraign Trade, published posthumously in 1664, the classic text of English political economy until Adam Smith replaced it. There, in his plain style, he explained again why Malynes was wrong. ‘The principal efficient cause of loss by exchange’ was the greater value of commodities imported over those exported. All the remedies which had been talked about in the 1620s had therefore been futile at best, counterproductive at worst: Let the merchants’ exchange be at a high rate, or at a low rate, or at the Par pro pari; … let foreign princes enhance their coins, or debase their standards, and let his Majesty do the like, or keep them constant as they now stand; … let the mere Exchanger do his worst, … let merchants carry out what money they shall have occasion to use in traffic,

the outcome would always be dictated by whether ‘foreign trade doth over- or under-balance in value. And this must come to pass by a necessity beyond all

  BL Add. MS 34324, fol. 161v.  Supple, Commercial Crisis, pp. 96–8, 268. 33   W. Cunningham, The Growth of English Industry and Commerce in Modern Times (2 vols, Cambridge, 1903), II, pp. 900–1. 34  Supple, Commercial Crisis, p. 189. Dudley Digges, a member of the commission, reported in similar terms to the Commons in 1624: House of Commons 1604–1629, IV, p. 73. 35   Seventeenth-Century Economic Documents, pp. 27, 29. 31

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resistance’.36 Mun was presenting the economy as a separate entity, working of ‘necessity’ by its own rules, and not readily governed by political agency of any kind. II

As novel as that intellectual development was the political process which led up to it, and without which Mun’s argument never could have had the impact it did. It was a process involving public participation to an unusual, perhaps unprecedented, degree. When trying to determine policy in such complex areas of commerce and finance, King and council needed evidence and expert advice. When the expert committees produced incompatible recommendations and the evidence pointed in more than one direction, and when the King and his council were also at odds they had to look for consensus and even consent among the political establishment outside. Policy was deliberately thrown open to discussion by interested parties. There was what Maddison, this time with some accuracy, called ‘public agitation’; and public agitation helped to create a political elite, in council, Parliament and outside, which was unusually well informed about the issues at stake.37 It was an educative process. Governments had occasionally had to resort to devices for more open public debate of this kind before, as in the case of the Great Contract in 1610,38 and the controversy over the Cokayne project three years later, which provided something of a dress rehearsal for arguments in the 1620s. There was much to be said in favour of reducing the country’s dependence on the export of unfinished textiles, but the attempt to do it at a stroke, by destroying the trade of the Merchant Adventurers and substituting Cokayne’s new company, was wholly impractical. It had to be forced through an unwilling privy council by a determined King, using two successive committees, Sir Julius Caesar warning them in his usual fashion that something like it had twice been proposed in the past, and, ‘after long and deliberate dispute, the state and councillors’ had ‘refused to meddle with it’.39 The Merchant Adventurers were right to tell councillors that something so ‘unfeasible’ could never be done simply ‘with a pen … at council table’. The remark was reported to the House of Commons in 1614, and public agitation would have been all the greater if that Addled Parliament had sat for longer.40  Mun, England’s Treasure by Forraign Trade (1664), pp. 48, 87–8.  Supple, Commercial Crisis, p. 268. 38   The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England, ed. Peter Lake and Steven Pincus (Manchester, 2007), pp. 3–8. 39   Joel D. Benson, Changes and Expansion in the English Cloth Trade in the Seventeenth Century: Alderman Cockayne’s Project (Lewiston, NY, 2002), p. 34; Supple, Commercial Crisis, p. 35; Seventeenth-Century Economic Documents, p. 197. 40   House of Commons 1604–29, V, p. 464. 36 37

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In the crisis of the early 1620s things were different, partly because Parliaments were sitting more often, partly because King and council had no quick solution to offer. When a new Parliament met early in 1621, in the depth of the economic depression, James himself invited it to ‘search out the reasons of this scarcity of money, which neither himself nor his council could find out’.41 Members of the Commons were eager to respond but the task was beyond them. Some of them were familiar with the publications of Malynes and Mun almost as soon as they were written,42 and fifty-one of them were active or recently retired merchants.43 They set up a ‘great committee’ on ‘the decay of money’ and ‘decay of trade’, hearing evidence from clothiers in various counties as well as from the London mercantile companies and interlopers on their trades. This was a committee of the whole house, meeting one afternoon every week, and the first of a series established in every Parliament of the decade except that of 1625.44 MPs were as divided and uncertain as councillors, however, and unable to reach a conclusion. At the end of the Parliament, in November 1621, Robert Phelips could only complain, like the pot calling the kettle black, that ‘our trade is decayed, and the letters and remedies of the Privy Council have wrought no good effects at all’.45 The council for its part had started discussing the decay of trade in July 1620,46 and the challenge from the Commons in 1621 spurred councillors on towards more detailed investigation and consultation, with no better immediate result. They wrote to the trading companies asking for advice about the exchanges, and in September to twenty provincial ports for help in ‘debating … the decay of trade and scarcity of money’. Replies came in from at least fourteen of them.47 In November, there was a committee of ‘persons of quality and experience’, politicians and merchants, with the same agenda, and in April 1622 a commission inquiring further into the ‘efficient cause’ of the ‘great decay’ of trade, with Mun among its members. It reported in June that there were at least eight separate causes, and that their proper investigation required yet another commission, sitting regularly and able to free councillors themselves ‘from much trouble and loss of time’.48 Since the council had also appointed the two committees led by

  Conrad Russell, Parliaments and English Politics 1621–1629 (Oxford, 1979), pp. 85–6.   Commons Debates in 1621, ed. Wallace Notestein et al. (New Haven, 7 vols, 1935), II, p. 137; III, p. 50. 43   House of Commons 1604–29, I, pp. 510–12. 44  Supple, Commercial Crisis, p. 54; House of Commons 1604–29, I, pp. 195–6. 45   R. H. Tawney, Business and Politics under James I: Lionel Cranfield as Merchant and Minister (Cambridge, 1958), p. 186. 46   BL Add. MS 34324, fol. 191. 47   Acts of the Privy Council 1619–21, p. 393; Acts of the Privy Council 1621–3, p. 40; Supple, Commercial Crisis, pp. 54–5. 48   Acts of the Privy Council 1621–3, pp. 79–80; Astrid Friis, Alderman Cockayne’s Project and the Cloth Trade (Copenhagen and London, 1927), pp. 417–24. 41

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Malynes and Mun, there was, by then, a surfeit of voices and committees, and an evident need for a single clearing house. The result, established in October 1622, when Parliament was no longer sitting, was a standing commission on trade with no fewer than fifty-one members, all of them ‘gentlemen of quality’, led by Henry Montagu, President of the Council. They included Cotton, Maddison and Mun, several prominent London merchants, and gentry – but no merchants – from the provinces. Thirteen of them were to be MPs in 1624, and it has been remarked that they ‘constituted quite a small parliament’ in themselves, albeit a nominated one.49 In fact, James had invented the first board of trade, and although too large a body to produce speedy answers to the major questions raised by the depression, it was in every other respect a remarkable political innovation. At its first meeting it agreed to assemble every week, at Haberdashers Hall, on Tuesday afternoons. It agreed also to seek the King’s permission to print its terms of reference, so that ‘the common people’ could see ‘his majesty’s great care for so universal a good to his subjects’, and ‘all good patriots … contribute more or less of their skill to the perfecting of this … work’.50 That would have been an open-ended invitation to public participation, and the commission’s terms of reference were never published. They were nonetheless thorough and far sighted. They rehearsed every problem in the current economic debate and asked for no single answer to all, or perhaps to any of them. Since commercial affairs ‘must be directed and governed as times and occasions shall serve or do vary’, the commissioners were to report to the privy council ‘from time to time … as occasion shall require, without the expectation of a total and absolute reformation of every part of these … instructions all at once’.51 The council clearly had no expectation of a simple or rapid solution to a complex crisis from its commissioners, and it did not receive it. They hoped initially to be able to deal with all their terms of reference together rather than ‘severally and apart’, but an effort to do so told the council little that it did not know already. They were successful in producing action only when they gave specific advice on detailed problems and complaints delegated to them, like those concerning the export of wool from Ireland and some of the grievances of the outports.52 Under a King as hostile to public consultation as Charles I, the commission could not survive. He experimented with potential successors, a new even larger commission and then a smaller one, which he sometimes attended himself. In 1629 they were replaced by a sub-committee of the council

  Ibid., pp. 424–5; Thomas Rymer, Foedera (20 vols, 1704–35), XVII, p. 410.   BL Add. MS 34324, fol. 193. In 1655 Maddison confirmed that it had indeed met weekly: Maddison, Remembrancer, p. 26. 51   Seventeenth-Century Economic Documents, pp. 16–23. 52   Ibid., pp. 27–9; Acts of the Privy Council 1623–5, pp. 34, 105, 115–16, 366, 389. 49 50

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itself, a ‘committee on trade’ meeting weekly and eventually, like the old trade commission, on Tuesday afternoons, but now without external members.53 For as long as it lasted, however, the Jacobean commission had been the prime example of what Misselden called a ‘parliamentation and consultation’ about the ‘causes and remedies’ operating in commerce.54 It had facilitated public debate and disseminated information about the causes, even if it had not produced remedies for the most intractable of them, and it had proved to be a useful bridge between council and Parliament, ventilating controversial issues of general public interest and sometimes producing compromises when they could be found.55 It had done more than that, however. It represented in concrete political form a recognition that the domestic economy of a country like England, heavily dependent on overseas markets, was far too complex a phenomenon to be governed by Malynes’s ideal of a monarchical ‘absolute government’ regulating all commercial behaviour;56 and that merchants, councillors and country gentry had to talk to one another if the economy was to be understood at all. Parliamentation and consultation therefore had the salutary effect of providing a learning experience for members of the political elite as well as for monarchs. In 1640, Maddison could take it for granted that both ‘merchandising exchange’ and ‘the balance of trade’ were now ‘words of art or science well known’ to MPs, who needed to understand their implications. Merchants like Mun and Misselden, for their part, were quick to borrow the language of reason of state from politicians, and they naturally used it to underline the point they had often made in the past, that their special skills and knowledge were politically indispensable in a world of competitive international commerce.57 The argument was never wholly persuasive, since it was a widely accepted point of principle, often voiced by Malynes, that merchants could not be trusted in matters of state, pursuing as they necessarily did their own private ‘gain’ to the neglect of the general good.58 By the 1620s, however, when the stigma of private financial interest was being attached to the authors of almost every

 Rymer, Foedera, XVIII, pp. 81–7; Cunningham, Growth of English Industry and Commerce, I, pp. 175–6, n.5, II, pp. 904–9; Acts of the Privy Council 1628–9, p. 276, 1630–1, p. 4. 54  Misselden, Free Trade, pp. 4–5. 55   J. P. Cooper, ‘The Fall of the Stuart Monarchy’, New Cambridge Modern History, IV, The Decline of Spain and the Thirty Years War 1609–48/59, ed. J. P. Cooper (Cambridge, 1970), pp. 551–2. 56  Ogborn, Indian Ink, p. 132. 57  Maddison, Englands In and Out, sig. a3; Mun, Treasure, p 88; above p. 59 Misselden on ‘matters of state’; Slack, Invention, pp. 72–3. 58  Malynes, View, sig. A3r; Malynes, St George, p. 75; Malynes, Center, sig. A3v, p. 5 . Cf. James Davis, Medieval Market Morality. Life, Law and Ethics in the English Marketplace, 1200–1500 (Cambridge, 2012), pp. 49–55; Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago, 1994), pp. 93–5. 53

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project for the public good, including Malynes himself,59 the charge was losing much of its sting. One of the effects of the depression of the 1620s, moreover, was to persuade governors that private gain was not only another inescapable reality, a ‘necessity’ in Mun’s word, but vital to the public interest. After all, they were relying on advice from successful merchants, presumably because it was probable, as one tradesman argued in 1635, that those who had ‘done well’ for themselves would ‘know how to do well for the public good’. They might not have wholly agreed with Misselden’s claim that what made a ‘common-wealth’ was nothing more than ‘the private wealth … of the members thereof in the exercise of commerce amongst themselves and with foreign nations’;60 but they acted in ways that suggested they took the point. It is no accident that in the 1620s, in their approach to sectors of the domestic economy as well as to foreign trade, they were beginning to break away from efforts to regulate profit-taking and accepting that it must not only be tolerated but positively encouraged because, like it or not, it did more good than harm. III

Some of the momentum for that change of political direction sprang from the free trade campaign in the House of Commons which had begun in 1604 and was effective in opening up trade with southern Europe in 1606 and limiting the privileges of the Merchant Adventurers in 1624.61 The Commons was also acquiring a propensity to abandon old regulatory devices if they seemed unlikely to serve their purpose. In 1604 again, for example, Parliament had repealed the old sumptuary laws on diet and dress because they were wholly ineffective, and despite repeated calls for their return in order to improve the balance of trade and reduce consumer extravagance, a majority could never be found to replace them. When defending the East India Company in 1621, even Mun thought some means of ‘bridling’ appetites for foreign imports was needed, but he clearly had little expectation that ‘the force and fear of Princes’ prohibitions’ could achieve as much as that.62 It turned out to be more realistic to tax luxuries with heavy duties when they were imported, and the early Stuarts were being persuaded to take the same view about supposed nuisances like alehouses and new buildings in London whose proliferation no exercise of the royal prerogative could hope to control.63

 Misselden, Circle, sig. B1; Mun, Treasure, p. 45. Cf. Commons Debates 1621, VII, pp. 356–8.  Slack, Invention, p. 72; Misselden, Circle, p. 17. 61  Supple, Commercial Crisis, pp. 70–1, 231–2. 62  Slack, Invention, p. 86; Mun, Discourse, pp. 6, 46. 63  Slack, Invention, pp. 60–1, 86. 59 60

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None of this represented a conscious or coherent drive towards a policy of wholesale laissez-faire. In sectors of overseas trade where companies were already established and plainly necessary, the government was able to give them extra protection, as with English merchants in the Baltic, and to compel them to export fixed quotas of English manufactures when it chose to do so.64 Regulation was still thought essential for some new areas of domestic industry, like the new draperies, where numerous proposals for new companies and corporations only failed because local magistrates refused to comply with the dictates of central government.65 In three other areas of the domestic economy, however, there was a notable loosening of regulatory restraints on economic behaviour, and in all of them some of the participants in debates about foreign exchange were directly or indirectly involved. One was the reduction in the maximum legal rate of interest from 10 per cent to 8 per cent in 1624, by a Parliament ready to take a more relaxed view of usury than its predecessor in 1570–1, and prepared to leave its morality as a question ‘to be determined by divines’.66 It was naturally an issue which interested all writers on the money supply. Sanderson, the most conservative of them, rehearsed all the arguments from scripture, canon, civil, and statute law against usury in 1623. Mun predictably welcomed low interest rates without qualification because they released unexploited capital for investment in trade and allowed ‘younger and poorer merchants to rise in the world’.67 Misselden – equally predictably – thought that the legal rate was irrelevant because ‘plenty of money’ would reduce interest rates ‘better than any statute for that purpose’. Malynes, however, had shifted his ground over time. Having condemned usury without qualification in 1601, he was ready to be realistic in 1622 and admit that it was tolerated everywhere and should be treated ‘as a sin … rather in the conscience than in the act’. ‘Over-preciseness’ on the issue would only cause ‘great inconvenience’.68 Informed opinion was swinging in the same direction on the equally long-standing issue of agrarian enclosures. In 1607, after the Midland Rising against them, Robert Cotton wrote a defence of enclosure for his patron, the Earl of Northampton, and he was probably the author of another paper, intended for the council, which argued that farmers could safely be left to respond to market forces in most parts of the country with ‘no inconvenience in the state’. Provided

 Supple, Commercial Crisis, pp. 87–8, 238–9.   Seventeenth-Century Economic Documents, pp. 31–2; Michael Zell, ‘Walter Morrell and the New Draperies Project, c. 1603–1631’, HJ 44 (2001), 651–75. 66   Norman Jones, God and the Moneylenders. Usury and Law in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1989), pp. 175, 194–8. 67   SPD, 14/140/61; Mun, Treasure, pp. 58–9. 68  Misselden, Free Trade, pp. 116–17; Malynes, St George, pp. 78–9; Gerard Malynes, Consuetudo Vel Lex Mercatoria, or The Ancient Law-Merchant (1622), p. 329; Jones, God and the Moneylenders, p. 162. 64 65

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the interests of poor tenants were protected, the gentleman should not be ‘hindered in his desire’ for ‘improvement’ and profit.69 As Cotton had suggested, a new commission of inquiry into enclosure and depopulation appointed in 1607 was limited to only seven Midland counties, and it was said afterwards that ‘no reformation’ had followed even there. One of the commissioners was Cotton; another was Edward Montagu, a Northamptonshire magistrate of high moral principle who had led the military force which suppressed the 1607 rising. Yet Cotton himself and Montagu’s son were among those charged with offences under the tillage statutes by other commissioners.70 The enclosure commission had caused nothing but trouble and was the last of its kind. The tillage statutes themselves were looking ‘unfit for this time’. One of them, dating back to 1563, was finally repealed in 1624, and others would have been in 1621 if the Commons had not run out of time.71 In circumstances like these, political actors were learning at first hand the difficulties of enforcing any economic policy consistently or equitably in a changing world; and if that applied to Cotton and Edward Montagu, it applied even more to Edward’s brother Henry, who as Lord Treasurer and then President of the Council, was involved in almost all the committees on trade and money in the decade, instigating or chairing several of them, including the trade commission.72 More experienced than any of his contemporaries in grappling with the art of the possible, in 1630 he found himself involved with his brother in a third episode where pragmatism and political reality effectively triumphed over broadbrush economic regulation. In 1630, the Elizabethan book of dearth orders – that iconic representation of the ‘moral economy of the crowd’ – was enforced across the kingdom for what turned out to be the last time.73 The rigid controls which the book imposed on the movement and marketing of corn had proved attractive in principle, but never easy to enforce equitably and efficiently in an increasingly integrated national market.74 They probably helped to mitigate the worst effects of bad harvests in some parts of England

  House of Commons 1604–1629, III, p. 697; Seventeenth-Century Economic Documents, pp. 108–9. For Cotton’s probable authorship of the latter see Slack, Invention, p. 50. 70   Roger B. Manning, Village Revolts. Social Protest and Popular Disturbances in England 1509–1640 (Oxford, 1988), pp. 232, 250. 71   Joan Thirsk, ‘Enclosing and Engrossing’, The Agrarian History of England and Wales, IV 1500–1640, ed. Thirsk (Cambridge, 1967), pp. 235–7; Maurice Beresford, ‘Habitation versus Improvement: The Debate on Enclosure by Agreement’, Essays in the Economic and Social History of Tudor and Stuart England in honour of R.H.Tawney, ed. F. J. Fisher (Cambridge, 1961), pp. 49, 55. 72   For his attempts to interest the Lords in economic matters see Debates in the House of Lords 1621–8, ed. F. H. Relf (Camden Soc., Third Series, xlii, 1929), pp. 10, 79. 73   E. P. Thompson, ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century’, P&P 50 (1971), pp. 108–9. 74   On the book’s implementation see Paul Slack, ‘Dearth and Social Policy in Early Modern England’, Social History of Medicine 5 (1992), 1–17; John Walter, ‘The social economy of dearth 69

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in the later 1590s, and they may well have had the same effect again in 1622–3, despite Maddison’s suggestion that this was a ‘famine without dearth’, caused by a shortage of money rather than a shortage of grain.75 By then, however, MPs were increasingly concerned about the declining incomes of farmers when grain was plentiful, especially in a glut like that of 1620, and ready in 1621 to consider bills to raise grain prices and even repeal an Edwardian statute against middlemen.76 In 1630, when the council itself recognised that ‘the poor suffer as much in the want of work as in the price of corn’, the book of orders was looking as anachronistic as the tillage statutes and its prescriptions as dated as those proposed by Malynes for the management of foreign exchange.77 In that year Henry Montagu compared notes with his brother on the devices which local magistrates were now using to circumvent the strict letter of the dearth orders. In Hertfordshire, Henry observed that farmers and corn-masters were left free to use the markets as they wished, provided they agreed to relieve the poor with grain at home and charged them less than the market price. In Northamptonshire, Edward and another magistrate agreed that it was best to keep the poor (rather than corn-masters) away from markets, and reported that they used the normal mechanisms of the Poor Law to put cash in the pockets of the unemployed.78 Justices of the peace were doing the same in other counties because the Poor Laws were more flexible than the dearth orders, politically more acceptable since they had statute law to back them, and less likely, as the Somerset justices remarked, to cause ‘a dearth without scarcity’ by encouraging hoarding.79 Counterproductive and unpopular with the men responsible for implementing them, the dearth orders were never enforced by proclamation again.80 The dismantling in a single decade of much of the apparatus regulating the economy since the sixteenth century was the consequence of an unusual set of circumstances, political as well as economic. Parliaments were meeting more regularly than they had for a decade, the Crown proving itself incapable of

in early modern England’, Famine, disease and the social order in early modern society, ed. John Walter and Roger Schofield (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 75–128. 75   Seventeenth-Century Economic Documents, p. 25. On the reality of distress in the north–west see Andrew B. Appleby, Famine in Tudor and Stuart England (Liverpool, 1978), pp. 147–50. 76   David Pennington, ‘Beyond the Moral Economy: economic change, ideology and the 1621 House of Commons’, Parliamentary History 25 (2006), 217–19. 77   Slack, ‘Dearth and Social Policy’, p. 11. 78   Historical MSS Commission Reports, Buccleuch, I, p. 272; III, p. 355; Northants Record Office, Montagu (Boughton) MSS, vol. 16, fol. 87. 79   Slack, ‘Dearth and Social Policy’, pp. 12, 15; Seventeenth-Century Economic Documents, p. 346; Walter, ‘Social economy of Dearth’, pp. 114, 120. 80   They had an afterlife in local responses to later harvest crises, however: R. B. Outhwaite, ‘Dearth and Government Intervention in English Grain Markets, 1590–1700’, EcHR, 2nd ser. 33 (1981), pp. 398–9; Steve Hindle, ‘Dearth and the English Revolution: the Harvest Crisis of 1647–50’, EcHR 61 (2008), pp. 72–8.

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unprejudiced and effective economic management, and both facing an economic crisis which no one could have controlled. In that context, the political elite was compelled to acknowledge that England was, for good or ill, a commercial society, and no longer a commonwealth to be regulated and stabilised by a paternalistic sovereign. Instead, the ‘gain’ of private citizens was to be harnessed to the public good because it was socially useful.81 That perception was not, of course, arrived at suddenly, at a stroke. In the later Middle Ages, attitudes towards usury, the activities of middlemen, and market regulation, were already being adjusted in response to commercial change, and the process continued in the sixteenth century.82 It scarcely needs saying that the process did not entail the disappearance of every kind of moral restraint on economic behaviour. That continued long afterwards in everyday transactions in markets and between individuals.83 If Malynes’s ideal of ‘par’ was no longer enforceable in foreign exchange, there was a general expectation that economic bargains should be fair and broadly equitable; and the primary argument against debasing the currency was Cotton’s moral one, that ‘corruption’ in the coinage would infect the whole commonwealth.84 Nevertheless, the deliberate removal or attenuation of so many formal controls on economic activity in the 1620s marked a turning point in English politics, as notable as Mun’s refashioning of English political economy. IV

English reactions to the events of the 1620s were significant finally because they had no precise parallel in other countries where politicians confronted similar problems of monetary and commercial crises at much the same time. There was undoubtedly some resemblance to the English ‘parliamentation and consultation’ in the activities of the arbitristas in Spain around 1600, presenting their economic and commercial projects to a multiplicity of committees and councils advising ministers.85 There was something much closer to it and more effective in France in the 1570s, where consultative assemblies and the Estates General discussed proposals for moral and economic reform and forged a consensus

  Craig Muldrew, ‘From Commonwealth to Public Opulence: The Redefinition of Wealth and Government in Early Modern Britain’, Remaking English Society: Social Relations and Social Change in Early Modern England, ed. Steve Hindle, Alexandra Shepard and John Walter (Woodbridge, 2013), pp. 317–24. 82  Davis, Medieval Market Morality, pp. 136, 259–60, 329, 382. 83   Ibid., pp. 440, 451; Craig Muldrew, ‘Interpreting the Market: the Ethics of Credit and Community Relations in Early Modern England’, SocHist 18 (1993), 163–83. 84   Select Tracts, ed. Shaw, pp. 23–4. Cf. Works of James I, p. 26. 85   J. H. Elliott, ‘Self–Perception and Decline in Early Seventeenth-Century Spain’, P&P 74 (1977), 43–57. 81

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in support of Henry III’s devaluation of the currency.86 Yet there was little suggestion in either case that Kings might be powerless in the face of economic necessity. On the contrary, when Turquet de Mayerne and Montchrétien first used the term ‘political economy’, in 1611 and 1615, they were emphasising that the responsibilities of a sovereign as an economic manager were just as great as those of the heads of households described in the classic economic texts by Aristotle and Xenophon.87 When it came to the details of economic policy, the closest equivalent elsewhere to the exchange between Malynes and Mun in England was probably the debate between Serra and De Santis in Naples about the failure artificially to control exchange dealings there in 1607.88 Like Mun opposing Malynes, Serra showed a greater awareness than De Santis of the economic conditions determining the balance of payments, and of the need to balance imports by exporting manufactures.89 Mun could have found some notion of the balance of trade in Serra’s ‘short treatise’ of 1613, as has sometimes been argued,90 though there is no reason to suppose he had read it. He would certainly not have found there his model of an economy working according to its own necessary logic, whatever the dictates of sovereigns or morality. That came, and could only have come, from the peculiar pressures of circumstances in England in 1621–3. The European literature of political economy in the early seventeenth century was nonetheless by its very nature comparative, as writers in one state pointed to the reasons for the economic and commercial success of another. The French were beginning to look for lessons to the English and both of them to look to the Dutch Republic and ask what accounted for its economic miracle. The conventional answer was to point to its political constitution, and assert that ‘the differences between a monarchy and a commonwealth’ or ‘popular government’ must be ‘many and great’, in their economic as in their political consequences.91 For the English to try to copy the monetary policies of the Dutch, Cotton argued in 1626, was to attempt the impossible, ‘to frame a royal monarch[y]

  Mark Greengrass, ‘Money, Majesty, and Virtue: the Rhetoric of Monetary Reform in later sixteenth-century France’, French History 21 (2007), 179–83; Jotham Parsons, ‘Governing Sixteenth-Century France: The Monetary Reforms of 1577’, French Historical Studies 26 (2003), 1–30. 87   Alain Guery, ‘L’honneur et le profit’, Montchrestien et Cantillon. Le commerce et l’émergence d’une pensée économique, ed. Alain Guery (Lyon, 2011), pp. 436–8. 88   Annalisa Rosselli, ‘Early Views on Monetary Policy: The Neapolitan Debate on the Theory of Exchange’, History of Political Economy 32 (2000), 61–82. 89   Antonio Serra, A Short Treatise on the Wealth and Poverty of Nations (1613), ed. Sophus A. Reinart (2011), pp. 63, 193, 219, 237, 241. 90   E.g. Alessandro Roncaglia, The Wealth of Ideas: a History of Economic Thought (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 42–3. 91  Maddison, Remembrancer, sig. A2v; Malynes, Lex Mercatoria, pp. 230, 235. Cf. Jean Bodin, The Six Bookes of a Common-weale (1606), pp. 755–6. 86

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by a society of merchants’.92 Yet it might be suggested, in conclusion to this chapter, that one of the effects of the crisis of the early 1620s in England was to push that monarchy a little further towards a popular commonwealth, in its economic thinking as well as its economic behaviour. In a country with a landed aristocracy already engaged in commercial and industrial enterprises, an expanding mercantile community, and a workforce ever more dependent on foreign markets for the sale of its products, the political elite was compelled to engage in a discourse about coin, commodities and commerce which concluded that royal command could do little to counter the logic of the market. The new style of English political economy, whose formation had begun in the 1620s, was still to be shaped by later bouts of political activity, most of them dictated again by circumstances of economic crisis. In the middle of the century a favourable balance of trade had to be defended by Navigation Acts and naval power, by protection rather than by Dutch-style free trade. It had to be defended once more at the end of the century, by armies whose financing required a final recoinage, by a bank on the Dutch model, and by trying to create a commercial empire in which Scotland, Ireland and the plantations all served English interests. Nonetheless, many of the issues at stake later had been foreshadowed in the terms of reference of the first standing commission on trade in 1622,93 and once again they could only be resolved by ‘acts of state’ when there was a parliamentation and consultation in which political actors from diverse backgrounds determined not only what was desirable in principle, but what was achievable and not achievable in practice.94

  Select Tracts, ed. Shaw, p. 38.   The need for something like a Navigation Act and for consistency of economic policy across the three kingdoms, for example: Seventeenth-Century Economic Documents, pp. 18–22. 94   In the 1650s, Maddison explicitly cited the events of the 1620s as a model for what might be done thirty years later: Remembrancer, sig. A2v. 92 93

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4 Provision, household management and the moral authority of wives and mothers in early modern England Alexandra Shepard

The challenges of finding access to popular political culture have been amply demonstrated and ably met by John Walter’s scholarship, not least in his analysis of the records of riot which, he argues, allow ‘subordinate groups, rendered otherwise silent by the inequalities of literacy and preservation of the historical record, to testify to their attitudes and beliefs’.1 One noteworthy feature of such records is the inclusion of the actions and voices of female participants who played prominent roles in varied forms of popular protest, and most especially in food riots. Women’s moral authority in demanding just treatment in the market in times of scarcity has yielded glimpses of female leadership such as Ann Carter’s exclamation – as ‘Captain’ of a contingent of rioters in Maldon in Essex in 1629 – that ‘I will be your leader for we will not starve.’ Accounting for the more general presence of women in the crowd that gathered at Maldon to prevent grain shipments, Walter ascribed their motivations to two factors. First was the ‘special licence’ they derived from a gendered division of labour which designated women as ‘provisioners of their families’. Second was the ‘licence afforded them by their ambivalent legal status’, which may have rendered them less vulnerable to formal prosecution.2 These explanations have proved foundational to approaches to women’s direct participation in the politics of subsistence, although historians have disagreed over the wider significance of such examples of female political agency. On the one hand, the ascription of women’s roles in popular protest to starkly gendered divisions of labour as well as to women’s imprecise legal status This chapter was completed during a semester spent as Hinkley Visiting Professor at Johns Hopkins University. I am grateful for the opportunity to discuss my ideas with John Marshall and to teach and write in such a stimulating environment. I am also grateful to Sarah Knott for her comments on an earlier draft.   John Walter, Crowds and Popular Politics in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2006), p. 16.   John Walter, ‘Grain Riots and Popular Attitudes to the Law: Maldon and the Crisis of 1629’, An Ungovernable People: The English and their Law in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, ed. John Brewer and John Styles (New Brunswick, 1980), pp. 47–84, at pp. 72, 62–3. 1 2

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has become commonplace. In the English context, the emphasis on women’s domestic responsibilities for purchasing food originated in E. P. Thompson’s attribution of women’s participation in riots both to their involvement in ‘faceto-face marketing’ which made them most acutely aware of price fluctuations and trading abuses, and to ‘the calculation that they had slightly greater immunity than the men from the retaliation of the authorities’.3 In his exploration of the Wealden riots associated with disruption to the cloth trade, Peter Clark similarly ascribed the role of women to their ‘greater immunity from the law than men’ and ‘a special immunity for women who were unable to fulfil their familial role of feeding their household because of food shortage’.4 The ambiguous legal status of women made them ideal ‘mouthpiece[s] for their menfolk’s grievances’, according to Buchanan Sharp, although he did also concede that women protesters may have ‘had their own discontents’ rooted in ‘their immediate and direct experience, as purchasers, of high prices and sharp practices of middlemen in the marketplace’.5 When explored in more depth by historians of riot, women’s complaints have been linked to a rich culture of female sociability and to working cultures that ‘brought women together and enabled them to form their own opinions’.6 While R. A. Houlbrooke likewise assigned women’s participation in common action to legal ambiguities about female culpability and also cited women’s responsibility for food purchasing as the reason for their prominence in grain riots, he nevertheless linked women’s protest to their broader interests established both in a semi-autonomous female sphere and (to a lesser extent) through religious commitments shared with men.7 Far from ‘bread and butter politics’, women’s protest can be viewed as articulating a specifically ‘female consciousness’ invested in upholding and exploiting the moral mileage to be gained from gendered divisions of labour rather than overturning them.8 The extent to which this ‘female consciousness’ rested on the obligations associated with mothering, however, has remained relatively unexplored. And even in the most expansive

3   E. P. Thompson, ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century’, Customs in Common (London, 1991), pp. 185–258, at pp. 233–8. 4   Peter Clark, ‘Popular Protest and Disturbance in Kent, 1558–1640’, EcHR 29:3 (1976), 365–82, pp. 376–7. 5   Buchanan Sharp, In Contempt of All Authority: Rural Artisans and Riot in the West of England, 1586—1660 (Berkeley, 1980), p. 36. Roger B. Manning similarly cited women’s unclear legal accountability as the reason for their participation in anti-enclosure riots in his Village Revolts: Social Protest and Popular Disturbances in England, 1509–1640 (Oxford, 1988), p. 96. 6   R. A. Houlbrooke, ‘Women’s Social Life and Common Action in England from the Fifteenth Century to the Eve of the Civil War’, C&C 1:2 (1986), 171–89, p. 185. 7   Ibid. See also Rudolf M. Dekker, ‘Women in Revolt: Popular Protest and its Social Basis in Holland in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, Theory and Society 16 (1987), 337–62. 8   Temma Kaplan, ‘Female Consciousness and Collective Action: The Case of Barcelona, 1910–1918’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 7:3 (1982), 545–66; E. P. Thompson, ‘The Moral Economy Reviewed’, in his Customs in Common, pp. 305–36.

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accounts of female protest, historians have stopped short of labelling it ‘feminist’ while also remaining doubtful about whether – because of its gender specificity – women’s rioting manifested political consciousness. On the other hand, a less commonly articulated view is that women participated (in grain riots at the very least) on near-equal terms with men, motivated by shared rather than gender-specific concerns. Kenneth Logue concluded that in Scotland women took part in most disturbances ‘for much the same reasons and generally in the same way as men did’. He found no evidence of ‘a woman’s view of popular direct action’; instead, women became involved ‘because they experienced the same pressures, felt the same hunger and reached the same conclusions as the male part of the common people’.9 In a more sustained attempt to debunk ‘the myth of the feminine food riot’, John Bohstedt ascribes the grievances of women protesters to their importance as ‘producers of income, not as directors of consumption’, and argues that women’s ‘leverage in practical politics’ was a consequence of their ‘near-parity’ with men in proto-industrial households.10 Most recently, David Pennington has similarly argued that food scarcity ‘brought poor men and women together in common cause’, but he has reiterated women’s importance as consumers and has also emphasised their interests as traders in motivating women’s participation, rejecting the presumption of legal immunity as a significant determinant of female protest.11 John Walter’s own critique of historians’ tendency to ascribe men’s protest to grievance and women’s protest to gender offers a means of revisiting the relationship between gendered divisions of labour and women’s moral authority in less polarised terms. Mindful of the ways in which ‘protest and its prosecution offer a contested site where we can see competing representations of age and gender roles in play’ (rather than a simple reflection of the nature and extent of gender inequality), and building on Natalie Zemon Davis’s germinal analysis of the symbolism attached to riotous ‘women on top’, Walter has encouraged us to be alert to women’s ‘playful exploitation of their gendered identity’ in the negotiation of power.12 It should not surprise us that such ‘play’ entailed a degree of contradiction, which is more usefully read as evidence of women’s deft manipulation of gendered identities rather than as a straightforward index on which to base measurement of the gendered distribution of economic agency or political

  Kenneth J. Logue, Popular Disturbances in Scotland, 1780–1815 (Edinburgh, 1979), p. 203.   John Bohstedt, ‘The Myth of the Feminine Food Riot: Women as Proto-Citizens in English Community Politics, 1790–1810’, Women and Politics in the Age of the Democratic Revolution, ed. Harriet B. Applewhite and Darlene G. Levy (Ann Arbor, 1990), pp. 35, 21. 11   David Pennington, Going to Market: Women, Trade and Social Relations in Early Modern English Towns, c. 1550–1650 (Farnham, 2015), p. 142. 12   John Walter, ‘Faces in the Crowd: Gender and Age in the Early Modern English Crowd’, The Family in Early Modern England, ed. Helen Berry and Elizabeth Foyster (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 98, 114; Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘Women on Top’, in Natalie Zemon Davis’s book of eight essays, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (London, 1965). 9 

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engagement. Women protesters’ play on associations of feminine weakness and fears of female unruliness, as well as their exploitation of legal ambiguities surrounding prosecution, did not preclude either shared grievances with men or common modes of asserting entitlement to official remedy and intervention. This chapter draws on another form of self-representation articulated by labouring people that was recorded in less extreme circumstances, in order to explore further the strategies that married women in particular deployed when expressing claims to authority in a more mundane context. The discussion focuses on the responses provided by witnesses in court to questions about their creditworthiness. Just as female protesters exploited the ambiguities surrounding female criminal culpability, so wives in court manipulated a wider set of contradictions inherent in early modern approaches to ‘coverture’ – the common law tenet that women surrendered ownership of moveable property to their husbands on marriage, along with the right to enter contractual relationships of debt and credit independently.13 Paying lip service to the legal conventions that theoretically rendered them economically dependent did not preclude women’s concurrent claims to substantial economic agency as wives, providing for themselves and their families. Such claims were made with reference to a much broader range of responsibilities than can be summed up either as ‘provisioning’ (that is, ensuring family members were fed) or as ‘breadwinning’ (in terms of waged work). Women’s responses in court involved strategic oscillation between expressions of dependency and assertions of self-sufficiency in ways that alert us to the broader foundations of women’s moral authority as providers. The terms of self-description deployed by lower-ranking witnesses, emphasising their responsibilities for income generation, managing household assets and negotiating credit, therefore further support the breadth of the economic foundations of women’s interventions in the politics of exchange. While some of these roles were gender-specific, labouring women nonetheless often claimed creditworthiness in court in similar terms as their male counterparts. The ‘grids of power’ represented by the intersection of social with gender hierarchies did not prevent these wives from having a sense of entitlement to their household’s property, alongside a commitment to their children’s prospects, which informed expectations of just treatment in

  On coverture and its circumvention see Any Louise Erickson, Women and Property in Early Modern England (London, 1993); Tim Stretton, ‘The Legal Identity of Married Women in England and Europe 1500–1700’, Europa und seine Regionen:2000 Jahreeuropäische Rechtsgeschichte, ed. Andreas Bauer and Karl H. L. Welker (Köln, 2006), pp. 309–21; Margot Finn, ‘Women, Consumption and Coverture in England, c. 1760–1860’, HJ 39 (1996), 703–22; Joanne Bailey, ‘Favoured or Oppressed? Married Women, Property and “Coverture” in England, 1660–1800’, C&C 17 (2002), 351–72; Married Women and the Law in Premodern Northwest Europe, ed. Cordelia Beattie and Matthew Frank Stevens (Woodbridge, 2013); Married Women and the Law: Coverture in England and in the Common Law World, ed. Tim Stretton and Krista J. Kesselring (Montreal and Kingston, 2013).

13

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the marketplace.14 Their self-fashioning was premised on expectations of gender convergence as well as divisions of labour, and was a product of women’s (and men’s) astute exploitation of the possibilities for strategic positioning offered by the legal framework of coverture and with reference to a spectrum of gendered identities that were far from fixed. From the later sixteenth century, witnesses in English courts deploying a civil law procedure were routinely required to state how they maintained themselves and to provide an appraisal of their ‘worth’ as part of a process designed to assess the credit to be attached to their testimony. Witnesses’ answers to these questions afford access to claims to authority voiced by lower-ranking women in rather less acute circumstances than those brought to light by official responses to violent protest, although they similarly attest to the precarious economic conditions in which such women, like Ann Carter and other female rioters whose circumstances can be reconstructed, strove to make a living.15 Some witnesses were occasionally subject to discussion by others, allowing comparison of their self-representation with broader assessments of their creditworthiness.16 The following discussion draws on a sample of over 13,500 witnesses’ replies to the question of their worth, of whom many also detailed how they maintained themselves, spanning the mid sixteenth to the early eighteenth centuries, and gathered from a range of English jurisdictions.17A quarter of these witness statements were provided by women, just over half of whom were married. Their responses, contextualised with reference to prescriptive and supplicatory sources, are suggestive of women’s centrality within early modern household economies in ways which expand our understanding of the grievances articulated by female protesters demanding fairer access to resources. Of the 714 wives who responded to the question of how they got a living, 56 per cent claimed responsibility for at least part of their maintenance. Only

  Michael J. Braddick and John Walter, ‘Grids of Power: Order, Hierarchy and Subordination in Early Modern Society’, Negotiating Power in Early Modern Society: Order, Hierarchy and Subordination in Britain and Ireland, ed. Michael J. Braddick and John Walter (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 1–42. 15   Walter, ‘Grain Riots and Popular Attitudes to the Law’, pp. 56–8; Alexandra Shepard, ‘Poverty, Labour and the Language of Social Description in Early Modern England’, P&P 201 (2008), 51–95. 16   For a fuller description of the procedures for assessing the creditworthiness of witnesses see Alexandra Shepard, Accounting for Oneself: Worth, Status and the Social Order in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2015), pp. 10–14. 17   The jurisdictions covered include the Cambridge University courts, and church courts belonging to the dioceses of Canterbury, Chester, Chichester, Ely, London, Salisbury and York, the archeaconries of Lewes and Richmond. The compilation of this data set was funded by a grant from the Economic and Social Research Council (RES–000–23–1111) and completed with the aid of Dr Judith Spicksley. The data set, entitled ‘The “Worth” of Witnesses in the English Church Courts, 1550–1728’ is available from the UK Data Archive: https://discover.ukdataservice.ac.uk/catalogue?sn=5652. 14

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a minority of wives claimed to depend on their spouse, with statements of dependency diminishing in frequency as the wealth and social status of witnesses decreased. Of wives describing the source of their maintenance whose husband’s occupations were stated, only 27 per cent of women married to labourers referred to depending on their spouse, whereas 73 per cent of gentry wives and 50 per cent of yeomen’s wives claimed to be maintained by their husbands.18 Even such admissions of dependency need to be taken with a pinch of salt, however. While wives’ responses to the question of how they got a living shed a good deal of light on female economic agency, they still only provide partial accounts that informed rhetorical strategies of self-representation in which statements of dependency could signal relative status, rather than being straightforward descriptions of economic activity. Wives responding in court to the question of how they maintained themselves nonetheless revealed a good deal more than their much more limited use of formal occupational descriptors. When they were interrogated about their creditworthiness as witnesses, the majority of married women described themselves as earners and producers, even though they commonly also declared themselves worth little or nothing in response to the question about their worth. It is not always easy to detect whether the married women who claimed to be worth nothing did so in acknowledgement of the conventions of coverture which denied wives formal ownership of moveable property or in admission of their precarious economic circumstances, although several implied that they laboured for their living on account of having nothing else on which to live. In 1615, for example, Elizabeth Crowch described herself as ‘a poore woman [who] liveth by her labour’.19 Declaring themselves worth nothing, in 1616 a Kentish woman described as a spinster as well as a wife claimed that ‘she getts somewhat towards her lyvinge by spininge, Cardinge & such like worke’, while in 1628 a Canterbury shoemaker’s wife responded that she was ‘faine to get her living by helping to wash for other folkes’.20 It was not just necessity or poverty that explained wives’ contributions, however. Married women’s work was critical to most households. In 1637, a migrant to London from Newcastle replied that ‘she keeps weomen in theire lyeinges in in Childbeds and her husband makes needles & fishehooks’, while Anna Smith, the wife of a mathematical instrument maker, who had moved to London from Cambridge in 1717, responded in 1720 that she got her living by ‘go[ing] a nursekeeping’.21 In 1629, Thomasina Slodden, married to a wheelwright and living in Kent, was more unusual in laying claim to a formal occupation

  Alexandra Shepard, ‘‘The Worth of Married Women in the English Church Courts, c. 1550–1730’, Married Women and the Law, ed. Beattie and Stevens, pp. 202–11. 19   Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre, Chippenham [W&SHC], D1/42/29, fo. 91av. 20   Canterbury Cathedral Archives [CCA], DCb/PRC 39/33, fo. 61; DCb/J/X.11.16, fo. 247. 21   Guildhall Library, London [GL] 9065A/7, 27 Sept 1637; 9065A/11, fo. 342v. 18

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when she responded that ‘she … is a Midwife’.22 Wives regularly referred to the dual provision undertaken by spouses. In 1666, Jane Leafe, whose husband was described as a cooper, claimed that ‘her husband is a soldier in the Castle of Chester and she imploys herselfe about baking and selling of pyes & puddings’, while in 1713, Elizabeth Fillamore responded that ‘shee followes the employment sometimes of droveing & sometimes of nursekeeping’.23 That her husband was described as a drover suggests that the former occupation was shared with her spouse. Other wives referred more directly to their ‘assisting work’, such as Frances Wilden of St Margaret’s Westminster, who, in 1716, claimed that for the past three years she had ‘assisted her husband in the buisnesse of a staymaker’.24 Such responses confirm that married women routinely had ‘occupations’, even if they did not refer to them in the highly gender-related occupational descriptors that have been deemed conventional by economic historians.25 Indeed, marriage opened up rather than narrowed the possible parameters and autonomy surrounding women’s work. The transition out of service into self-employment was narrated by a grocer’s wife (who had migrated to London from Bedfordshire) who recounted that ‘seven years ago shee gott her liveing by goeing to service & soe contined to doe till about foure years since & then intermarrying shee followed the employment of plaine worke & starching as shee hath done ever since’.26 The majority of wives who claimed a hand in providing their own living spoke in much more general terms, however, rarely providing details of the specific tasks involved. The most common statement made by both male and female witnesses in response to the question of how they maintained themselves was that they lived by their labour. Nearly a quarter of witnesses who provided a response – both men and women – spoke of labouring for a living. In 1632, for example, the wife of a Canterbury school teacher declared that ‘she is nothing worth, but what she getteth by her daily worke & labour’.27 When such

  CCA, DCb/PRC 39/39, fo. 141v.   Chester Record Office [CRO], EDC 5(1665)/30; GL, 9065A/11, fo. 16v. 24   London Metropolitan Archives [LMA], DL/C/633, fo. 224. See also Ariadne Schmidt, ‘The Profits of Unpaid Work: “Assisting Labour” of Women in the Early Modern Urban Dutch Economy’, History of the Family, 19:3 (2014), 301–22. 25   Amy Louise Erickson, ‘Married Women’s Occupations in Eighteenth-Century London’, C&C 23:2 (2008), 267–307; Alexandra Shepard, ‘The Worth of Married Women’, pp. 202–11; Pennington, Going to Market. On the verb-oriented (rather than noun-based) description of women’s work, Rosemarie Fiebranz, Erik Lindberg, Jonas Lindström and Maria Ågren, ‘Making Verbs Count: The Research Project “Gender and Work” and its Methodology’, Scandinavian Economic History Review, 59:3 (2011), 273–93; Alexandra Shepard, ‘Crediting Women in the Early Modern English Economy’, HWJ 79:1 (2015), 1–24, pp. 10–12. 26   LMA, DL/C/633, fo. 260v. See also Jane Whittle, ‘Enterprising Widows and Active Wives: Women’s Unpaid Work in the Household Economy of Early Modern England’, History of the Family 19:3 (2014), 283–300; Shepard, ‘Crediting Women’. 27   CCA, DCb/PRC 39/42, fo. 153v. 22 23

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statements are contextualised with reference to other categories of response and the further biographical details that witnesses provided, it becomes clear that the ‘labour’ involved was wage labour rather than more general manual work, and that labouring for a living carried close associations with poverty for both men and women. The wife of a Kentish husbandman responded in 1636 that ‘she and her husband are poor folks but maintain themselves by their labour’, while a Wiltshire shepherd’s wife answered in 1606 that she was ‘a poor woman and lives by her husband’s and her own labour’.28 In the hard early decades of the seventeenth century, as a growing proportion of the population became increasingly wage dependent, a higher percentage of women than men among those witnesses who described the source of their maintenance in court responded in these terms – suggesting that women may have borne the brunt of the incipient proletarianisation underway during this period.29 We should be wary of framing the gender overlap between the men and women who laboured for their living in terms of gender equality implied by a ‘near parity’ – even though this was indeed the social group who showed the greatest degree of convergence in their replies to the question of how they got a living.30 While there was a clear division of labour in terms of the tasks performed by labouring men and women, the general terms in which they spoke nonetheless indicate a degree of common cause and solidarity. In 1637, Joan Willett, married to a Surrey husbandman, responded that ‘shee together with her husband doe live by her labour’, while Elizabeth Allen, a Kentish blacksmith’s wife, asserted that ‘she and her husband be labouringe people and have nothinge but what they gett by their owne labor’.31 On occasion husbands also acknowledged the joint labours required to keep their household afloat, such as the husbandman from Seaford (Sussex) who in 1621 responded that ‘he liveth by the labor of himself & his wife’.32 The labour provided by such women was neither auxiliary nor negligible. The income of wives and their children generated from spinning alone amounted to as much as 30 per cent of poorer households’ earnings by the eighteenth century.33 Labouring women who provided evidence in court claimed credit for their work by associating it with the values of honesty, painstaking, and   CCA, DCb/PRC 39/46, fo. 123; W&SHC, D1/42/24, fo. 49v. See also Shepard, ‘Poverty, Labour and the Language of Social Description’. 29  Shepard, Accounting for Oneself, pp. 159, 262–4. 30   Bohstedt, ‘Myth of the Feminine Food Riot’, p. 21. 31   West Sussex Record Office, Chichester [WSRO], Ep II/5/16, fo. 3v; CCA, DCb/PRC 39/38, fo. 89v. 32   WSRO, Ep II/5/12, fo. 26v. 33   For the growing significance of women’s earnings from spinning see Craig Muldrew, ‘“Th’ancient Distaff” and “Whirling Spindle”: Measuring the Contribution of Spinning to Household Earnings and the National Economy in England, 1550–1770’, EcHR 65:2 (2012), 498–526. See also Craig Muldrew, Food, Energy and the Creation of Industriousness: Work and Material Culture in Agrarian England, 1550–1780 (Cambridge, 2011), chap. 5. 28

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industriousness. A Wiltshire wife in 1598 responded that she lived ‘by her true & hard laboure without the Almes of the parish’, while a married woman from Cambridge declared in 1618 that she was ‘a poore woman & liveth by her honest labour, &paynes taking’.34Although wives’ provision was often overlooked in their husbands’ statements, this was most likely because it was assumed rather than because it was insignificant. It was commonly accepted that married women routinely supported their households, and this expectation was frequently articulated in comparable terms to men’s assertions of their duty to provide for dependents. In his damning assessment of the inequities of the cloth trade, Thomas Carew made clear his expectations that labouring families depended on dual provision by husbands and wives, even if women were relatively disadvantaged by lower rates of pay. Commenting on the Biblical injunction that poor men should ‘labour and vse good meanes to maintaine themselues’, Carew assumed that the only way such men might provide for a ‘charge’ of children was with ‘a second person to ioyne with him in labour’ – that is,a wife. Carew also condemned the mean wages paid to women for spinning and carding, not least since ‘the woman spendes as much time, takes as much paines, and dooth as profitable worke as men of other trades’.35 Even in the domestic conduct literature pitched more towards the higher ranking and middling sorts, the joint labours of husband and wife were represented as critical. The clergyman William Whately, for example, advised that ‘both must be laborious and industrious in their calling, and set themselues with diligence to doe somthing, for which their family may fare the better’, adding that if either partner was a ‘doe-nothing’ the entire household would be troubled like a body with a diseased limb. ‘They must therefore ioyne as partners in labouring’ and unite themselves in ‘honest and thrifty sauing’.36 In recognition of the ubiquity of women’s labour, Anne Hills, a ‘spinster’ from Ringwould (Kent) who declared in court in 1617 that she laboured with her husband to maintain herself, was described by a co-witness as ‘but a poor woman and one that lives by her labour as other poor women do’.37 By contrast, Margaret Hiland was condemned in 1628 by other witnesses for having ‘in time past lead an idle

  W&SRO, D1/42/16, fo. 41v; Cambridge University Library [CUL], Cambridge University Archives [CUA], Comm.Ct.II.17, fo. 113. See also Alexandra Shepard, ‘Honesty, Worth and Gender in Early Modern England’, Identity and Agency in England, 1500–1800, ed. Jonathan Barry and Henry French (Basingstoke, 2005), pp. 87–105; Eleanor Hubbard, City Women: Money, Sex and the Social Order in Early Modern London (Oxford, 2012), chap. 6. On the growing significance of a reputation for ‘industriousness’ to labouring respectability from the early seventeenth century see Muldrew, Food, Energy and the Creation of Industriousness, chap. 7. 35   Thomas Carew, Certaine Godly and Necessarie Sermons, Preached by M. Thomas Carew of Bilston in the Countie of Suffolke (London, 1603), Sigs [T6], V2. 36   William Whately, A Bride-Bush, or a Wedding Sermon Compendiously Describing the Duties of Married Persons (London, 1617), pp. 14–15. 37   CCA, DCb/PRC 39/33, fos 279v, 277. 34

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and lazy course of life, not endeavouring to get her living by pains taking as she ought and was able’.38 Labouring women’s ‘provisioning’ thus involved a good deal more than simply supplying their households with food – although their work and skill involved in negotiating affordable prices for essential supplies was nonetheless critical to the household economies of the poor.39 Besides appreciating wives’ significance as earners and producers, there is also a case for taking an expanded view of their roles as consumers which should not be reduced to ‘shopping’ for affordable food. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, consumption was inseparable from saving, and both were critically bound up with a household’s credit. Married women, despite not formally owning the moveable assets that constituted a household, held an enormous stake in family property and were often directly responsible for its management.40 This was no mean task, but comprised the basis of most households’ credit. Particularly among lower-ranking people, the bulk of a household’s wealth was vested in clothes and basic durable goods. A significant proportion of this investment was brought to marriage by women, and wives were formally charged with protecting, maintaining, repairing, and accounting for such household assets.41 In their prescriptive guide to household management, John Dod and Robert Cleaver declared it a specific duty of wives to ‘gather [goods] together, and saue them’ and ‘to giue account of all’.42 This was implicit in the claim of Ester Sparrow (questioned as a witness in the Ely Consistory Court) when she referred to being ‘maintained by her … Husband’ who was a labourer while also asserting that ‘she as the wife of Richard Sparrow takes care of his House & family that being her busines’.43 Provisioning was premised upon the protection and management of household resources. One of the central duties of a wife, according to George Herbert (writing about   CCA, DCb/PRC 39/39, fo. 79.   Claire Walsh, ‘Shopping at First Hand? Mistresses, Servants and Shopping for the Household in Early-Modern England’, Buying for the Home: Shopping for the Domestic From the Seventeenth Century to the Present, ed. David Hussey and Margaret Ponsonby (Farnham, 2008), pp. 13–26. 40   Amy Louise Erickson, ‘Possession—and the Other One-Tenth of the Law: Assessing Women’s Ownership and Economic Roles in Early Modern England’, Women’s History Review 16:3 (2007), 369–85; Garthine Walker, ‘Keeping it in the Family: Crime and the Early Modern Household’, Family in Early Modern England, ed. Berry and Foyster, pp. 67–95; Shepard, ‘Crediting Women’. 41   Diana O’Hara, Courtship and Constraint: Rethinking the Making of Marriage in Tudor England (Manchester, 2000), chap. 6; Jane Whittle, ‘Servants in Rural England c.1450–1650: Hired Work as a Means of Accumulating Wealth and Skills before Marriage’, The Marital Economy in Scandinavia and Britain 1400–1900, ed. Maria Ågren and Amy Louise Erickson (Aldershot, 2005), pp. 89–107. See also Natasha Korda, Shakespeare’s Domestic Economies: Gender and Property in Early Modern England (Philadelphia, 2002). 42   John Dod and Robert Cleaver, A Godlie Forme of Householde Government (London, 1612), p. 168. 43   CUL, EDR K2/30a, 27 July 1748. 38 39

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household governance) was ‘a providing for her family in such sort, as that neither they want a competent sustentation, nor her husband be brought in debt’.44 In an economy in which specie formed a very small proportion of most people’s wealth, and in which the vast bulk of transactions were conducted upon trust, the responsibility of managing household property was of central significance, and should be understood as an ‘occupation’ in its own right. The extent of women’s brokerage in the market depended upon their household’s credit, which, in turn, was founded on appraisals of the moveable property at a household’s disposal and the due care exercised over it. While a reputation for honesty was central to the negotiation of credit – evident not least in labouring witnesses’ emphasis on their solvency as well as their thrift and painstaking industry – the extension of credit also depended upon ‘common fame’ of the value of goods in people’s possession.45 Moveable property functioned both as a store of wealth and as security for credit. At stake, therefore, for labouring families when resources were scarce or under threat, was the balance between saving and consumption represented by the ‘stock’ of goods possessed by households that those dependent upon the market were forced to ‘spend’ in order to survive. One of the central grievances of protesters in food riots was that middlemen refused to sell corn on credit, thereby breaking with normal conventions.46 The liquidation of household assets that was required to purchase grain with cash and at high prices was deemed as threatening to households as the arrival of bailiffs come to seize goods – which inroads were similarly resisted with female violence.47 When Wiltshire Justices of the Peace reported the desperation associated with a slump in the cloth trade to the Privy Council in 1622, they cited the clothworkers’ plight of having ‘spent all theire poore goods to buy foode for them and their familyes’.48 Unemployment not only threatened labouring people’s livelihoods; it also destroyed the basis of their households’ credit, over which wives often exercised primary responsibility.49 When women protested against their inability to access grain under reasonable market conditions, their claims to just treatment rested upon very broad economic foundations which encompassed their earning ability, their consumption opportunities, and their responsibility for managing their household’s 44   George Herbert, A Priest to the Temple, or, The Country Parson his Character, and Rule of Holy Life (London, 1652), p. 39. I am grateful to John Walter for this reference. 45   Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, 1998); Shepard, Accounting for Oneself. 46  Pennington, Going to Market, p. 150. 47   Walker, ‘Keeping it in the Family’. See also Garthine Walker, Crime, Gender and Social Order in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2003), chap. 6. 48  Sharp, In Contempt of All Authority, pp. 23–4. 49   Marjorie K. McIntosh, ‘Women, Credit, and Family Relationships in England, 1300– 1620’, Journal of Family History 30:2 (2005), 143–63; Pennington, Going to Market, chap. 4; Alexandra Shepard, ‘Minding their Own Business: Married Women and Credit in Early Eighteenth-Century London’, TRHS 25 (2015), 53–74.

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assets and credit. At risk, therefore, was not simply their ability to feed their children (although this was, of course, no mean concern), but also their ability to protect any remaining household assets that served as their security for credit. Without credit, the only remaining option was charity, the receipt of which entirely redrew the basis of relief-takers’ participation in relationships of exchange.50 Witnesses in court were alert to the fine yet crucial differences between those who had some small modicum of wealth invested in goods and those with nothing on which to depend for credit. When discussing the credit of Clare Vause, who was married to a grocer in Bridlington (Yorks), witnesses in 1634 confirmed that ‘Vause and her husband are but poor people but that Clare is of very good credit and estimation amongst her neighbours’. The justification for this assessment was that ‘Clare Vause & her husband brought goods with them to Bridlington worth 20 nobles [£6.67] of which they have spent little or nothing and live well’.51 By contrast, Margaret and Edward Jerrot of Hutton (Yorks) were described by fellow witnesses in 1575 as ‘very poore and bare in substance’ and ‘not worthe in ther goods ther detts paid v s in all the world for … they are so poore and bare that they have nothing except yt be a bed to lye in’.52 They had no stock of goods on which either to base claims to credit or to convert into cash resources, and by implication they could not be trusted in the relationships of exchange on which social inclusion as well as material well-being depended. Women’s provision for their families therefore combined production and consumption, and involved the protection of household assets as well as the generation of income. This work was widely recognised as critical. Women prisoners detained from husbands and children used the same rhetoric as men in their petitions for release, claiming their indispensability to their family’s ability to survive. Male and female prisoners awaiting trial by the assizes cited responsibilities for the ‘charge’ of dependents in comparable terms. Ann Robinson, on suspicion of ‘vending bad moneys’, sought release from York Castle on account of having ‘left at home her poor husband having nothing to relieve him on but his poor hand labour’, while Stephen Harrison petitioned for release from Appleby gaol in order that he could work for the maintenance of his wife ‘and a great many poor Children’.53 A petition from Hertfordshire in 1603/4 similarly featured the complaint of several women on behalf of a labourer’s wife who had been beaten while gleaning, rendering her ‘unable to work for her husband and children’.54 The minority of female witnesses who claimed to depend on their husbands might, therefore, have been paying lip service to claims to respectability rooted in normative expectations of male provision rather than suggesting their own  Shepard, Accounting for Oneself, pp. 194–205.   Borthwick Institute, University of York [BI], CP.H.2001, 7 Feb. 1634. 52   BI, CP.G.1753, 24 Sept. 1575. 53   TNA, ASSI 47/20/1, nos 602, 519. 54   Houlbrooke, ‘Women’s Social Life and Common Action’, p. 175. 50 51

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economic inactivity. That there was some tension between these two positions is suggested by the response of Helen Hanbury, of Cambridge, who claimed in court in 1600 that she had ‘alwayes lyved honestlye as a poore servant’ until she was married, after which point she had ‘lyved by hir labor & hir husbands’, while also adding that ‘hir husband whoe is a laboreinge man … getteth his lyveinge & hirs honestlye’.55 Similarly, female as well as male protesters during periods of dearth asserted their obligations to contribute to their household economies, but in the associated rhetorical ploys, women might be cast more interchangeably than men as both dependents and providers in relation to the representation of dire need. We should not read into such rhetorical strategising an unduly narrow foundation for labouring women’s economic agency which was far more expansive than claims of dependence suggested. Wives’ work involved a degree of overlap with labouring men as well as some gender-specific tasks which were no less important on account of being primarily associated with women. When married women protested, they may have had an acute sense of themselves as mothers of children as well as dual supporters of a household economy. Motherhood may have lent a particular brand of moral authority to women rioters, in addition to their general responsibilities as spouses and household managers. While mothering clearly did not preclude women from making significant contributions to their household economies, women nonetheless shouldered many of the practical burdens of providing care and training for young children. The commonplace assumption by historians that it was relatively easy for labouring women to combine the demands of work and childcare because of their co-location in the household has most likely underestimated the difficulties associated with both sets of endeavour, and overlooked the extent to which labouring women depended on a range of strategies and substitutes to provide basic care for their children.56 Given that they had limited options to buy in care in the form of wet nurses, servants, or school dames, labouring women are likely to have depended at least partially on collective strategies for overseeing the needs of their children, which would have fostered solidarity with each other not only in order to enable their duties of provision for their children but also in attempts to protect the future prospects of the next generation. It is not insignificant that women protesters were often accompanied by their children, whose presence served as a reminder of their present and future obligations to their young. John Walter supplies a telling example relating to a group of women charged with throwing down an enclosure who responded that they had acted to protect ‘the children w[hi]ch kept the … beasts’ in the cow pasture, who, it was rumoured, had been detained to be whipped. The ‘symbolic force’ of motherhood here asserted the protective obligations of   CUL, CUA, V.C.Ct.II.2*, fo. 54v.   We still know extraordinarily little about the practicalities and labour demands of early modern childcare, although see Linda Oja, ‘Childcare and Gender in Sweden c. 1600–1800’, Gender & History, 27:1 (2015), 77–111.

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mothers to defend the interests of their own children and those of each other’s children.57 Women witnesses in court could be vulnerable to the stigma of having failed their children when subject to the discrediting strategies of others. In 1624, Margaret Cooper, ‘a poore creature’ who sometimes relied on the ‘poor man’s box for relief … and for relief of her husband’, was condemned by her co-witnesses for having children that ‘tear hedges’ and ‘beg some alms’. Others stated that she had ‘unruly boys’ who were also described as ‘idle’, and suspected of stealing wood and apples and corn.58 What was deemed a failure to inculcate labour discipline and support offspring left poor families vulnerable to the intervention of parish authorities bent on removing children from labouring families through the system of pauper apprenticeship.59 Threats to labouring people’s ability to provide both material and moral foundations for their charges could have dire consequences. Early modern women protestors have been doubly downgraded by historians’ claims that their grievances were pre-political (in good part on account of their gender specificity) yet fell short of feminism. However, we might liken early modern English women’s collective action to defend the broader interests of the next generation (alongside the immediate concerns of their own households) to the forms of political consciousness ascribed by Patricia Hill Collins to a collaborative commitment to ‘othermothering’ associated with African-American communities in enslaved and more recent times. Comprising the cooperative provision of childcare (that has allowed black women to fulfil their commitment to self-reliance as an aspect of good mothering), ‘othermothering’ can also translate into ‘activist mothering’, forming the basis of political intervention. Rejecting the dismissal of ‘maternal politics’ as pre-feminist, Hill Collins argues that it instead has fostered black women’s leadership and a form of social activism designed to address the needs of the next generation and the wider community, thereby rendering motherhood a symbol of power.60 Without pushing false equivalences, it is noteworthy that maternal language was a feature of the claims of women petitioners in England the 1640s and 1650s, serving as a platform for their engagement in rational political debate.61 We should not, therefore, underestimate the potential breadth of both the moral and economic foundations of the assertions of early modern wives and   Walter, ‘Faces in the Crowd’, p. 112–13.   W&SHC, D1/42/40, fos 136r–v, 150v, 152v. 59   Pamela Sharpe, ‘Poor Children as Apprentices in Colyton, 1598–1668’, C&C 6 (1991), 253–70; Steve Hindle, ‘Waste Children? Pauper Apprenticeship under the Elizabethan Poor Laws, c.1598–1697’, Women, Work and Wages in England, 1600–1850, ed. Penelope Lane, Neil Rave and K. D. M. Snell (Woodbridge, 2004), pp. 15–46. 60   Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York and London, 2000), pp. 189–94. 61   Sharon Achinstein, ‘Women on Top in the Pamphlet Literature of the English Revolution’, Women’s Studies, 24 (1994), 131–63; Ann Hughes, Gender and the English Revolution (Abingdon, 2012). 57

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mothers who both led and lent their support to direct action in defence of their livelihoods and in pursuit of fair treatment. Such claims were expressed most audibly and visibly during a period not only of acute socio-economic dislocation but also of widening wealth inequality, of which protesters cannot have failed to be aware. Thomas Carew’s tirade against the pitiful wages paid to spinners and weavers condemned a situation in which ‘a fewe Clothiers in a countrye growe ritch and many thousands growe poore’. Carew deployed Biblical rhetoric against ‘ritchmens grinding the faces of the poore, flaying of their skinnes, & buying the needy for silver’, condemning clothiers for forcing labouring people into debt which they were then bound to work off.62 The rapidly expanding gap between rich and poor was not limited to the cloth trade, and cannot have escaped the bitter resentment of those whom it disadvantaged.63 The same critique could be applied to any situation in which ‘any that set [the] poore on worke … and the labour of the poore affoording them great profit … yet they shall not rewarde them competently for their labour … [shall] growe ritch by others pouertie’.64 The redistribution of wealth during the century after 1550 profoundly stretched the divergence between rich and poor. The median value of labourers’ estimates of their worth – that is the net value of their moveable property, which they were required to appraise when they were questioned as witnesses in court – remained static during the century between 1550 and 1650. In the face of the acute inflation that was a feature of the later sixteenth and early seventeenth century, labourers’ worth diminished in real terms from a meagre £1.35 in 1550–99 to a pitiful £1.19 in 1600–49. Such reduced circumstances were profoundly compounded by the relative gains of yeomen, whose median worth became realigned with that of the gentry over the same period, increasing tenfold in real terms between 1550–74 and 1625–49, reaching a median of £50 in the latter period.65As labouring people’s material circumstances dwindled, their limited means were concurrently dwarfed by the gains of those able to take advantage of high prices and low wages in a dual process of loss and benefit which cannot have seemed anything other than causally related to those on the losing side. It is hard to imagine how such circumstances could not have  Carew, Certaine Godly and Necessarie Sermons, Sig. V[7]r–v.   For glimpses of associated resentment see Andy Wood, ‘“Poor Men Woll Speke One Day”: Plebeian Languages of Deference and Defiance in England, c.1520–1640’, The Politics of the Excluded, 1500–1850, ed. Tim Harris (Basingstoke, 2001), pp. 67–98; John Walter, ‘Public Transcripts, Popular Agency and the Politics of Subsistence in Early Modern England’, Negotiating Power, ed. Braddick and Walter, pp. 123–48; Andy Wood, ‘Fear, Hatred and the Hidden Injuries of Class in Early Modern England’, JSocHist 39:3 (2006), 803–26; John Walter, ‘The Poor Man’s Joy and the Gentleman’s Plague: A Lincolnshire Libel and the Politics of Sedition in Early Modern England’, P&P 203 (2009), 29–67. On women’s articulation of complaint see Achinstein, ‘Women on Top’. 64  Carew, Certaine Godly and Necessarie Sermons, Sig. X[6]v. 65  Shepard, Accounting for Oneself, pp. 68–81; Alexandra Shepard and Judith Spicksley, ‘Worth, Age and Social Status in Early Modern England’, EcHR 64:2 (2011), 493–530. 62 63

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shaped the grievances of both women and men whose material circumstances were becoming ever more precarious and whose working lives were becoming ever more squeezed. Carew identified low wages as a source of ‘the misery of the poore’, lamenting the injustice ‘that where some Clothiers die worth twenty thousand pound, some workeman that hath wrought vnder him not seuen, but twenty yeare, dies not worth twenty groates’. Carew added that labouring men and women’s limited earning potential meant that if they faced any ‘hindrances’, such as sickness or ‘sucking children’, they would no longer be able to ‘buy them & theirs bread, clothes, firewood[,] pay their house rent, and such like necessities for their life’. Their spiritual well-being was likewise threatened by their being unable to ‘spare an houre in a weeke’ which necessitated their use of the Sabbath to ‘washe their cloathes, to peece their ragges, to fetch a bundle of wood’ instead of attending church.66 As a married ‘spinster’ put it in 1625, when she was called as a witness in Canterbury, ‘neyther her husband nor her self have any thinge to live by but onely what they get by their fingers ends and that they labor for’.67 Riot and protest, of course, were not the exclusive preserve of the labouring poor, although it is clear that the participation of the middle-ranking waned from the early seventeenth century.68 When details of the social profile of women rioters can be reconstructed, however, it becomes clear that many did indeed depend on an insecure economy of makeshifts. Ann Carter, for example, leader at Maldon in 1629, had been questioned in 1623 by a bailiff about her absence from church and had responded that ‘yf he woold prouid[e] wone to doe hir worke shee would goe’. Several of the Maldon rioters (men as well as women) had a history of petty offences that were ‘to some extent part and parcel of their poverty’, including unlawful ale-selling, as well as minor infringements of the town’s bye-laws concerning the keeping of animals. Ann Carter and her co-protester Dorothy Berry were prosecuted for flouting market customs by buying up fish before the allotted time, in regulatory initiatives that appear to have overlooked the actions of the larger Dutch and Flemish merchants.69 Men and women’s motivations for direct protest involved some shared and some more gender-related concerns which, it should be emphasised, were not mutually exclusive. Married women fully identified as providers for their households, and as protectors of their children’s welfare, in ways that both overlapped with male householders’ articulations of their responsibilities and that were also rooted in specific notions of female and maternal obligation. Wives’ ‘provisioning’ included a good deal more than ensuring that their children were fed. It was founded on their commitment to and skills in production, consumption, asset management, and credit broking. The depiction  Carew, Certaine Godly and Necessarie Sermons, Sig. V[6]r–v.   CCA, DCb/PRC 39/38, fo. 88v. 68   Andy Wood, Riot, Rebellion and Popular Politics in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, 2002), chap. 3. 69   Walter, ‘Grain riots and Popular Attitudes to the Law’, pp. 58, 56. 66 67

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of wives as dependents, by themselves as well as by their husbands, should be read more as a means to bolster men’s demands for conditions in which they might meet patriarchal aspirations to provide than as a straightforward description of women’s limited agency or a relatively narrow and indirect foundation for deeply felt grievance in the face of hostile social and economic circumstances. Not all women protesters were mothers, and not all mothers identified as such when expressing their grievances. However, an element of ‘maternal activism’ may have provided early modern women with a gender-specific foundation for the expression of grievance and demands for access to resources which should not be overlooked owing to assumptions that mothering was extra-political and/ or a problematic basis for a certain brand of feminist politics. Female protesters had good cause to feel aggrieved, as women, as mothers and as labouring people, and invested their efforts in upholding their claims to resources with assertions of moral authority and foundations for grievance that were comparable in significance, if not always identical in substance, to men’s.

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5 Popular senses of past time: dating events in the North Country, 1615–1631 Keith Wrightson

On 27 March 1642, according to George Naworth’s New Almanacke and Prognostication calculated for the ‘Meridian and Latitude of the ancient City of Durham’, the sun would rise at 5.14 a.m. precisely. (He told his readers to ‘expect windy cold and open weather’.) Moreover, his ‘Computation of time complete to this present year’ informed them that 1642 would be 5591 years ‘since the Creation of the World’, 2461 years ‘Since England received the Christian Faith’, and 576 ‘Since the Conquest of England by William Duke of Normandy’. Of more local interest, it would be 647 years ‘Since Durham was built’, 242 ‘Since the building of the bridge at Aukland’ by Bishop Skirlaw, and 73 ‘Since the Rebellion of the Earles of Northumberland and Westmerland’. More recently, it was 54 years ‘Since the camp at Tilbury in Essex’, 37 ‘Since the Gunpowder Treason’, and 19 ‘Since his Majesties returne from Spain’. It was 17 years since ‘Charles our King began his raigne’ on 17 March 1625, and a list of the exact regnal years of Charles’s predecessors since the Conquest was supplied elsewhere.1 As all this indicates, Naworth, like other compilers of almanacs, had a highly sophisticated grasp of astronomical and calendrical time. If he was attentive to the movements of the heavenly bodies and the cycle of the seasons, he also had a firm conception of time as linear, continuous, regular and measurable: evenly divided into minutes, hours, days, weeks, months and years. As a self-proclaimed ‘Student in the Mathematicks’, he was preoccupied with chronological exactitude: one of those authors of almanacs who, as Daniel Woolf puts it, were engaged in ‘the homogenization of time’, in the construction of timelines of events which served ‘to fix the past, to objectify it independent of the powers of human memory’, and ultimately to contribute to a standardised and chronologically rigorous ‘national sense of the past’.2   George Naworth, Naworthe 1642. A New Almanacke and Prognostication for the yeere of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. 1642 (London, 1641). 2   Daniel Woolf, The Social Circulation of the Past: English Historical Culture 1500–1730 (Oxford, 2003), quoting pp. 10, 101, 274. Naworth was, in fact, the young George Wharton, later the most famous of Royalist astrologers, whose innovatory political chronology of the 1

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Naworth’s, however, was only one way of thinking about time and ordering events, albeit perhaps the one with which we have become most familiar. As has often been observed, there are many ways of mapping time, many ‘temporal frameworks’, ‘time senses’, and forms of ‘time consciousness’. There are many forms of ‘temporal experience’, and many levels of ‘temporal skills’. Cultural conventions for reckoning and measuring time are numerous and varied, as are ‘dating tools’, those ‘familiar idioms’ with which people have located and ‘pegged their memories in time’.3 Moreover, the forms of expression adopted in describing time and the referents employed in specifying time are meaningful and revealing. As Sorokin and Merton pointed out long ago, the frames of reference involved are more often social than astronomical. Time expressions reflect the social life of groups, and ‘systems of time reckoning reflect the social activities of the group’ and reveal the ‘rhythms of their societies’.4 Or as Glennie and Thrift usefully put it, ‘time is embedded in practices’ and in ‘communities of practice’.5 The idioms used to express time and date events can thus provide a point of entry to the mentalities and activities of people in the past: what they shared, how they differed, and what both might mean. We have a partial history of such matters. Several attempts have been made to characterise time consciousness in late medieval and sixteenth-century France and Britain, employing such records as inquisition examinations, pardon letters, proofs of age, or contracts specifying dates of payment. These tend to emphasise a number of characteristics. First, accuracy in recording time was ‘not yet an intellectual requirement or a need of daily life’. There could be considerable vagueness when referring to chronologically distant events, and in general, as Mandrou puts it, ‘approximation was still the general rule’.6 Second, in attempting to peg their memories more firmly in a past time often conceived of seventeenth century, the Gesta Britannorum, set a new standard for detailed chronological histories of Britain. See Bernard Capp, English Almanacs 1500–1800: Astrology and the Popular Press (Ithaca, 1979), p. 222 and passim. 3   Quoting phrases used in Paul Glennie and Nigel Thrift, Shaping the Day: A History of Timekeeping in England and Wales 1300–1800 (Oxford. 2009), pp. 8, 19, 57, 90, 100; A. Fox, ‘Remembering the past in early modern England: Oral and Written Traditions’, TRHS, 6th series, IX (1999), p.241; Joel T. Rosenthal, Telling Tales: Sources and Narration in Late Medieval England (University Park, Pennsylvania, 2004), pp. xxiv, 57. 4   Pitirim A. Sorokin and Robert K. Merton, ‘Social Time: A Methodological and Functional Analysis’, American Journal of Sociology 42:5 (1937), 615–29, pp. 618–19, 620, 623. Cf. Chris Wickham’s point that ‘Time, above all remembered time, is not a constant: it is given meaning in cultural contexts that change from social group to social group’: Chris Wickham, ‘Lawyer’s Time: History and Memory in Tenth- and Eleventh-Century Italy’, Land and Power: Studies in Italian and European Social History, 400–1200 (London, 1994), pp. 275–92, at p. 276. 5   Glennie and Thrift, Shaping, pp. 5, 68. 6   Robert Mandrou, Introduction to Modern France 1500–1640: An Essay in Historical Psychology, trans. R. E. Hallmark (New York, 1975), pp. 69, 70. See also Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou: Cathars and Catholics in a French Village 1294–1324, trans. Barbara Bray (Harmondsworth, 1980), p. 280; Lucien Febvre, Le Problème de l’Incroyance au 16e siècle: La

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as uneven in quality, rather than as a regular flow, people tended to ‘work by association’ with moments of particular significance within the annual cycle or the individual life course.7 Ecclesiastical feasts and seasonal agricultural festivals (which were often associated) provided the principal framework of time referents alluded to. The great feasts constituted ‘a universally known cycle’ and the priests who routinely announced the imminence of particular saint’s days were ‘the guardians of time’.8 Personal life events were also used to locate memories in time: births, deaths, marriages, apprenticeship, knighthood or other significant moments in the unfolding of lives or the transition of generations.9 But it was rare to refer to the proximity of prominent events of conventional historical importance: an accession; a deposition; a war; a rebellion.10 Nor was clock time alluded to more than occasionally, and then usually in an urban context.11 Most of these accounts of a former time experience are essentially static or synchronic. The point is sometimes made that different systems of time measurement co-existed in late medieval Europe. Le Goff distinguished ‘church time’ and ‘merchant time’ (to which Wickham has added ‘lawyer’s time’). Le Roy Ladurie contrasted the loose time sense of the peasants of Montaillou with the precise dating of the inquisition scribes who recorded their examinations.12 But only G. T. Moran has suggested larger ‘mutations in mental habits’ in late sixteenth-century Montpellier, with what he terms ‘modern’ dating (day, month, year) gradually gaining on ‘traditional’ dating by reference to the ecclesiastical calendar in the contracts of the cathedral chapter.13 For the rest, we have only two dominant narratives of change, both hinging on the course and consequences of the rise, and ultimate dominance of the ‘clock Religion de Rabelais (Paris, 1968 edn), p. 368; Robert Bartlett, The Hanged Man: A Story of Miracle, Memory and Colonialism in the Middle Ages (Princeton, 2004), p. 55. 7   Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England (London, 1971), pp. 618, 620; Margaret McGlynn, ‘Memory, Orality, and Life Records: Proofs of Age in Tudor England’, Sixteenth-Century Journal, 40:3 (2009), 680–97, p. 687. 8   Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou, pp. 279, 280. See also Febvre, Problème de l’Incroyance, p. 315; Gerard T. Moran, ‘Conceptions of Time in Early Modern France: An Approach to the History of Collective Mentalities’, Sixteenth-Century Journal, 12:4 (1981), pp. 11–14; Natalie Zemon Davis, Fiction in the Archives. Pardon Tales and their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France (Stanford, 1987), pp. 29–30; Rosenthal, Telling Tales, p. 58; Bartlett, Hanged Man, p. 56. 9   This was particularly so in ‘proofs of age’. See John Bedell, ‘Memory and Proof of Age in England, 1272–1327’, P&P 162 (1999), 3–27, pp. 18, 27; Rosenthal, Telling Tales, p. 15; McGlynn, ‘Memory’, pp. 687, 691. 10   Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou, p. 281; Davis, Fiction, p. 29; Bedell, ‘Memory and Proof’ p. 19; Rosenthal, Telling Tales , pp. 59–60. 11  Febvre, Probleme, pp. 365, 368; Mandrou, Introduction, p. 68; Bartlett, Hanged Man, p. 64. 12   Jacques Le Goff, ‘Au Moyen Age: Temps de l’Eglise et Temps du Marchand’, Annales: Histoires, Sciences Sociales 15:3 (1960), 417–33; Wickham, ‘Lawyers’ Time’, pp. 288–9; Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou, p. 280. 13 Moran, ‘Conceptions’, p. 4 and passim.

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time’ that features so rarely in accounts of time senses between the thirteenth and the sixteenth centuries. First, there is the narrative of technological progress towards modern precision time-keeping, notably after the ‘horological revolution’ of the seventeenth century. Second, there is the narrative of the impact of clock time (standardising, regularising, coordinating, disciplining) in the course of industrialisation, associated above all with E. P. Thompson’s influential article on ‘Time, Work-discipline, and industrial capitalism’.14 Both have recently been subject to telling criticism and modification in Glennie and Thrift’s Shaping the Day, another work focused above all on clock time.15 But it is not my purpose to join directly in these debates. Rather, this chapter responds to Glennie and Thrift’s call for more substantive work on ‘actual timing practices’ in early modern England, and in particular on those ‘timing “vocabularies” … which have now lost their meaning for us’. As Andy Wood has observed, the discussion of popular time consciousness remains ‘empirically impoverished’.16 This chapter, then, offers a reconstruction, for a particular time and place, of a previous everyday time consciousness. By doing so, it seeks to provide a firmer empirical basis for the reconsideration of change in temporal practices. The evidence examined here is provided by ecclesiastical court depositions. These were taken from witnesses in cases which commonly turned upon a particular event (a ‘handfasting’; the making of a will; a defamatory statement, etc.) or upon a connected series of events. In consequence, these documents usually involved one or more ‘dating statements’: the date of an event witnessed, or the dates bracketing a particular state of affairs. Such dating statements were commonly the first step in a process of narrativisation, or provided the signposts that shaped the witnesses’ narration of events, and as such they reveal the social conventions by which events were placed in time.17 They have always interested me, primarily because the forms of expression used can vividly evoke an unfamiliar world, and I have long been in the habit of jotting down some of the more colourful or idiosyncratic examples. In recent years I began noting them systematically while working through some of the deposition books of the Consistory Court of the Bishopric of Durham in north-east England. As a result, I now have two samples of such dating statements large enough to be worth

  Glennie and Thrift, Shaping provides a recent critical overview and bibliography of what is now a very substantial literature on the former issue. For Thompson’s classic article see E. P. Thompson, ‘Time, Work-discipline and industrial capitalism’, P&P 38 (1967), 56–97. 15   See also Bruno Blondé and Gerrit Verhoeven, ‘Against the Clock: Time Awareness in Early Modern Antwerp, 1585–1789’, C&C 28:2 (2013), 213–44, which suggests a ‘slow burn’ change in clock-time awareness from at least the sixteenth century. 16   Glennie and Thrift, Shaping, pp. 47, 58; Andy Wood, ‘Popular Senses of Time and Place in Tudor and Stuart England’, Insights 6:3 (2013), 2–10, pp. 3, 4. 17   For a stimulating discussion of the process of narrativisation see M. Freeman, ‘Telling Stories: Memory and narrative’, in Memory: Histories, Theories, Debates, ed. Susannah Radstone and Bill Schwarz (New York, 2010), pp. 263–87. 14

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analysing.18 The first is a rural or small town sample, comprising every dating statement used in the depositions for the whole diocese of Durham (except the growing urban complex of Newcastle upon Tyne and Gateshead) for three whole years March 1618/19 to March 1621/2: 242 dating statements from 202 witnesses (some of whom made more than one) in seventy-three cases.19 The second is an urban sample, comprising every dating statement made in cases from Newcastle and Gateshead for a total of almost fourteen years between 1615 and 1631: 235 dating statements made by 200 witnesses in sixty-five cases.20 In exploring this material I am interested in anything the evidence reveals about people’s senses of time (as we will see). But of especial interest to this analysis is the nature of the time referents they employed: how they located events in time. These form the basis of the five categories used in the analysis, each of which requires some preliminary introduction. First, there were those witnesses who dated events primarily with reference to ecclesiastical feasts. It was ‘in or about a fortnight before Candlemas last past’; ‘between St Ellenmas and Whitsuntide last past’; ‘about all hallowemas … until about three weekes before St hellenmas then next after and now last past’; ‘upon the Satterdaie next before fastings eve last past’, or ‘from about Whitsuntide gone a twelvemonth till about michaelmas then next after and now last past’. One witness in a 1625 case detailed a series of events over a sixteen month period with reference to ‘Christmas last past’, ‘ladie d[ay] in lent’, ‘Easter last’, ‘Whitsontide gone a twelvemonth’, ‘Martynmas last past’ and ‘Michaelmas last past’, which was quite a full hand.21 Second, there were those who employed seasonal and agricultural referents. These might refer to particular days, as in ‘aboute Lamas last’; ‘on Midsomer eve last past’; ‘about maye daie two years come maie daie next’; or ‘one daie in or about some twentie daies next before lamas gone five years at lamas last past’.22 Alternatively, they might refer to the seasons associated with particular agricultural tasks: ‘one daie in corne harvest’; ‘in hay tyme now last past’; ‘at clipping time’; or ‘at tithing time … in harvest gone four yeares’.23 These seasonal

These are based upon Durham University Library, Archives and Special Collections [hereafter Durham U. L.], DDR/EJ/ CCD/1/10a–10b; DDR/EJ/CCD/1/11; DDR/EJ/ CCD/ 1/12. 19 The Bishop of Durham had jurisdiction over most of the counties of Durham and Northumberland and some outlying territories. The diocesan sample includes thirty-five witnesses from the small city of Durham (17.3 per cent), which was predictably over–represented, while the remainder came from forty-seven places in Durham, twenty places in Northumberland, two in North Yorkshire and two in Westmorland. 20   Because cases from Newcastle and Gateshead were fewer in any given year, it was necessary to use more years in order to get a sample of comparable size. 21   Durham U. L., DDR/EJ/CCD/1/11, fos 3, 73v, 181v, 240, 409v–411; DDR/EJ/ CCD/1/10a–10b, fo 155v. 22   Durham U. L., DDR/EJ/CCD/1/11, fos 6v, 15v, 186v, 519v. 23   Ibid., fos 41, 51, 141v–142, 394v, 430v; DDR/EJ/CCD/1/12, fo 124 . 18

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referents were distinct from, but could also be closely related to, certain ecclesiastical feasts, for the simple reason that some saints’ days remained associated with particular moments of the agricultural year. Andrewmas, for example, by which time ploughing should be completed; Martinmas when spare animals were slaughtered; St Luke’s Day when the ‘tupping’ of ewes commenced, or Lady Day and Michaelmas when farm rents were due.24 Third, there were witnesses who cited specific dates by day, month, or year. In more than half the cases, this involved the day and month followed by the phrase ‘last past’, as in ‘on or aboute the fourth daye of Julye last past’, or ‘in and upon the xxvth day of Januarye last past’.25 This indicated that the event in question had happened within the last calendar year. Less frequently, in around a fifth of instances, the year was actually stated. This was mostly in the anno domini form, as in ‘in and upon the xxviith day of Julie in anno dm 1619’. This form was usually employed in testamentary cases in which the existence of a dated will may have guided witnesses towards stating the year. Only exceptional witnesses (three in all) stated the regnal year, as in ‘in and upon the first day of November in the tenth year of the kings majesties reigne that now is’ [i.e. 1613].26 Yet even witnesses who aspired to such apparently precise reckoning in dating events could sometimes fall back on approximation. A few could cite only the year concerned. Some could offer only the month and year. Many more (close to a fifth) could state the month ‘last past’, but were uncertain as to the exact date: ‘one daye eyther in the end of Maie or in the beginning of the month of June gone a twelvemonth’; ‘in or about the fore end of the month of June last past’; ‘in the [month] of Maie last past butt upon what daie of the weeke or of what particular … daie of the month she cannot depose’.27 Fourth, there were those whose principal referent was another event. Usually this was a relevant event. It was most commonly a death (‘a little before the death of Thomas Reed’; ‘a year or more after the death of George Thompson’), or an associated will-making. But it could also involve a birth (‘att the labor or sickening of one Alice wife of Robert Dawson’; ‘soon after that Margaret Garnet was delivered’), a marriage, or even a wake (the evening when Dorothy Stokoe’s ‘frinds and neighbors [came] into the place where she was lyinge as the fashion is to keep companie and watch with her’).28 Occasionally, it involved allusion  Thomas, Religion, p. 618; Nicola Whyte, Inhabiting the Landscape: Place, Custom and Memory, 1500–1800 (Oxford, 2009), pp. 134–5. For the frequent use of saints’ days in the agricultural calendar of the hill-farming north see Angus J. L. Winchester, The Harvest of the Hills: Rural Life in Northern England and the Scottish Borders, 1400–1700 (Edinburgh, 2000), chap. 3, ‘The Hill Farming Year’. 25   Durham U. L., DDR/EJ/CCD/1/11, fos 9, 11. 26   Ibid., fos 81v, 158. All of these witnesses were citing the granting of formal leases. 27   Ibid., fos 64, 343v, 373. 28   Ibid., fos 41v, 70v. 148v, 152, 169, 369. There might also be reference to an event in addition to another form of dating. In the numerical analysis below, events are counted as dating referents only where they are the only, or seem to me the primary, referent used. 24

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to a significant local event: the induction of ‘Mr Macklewyan’ as new vicar of Lesbury, Northumberland; the time when the apparently well know malefactor John Aynsley ‘was then readie to be hanged’; a ‘visitation’ of the plague in Newcastle, or upon ‘the night next after the Quarter Sessions at Durham next after Christmas now last past’.29 But on only a single occasion was there reference to what we might regard as a major ‘historical’ event: ‘in the year of the insurreccon or rebellion in the north that last was’ – a reference to the rising of the northern earls in 1569, recalled in 1620 by the now 75-year-old Robert Darling of Plawsworth.30 Fifth and finally, there were those who dated an event by reckoning back from the present in units of time, i.e. in days, weeks, months or years ‘since’, ‘past’, ‘gone’, or ‘agoe’. This certainly implies a firm sense of the regular linear progression of time and a familiarity with the units in which it was measured. Indeed, the not infrequent employment of such terms as a ‘sennet’ for a week, a ‘fortnight’ for fourteen days or two weeks, a ‘twelvemonth’ for a year, or ‘a quarter of a year’ for three months, indicate common awareness of the numerical relationships between those units.31 People were perfectly aware of these conventions of time measurement and used them constantly in conjunction with other calendrical referents. But they could also use them alone. A minority did so to specify the number of days, weeks or months since the occurrence of relatively recent events: for example, ‘in an upon a tewsday gone a fortnight on tewsday last’, or ‘six weeks last past’.32 Most people used this form to refer to events that had taken place more than a ‘twelvemonth’ before, around a quarter of witnesses referring to events more than ten years earlier. And as they crossed that time barrier the relative precision of their dating deteriorated. It was ‘about a year or more’ ago; ‘divers years’ ago; ‘two or three years last past’; ‘three years and more’ since; ‘these fower yeares and an half last past and more’; ‘about six or seaven yeares agoe as he remembreth’, or ‘about 12. 13. or 14 yeares agoe, a more certain time he remembreth not’.33 For events of more than ten years previously, as sharp recall diminished, there was a marked propensity to fall back on round decadal numbers, or on significant even numbers like twelve: ‘about ten yeares since’, ‘about twentye yeares since’, or ‘about a dozen yeares agoe’.34 None of this, it should be added, included references to ancient customs said to have existed ‘these fiftye yeares last past’, ‘these fiftye years last past and more’, or ‘during

    31   32   33   34   29 30

Ibid., fo 54; DDR/EJ/CCD/1/12, fos 47/47v, 94v, 300–1. Durham U. L., DDR/EJ/CCD/1/11, fo 75v. Ibid., fos 19–19v, 42, 146v, 164, 181v, 401; DDR/EJ/CCD/1/12, fo 63v. Durham U. L., DDR/EJ/CCD/1/11, fos 4, 164. Ibid., fos 28, 122v–123v, 128v, 129v, 135v, 138v, 148v, 418, 602. Ibid., fos 73–5.

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these fiftye yeres last past and of his owne remembrance and by reporte tyme out of mynde of man’. This analysis is confined to the dating of specific events.35 The forms of expression employed in these dating statements by Durham deponents confirm the central characteristics highlighted by existing studies of the senses of time prevalent in late medieval France and Britain. Most involved degrees of approximation, and at times the witnesses’ uncertainty could be acute. Robert Cooper, an aged ‘singing man of the Cathedrall Church’, remembered being asked to mediate in a dispute ‘about three yeares agoe (but what tyme of the yeare it was he cannot call to mynde)’. John Marley, a yeoman aged thirty-two, recalled the contentious codicil to Bartholemew Musgrave’s will in detail, ‘but in what month daie or yeare it was he cannot depose save onelie he thinketh it was about half a yeare before the death of the said Bartholemew … neither can he depose when the said Bartholemew died’.36 Some suggested a proximate feast day, only to have their testimony struck through and corrected when other witnesses agreed on a different date. It wasn’t ‘Whitsun Monday or Whitsun tewsday’, but ‘Easter tewsday gone a twelvemonth’. It wasn’t ‘about Cuthbertstide’ (20 March) but ‘about St Ellenmas’ (21 May). It wasn’t ‘a little before Christenmas’, but ‘about St Lukemas’ (18 October).37 Such disagreements were corrected in the record, but on occasion minor variants in dating statements were allowed to stand, as in a defamation case of 1627/8 in which seven deponents offered six different attempts at dating the quarrel concerned. All that could be said for sure was that the abusive words in question were hurled some time between Michaelmas (29 September) and Martinmas (11 November).38 Again, most witness statements involved dating by association with a calendrical high point or a particular event. This form of association was sometimes given additional specificity by the witnesses’ recall of the day of the week concerned: it was on a Monday or Tuesday, a Sunday ‘ymediately after evening prayer’, at the Saturday market on Sandhill, Newcastle; on a Wednesday when Teesdale villagers came to the market at Barnard Castle.39 And frequently it was lent weight by the memory of exactly what the deponent had been doing at the time, or by a comparable memory marker of a highly personal kind. Witnesses recalled ‘setting up his shop stall’, ‘going about his sheep upon the fells’, ‘beinge spinning   Ibid., fos 17–18, 27, 45v. To exemplify this point concerning custom: A tithe dispute of 1620–1 from Middleton-in-Teesdale involved the taking of nineteen depositions from elderly men who testified as to the tithing customs governing the lands concerned. Such general statements of the antiquity of custom are not included in this analysis. Only four of these depositions were used, since they dated specific events known to the deponent: the sale of a parcel of land; a specific payment made; specific disputes remembered: Ibid., fos 117–127v, 132–4. 36   Ibid., fos 173, 299v. Cf. DDR/EJ/CCD/1/12, fos 47, 88, 184. 37   Durham U.L., DDR/EJ/CCD/1/11, fos 80v, 129v–130, 131v. Cf. fos 150–150v. 38   Durham U. L., DDR/EJ/CCD/1/12, fos 87v–94v. 39   Durham U. L., DDR/EJ/CCD/1/11, fos 12, 64v, 67v, 92v, 106, 136v, 362. 35

98

POPULAR SENSES OF PAST TIME 1615–1631

one daye’, ‘threshing corne’, going ‘to take his morning draught’, ‘braking dowe for bread’, ‘passing the time with a pint of wine’, ‘att the wash pool about washing his sheep’; ‘coming home from milking kyne with divers other maids of Billingham’, ‘lying then in childebedd’, or ‘having then a child upon her knee crying and making a noise’.40 The rough time that Simon Dodds of Bellingham, Northumberland and his housekeeper Mabell Hunter had cohabited before being ‘by lawe compelled to marrie together’ could be suggested by the fact that they already had three bastard daughters, and that at the time ‘the youngest of the three daughters was able to beare home from the fells there a burden of lyng for the fire’.41 There was, then, plenty of the approximation and association that we might expect. And the characteristic paucity of reference to conventional historical events (i.e. national political events) is equally unsurprising. But this does not mean that for these witnesses, as for the people of Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou, ‘history was absent or almost absent’ in their sense of the past, or that they ‘lived in a kind of “island of time”’, framed by a broad sense of Christian eschatology.42 Most of the events to which they referred were both quotidian in nature and relatively recent in time. There was therefore a certain lack of opportunity for what Natalie Zemon Davis calls a ‘convergence between historical time and the time of the story’.43 Again, it might well be the case that ‘the affairs of the great left their mark upon popular memory’ and that there could be ‘an intertwining of local and national events’.44 Yet this was true only to a particular degree, depending upon the specific case. The people of north-east England were certainly aware that momentous events had taken place within relatively recent times. Court deponents in the later sixteenth century might remember pre-Reformation times as ‘latten service’ or ‘latin mass time’, might recall ‘the commocion tyme in thes[e] north partes..xxx yeres ago’ [the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536] or the ‘surrender’ of the monastery at Durham in 1539. Many details of the later ‘commocion time’ or ‘tym of the rebellion’ were recalled in the immediate aftermath of the rising of 1569.45 But such events were likely to be recalled only

  Ibid., fos 10, 10v, 100v, 105a, 125, 165, 167, 408, 416v. Dr Sarah Barber of Lancaster University has suggested that such details might result from deponents’ desire to seem more authoritative witnesses when testifying before potentially intimidating courts. 41   Ibid., fo 399. Presumably the inhabitants of the northern uplands had a good idea of when a child was able to perform that valuable household task. 42   Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou, pp. 281, 282. 43  Davis, Fiction, p. 26. 44   Wood, ‘Popular senses of Time and Place’, p. 6. 45   Margaret Harvey, Lay Religious Life in Late Medieval Durham (Woodbridge, 2006), pp. 46–7; 195–7. Durham U. L., DDR/EJ/CCD/1/2 (1565–73) fos 14, 68v, 19v, 72, 113v, 142, and 186v ff. Many of the post–1569 depositions are printed in Depositions and other Ecclesiastical Proceedings from the Courts at Durham, ed. James Raine, Surtees Society, 21 (1845). For an excellent recent account of 1569 see Krista J. Kesselring, The Northern Rebellion of 1569: Faith, Politics and Protest in Elizabethan England (Basingstoke, 2007). 40

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when they were directly relevant to the case in hand and in particular served to legitimise claims being made. The dissolution, for example, directly impacted the tithe rights over Holyfield in Muggleswick parish. Robert Darling later recalled 1569 because of its relevance to the current tithing customs of Plawsworth.46 Most ‘historical’ events had no such relevance to the deponents studied here. Some were long ago; others were not conventionally regarded as their business; and in consequence they mostly went unmentioned. It is striking, nonetheless, that the witnesses were also unlikely to refer to the new ‘Protestant Calendar’ introduced by the post-Reformation state: the accession day of Queen Elizabeth (17 November) or such ‘deliverances’ as that from the ‘Gunpowder Treason’ celebrated on 5 November. The lists of significant recent events provided by almanacs such as Naworth’s sought to remind them of such dates, but they generally went unremarked in their ‘dating statements’.47 What the early seventeenth-century evidence does bring out most strongly (perhaps more forcibly than earlier studies of popular conceptions of time) is the phenomenon of ‘pluritemporalism’: the presence already of what Glennie and Thrift call ‘multiple temporal coexistence’; a ‘mixture of times – unfolding at different speeds in different places – which intersect and interact in all manner of ways’.48 Such coexistence comes out sharply when different witnesses to the same event adopted alternative forms of dating referent. The scribe who wrote Isabel Anderson’s will, for example, said that it was on 23 November last; a tailor who witnessed it said it was ‘upon the wednesdaie nexte before St Andrews daie last past’. Three witnesses dated a defamation in Durham to ‘one day in the month of March last’, ‘one daye in or about two weeks before Easter’, and ‘one daye about mid Lent last past’.49 The common currency and interaction of these variant forms of reckoning and recollecting can also be found in the hybrid forms of dating that sometimes appeared when a witness chose to reinforce one form with another: ‘the fower and twentieth day of June in Ao dm 1619, being midsomerdaye’, or ‘about March gone fower yeares at Martynmas last’, or ‘upon Tuesday next before Christmas, being the xxiith day of December last’.50

  Durham U. L., DDR/EJ/CCD/1/2 (1565–73) fos 68v, 19v, 72, 113v, 142. For Robert Darling see n. 30 above. 47   For the new Calendar of national celebration see David Cressy, Bonfires and Bells: National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England (Berkeley, 1989), passim. 48   Glennie and Thrift, Shaping, p. 66. For ‘pluritemporalism’ see Wood, ‘Popular senses of Time and Place’, pp. 4–5. 49   Durham U. L., DDR/EJ/CCD/1/11, fos 144v–145v, 451–452v. Nor were such alternatives necessarily any the less accurate as dating forms. While a degree of approximation was common, to say that an event occurred on ‘upon the first day of August’ and ‘upon lammas daye last past’, was to say exactly the same thing, as was ‘about midnight on Sct Andrew daie gone five yeares’ and ‘about 12 a clock in the night the last daie of November 1615’ : Ibid., fos. 103v–104, 109v–110. 50   Ibid., fos 84, 151; DDR/EJ/CCD/1/12, fo 177. 46

100

POPULAR SENSES OF PAST TIME 1615–1631

Given such coexistence, then, what is needed is the simple quantitative analysis necessary to establish the relative importance of the different dating practices currently in use. Before moving to such an analysis, however, one final issue needed to be considered. Since a variety of forms of dating coexisted, one inevitably wonders whether the forms of expressing time used by witnesses were influenced by the practice of the courts or the nature and the circumstances of the cases? From the evidence already presented, it seems clear that the court’s scribes (who dated the court sessions by day, month, and year) did not impose any particular system of dating upon the witness statements that they recorded. These were far too varied and idiosyncratic for this to have been the case. Yet some witnesses may have influenced one another. In some cases a number of witnesses can be found using exactly the same dating statement, implying that they may have followed one another. According to usual practice, they should have made their depositions separately and in private to a clerk who would put to them questions derived from the initial statement of the case.51 But they may well have discussed the case in advance and shaped a common memory and forms of expressing it influenced by what has been called a process of ‘collaborative knowledge making’.52 Alternatively, individual scribes may at least sometimes have reduced successive and repetitive witness responses to a common formula established by a prior witness. These things are possible, but their distorting influence should not be exaggerated. Neither appears to have been systematic. As we have seen, witnesses commonly differed in the expressions used. This gives some grounds for confidence in working with what the sources provide. One category of cases was special. In testamentary cases, wills were exhibited in court and sometimes read out, and these documents were, of course, dated. This may have influenced some witnesses to follow the day, month, year format employed in the will. Sometimes this is strongly indicated, as when a witness declares that the will was made ‘in and upon the daye and year in the will mentioned’.53 But in fact they rarely did this. Nor did most of them simply repeat the date given in a will. Indeed, in the diocesan sample, of the eighty-five dating statements made in testamentary cases, less than half (42.4 per cent) actually used the day, month, year form that might be anticipated. Rather more used an ecclesiastical or seasonal referent (44.7 per cent in all). It is true, then, that day, month, year dating was more likely to appear in testamentary cases, for very good reasons; but as yet it was not dominant.

51   For a lucid statement of court practice in the taking of depositions and the problem of potential distortion see Amanda Flather, Gender and Space in Early Modern England (Woodbridge, 2007), pp. 11–13. 52   I owe this phrase to my former student, Caroline Leiffers. 53   For examples of this or similar phrases see Durham U. L., DDR/EJ/CCD/1/11, fos 86, 88, 115v. As has already been observed, the existence of a written will seems also to have influenced the frequency with which witnesses in testamentary cases stated the year.

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Despite these reservations and qualifications, the cumulative impression formed by the evidence is that when asked to date an event, witnesses who were certainly aware of a variety of dating practices reached for the formulation that came most naturally to them. The context in which they did so might influence their choices, of course. But the outcome of those choices, it seems to me, reflected above all the forms most familiar to them within their own ‘communities of practice’. We can now turn to the quantitative analysis needed to establish the relative importance of the dating practices adopted by the witnesses in our two samples. A number of simple conventions were adopted, some of which have already been signalled. First, I counted dating statements. If a single witness made more than one such statement (e.g. in recounting successive events) I counted each. Second, these statements related to specific events only. I did not include statements (in tithe cases) that a custom had existed for a long period of years. Third, in each statement I have counted only the principal time referent employed (though occasionally witnesses supplemented it with a second form). Finally, the sex, occupation, age and place of residence of each witness was noted where this information was given. The results of the analysis are set out in Tables 5.1 to 5.3. Table 5.1 Referents used in dating statements

Diocese 1619–22

Newcastle/Gateshead 1615–31

 No.

  %

 No.

  %

Ecclesiastical Feasts

 99

 40.9

 61

 26.0

Seasonal/Agricultural

 33

 13.6

 18

  7.6

Date

 69

 28.5

 82

 34.9

Event

  5

  2.1

 39

 16.6

Unit of time

 36

 14.9

 35

 14.9

Totals

242

100

235

100

Table 5.1 demonstrates (yet again) that we are dealing with multiple coexisting methods of locating events in time, which, in turn, implies the coexistence of a variety of forms of time sense or time consciousness. But there are interesting differences in the numbers and proportions of the time referents employed by the witnesses. In the rural/small town ‘diocese’ sample, the commonest form of dating an event was with reference to an ecclesiastical feast (40.9 per cent). And if we add the closely related use of a seasonal/agricultural referent, then a total of 54.5 per cent of events were dated in this broad manner. Use of the date by day, month or year was prominent (28.5 per cent of instances) but much less common. In the urban sample drawn from Newcastle and Gateshead, the reverse 102

POPULAR SENSES OF PAST TIME 1615–1631

was the case. The use of ecclesiastical feasts and seasonal/agricultural referents was certainly common (33.6 per cent of usages in all), but much less frequent than in the diocesan sample.54 The use of day/month/year dates, however, was more frequent, and the commonest single mode of dating events (34.9 per cent of instances). Paradoxically, however, it was also the case that of those witnesses who attempted to use dates but could only remember the month concerned and not the precise day, such uncertainty was actually far commoner in the urban sample (28 per cent of all usages of ‘dates’) than in the diocese (8 per cent). It seems that urban people were more familiar with the monthly calendar, but were actually less prone to recall the actual day of the month. Finally, while the use of units of time to reckon back to an event was much the same in town and country, the use of other events as memory markers was notably more common in the urban sample; an intriguing finding. We have, then, several elements of urban/rural difference to consider. Table 5.2 Dating referents used by gender

Diocese 1619–22     M         No.

%

No.

Newcastle/Gateshead 1615–31

F   

M       

%

No

%

No.

F %

Ecclesiastical Feast

 71

 36.6 28

58.3

 32

20.6 29

 36.2

Seasonal/ Agricultural

 27

 13.9  6

12.5

  9

5.8

 9

 11.2

Date

 60

 30.9  9

18.8

 63

40.7 19

 23.8

Event

  5

  2.6  0

 0

 26

16.8

13

 16.3

Unit of time

 31

 16.0

 5

10.4

 25

16.1

10

 12.5

Totals

194

100

48

100

155

100

80

100

Table 5.2 shows that we also have a fairly pronounced gender difference to consider. In the diocese, women referred themselves to seasonal/agricultural high points in about the same proportion as did men, but they were much more likely than men to refer to ecclesiastical feasts (58.3 per cent as against 36.6

  The feasts concerned were much the same in town and country alike, being dominated by Christmas, Candlemas, Lent, Easter, Whitsuntide, Michaelmas and Martinmas. In addition diocesan witnesses showed a fondness for St Ellen’s and St Andrew’s days and mentioned seven others from time to time. Urban witnesses preferred St Luke’s day and mentioned only three others.

54

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KEITH WRIGHTSON

per cent). Conversely, they were much less given than men to using day/month dating (18.8 per cent as against 30.9 per cent). Interestingly, these gendered characteristics were also observable in the city. Women there were considerably more likely than were men to use both ecclesiastical feasts and seasonal/agricultural referents (especially church feasts). Moreover, while both men and women in town were more likely to use day/month/year dating than their rural counterparts, urban women were far less given to doing so than urban men. Table 5.3 Dating referents used by age

Diocese 1619–22

Newcastle/Gateshead 1615–31

  No.   % Under 40

  No.   % Over 40

  No.   % Under 40

No.   % Over 40

Ecclesiastical Feast

 46

 42.6

 47

 37.0

 45

 31.3

14

 16.7

Seasonal/ Agricultural

 13

 12.0

 19

 15.0

 14

  9.7  3

  3.6

Date

 35

 32.4

 35

 27.6

 52

 36.1

26

 30.9

Event

  1

  0.9

  4

  3.1

 17

 11.8

22

 26.2

Unit of time

 13

 12.0

 22

 17.3

 16

 11.1

19

 22.6

Totals

108

99.9

127

100

144

100

84

100

Table 5.3 considers the possible influence of age; using those depositions in which the age of the witnesses was stated, and dividing them roughly into those who were below or above the age of forty: i.e. born since or before the late 1570s.55 It suggests that in the diocesan sample there was not much difference in the propensity of people under forty to use particular dating conventions, as compared to older witnesses. Older people were somewhat more likely to use units of time, or to refer to past events as markers, but this may simply reflect the fact that they were precisely the people called upon to recall events more distant in time. Overall, there is not a strong suggestion of a significant generational difference in the use of dating referents. In comparison, the urban sample

  Urban witnesses were somewhat younger than the diocesan witnesses, some 68 per cent being under forty as against 44 per cent in the diocese (and this was much the same for men and women alike). The urban population may indeed have been somewhat younger, though one must also bear in mind that a large minority of diocesan cases concerned tithing customs, which meant the involvement as witnesses of more elderly inhabitants. Such cases were almost absent in the urban context.

55

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POPULAR SENSES OF PAST TIME 1615–1631

suggests that there was not a great difference in the propensity of different generations to use day/month dating (though both did so slightly more than their rural counterparts). As in the diocese, older people were more likely to refer themselves to past events and to reckon back in units of time. The unexpected finding in the urban sample is that although urban witnesses were generally less likely to refer to ecclesiastical feasts or seasonal/agricultural markers than diocesan witnesses, it was actually the younger urban witnesses who were most likely to do so. This pronounced generational difference was not observable in the diocese, and one can speculate that is reflects the presence of young rural-urban migrants from the countryside. Finally, another urban/rural difference deserves brief comment. Only a minority of witnesses ever referred to the time of day at which an event took place, though on occasion they might do so colourfully: one villager described the dawn as ‘day gate’.56 Of those who did so in the diocesan sample about half (52 per cent) referred to clock time, and these witnesses were disproportionately small town dwellers, living, for example, in Durham or Barnard Castle. Of those who mentioned the time of day in Newcastle and Gateshead, more than four fifths (86 per cent) used clock time. Urban dwellers were clearly much more familiar with that means of shaping the day; like Jane Rand of Gateshead who, being woken at night by a kinsman, asked immediately ‘what a clocke it was’, and was answered ‘about fower’.57 Where does this laconic, but intriguing, evidence of the ‘time consciousness’ of the common people leave us? First, if people’s sense of time is, as we are told, ‘embedded in practices’ and reflects ‘the social activities of the group’, then this survey suggests the coexistence of a variety of ‘communities of practice’. Of the principal modes of locating events in time employed in the north country in these years, one (reference to ecclesiastical feasts) surely reflects the community of the parish which provided the most immediate experience of the cycle of the Christian calendar. This context may have been more enveloping in the countryside than in the town, and it appears to have been of particular significance in women’s perception of the most meaningful reference points of the year. Similarly, the closely related use of seasonal and agricultural referents would reflect the practices of particular localities, or manorial communities, in which a reference to ‘haytime’, or ‘clipping time’ would be most meaningful. The other principal mode of dating (by day and month, and sometimes year) involved a level of exactitude that might have recommended itself most strongly to a different and less geographically focused kind of community: networks of people engaged in activities that required a more precise and regular sense of   Durham U. L., DDR/EJ/CCD/1/11, fo 56v. More usually people simply refer to such major divisions of the day as ‘forenoone’, ‘evening’, or ‘at night’. 57   Ibid., fo 185v. People always approximated to the nearest preceding hour, never referring to minutes or other divisions of the hour. They had presumably heard the hour sounded by church and other clocks. 56

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time. It afforded certain possibilities to merchants, tradesmen, manufacturers and commercial farmers who were making, and undertaking to honour, contracts on specific dates; also to lawyers, clerks, administrators, and other makers and keepers of records used to handling a variety of dated instruments and to operating within a calendrical format that facilitated forward planning. Such networks would have been densest in the city (though they would also have extended out into the countryside), and in this period they would have been largely (though not exclusively) made up of men. Of course, many individuals were probably familiar with all these means of reckoning time, and some would have participated in more than one kind of ‘community of practice’. When examined in court, however, they perhaps chose to use the mode of dating events with which they were most familiar, or comfortable, or perhaps deemed most appropriate to the circumstances. Secondly, a synchronic survey of this kind reveals a situation in being. It tells us nothing about how long it had been so, and can only hint at possible processes of change. These matters must await further exploration. Yet as regards the central themes of this volume, it reveals something about a little-examined aspect of popular culture: people’s quotidian senses of time and how these may have related to their daily agency within particular communities of practice. Such types of agency are too little discussed historically. The very term ‘agency’ is often assumed to have a political implication, whether in the politics of the state, of social relations, or of gender. These forms of popular agency and the modes of time consciousness that reflected them, need not be considered in overtly political terms. Yet both could carry political implications in a broad sense. One was clearly related to the communities of the parish and the manor and their familiar customs. Custom, as we know, was the fulcrum on which many local political disputes turned. It provided, as John Walter has repeatedly demonstrated, legitimation for popular protest and resistance. Andy Wood argues that it was ‘central to early modern popular memory’, defining ‘senses of belonging and entitlement’, and providing ‘a usable past … that legitimated claims to rights, space and resources in the present’.58 The other related to a form of dispersed community which we have good reason to believe was growing and elaborating in England at the turn of the seventeenth century, not least in the north-eastern region covered by this study. It is well illustrated by A. T. Brown’s examples of the Shepardson and Shadforth families of Bishopwearmouth: prosperous copyholders in the late sixteenth century, increasingly involved in commercial farming in the early seventeenth century, extending their holdings, engaging in enclosure, diversifying their activities into ship ownership, fishery leases, quarrying, lime production, and colliery partnership and forming the

  Andy Wood, The Memory of the People: Custom and Popular Senses of the Past in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2013), p. ix.

58

106

POPULAR SENSES OF PAST TIME 1615–1631

more extensive business connections that all this entailed.59 Such vigorous response to growing commercial opportunity might not be directly related to political participation, but it was part of the way in which the context of popular political culture was changing in early modern England through the intensified internal connectedness of English society. Understanding how people in early modern England dated past events can tell us much about their society and culture at a particular point in time. It may also tell us something about how it was changing. It may reflect forms of social and cultural differentiation that carried political implications for the society of mixed forms that emerged from a ‘Jacobethan’ watershed that involved change in religious identity, rapid commercialisation, a restructuring of society, state formation, and the normalisation of new communicative technologies and capacities. Such quiet shifts matter. They create novel possibilities.

  Alex Brown, ‘Church Leaseholders on Durham Dean and Chapter’s Estates, 1540–1640: The Rise of a Rural Elite?’, Economy and Culture in North-East England, ed. Barbara Crosbie and Adrian Green (Woodbridge, forthcoming).

59

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6 Spectral lordship, popular memory and the boggart of Towneley Hall1 Andy Wood

A spectre haunts Towneley Hall: the spectre of lordship. It takes the form of a boggart – that is, a supernatural presence – crying regret at having enclosed the nearby commons of Horelaw, Hollinhey and Hollinclough, bordering the Lancashire town of Burnley. This chapter begins with the identification of the sorrowful boggart and with what this might have to say about early modern social relations. The first part of the chapter tells the story of the enclosure of Horelaw, Hollinhey and Hollinclough in the early sixteenth century. It goes on to consider the subsequent contestation of that enclosure over the course of the sixteenth century. The second half of the chapter deals with the significance of curses and ghosts in the history of enclosure, and with the local memorialisation of these enclosures. It touches on a particularly chilling practice of anti-enclosure protest noted by John Walter: that of cursing enclosing lords to a ghostly afterlife, the incarnation of spectral lordship.2 In 1818, the Lancashire antiquary T. D. Whitaker reported that The malice and the superstition of the common people have doomed the spirit of some former and hitherto forgotten possessor of this estate [that is, Towneley Hall], to wander in restless and long unappeased solicitude, crying Lay out Lay out, Horelaw and Hollinhey Clough. Let it be understood that by lay out, is meant the reverse of taken in – to throw open, that is, or disappropriate.3

1   I am grateful to Mike Braddick and Andy Burn for their comments on earlier drafts of this piece. I am also very grateful to John Walter for his support and friendship over many years. 2   John Walter, ‘Public transcripts, popular agency and the politics of subsistence in early modern England’, Negotiating Power in Early Modern Society: Order, Hierarchy and Subordination in Britain and Ireland, ed. Michael J. Braddick and John Walter (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 132–3. See also Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England (London, 1971), pp. 602–3, 608. For Scottish examples see Robin Ganev, Songs of Protest, Songs of love: Popular Ballads in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Manchester, 2009), pp. 83–4. 3   Thomas Dunham Whitaker, An history of the original parish of Whalley and Honor of Clitheroe (London, 1818), p. 342. For the local landscape see Victoria County History (VCH)

ANDY WOOD

Whitaker couldn’t establish the identity of the encloser: ‘the offence has been remembered long after it had been redressed, and even when the name of the offending party was forgotten’.4 Whitaker was wrong: the name of the boggart was not forgotten. His inability to name the ghost of Towneley Hall was corrected a generation later by the Victorian antiquarian Thomas Turner, who identified the boggart as Sir John Towneley. Turner had this to say of Sir John: He … obtained authority for enclosing a large portion of the waste land on Burnley Moors; much to the dissent of the peasantry, who, before, had free common for their cattle and geese on such lands. The Law, however, was stronger than the opposition of the poor; – but they revenged themselves by stating that, after death, his soul would never have rest until his successors had restored the land. The legend states that the soul of Sir John has ever since visited the scene of this alleged wrong-doing; – and as it wanders along it cries out in a wailing tone:   “Lay out! Lay out!   Give back to the poor!   Hore-law and Hollin Hey Clough   For me and mine, there’s land enough!” Sir John requires a victim from Towneley once every seven years; and there are many persons who will name the accidental deaths at Towneley in accordance with the popular tradition.5

The reported words spoken by the tormented boggart were different from that in Whitaker’s account, as were their deadly effects; but their basic meaning remained unchanged. So far as can be told, Turner’s was the first identification (at least within written tradition) of the boggart as the spirit of Sir John Towneley. Turner added a note concerning the tradition that the walls of Sir John’s park at Hapton enclosed an area of 10 miles in circumference, and that the names of two landmarks – Porter’s Gate and Park Gate – alluded to their place in the walls.6 Following Turner’s identification of the boggart, no account of Lancashire folklore was complete without some mention of the condemned spirit of Sir John Towneley.7 This chapter pursues the insight developed within much cultural history and folklore studies that local traditions do things: that they bear meanings beyond the subject itself. What, then, did the boggart of Towneley Hall do for the people of nineteenth century Burnley? Lancashire, VI, 454. 4   Ibid., 342. 5   Chetham Library, Ms A.4.118 (1), pp. 22–3. 6   Chetham Library, Ms A.4.118 (1), p. 20. 7   See, for instance, John Harland, Lancashire Folklore: Illustrative of the Superstitious Beliefs and Practices, Local Customs & Usages of the People of the County Palatine (London, 1882). Sir John Towneley lives on in the darker corners of the Web. See www.mostlyhaunted.co.uk/index. php?option=com_content&task=view&id=21&Itemid=37 [accessed 3 December 2015]. The most recent reports of Sir John Towneley’s boggart describe his meddling with the electrical system of Towneley Hall: see www.paranormaldatabase.com/hotspots/burnley.php [accessed 3 December 2015].

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Towneley Hall lies in central Lancashire, about a mile from the industrial town of Burnley. At the time at which Whitaker was writing, Lancashire was one of the centres of the working-class politics described by E. P. Thompson.8 Largescale parliamentary enclosure was very much a live presence, and was understood by working-class radicals as a kind of metaphor – along with the factory system and the workhouse – for an illegitimate capitalist order.9 The memory of enclosure connected the working-class politics of the early nineteenth centiury to the traditions of early modern plebeian culture.10 The best way to appreciate such enduring connections is within a local landscape. As we shall see, the boggart of Towneley Hall had a utility for working people over a very long period of time. The scrutiny of sixteenth-century legal papers shows that there was indeed a Sir John Towneley who enclosed exactly the tracts of land – Hollinhey, Hollinclough and Horelaw – mentioned by Whitaker in 1818. The endurance, albeit in a changed context, of a very distinct local memory over a very long period of time – until 1818, apparently in oral tradition alone – confirms what has been said about the dynamics of memory.11 But it stands in opposition to the frequently assumed mutability of oral tradition. For, although the re-emergence of Sir John Towneley as a boggart represented a discontinuity, the essence of the story – Sir John’s role in the enclosure of Horelaw, Hollinhey and Hollinclough – remained intact within oral tradition from the mid sixteenth century until Whitaker noted the tradition in 1818. Let us wind the clock back to the start of our story. In the late fifteenth century, Towneley Hall was substantially rebuilt by Sir John Towneley, who was also responsible for the extension, around 1499, of its deerpark. In 1490, Henry VII gave Sir John permission to impark his estates. In 1514, Sir John received another royal award, this time to ‘impark and enclose with pales, ditches, hedges, all his lands in Hapton and make a park into which no one might enter to hunt or chase without permission’.12 The Towneleys were enthusiastic participants in the imparkment movement: Sir John was reported to the 1517 Enclosure Commission for having enclosed 40 acres of arable, 10 acres of woodland and 200 acres of waste into his park at Hapton and a further 70 acres into the park at Towneley.13 It was around this time – years later, elderly folk remembered it as   E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1963; 2nd edn, London, 1968).   The relationship between the county-based folkoric studies of the nineteenth century and the class struggles of that time remain to be properly explored, but represent a potentially rich source of evidence. Patrick Joyce’s inspired work, Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class, 1840–1914 (London, 1991), represents a starting point for the interrogation of the relationship between working-class life and local identity. 10   Andy Wood, The Memory of the People: Custom and Popular Senses of the Past in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2013). 11   See, for instance, James Fentress and Chris Wickham, Social Memory (Oxford, 1992). 12   W. Bennett, History of Burnley, 3 vols (Burnley, 1946–51), II, p. 98. 13   Lancashire Record Office [hereafter LRO], DDTO/O/1/65. The 1517 Enclosure Commission deserves fuller study, especially in relation to those of 1548–9. 8  9 

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four or five years after the Battle of Flodden (1512) that Sir John enclosed into his deer park three tracts of common land, Horelaw, Hollinhey and Hollinclough. Thereby, he united the Towneley and Hapton estates. The Towneleys now held parkland of nearly 2,000 acres, an estate second in Lancashire only to the Stanleys’ park at Knowsley.14 Popular rights were extinguished: the inhabitants of Igtenhill, Cliviger and Burnley had, up to imparkment, intercommoned on the lands in question. At the same time, the Towneleys were converting copyhold into leasehold in Igtenhill and were driving the Duchy tenants of that village out of their coal mines on Broadhead Moor, a piece of common that abutted Horelaw.15 As an example of the aggressive early Tudor lordship so deplored by rebels and social theorists alike, the Towneleys stand out as particularly belligerent examples of bastard feudalism. The Towneleys were a militaristic family; Sir John, his father and his son, Richard, were all knighted between 1482 and 1547 for their service in the Scottish wars.16 Sir John was a powerful figure in the local area: as we shall see, he was remembered in 1554 as ‘a man of greate power and ruled muche in the cuntrie thereabouts’.17 As befitted his status as a late-medieval magnate, Sir John lay at the centre of a web of clientage that stretched across the ‘country’ of Blackburnshire (a vague area, encompassing central Lancashire).18 In 1526, the Abbott of Whalley Abbey and Sir John Towneley were jointly accused of illegally dispossessing a copyholder of Accrington manor (held by the Duchy of Lancaster). The two of them pointedly denied possessing in Blackburnshire ‘suche might and frendshyppe that they can or wyll defend any suyt otherwise then according to right and good conscience’.19 Sir John’s ‘greate power’ was rendered visible in prominent buildings as well as in his expanding deer park. He acquired a licence to crenellate Towneley Hall in 1499 and in the early sixteenth century invested significantly in Burnley parish church, paying for a new font and rebuilding an aisle.20 In the 1510s, Sir John endowed a chantry and rebuilt the chantry chapel. The screen bore a Latin inscription recording his role in its reconstruction.21 Social historians have long recognised that the layout of parish churches and the placement of family pews represented social maps of the parish, with the more prominent seats going to

 Bennett, History of Burnley, pp. 33, 154.   Henry Fishwick (ed.), Pleadings and depositions in the Duchy Court of Lancashire, Vol I: Henry VII and Henry VIII, Lancashire and Cheshire Record Society 32 (1896), pp. 138–45. 16  Bennett, History of Burnley, p. 182. 17   TNA, DL44/196. 18   Changing senses of ‘country’ in the late medieval and early modern periods are worthy of further attention. 19   TNA, DL3/15/K5. The bill which contained this accusation has not survived. 20  Bennett, History of Burnley, p. 106. 21   Ibid., pp. 110–11. 14

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leading families.22 In a sign of his capacity to bulldoze local opinion, in 1525 Sir John overcame the Burnley parish churchwardens, asserting the right to allot seats in their church; there were to be stalls for many of the farmholdings, but seats were to be allotted by Sir John, assisted by some ‘honest men’. In this manner, Sir John arrogated the power to map the social hierarchy of the parish. David Rollison has shown how, in pre-reformation Cirencester (Gloucesterhire), popular financial investment in the decoration and extension of the parish church constituted a sense of plebeian autonomy and self-identification.23 In Burnley, we find the opposite: the structure, trappings and layout of the parish church reflected the authority of Sir John Towneley. Litigation at the court of the Duchy of Lancaster resulted in the production in 1554 and 1572, of two bundles of depositions taken from among the older population of Igtenhill, Cliviger and Burnley. They allow the story of the enclosure of Hollinhey, Hollinclough and Horelaw to be told in some detail. Around 1516, Sir John Towneley employed the services of one John Estgate of Whalley, known locally as ‘Roughneck’, whom he brought into his household. Roughneck had been employed by other enclosing lords to provide documentary evidence of their ownership of lands they coveted. The witnesses of 1554 and 1572 remembered Roughneck as ‘a man that if he had seene any hande wrytinge before him, he could have wrytten the like hand’. The aged witnesses recalled how there had been ‘a common sayeing in the Cuntrie that soe longe as Rughnecke lyved, Abbeis shuld never wante Evidenc[e]s’ and that Roughneck ‘did Forge and make certen writings and Evidenc[e]s concerning the said horlowe pasture unto the said Syr John Towneley’.24 There had also been trouble over Horelaw prior to its enclosure. Although the witnesses of 1554 and 1572 were emphatic that the land had been part of their common, the Duchy freeholder William Halsted remembered that Sir John Towneley employed his father to drive tenants’ cattle off Horelaw.25Around 1516, Horelaw, Hollinclough and Hollinhey were enclosed into the Towneley estate. Sir John Towneley’s ambitions did not go unopposed. The imparkment proceeded in three stages. The enclosing walls, encompassing 100 acres, were wrecked by Duchy tenants. They were erected a second time. Once again, they were torn down. For a third time, the walls went up. This time, they enclosed

  Amanda Flather, The Politics of Place: A Study of Church Seating in Essex, c.1580–1640 (Friends of the Department of English Local History, Friends’ Papers no. 3, Leicester, 1999); Christopher Marsh, ‘Order and Place in England, 1580–1640: The View From the Pew’, JBS 44 (2005), 3–26; Marsh, ‘“Common Prayer” in England, 1560–1640: The View From the Pew’, P&P 171 (2001), 66–94; C. Marsh, ‘Sacred Space in England, 1560–1640: The View from the Pew’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 53:2 (April 2002), 286–311. 23   David Rollison, Commune, country and commonwealth: the People of Cirencester, 1117–1643 (Woodbridge, 2011). 24   TNA, DL44/196. 25   TNA, DL4/14/9. 22

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a full 600 acres. Although most of 1554 and 1572 deponents declined to identify any of the rioters, William Halstead coughed up the names of Hugh Hubringham and Henry Harger; Ranolde Whittaker stated boldly that he had taken part in night-time attacks on the enclosures. Rioting went hand-in-hand with the formal articulation of popular complaint. Finding ‘them Selves greved’ by the imparkment of their commons, the Duchy tenants resorted unto … Sr John requiring him to redresse the same, whoe answered them … he had a sufficient deed wch gave him the … p[ar]cell of ground For to kepe a leashe of greyhoundes wch he promised theme they shuld see where upon the … Charterers and Copye houlders dep[ar]ted

Direct negotiation having failed, the Duchy tenants, ‘mete together and concluded amongst theme selves to make Suete by Supplicacon to the kings ma[jes]t[y]s counsel For a redresse of theire said wronges’.26 When Towneley heard of this, he sent for the tenants and ‘handled them in such wyse that For Feare of the displeasure of … Syr John’, they dropped their case. One of the mid-century witnesses saw the failure of the Duchy tenants’ action in terms of the domination exercised by Sir John over the Blackburnshire: For soe muche as … Sr John Towneley was a man of greate power and ruled muche in the cuntrie thereabouts And many of the cheffest customers or Charterers then beinge his Servantes or retenders, Therefore the said custom[er]s durst not entermedell any Further, nor Sue For theire remedye aganest him For Feare of his displeasure27

This was not the end of local opposition to the Towneleys. In 1526, a crowd of eighty people destroyed Richard Towneley’s coal mines on Broadhead Moor, on which the tenants claimed mineral rights (their shared memories of digging the surface deposits went back to the 1440s). And as we have seen, in 1554 and again in 1572, the tenants sued the Towneleys at the court of the Duchy of Lancaster. The Duchy played a critical role in the conflict. Not only did it provide a legal forum in which the tenants could legitimately state their complaints, the Duchy had an interest in defending their rights over the enclosed land. The jurisdictional context is worth attention. As in the struggles in Derbyshire’s Peak Country a generation later, in Blackburnshire we find the extensive estates of an aggressive lord sitting adjacent to large, loosely administered manors held by the Duchy of Lancaster.28 And, just as in the Peak, Duchy tenants laid claim to extensive customary rights that they habitually asserted in litigation at the Court of the Duchy of Lancaster. The fact that the tenants of the two major Duchy manors involved in the dispute – Cliviger and Burnley – shared common rights on Horelaw, Hollinhey and Hollinclough only strengthened the material

  For more on petitioning in Tudor England see R. W. Hoyle, ‘Petitioning as Popular Politics in Early Sixteenth-Century England’, Historical Research 75:190 (2002), 365–89. 27   TNA, DL44/196; see also TNA, DL3/73/R9a. 28   Andy Wood, The Politics of Social Conflict: the Peak Country, 1520–1770 (Cambridge, 1999). 26

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and communal basis of opposition to Towneley.29 The particularities of the geography of lordship in Blackburnshire therefore set a powerful gentry clan against a pugnacious band of commoners.30 Thinking about the 1554 and 1572 depositions as memory texts allows us to problematise Ranolde Whitaker’s pessimistic assessment of the capacity of the Duchy tenants to sustain resistance to the Towneleys.31 Recent work has emphasised the importance of the landscape to early modern popular memory and collective identity.32 Important ways in which the landscape became ingrained in memory included the labour process, movement across the land and the organisation of collective resources. Workers knew their place within the landscape, producing a kind of agency. Thus, one of the 1572 deponents noted how, before the enclosure of Hollinhey, Hollinclough and Horelaw, the Free houlders and Copie houlders of Burneley and Cleveger … before that tyme … used and occupied the same tyme out of mynd as p[ar]cell of the kings ma[jes]tie waste ground and as theyr common there, in depasturinge the same w[i]th theire cattell And alsoe in gettinge and moweinge bedding For theyr cattell and to thacke w[i]thall and w[i]th gettinge Turves alsoe without any Lett disturbance or contradiction of any man33

The routine practices of the everyday assertion of common rights – pasturing animals, searching for nuts and berries, collecting firewood, digging surface coal – represented more than simply material practices. They also had cultural implications, grounding a sense of entitlement in the land and in collective memory,   TNA, DL44/196.   TNA, DL3/73/R9a; TNA, DL3/66/R4. In the 1554 case, the Crown sent commissions into Lancashire to inquire as to where there Duchy land had been seized. In their evidence, the Burnley tenants mostly tried to gloss over their own encroachments, while highlighting the power of the Towneleys. This came at a time at which the Towneley family was falling out see TNA DL3/73/T2a–q; TNA, DL3/80/T1). Just like the Peak miners in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the Burnley tenants allied themselves to the Duchy in order to gain advantage over powerful local magnates. For the history of Hollinhey, Hollinclough and Horelaw in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries see LRO, DDTO/O/1/65; LRO, O/1/84; LRO, DDTO/I/12; LRO, DDTO/B/9. For the Peak miners’ manipulation of the Duchy’s interests within their region see Wood, Politics of Social Conflict. 31   On pessimism in the recent historiography of early modern social relations see Mark Hailwood, ‘Alehouses, Popular Politics and Plebeian Agency in Early Modern England’, Locating Agency: Space, Power and Popular Politics, ed. Fiona Williamson (Newcastle, 2010), pp. 51–76. 32   Alexandra Walsham, The Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Identity and Memory in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford, 2011); Nicola Whyte, ‘Landscape, Memory and Custom: Parish Identities c.1550–1700’, SocHist 32:2 (2007), 166–86; Whyte, Inhabiting the Landscape: Place, Custom and Memory, 1500–1800 (Oxford, 2009); Wood, The Memory of the People; Simon Sandall, ‘Custom, Memory and the Operations of Power in Seventeenth-Century Forest of Dean’, Locating Agency, ed. Williamson, pp. 133–60. Much of this work has been inspired by David Rollison’s suggestion that the landscape was suffused with a sense of memory and place. See his Local Origins of Modern Society: Gloucestershire, 1500–1800 (London, 1992). 33   TNA, DL4/14/9. 29 30

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generation after generation. Here, there was no straightforward dialectic between economic base and cultural superstructure; rather, productive activity and identity were, to use the archaeologist Ian Hodder’s phrase, ‘entangled’.34 William Ingham’s 1554 testimony articulates that sense of the entanglement of labour, memory and entitlement, remembering how he had had once joysted or graysed in a Somer tyme [Five score] oxen [on Horelaw, but] that [the tenants] durst not medle with the said Syr John Towneley concerninge the redresse therein, … that he and his Father before him have gotten Turves w[i]t[h]out let, and never payd any rent, bothe to theire owne use, and have sould the same alsoe and mowen theire bedding For theire cattell & thack For their houses35

William Ingham’s words resonate with the work of anthropologists and archaeologists who have deployed a phenomenological reading of economic activity generated within what they call a ‘taskscape’.36 They see social relations and collective mentalities as reproduced within this conjunction of the material and the cultural. The entanglement of productive and cultural practices within the taskscape allows us to achieve a fuller understanding of the significance of the enclosure of Hollinhey, Hollinclough and Horelaw for those who lost their rights thereon. The enclosure did more than remove a body of resources from the collective reach of the tenants and commoners. It also disrupted a taskscape embedded in popular consciousness through the daily repetition of working practices, fostering a sense of place and community. Movement was especially important. The 1572 testimony of the 80-year-old Igtenhill copyholder John Haworth gives a clear sense of a remembered landscape that facilitated movement that, in the present, had been disrupted: he sayth that about lx years last past he this deponent then dwelling at middle towne in the county of Lanc[ashire] about xiii.th myles distaunte frome … [Horlowe pasture] did travel frome Todmerden where he had dwelled from the tyme of his birth until he was thirteen yeres of age w[hi]ch Todmerden is v myles distaunte frome … [Horlowe] to Paddiam through … [Horlowe] and founde neyther gate nor hedge in his waye & further this deponent thinketh that the ten[a]nts and inhabitanuts of Brounley

  Ian Hodder, Çatalhöyük: the Leopard’s Tale: Revealing the Mysteries of Turkey’s Ancient ‘Town’ (London, 2006). 35   TNA, DL44/196. 36   The key text is Tim Ingold, ‘The Temporality of the Landscape’, World Archaeology 25: 2 (1993), 152–74. A younger generation of social historians is rethinking the relationship between the ‘social’ and the ‘material’. Albeit from different starting points, this has entailed thinking about the spatial contexts of popular protest. See, for instance, Carl J. Griffin, ‘“Cut Down by Some Cowardly Miscreants”: Plant Maiming, or the Malicious Cutting of Flora, as an Act of Protest in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Rural England’, Rural History 19:1 (2008), 29–54. The taskscape has a special place. For an important starting point see Katrina Navickas, ‘Luddism, Incendiarism and the Defence of Rural “Task-Scapes” in 1812’, Northern History 48:1 (2011), 59–73. 34

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This was a remembered landscape, disrupted by Sir John’s enclosures. Haworth added the morbid note that two Burnley tenants – his father-in-law, Richard Pycoppe and his neighbour Robt Sager – used to common on Horelaw, but ‘the report was that they nev[er] had any lykinge after the [e]nclosure therof but died verye shortrlye afterwards’.37 These memories – which, as John Haworth’s testimony made clear, crossed gender divisions – helped to foster the opinion, articulated by the 68-year-old John Barcrofte of Colne that ‘the said Sur John Towneley did the queens ma[jes]t[y] And hir p[ro]genitors and the tenants there, great wronge in enclosing the same’.38 Cleverly linking the interests of the Queen (in her place as holder of the Duchy of Lancaster) with the interests of the tenants, Barcrofte’s testimony articulated a clear sense of popular hostility to the Towneleys that reached back by two generations. The authority of the early modern gentry depended, in part, upon the acceptance of a fair-minded legalism, playing to rules that helped to underwrite their honour as paternalistic figures in a community. These were no ideological fictions: they were genuine forces that impinged on the minds and actions of gentlemen and gentlewomen. But as inflation bit into rent rolls, many ­sixteenth-century landlords turned to asset-stripping their estates, converting copyhold land into leasehold, enclosing commons and ratcheting up rents, fines and dues and attempting to reclaim labour services from a resistant tenantry.39 The Towneleys were early examples of what historians have called fiscal seigneurialism. In particular, local memories of Sir John Towneley’s attacks upon common right dwelt heavily upon the outrageous dealings of his minion, Roughneck. In 1554, Thomas Sutcliffe and Nicholas Barcroft explained that they had had exercised common rights on Horelaw ‘untill aboute iiii or v years after Flowden Feyld’ when the lands were seized from them. The attack on common rights, they observed, was underpinned by Roughneck’s forgery of some key documents that supported Sir John’s claims.40 The consistency with which the story of Roughneck’s forgeries was retold points to its place within the ‘common fame’ or ‘common report’ of the neighbourhood. This was not exactly the closed, subaltern discourse of seditious rumour; yet neither would it be politic to state openly such opinions before the Towneleys. Rather, local memories of Roughneck hovered on the edge of what James C. Scott calls the ‘hidden transcript’ within which poorer people articulated criticism of their   TNA, DL4/14/9.   TNA, DL44/196. For more, see Nicola Whyte, ‘Custodians of Memory: Women and Custom in Rural England c.1550–1700’, CSHist 8:2 (2011), 153–73. 39   For an important overview see R. W. Hoyle, ‘Tenure and the Land Market in Early Modern England: or a Late Contribution to the Brenner Debate’, EcHR, 2nd ser. 43 (1990), 1–19. 40   TNA, DL44/196. 37

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betters. As such, the tradition concerning Sir John’s enlistment of Roughneck and his corrupt practices reminds historians of not drawing too sharp a distinction between secret plebeian mutterings and the public critique of power relations.41 In any case, local opinion that the Towneleys were corrupt, avaricious and aggressive helped to undercut their local authority and, as the depositions of 1554 and 1572 demonstrate, the story lasted for a long time. This had implications for the authority of the Towneleys within Blackburnshire. The early modern gentry relied in large part for their authority upon the acceptance of their ‘credit’ as decent, honest and honourable. That Sir John Towneley’s corrupt dealings with his client Roughneck were still common gossip in Blackburnshire in 1572 suggests something of how local memory could undercut gentle authority: we might imagine the Towneleys riding through Burnley, noting the doffed caps of their tenants as they passed, but blocking their ears to murmers of old Roughneck’s practices. This did nothing to sustain their honour or legitimacy. Instead, it was coercion rather than persuasion that represented the Towneley’s main source of authority. Social historians recognised long ago that early modern England never corresponded to Max Weber’s static, functionalist ideal of a ‘traditional’ society. But the gentry of the period certainly sought to situate themselves at the top of an unshakeable hierarchy, generating a sense of their social world that had some relationship to Weber’s formulation. For Weber observed that, in a traditional society, ‘legitimacy is claimed … on the basis of the sanctity of the order and the attendant powers of control as they have been handed down from the past, “have always existed”’.42 The insight is an important one: the authority of the Tudor and Stuart gentry relied upon the popular acceptance of their legitimacy, which itself depended upon the sense that gentry authority reached back generations, into a hegemonic haze where gentlemen and gentlewomen had always been decent and honourable. The power of the story of Sir John Townley’s dealings with Roughneck in the seizure of Hollinhey, Hollinclough and Horelaw lay in its giving the lie to that fiction. And it was from the enduring popular memory of Sir John’s corrupt practices that the boggart emerged: in 1818, just as in 1554 and 1572, the product of an unbroken tradition, manifest over the centuries, of the oppressive dealings of the Lancashire gentry. That was the work that local memory did. The struggle over Horelaw, Hollinhey and Hollinclough, then, represents an especially well documented example of imparkment, while also detailing popular opposition – through riot, negotiation, litigation and petition – to that imparkment. The dispute fits into a wider pattern. Unlike blunter struggles over tenure, asset-stripping of common resources or the enclosure of common land   James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, 1990).   Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization (New York, 1964), p. 341. See also Howard Newby, The Deferential Worker: a Study of Farm Workers in East Anglia (London, 1977), p. 118.

41

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into cultivated fields, imparkment was driven by a concern with the symbolism of lordship. Imparkment was one way in which a lord could stamp his or her authority on the landscape. Importantly, parks were one of the main targets of rebels in 1549. Similarly, poaching expeditions in the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were not just about the desire to make money on the local meat market by stealing deer from gentry estates. In this respect, popular trespass and hunting expeditions represented a form of agency, a way of transgressing boundaries in the landscape. Cursing was another way in which poorer people could get back at their rulers.43 In particular, it was widely believed that enclosing landlords faced curses that would lead to their death and, in some cases, their reincarnation as ghosts.44 In this way, ‘it was possible [for the poor] not only to imagine the “reward” of the humble [in heaven] but also to enjoy some revenge upon their oppressors, by imagining their torments to come’.45 In the 1540s, for example, John Leland noted that ‘Edward Duke of Bukkyngham [had] made a fayre parke hard by the castle [of Thornbury, in Gloucestershire], and tooke much faire grownd in it very frutefull of corne, now fayr launds, for coursynge. The inhabytaunts cursyd the duke for thes lands so inclysd’. This wasn’t the only place where Buckingham was cursed: in Estwood, Duke Edward expanded a deer park from two to six miles, but ‘not without many curses of the poore tenaunts’.46 When Buckingham was executed in 1521, the people of Thornbury and Estwood might have felt that their curses stood fulfilled. It was for good reasons that stewards warned depopulating landlords that common people would remember their actions.47 We find the same pattern elsewhere. The tenants of Longstanton (Cambridgeshire) warned Lord Brooke in the 1590s that if his agents enclosed the village commons, it would be ‘to the utter undoing of most, or all of us, & o[u]r posterities for ever’ and would (menacingly) bring about ‘an endlesse curse to light upon th[e] offenders’.48 In 1639, the antiquary John Smyth noted the tradition current twenty years earlier in Nimsfield (Gloucestershire) concerning the enclosing lord, Sir George Huntley. He had enclosed a wide area of common with a great wall  Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic; Alan Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart Essex (London, 1970; 2nd edn, 1999). 44   For the unpleasant last days of one depopulating landlord see Andrew Hopper, ‘The Wortley Park Poachers and the Outbreak of the English Civil War’, Northern History 44:2 (2007), 99–101. 45  Thompson, Making, p. 37. 46   The Itinerary of John Leland, in or about the years 1535–43, ed. L. Toumin Smith, 5 vols (London, 1910), V, pp. 100, 101; Barbara J. Harris, Edward Stafford, Third Duke of Buckingham, 1478–1521 (Stanford, Calif., 1986), p. 84. For the Thornbury tenants’ appeal against enclosure see TNA, SP1/22, fol. 97r. 47   The Wealth of Five Northamptonshire Families, 1540–1640, ed. Mary E. Finch, Northamptonshire Rec. Soc., 19 (Northampton, 1956), p. 87. 48   Northamptonshire Record Office, Finch-Hatton MS 1382. 43

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ANDY WOOD and thereof made a Parke wherein at his death 3. or 4. yeares after (occasioned by a fall from his horse, whereof hee sodainely dyed as hee was in opening of a gate) … the inhabitants out of a rurall reluctacon against such enclosures, ascribe to the injustice of that act not only his suddaine death forthwith after the place, But the sale of that and all the rest of his land by his sonne Will[ia]m Huntley in a short time after.49

Fear of the curses of common people endured in Lincolnshire. In the 1650s, a landlord of that county, Edward Hussey, expressed initial reluctance to enclose commons on his estate, worried by the curse that was known to fall upon enclosers: thinking of his own intended enclosures, he said that ‘I am possest with a strong conceit that after all is finished I shall not live long to enjoy it’. Rashly, Hussey scorned ‘this superstitious conceit’ and the enclosure went ahead. Shortly afterwards, the lord’s legal advisor died suddenly. Next to die was a commissioner appointed to oversee the enclosure. A second commissioner fell ill and, ‘being affrighted of the 2 former, writ to [Hussey] to excuse him from acting [as a commissioner], & he recovered’. Finally, eight days after the enclosure of the commons, Hussey himself died. A local minister detected in this nothing less than the hand of God: ‘Forasmuch … as they never consulted with God, nor his most Holy laws of equity and justice, but trusted to ther own wisdom & the counsel of the lawyers, the L[or]d gave them an instance of his power and displeasure.’50 Another Interregnum minister also felt that, in transgressing God’s laws, enclosers ought to expect divine retribution, summoned by the curses of the poor. In his 1653 pamphlet, John Moore, minister of Knaptoft (Leicestershire) cited Proverbs 28:7 (‘He that hideth his eyes from the poor, shall have many a curse.’). Ominously, Moore noted that enclosing landlords doomed not only themselves but also their descendants: ‘His house and land hath vomited him out, and his posterity. Seldom the third generation can call those inclosed lands his own’. Moore noted a darker example of enclosure by agreement than has occurred to many historians of the subject: In one Town, being upon such inclosure, and to set their hands to the Articles, so terrible was the business, that no body would begin [to sign the enclosure agreement]; at last one snatched the pen, subscribed his Name, and bid them follow him all in the Devils name.51

Perhaps the most startling example of divine judgment upon enclosing lords – certainly the closest to the transformation of Sir John Towneley into a boggart – was that noted by Thomas Fuller in 1656 concerning Henry Burgwash, Bishop of Lincoln in the 1320s. Fuller describes him as ‘neither good for church nor state, sovereign nor subjects; the Bishop was ‘covetous, ambitious, rebellious,

  The Berkeley Manuscripts, John Maclean (Gloucester, 1885), 3 vols, III, p. 303.   W. H. Hosford, ‘An Eye-Witness’s Account of a Seventeenth-Century Enclosure’, EcHR, 2nd Ser. 4:2 (1951), 216–17. 51   J. Moore, The crying sin of England, of not caring for the poor (London, 1653), pp. 21–3. 49 50

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injurious’. Just like Sir John Towneley two centuries later, the ‘apparition’ of Burgwash was ‘condemned after death’ to wander land that he had enclosed. Fuller goes on: This Burgwash was he who, by mere might, against all right and reason, took in the common land of many poor people (without making also the least reparation), therewith to complete his park at Tinghurst (Fingest). These wronged persons, though seeing their own bread, beef and mutton turned into the Bishop’s venison, durst not contest with him who was Chancellor of England, though neither law nor equity in this his action.

In consequence, the wronged inhabitants ‘loaded him with curses and excresions’. Following his death, the spirit of the Bishop appeared before one of his friends dressed as a forester with a bow and arrows and explained that ‘for the injuries done by him to the poor, whist living, he was now condemned to this penance to be the Park-keeper of that place, which he so wrongfully had enclosed’. The ghost requested of his friend that he see that ‘all hedges being cut down, and ditches filled up, all might be reduced to their property, and the poor men be restored to their inheritance’.52 So, what is the use of such stories? Robert Darnton offers some insight: The peasants of the Old Regime did not think monographically. They tried to make sense of the world, in all its booming, buzzing confusion, with the materials they had at hand. Those materials included a vast repertory of stories derived from Indo-European lore. The peasant tellers of tales did not merely find the stories amusing or frightening or functional. They found them ‘good to think with’.53

We might consider ghost stories as one such way into popular mentalities. Certainly, they were a common element of popular culture. Writing in 1725, Henry Bourne, one of England’s earliest ethnographers, observed that ‘Nothing is commoner in Country Places, then for a whole Family in a Winter’s Evening to sit round the Fire, and tell Stories of Apparitions and Ghosts.’54 For all his fascination with the ‘antiquities’ of the ‘vulgar’, Bourne’s early-enlightenment sensibilities led him to dispense with any possibility that there might have been some underlying sense to the stories he recorded. Yet it remains incumbent upon us to find some sense – some bigger meaning – in the stories recounted here. An important aspect of any such historicisation of folklore involves the recognition not only that it had its dynamics, as some tales came to represent different things to different generations – but also that folklore might also operate within certain given interpretive structures over long periods of time. The story of the boggart of Towneley Hall hints at the latter.   Thomas Fuller, The church history of Britain (London, 1656), pp. 106–7.   Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other episodes in French Cultural History (London, 1984), pp. 21, 70. 54   Henry Bourne, Antiquitates vulgares, or the antiquities of the common people (Newcastle, 1725), p. 76. 52 53

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In a remarkable study, Karl Bell has shown that in the nineteenth century, folklore comprised a mess of ideas, stories and patterns of belief from which subaltern agency might emerge.55 The boggart of Towneley Hall told nineteenth-century working people that the paternalistic Merry England imagined by Tory moralists was nothing more than a clumsy ideological screen.56 Rather, the sad cries of Sir John’s ghost showed to Lancashire folk that a running theme in their communities’ histories was that of dispossession. First noted by Whitaker in the year before the Peterloo Massacre, the spectre of Towneley Hall helped the people of Lancashire to make sense of current struggles. Alongside immiseration, exploitation and political activism, it was within this local appeal to the past that the English working class was so often made.

  Karl Bell, The Magical Imagination: Magic and Modernity in Urban England 1780–1914 (Cambridge, 2012). 56   Peter Mandler, ‘“In the Olden Time”: Romantic History and English National Identity, 1820–50’, A Union of Multiple Identities: the British Isles, c. 1750–1850, ed. Laurence Brockliss and David Eastwood (Manchester, 1997), pp. 78–91. For another Lancashire tradition of the period which contested the Tory idyll of ‘Merry England’, see Andy Wood, ‘The Pedlar of Swaffham, the Fenland Giant and the Sardinian Communist: Usable Pasts and the Politics of Folklore in England, c.1600–1830’, Locating agency, ed. Williamson, pp. 161–92; Marc W. Steinberg, ‘The Riding of the Black Lad and other Working-Class Ritualistic Actions: Towards a Spatialized and Gendered Analysis of Nineteenth-Century Repertoires’, Challenging Authority: the Historical Study of Contentious Politics, ed. Michael P. Hanagan, Leslie Page Moch, and Wayne te Brake (Minneapolis, 1998), pp. 17–35. 55

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7 Self-image and public image in the career of a Jacobean magistrate: Sir John Newdigate in the Court of Star Chamber Steve Hindle

Sir John Newdigate of Arbury, Warwickshire (1571–1610) has come to be regarded as the ideal type of ‘the public man’ in early Stuart England. Richard Cust’s painstaking analysis of his commonplace books has demonstrated how Newdigate aspired to personify the conscientious magistrate fired with the zeal of civic duty.1 Newdigate’s reading strategy arguably exemplifies the formation of the political culture of the provincial magistracy, revealing how the central themes of Renaissance political thought were internalised in the gentry parlour and on the sessions bench. Through the lens of Newdigate’s early schooling and exhaustive programme of continuing education, Cust suggests, we can see how a common stock of aphorisms and examples helped inculcate the values of civic humanism – wisdom, incorruptibility, courage, love of justice, love of country and, above all, love of God – which were supposed to unite the gentry as a governing class.2 Newdigate’s lived experience as an active magistrate was, nonetheless, rather more controversial than this pious self-image suggests. During the very period when he was so assiduously ‘reading for magistracy’, Newdigate’s personal and public roles as landlord and justice of the peace respectively brought him into conflict both with his own tenants and with the law officers of the crown. In June 1607, during the ‘commotion time’ of the Midland Rising (that series of anti-enclosure protests that convulsed the counties of Leicestershire, Northamptonshire and Warwickshire) Newdigate suppressed a series of riots on his own estate at Arbury. In retaliation, his neighbours subjected him to an orchestrated campaign of harassment and intimidation, characterising him not as a defender of the commonwealth but as an enemy of the people. In May 1608, 1   Richard Cust, ‘Reading for Magistracy: The Mental World of Sir John Newdigate’, The Monarchical Republic of Early Modern England: Essays in Response to Patrick Collinson, ed. John F. McDiarmid (Aldershot, 2007), pp. 181–99; Cust, ‘The Public Man in Late Tudor and Early Stuart England’, The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England, ed. Peter Lake and Steven Pincus (Manchester, 2007), pp. 116–43. 2   Cust, ‘Reading for Magistracy, pp. 182, 198–9.

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Newdigate accused six of these conspirators of seditious libel in the court of Star Chamber, only to find that he was, in turn, prosecuted on behalf of the crown in the very same court by Attorney General Sir Henry Hobart, who charged him with depopulating enclosure. By unpacking the narrative implicit in this tangled skein of litigation and reading it in the context of Newdigate’s own views about how a conscientious magistrate should conduct himself, this chapter analyses the complex relationship between the actual experience and the public representation of magistracy in early seventeenth century England. The Midland Rising remains one of the most significant, yet paradoxically least explored, episodes of popular protest in the historiography of early modern England.3 Thanks to the work of John Walter, however, we now know a great deal about the modes of communication (especially seditious libels and ballads) which drew participating communities together in rebellion, not only across the principal battlegrounds of the Midlands but also into those areas (especially Lincolnshire) which were more peripheral to the Rising.4 And we are gradually learning about the complexities of the government response to the crisis, and even about its cultural echoes – especially in the opening scene of William Shakespeare’s Coriolanus on the London stage: ‘enter a company of mutinous citizens armed with clubs and staves’.5 But very little detailed work has been done on how and why the social fabric proved so flammable on particular midland estates.6 Compare, for instance, how much we know about the circumstances and personalities at play in Oxfordshire in November 1596 during the abortive ‘rising of the people’ with how little we know of the social dynamics which caused the much larger, more prolonged and more significant commotion in the Midlands in May and June 1607.7

  For the limited historiography of the Rising itself see Edwin F. Gay, ‘The Midland Revolt and the Inquisitions of Depopulation of 1607’, TRHS n.s. 18 (1905), 195–244; John E. Martin, ‘[Part III] Case Study: The Midlands Revolt of 1607’, Feudalism to Capitalism: Peasant and Landlord in English Agrarian Development, ed. John E. Martin (London, 1983), pp. 159–215; Roger B. Manning, Village Revolts: Social Protest and Popular Disturbances in England, 1509–1640 (Oxford, 1988), pp. 229–46. 4   John Walter, ‘“The Pooremans Joy and the Gentlemans Plague”: A Lincolnshire Libel and the Politics of Sedition in Early Modern England’, P&P 203 (May 2009), 29–67. 5   Steve Hindle, ‘Imagining Insurrection in Seventeenth-Century England: Representations of the Midland Rising of 1607’, HWJ 66 (Autumn 2008), 21–61. 6   For very limited discussion see Martin, Feudalism to Capitalism, pp. 180–215. The flammability metaphor is Francis Bacon’s (‘Of Seditions and Troubles’), but cf. Ian Archer, The Pursuit of Stability: Social Relations in Elizabethan London (Cambridge, 1991), p. 257. 7   John Walter, ‘A “Rising of the People”? The Oxfordshire Rising of 1596’, P&P 107 (May 1985), 90–143; reprinted in John Walter, Crowds and Popular Politics in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2006), pp. 73–123. For an exception see L. A. Parker, ‘The Agrarian Revolution at Cotesbach, 1501–1612’, Transactions of the Leicestershire Archaeological Society 24 (1948), 41–76; and cf. Manning, Village Revolts, pp. 244–5. 3

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Close reading of the archive of Star Chamber litigation initiated in the aftermath of the Rising, and cross-referencing it with sources generated in the local environment of parishes and manors, illuminates the obscure social context of the crowd action on Newdigate’s estate. The following discussion accordingly reconstructs what seems to have happened at Arbury on 2 to 3 June 1607, emphasising the logistics of anti-enclosure protest; analyses the response of the Attorney General in prosecuting Newdigate alongside numerous other Warwickshire landlords for depopulating enclosure; investigates Newdigate’s personal and public responses to the experience of prosecution; and outlines his strategies for retaliation, both in the law courts and in his public pronouncements on the quarter sessions bench. The evidence also offers unprecedented insights into the preparation both by the Attorney General and by a private litigant of a Star Chamber brief, and rehearses the discourses that informed Newdigate’s attempt to exculpate himself in the face of public opprobrium. Cumulatively, it will be argued, the Arbury enclosure riot and its aftermath reveal in detail just how a popular political culture constructed around a series of expectations about the responsibilities of the good King or good lord, to say nothing of the good magistrate, implied the possibility that respect for royal, seigneurial or magisterial authority might be forfeited when those expectations were frustrated.8 I

John Newdigate was born in 1571 into what was to shortly become a notionally prosperous but severely indebted south Midlands family whose patriarch died a prisoner in the Fleet.9 As a very young man, Newdigate had accompanied the Earl of Derby on his embassy to Paris in 1585, but even after his advantageous marriage to the Cheshire heiress Anne Fitton in 1587, his father’s financial affairs were so complicated that his generous maternal inheritance was compromised and he remained dependent on his parents-in-law, who seem to have been responsible for sending him off to Brasenose College, Oxford, in 1588.

  John Walter, ‘Crown and Crowd: Popular Culture and Popular Protest in Early Modern England (Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries)’, and in Sotsial’naia Istoriia: Problemy Sinteza (Moscow, 1994), pp. 235–48; and Walter, ‘Public Transcripts, Popular Agency and the Politics of Subsistence in Early Modern England’, Negotiating Power in Early Modern Society: Order, Hierarchy and Subordination in Britain and Ireland, ed. Michael J. Braddick and John Walter (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 123–48; both reprinted in Walter, Crowds and Popular Politics, pp. 1–16, 196–222. 9   For Newdigate’s biography see Vivienne Larminie, ‘Newdigate, Anne, Lady Newdigate (1574–1618)’, ODNB, Oxford University Press, 2004 [www.oxforddnb.com/view/ article/52768]; V.M. Larminie, The Godly Magistrate: The Private Philosophy and Public Life of Sir John Newdigate, 1571–1610 (Dugdale Society Occasional Papers no. 28, 1982); Larminie, Wealth, Kinship and Culture: The Seventeenth-Century Newdigates of Arbury and Their World (Woodbridge, 1995), passim, esp. chap.10. 8

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It was there that he met William Whitehall, the younger son of a Staffordshire gentleman, who was subsequently to become his estate steward at Arbury, his chief accountant at his coal mines in Griff, and ultimately his co-defendant in the Star Chamber.10 In about 1595, John and Anne Newdigate took up residence at what had become the main family estate at Arbury in the parish of Chilvers Coton, near Nuneaton, in north-east Warwickshire. Newdigate’s father had acquired Arbury ten years earlier in a desperate attempt to exchange the more expensive Newdigate property at Harefield (Middlesex) for the more modest demesne in the Midlands. The couple was far from well established in Warwickshire society, and not only because they were newcomers. Their notional income from Arbury was only about £300 to £400 a year, and although the residue of the Middlesex estate added a further £240, this placed them way down the hierarchy of the county’s natural leaders.11 Within three years, however, Newdigate had at the precocious age of 27, secured a place on the Warwickshire commission of the peace (almost certainly through the patronage of Sir Fulke Greville); and by 1603 he had been knighted. Throughout his fifteen years’ residence at Arbury he energetically, if not always profitably, exploited all the agricultural possibilities on the manor, and took a very close interest in his mines on the most southerly part of the estate at Griff, through which ran the Warwickshire coal seam. With Whitehall’s help, Newdigate ensured that rents at Arbury were raised ‘to the utmost’.12 As Cust has shown, however, Newdigate made time amid the practice of fiscal seigneurialism for a strenuous programme of self-improving reading and common-placing, designed to furnish him with practical guidance on his duties as a magistrate.13 II

Newdigate’s aspirations to serve his country and protect the commonwealth were, however, severely compromised by his role as an improving landlord. By the summer of 1607 it was becoming clear that the spokesmen for the commonwealth were not self-proclaimed ‘public men’ like Sir John Newdigate, but those ‘levellers’ who protested against depopulating enclosure. The Warwickshire ‘diggers’, led by the charismatic John Reynolds, also known as ‘Captain Pouch’, drafted and circulated a manuscript broadside ‘to all the diggers of Warwickshire’, criticising depopulators (who went unnamed, but by implication included Sir John Newdigate) as ‘encroaching tyrants’ who ‘would grind our flesh on the

  For Whitehall see Larmine, Wealth, Kinship and Culture, esp. pp. 9–10, 14–16, 34–40.   Ibid., p. 11. 12   Warwick County Record Office, Warwick [hereafter WCRO] CR136/B311 (1610); Larminie, Wealth, Kinship and Culture, p. 11. 13   Cust, ‘Reading for Magistracy’. 10 11

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whetstone of poverty’ and ‘dwell by themselves in the midst of their herds of fat weathers’.14 At issue here was the enclosure of the common fields and wastes for the rearing of sheep in an environment where it had long been a commonplace that ‘the more the sheep the dearer the corn’.15 The scriptural fundamentalism of the diggers’ incitement to riot drew in particular on the prophetic rhetoric of Isaiah 3:15 (‘What mean ye that ye beat my people to pieces and grind the faces of the poor?’) and 5:18 (‘Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field, till there be no place, that they may be placed alone in the midst of the earth!’), and perhaps suggests the involvement of ‘the godly’ in general and possibly even the encouragement of godly clergy in particular. It may not be coincidental that the clergy of neighbouring parishes like Bedworth and Nuneaton had reputations as hard-line Calvinists with low thresholds of tolerance for behaviour they regarded as covetous.16 Rather than be starved to death for want of the very food which those ‘devouring encroachers’ were now feeding to their ‘fat hogs and sheep’, the diggers professed a willingness to ‘manfully dye’ in arms against their landlords and magistrates.17 Inflammatory rhetoric of this kind helped draw together very large crowds of protesters at such notorious sites of depopulation as Cotesbach (Leicestershire), Hillmorton (Warwickshire) and Newton (Northamptonshire), where die they did, most notoriously at Newton. There were fifty deaths under martial law at the hands of the local gentry on the battlefield at Newton on 8 June; and another fifty executed for treason in a harvest of heads at the Northampton assizes on 28 June, where the ringleaders were subjected to the logic of exemplary punishment and their quartered carcasses were distributed across those Midland towns which had expressed some sympathy for the diggers.18 The suppression of the Rising in Warwickshire seems to have occurred slightly earlier, on 1 June, at the depopulated village of Withybrook some 6 miles distant from Arbury on the road between Nuneaton and Rugby. Pouch was himself apprehended a few

  BL, MS Harley, 787/11. For Reynolds see John Walter, ‘John Reynolds [Captain Pouch] (d. 1607)’, ODNB; Hindle, ‘Imagining Insurrection’, 26–30. 15   Certayne Causes Gathered Together, Wherein is Shewed the Decay of England, Only by the Great Multitude of Shepe (London, 1552), sigs.A3r, A4r–4v. 16   For the influence of godly clergy in Warwickshire see Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (London, 1967), passim; Collinson, The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society, 1559–1625 (Oxford, 1982), p. 261; Ann Hughes, Politics, Society and Civil War in Warwickshire, 1620–1660 (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 62–87; Tom Webster, Godly Clergy in Early Stuart England: The Caroline Puritan Movement, c.1620–1643 (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 28, 55, 256, 301; Polly Ha, English Presbyterianism, 1590–1640 (Palo Alto, 2011), pp. 30, 125, 132, 133, 153. 17   BL, MS Harley, 787/11. 18   For narratives of the rising see Martin, Feudalism to Capitalism, pp.164–68; Manning, Village Revolts, pp.229–35; Hindle, ‘Imagining Insurrection’, pp. 21–3. 14

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days later and by 9 June had been examined before the privy council. It is almost certain that he subsequently met the gruesome end thought fitting for a traitor.19 III

Long before the crisis at Withybrook unfolded, however, there had been simmering tension over common rights on the Newdigate estate at Arbury. The enclosure of waste on Galley Common, and the extinction of common property rights to gather fuel and to fish, provoked furious recriminations in an exchequer suit of 1591, during the course of which the Chilvers Coton commoners were collectively denigrated as naughty, paltry fellows of neither value nor credit; and individually characterised as whores, bastard-bearers, pilferers, drunkards, perjurers and forgers.20 In 1604, the enclosure of the 12-acre waste on the Kidding Lawn provoked riotous assault as crowds of women leveled the ditches, buried the hedges and destroyed the fences recently set around an area on which their husbands had traditionally exercised common rights to pasture and fuel. Under examination, several of them promised that if the waste were ever enclosed again, any two women would destroy the hedges and ditches to try the right of enclosure at law.21 These tensions over common rights were compounded by the pressure put on local resources by the demands of Newdigate’s coal mining enterprise at Griff, which he initially ran himself, but then leased out to his brother-in-law, Francis Fitton, while retaining William Whitehall as his chief accountant.22 Between 1603 and 1605, the colliery was producing around 7,000 tons annually, and accordingly generating high demand for coal mining labor. Cumulatively, the Griff colliery was providing employment for perhaps three-dozen miners and other associated workers, although the demand was seasonal because of disruptions caused by flooding and frost. The Griff coalpits were, moreover, contiguous with the similar mine, owned and run by Sir Thomas Beaumont, immediately to the south in Bedworth. On the one hand, therefore, coal production offered significant, if precarious, opportunities for employment. On the other, it denuded the local landscape of timber, which was in demand for axles, windlasses, pit props, lintels and roofing. At a time when the exercise of common rights at Arbury was contested, the enclosure and coppicing of parts of the estate to provide wood for the pits was   For Withybrook see Martin. Feudalism to Capitalism, pp. 166–7, 170, 174–5, 177, 200; Manning Village Revolts, pp. 236, 245. 20   TNA, E 133/7/1021. For the context see Jonathan Healey, ‘The Political Culture of the English Commons, c.1550–1650, AgHR, 60:2 (2012), 266–87. 21   TNA, STAC 8/157/18 (Giffard vs. Temple et al., 1604); 152/20 (Giffard vs. Taylor et al., 1604). 22   E. G. Grant, A Warwickshire Colliery in the Seventeenth Century (Dugdale Society Occasional Papers no.26, 1978), pp.4–8, 30. 19

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bound to prove controversial. It was hardly coincidental then that the hedges and ditches surrounding the Kidding Lawn represented such a significant target for those accustomed to take their fuel rights there: throughout the winter of 1603 and the spring of 1604, the remodeled landscape was leveled by Chilvers Coton commoners.23 If the early success of the Griff colliery created tension among the commoners, its ultimate failure was to prove devastating to the coal miners themselves. By late 1604, it was becoming clear to the coal-owners that the income generated by their enterprise scarcely covered the substantial costs of development and drainage, and with effect from 27 April 1605, Newdigate and Beaumont entered into a mutual agreement to cease mining production.24 At the very time that opportunities for agricultural employment and for the exercise for common rights were being compromised by enclosing landlords, therefore, the labour market in the coal mines suddenly contracted. By the summer of 1607, the presence in and around Chilvers Coton of substantial numbers of underemployed harvest workers and unemployed colliers was a source of significant tension. It is hardly surprising that Newdigate, a landlord who could be accused of profiteering in his coal mines and breach of hospitality towards his agricultural labourers, should be singled out for particular vitriol. These tensions in the local markets for land and labour help explain the presence of considerable numbers of disgruntled commoners and coalminers from Arbury in Captain Pouch’s retinue at Withybrook on 1 June.25 Several of those present at Withybrook were convinced by Pouch’s celebrated claim that his leather satchel contained the King’s commission to destroy enclosures throughout the realm. Incited by Pouch’s rhetoric, they departed home to Chilvers Coton where, allegedly in crowds numbering in their hundreds, they spent two days leveling the hedges around a recent enclosure. The contested ground was Coton Croft, in the far north-east of the parish on the boundary with Nuneaton, and was particulary controversial since it lay in the Green Moor Field, one of the three great common fields in the village. Now leased to John Stratford, one of Newdigate’s leading tenants, the very existence of Coton Croft challenged the ethos of communal agriculture on which so many livelihoods depended. The timing of this ‘riot’ was opportune, for the political space created by their landlord’s absence to attend the county quarter sessions at Warwick gave the commoners license for inversion. Their digging was first and foremost an act of leveling: uprooting the quickset hedges from the mounds in which they had been planted, casting them into the ditches created by the removal of earth and then burning and burying the hawthorn bushes. Anti-enclosure protest might have been strategic and orderly, but it was undertaken in an acrid haze of flame, ashes, soil and sweat. Just as those prosecuted for food riots seldom seem to have   TNA, STAC 8/152/20  Grant, A Warwickshire Colliery, pp. 30–1. 25   The following account is based on TNA, STAC 8/221/1 (Newdigate vs. Taylor et al.), m.2 (bill of complaint of Sir John Newdigate, 4 May 1608). 23 24

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purloined grain, moreover, there is little evidence that hawthorn was stolen for fuel – the symbolism of the burned or buried hedge was more valuable than the modest fuel supply it represented.26 The Chilvers Coton diggers apparently continued their labour in Stratford’s enclosure even after they were told that Pouch himself had been apprehended. The riot was suppressed only on 3 June when Newdigate himself returned from Warwick to Arbury, dispersed the crowd, and apprehended the ringleaders. Together with three other justices (Sir Henry Dymocke of Scrivelsby, Lincs., Edward Devereux of Sheldon and John Ferrers of Baddesley Clinton), Newdigate presided at a sessions specially convened at Warwick on 29 June to enquire into the causes and circumstances of the episode, and indictments for riot were brought against nine named protagonists, all of them residents of Chilvers Coton, several of them linked by networks of credit and debt, and some of them related by marriage.27 Newdigate identified one Timothy Lloyd as the ringleader and had him brought before the lord lieutenant of Warwick, William Baron Compton, to whom Lloyd ‘did very insolentlie affirme and boast that he had bene authorised by Captayne Powche to doe [all] that he had done’ and repeated the claim that ‘Powche had authoritie to cutt downe all encloasures between … Northampton and the cytie of Yorke’.28 Lloyd was committed to Warwick gaol, and there the matter of the Chilvers Coton riot should, by rights, have ended. The riots of 2–3 June 1607 nonetheless had a long half-life, which can be reconstructed from the archives of four separate but related judicial proceedings. The first was initiated, as we have seen, with the convention of a special sessions at Warwick on 29 June at which four Warwickshire justices (including Newdigate) prosecuted those responsible for the riot at Chilvers Coton.29 The second was set in motion by the shift in the crown policy from retribution against the protagonists of protest to redress of the grievances that had provoked them, culminating on 27 August with the appointment of commissioners to inquire into the nature and scale of depopulating enclosures across the Midlands.30 The third was Newdigate’s prosecution, launched with a bill of complaint in the Star

 Martin, Feudalism to Capitalism, p. 176; Nicholas Blomley, ‘Making Private Property: Enclosure, Common Right and the Work of Hedges’, Rural History 18:1 (April 2007), 1–21. 27   The named defendants were Timothy Lloyd, William Wright, Richard Holmes, William Clarke, William Brown, Peter Dagle, Marmaduke Hartoppe, William Moreton and John Ralphe. Clarke and Lloyd were brothers-in-law and both Clarke and Dagle were indebted to Wright at the time of his death in 1608. Wright’s probate material describes him as a miller, while Dagle’s inventory suggest that he was a middling farmer: Lichfield Record Office [hereafter LRO] will and inventory of William Wright (18 and 28 September 1608); inventory of Peter Dagle (7 December 1626). 28   TNA, STAC 8/221/1, m.2. Although Lloyd is identified is the ringleader, he has left fewest traces in local archives. 29   Described in TNA, STAC 8/221/1, m.2, though the proceedings themselves are no longer extant. 30   BL MS additional 11402, f.128; TNA: C/82/1747. 26

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Chamber on 4 May 1608, of those who had libelled and defamed him after he had suppressed the Chilvers Coton riot and prosecuted its ringleaders.31 The fourth was the information brought by Attorney General Sir Henry Hobart in June 1608 accusing numerous Warwickshire landlords, including Newdigate, of depopulating enclosure.32 Taken together, these overlapping and intersecting judicial processes disclose extremely convoluted and highly contested narratives of entitlement, enclosure and exclusion. To be sure, there are the numerous contradictions and inconsistencies that were characteristic of a legal culture that was by definition adversarial, and the attempt to reconcile them, although not entirely fruitless, is highly problematic. As might be expected, Newdigate argued that his conduct was being misrepresented and his character defamed. This defence was lent greater legal weight by a fundamental flaw in the crown’s case against enclosing landlords. Because the powers of the depopulation commissioners were limited to the gathering of information rather than the determination of judgement, the defendants could not be compelled to answer the allegations made against them, and the judiciary ruled that the findings of the inquiry were by definition defamatory.33 This ‘worthless mandate’ helps explain why supplementary information by the Attorney General were thought necessary to force the issue, though in procedural terms the attorney’s bill of complaint merely summarised the findings of the commission and issued writs of subpoena to the defendants.34 Newdigate’s account of the conspiracy against him can be pieced together from his notes on the Star Chamber brief and from the bill of complaint and associated interrogatories in which they culminated.35 Newdigate identified Timothy Lloyd’s confederates, including his brother-in-law William Clarke, as the principal conspirators and claimed that they had orchestrated a systematic campaign to destroy his reputation and authority as a magistrate. In the aftermath of the indictments of 29 June, opprobrium rained in on Newdigate from every imaginable direction. The godly vicar of the neighbouring coal mining parish of Bedworth, Valentine Overton, contrived to write and publish libels against him to ‘divers colliers and other disordered persons’ who had been associated with Captain Pouch. Meanwhile, William Clarke had said openly in many market places throughout Warwickshire that he too had a royal warrant to cast down all   The bill itself is TNA, STAC 8/221/1, m.2.   TNA, STAC 8/15/21 (Sir Henry Hobart, Attorney General, Pro Rege vs. Arthur Gregory et al., 1608). 33   Edward Coke, English Reports (13 vols, 1572–1616), XII, p.31; Gay, ‘The Midland Revolt’, pp. 218–19; Eric Kerridge, The Return of the Inquisitions of Depopulation’, EHR 70:275 (1955), p. 222; Manning, Village Revolts, p. 250. 34   Gay, ‘The Midland Revolt’, p. 219. 35   WCRO CR136/C2623 (Notes by Sir John Newdigate on the Rebellions at Chilvers Coton’); B557/2 (‘The State of the Cause in Star Chamber’), 3 (‘Considerations on the Bill in Star Chamber’); TNA, STAC 8/221/1, mm.2 (Newdigate’s bill), 3 (interrogatories for the plaintiff). 31

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enclosures. Although another of those indicted, Richard Holmes, was realistic enough to recognise that the sacrifices made by Pouch and his supporters had achieved little or nothing for the commonwealth, he was nonetheless convinced that the diggers’ time would come, and idly fantasised about revenge: ‘he hoaped’, he said, ‘to have a daye of the gentlemen’, a threat that Newdigate construed as the intention of ‘some further rising’. More specifically, the defendants openly undermined Newdigate’s credibility as a paternalistic landlord and as a godly magistrate. By the winter of 1607, nine articles summarising Newdigate’s misconduct were circulating throughout the county. It was alleged that he had leased the tithes of Nuneaton to the impoverishment of the population of neighboring Weddington; and that he had sublet the tithes of Attleborough to tenants who could no longer sell their produce ‘at a reasonable rate’. At Arbury, he had allegedly evicted one tenant from a 44-acre farm, another from a half-yardland and a third from a smaller holding; enclosed another half-yardland which had previously been ‘a helpe to the common welthe’; and fenced off the lanes around his demesne which had previously provided commoners with access to some 10 acres of pasture. More generally, he had privately sold some £30 worth of barley which ‘would have bine great help to the pore cominite’ had he brought it to market; and had hoarded twelve quarters of wheat which was ‘very hurtful to the commonwelthe’. Newdigate identified the scribe and the probable authors of the allegations, but was most concerned to lay the blame on William Clarke, whom he believed had ‘skandalously divulged the articles’.36 This written attack on Newdigate’s economic misconduct was compounded by slanderous words openly spoken about his corruption and malfeasance. William Wright alleged that Newdigate would habitually deny men justice, ‘wronging’ them ‘when they had sutes unto him’ and thinking nothing of counterfeiting letters, allegations that Wright was prepared to justify ‘before whomsoever he should be called’.37 The most stinging rebuke of all, however, was the open allegation that Newdigate’s word was not to be trusted. Wright wrote directly to Newdigate, acknowledging receipt of his written promise of help in reinstating common rights in the town field, thanking him for his kindness, and assuring him that ‘when we have need of you we will be bould with you’. He was nonetheless determined to exert further pressure, reminding Newdigate that the commoners also had rights in the Arbury lanes, in the Prior’s Meadow and in Griff fields. If they could secure Newdigate’s help to ‘plucke downe’ these enclosures, then – and only then – would they ‘the better put him in trust’ to honour his promise of aid. But because Newdigate’s recent behaviour over the Coton Croft had been so malevolent, seeking to destroy his tenants’ families in defending John Stratford’s enclosure, Wright affirmed that ‘I will not believe you nor your letter’. In artful

  WCRO CR136/C2614 (William Clarke’s articles against Sir John Newdigate, 1608).   WCRO CR136/C2615 (words of William Wright to Sir John Newdigate, 1608).

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combination of the deferential and the imperative voice, Wright concluded by praying that Newdigate would use himself ‘like a neighbour amongst us and offer our pore neighbors no wrong’ and by commanding him to keep his pigs and sheep out of the common woodlands: ‘you have no right there at all – it belongeth to the poore’.38 These, then, were the grounds on which Newdigate indicted the enclosure rioters in Star Chamber for conspiracy and seditious libel.39 He agonised at some length about the prosecution, wondering aloud whether ‘the causes there alleged be sufficient matters to be examinable in the courte’. His anxiety was compounded by some ambiguities in his own case. Two of the defendants (Henry Mountford and Edward Baker) had avoided having to give evidence in their own defense because they had pleaded that they were plaintiffs in the crown case against him and had returned to Warwick without having been examined. It had become clear that the case against William Clarke was weaker than it initially seemed because there turned out to be no evidence that Clarke had actually made a presentment against Newdigate before the commissioners at Warwick. Newdigate nonetheless believed that the case for their prosecution was bolstered by the conduct of all three men in the aftermath of the commissions hearings, and especially by the survival of the scandalous letters that had been written to him. This, Newdigate believed, pointed to a conspiracy fomented by Clarke and Mountford who were effectively accusing him merely of fulfilling his oath of office in suppressing the riot.40 In a more detailed brief of ‘the state of the case in star chamber’, he emphasised the greed of those antagonists who bragged at having ‘put him to great [legal] charges’ and noted the legal advice that ‘anie letter written to a publicke officer is a libel’.41 Circumstantially, he believed that William Clarke was probably the chief conspirator: it was Clarke who had incited the composition of scandalous articles, Clarke who had orchestrated a petition against all the Warwickshire justices; Clarke who had reported his brother-in-law’s echo of Pouch’s claim about a general warrant to destroy all enclosures; Clarke who had liaised with the minister of Bedworth to publish the anti-enclosure petitions from the pulpit; Clarke who had extorted small sums from those he threatened to prosecute at law intending that modest allegations would ‘shake them but not to worry them’; and Clarke who had practised all the abuses characteristic of a corrupt informer in the court of exchequer.42 Whether or not it was Clarke himself, Newdigate was convinced that witnesses had been suborned to give evidence against him before the commissioners for depopulation at Warwick.

  WCRO CR 136/2613 (William Wright to Sir John Newdigate, 1608).   TNA, STAC 8/221/1, m.2. The six named defendants were Timothy Lloyd, William Wright, Richard Holmes, and William Clarke (all of whom had been indicted at Warwick for riot), together with Henry Mountford and Edward Baker. 40   WCRO CR136/B557/3. 41   WCRO CR136/B557/2. 42   WCRO CR136/C2623. 38 39

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The articles of enquiry administered by the commissions for depopulation solicited information about the number, nature and causes of any tenancies which had ‘decayed, wasted or depopulated or stand void and without inhabitants’ since 1578; and required that returns were certified into the Court of Chancery by 20 October 1607.43 As early as 18 August, Attorney General Hobart was becoming aware of the differential rates of progress achieved by each commission. He had heard from Lord Chief Justice Coke and Lord Chancellor Ellesmere that it would be redundant for the commissioners to proceed any further in Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire of Huntingdonshire since Coke had secured over 150 indictments for depopulation at the summer assizes while riding the Norfolk circuit. Certificates had been received from the commissioners in Lincolnshire and were expected very shortly from their colleagues in Norfolk. But Hobart was anxious that he had heard no word from the Lord Lieutenants of Leicestershire, Northamptonshire or Warwickshire, and feared that the appointment of gentlemen to staff the commissions in those counties would be neglected.44 By 8 September, however, the Warwickshire commission had been empanelled under the chairmanship of Sir Augustine Nichols and Thomas Spencer esq and had begun to hear presentments at Warwick. The nature of the procedure through which the commissioners heard evidence has caused some controversy among historians. The commission itself stipulated that the commissioners were to bring before them ‘sufficient fit and lawful men . . . by whom the truth may best be known’.45 Eric Kerridge was convinced that the resulting presentments were of dubious character, not least because witnesses did not bother themselves with the detailed provisions of the tillage statutes under the terms of which prosecutions could be initiated, and simply cast the net as widely as possible. This scattershot character of witness testimony meant that allegations were, at best, simply misinformed or, at worst, downright vexatious.46 John Martin is rather more optimistic that the source of information for the presentment of enclosers was relatively reliable. In most cases, he believes, those who gave evidence against their landlords were elderly substantial men, especially husbandmen, with the result that the commissioners’ information was derived from those who had intimate and first-hand knowledge of the places concerned and were familiar with the changes that had taken place.47 The precise circumstances in which evidence was given and presentments made are rarely visible in the archive, but are brought into sharp focus in the Arbury context by Newdigate’s assessment of how allegations were manufactured. From Newdigate’s perspective, the presentments were but a continuation

  BL MS additional 11402, f.128; TNA: C/82/1747.   HMC Salisbury, XIX, 1607, p. 220 (Hobart to Salisbury, 18 August 1607). 45   TNA, C/82/1747. 46   Kerridge, ‘The Returns of the Inquisitions of Depopulation’, p. 223. 47   John E. Martin, ‘Enclosure and the Inquisitions of 1607: An Examination of Dr Kerridge’s Article “The Return of the Inquisitions of Depopulation”’, AgHR 30 (1982), 46–7. 43

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of the conspiracy against him. His interrogatories make it clear that he believed that none of the witnesses against him had been summoned to Warwick by lawful process but had rather been bribed and maintained by his enemies to make false accusations against him. Henry Mountford and Edward Baker had, he believed, attempted to persuade one Barnaby Blakesley to attend the commission at Warwick and give evidence against Newdigate for depopulation. Blakesley was unimpressed, largely because his grievance was minor, relating only to the enclosure of the lanes around Arbury, which in any case had been fenced off long before Newdigate’s time. The conspirators were persistent, however, and promised Blakesley both money and a horse to travel the 16 miles to Warwick to make the accusation against Newdgate. In the meantime, Mountford had spoken with Richard Holmes, who had been ‘one of the diggers under Captain Pouch his authority’, about whether this was the appropriate time to give evidence at Warwick. Mountford advised Holmes that ‘now was the tyme to do themselves good or never’. The fact that Mountford was at the time the high constable of Hemlingford hundred lent him greater authority, but even then Newdigate believed that the presentments against him were encouraged by outright subornation, especially by Baker, who then (as we shall see) had the gall to write Newdigate a sarcastic and scandalous letter. All of this was particularly demeaning since both Mountford and Baker were familiar faces at Arbury, and hatched the conspiracy right under the nose of their patron. But then again, Newdigate would say that, wouldn’t he? In the event, Newdigate’s bill of complaint resulted in writs of subpoena against six defendants, three of whom were examined according to interrogatories on 1 July 1608. Almost inevitably, all three (performing according to the conventions of Star Chamber dramaturgy) played dumb, and either denied the allegations outright, pleaded ignorance of the circumstances from which they arose, or argued that they were not required to answer the case against them.48 Whether the evidence given against Newdigate at Warwick was the product of the bribery, maintenance and subornation of paid informers or of credible local knowledge by victims of expropriation and corruption, the commissioners took it seriously, and Chilvers Coton ultimately appeared on the list of 32 separate Warwickshire parishes in which depopulating enclosure had occurred.49 In total, 66 separate Warwickshire landlords were accused of converting 4868 acres of tillage to pasture and of destroying 106 houses, evicting almost 500 tenants in the process. In the case of five landlords, the enclosures had been more substantial than 200 acres: the most notorious offenders were Sir Robert Dudley (500 acres at Ladbroke), Sir William Lee (400 acres at Newnham Regis), John   TNA, STAC 8/221/1, mm.3 (interrogatories for the plaintiff), 4 (answers of Henry Mountford, gent., Edward Baker, gent., William Wright, miller). 49   TNA, SP 16/257/19 ([Warwickshire] ‘A Breife of the Inquisicions there conteigninge the Townes the persones the howses of husbandry and number of acres founde to be decayed’ [1608, but misfiled to the 1630s]). 48

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Alderfoote (300 acres at Priors Salford), Mary Astley (250 acres at Hilmorton), and Sir Thomas Lucy (210 acres at Priors Salford). In some communities, the cumulative effect of numerous enclosures must have been devastating: 576 acres at Ladbroke, equivalent to 29 per cent of the total acreage; 492 acres at Withybrook (20 per cent of the total acreage) – both of them (not coincidentally) sites of significant protest in 1607.50 Nor is it coincidental that the parish with the greatest number of enclosing landlords, where eleven individuals were collectively responsible for the conversion of 218 acres, was Hampton-on-the-Hill (Hampton Lucy), the parish from which the diggers had issued their manifesto ‘in haste’ to all other diggers.51 It is a nice irony that the list of depopulators also included Sir Henry Dymock, one of the justices who had, alongside Newdigate, prosecuted the Chilvers Coton rioters at Warwick on 29 June 1607, who was accused of enclosing 170 acres at Withybrook. In the light of all this, the accusation that Sir John Newdigate and his estate steward William Whitehall had illegally converted 80 acres and destroyed two farms in Chilvers Coton might seem insignificant. Newdigate believed, moreover, that he had the basis of a defence for his conduct, though his excuses are implied rather than clearly stated in his own notes.52 The lanes around Arbury had been enclosed not by Newdigate himself, but by his predecessor Sir Edmund Anderson who had sold the estate as long ago as 1585. The allegation of depopulating a tenement in Chilvers Coton was false, since that particular estate was leased by Newdigate to one William Haddon, and was still being cultivated, Newdigate adding the convoluted detail that the house was being sub-let to a poor man ‘to look to his cattle he being unmarried and dwelling in another town within a mile as a servant with his brother’. The accusation that he had depopulated a tenement and 20 acres in Griff was simply malicious, and based on the perjured evidence of suborned witnesses. It is nonetheless significant that none of these three conjectural lines of argument ultimately figured in the answer submitted to Attorney General Hobart’s information, which amounted only to an outright denial.53 Whether or not they were aware of his special pleading, the inhabitants of Chivers Coton were outraged at Newdigate’s hypocrisy and greed. Witness, for example, the offensive letter sent by Edward Baker to Newdigate in November 1607, which epitomises the rhetoric through which an outraged subordinate

  Acreages derived from The Victoria County History of the County of Warwick, ed. W. Page et al. 8 vols (London, 1904–69), [hereafter VCH] VI, pp. 143–7, 265–8. 51   VCH III, pp.100–4. 52   WCRO CR136/C2623. 53   TNA, STAC 8/15/21, m.2 (answer of Sir John Newdigate, 11 June 1608). Cf. the more robust defence (on the basis that his enclosed grounds were cultivated by convertible husbandry) of Sir Thomas Humfrey of Swepstone (Leics.) in STAC 8/16/13, m.2, reprinted in Eric Kerridge, Agrarian Problems of the Sixteenth Century and After (London, 1969), pp. 194–8, and discussed in Kerridge, ‘The Returns of the Inquisition of Depopulation’, p. 224. 50

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could put moral pressure on his landlord to fulfil his public duty as a resident magistrate.54 Baker argued that the parishioners (‘the Towne’) of Chilvers Coton saw ‘noe reason’ why ‘they should be charged with maynteyning the poore’ of the parish when Newdigate himself now held ‘all the farmes and fieldes which should do the same’. The expropriation of those common fields and wastes that had once kept the poorest inhabitants off the relief rolls, and their beggarly children away from the doorsteps of their prosperous neighbours, meant that the burden of charity and hospitality fell on the ratepayers. If Newdigate now monopolised what had once been common property, then surely he should bear the costs of supporting those whose rights he had extinguished? Baker also asked searching questions about Newdigate’s motives: if his estate management had been inspired merely by malice, then that was one thing, but the parish would find covetousness much more difficult to forgive: ‘pitty it is (saith the country)’, Baker reported, that those common fields which had once provided relief and hospitality for the poor and defrayed the expenses of the parish, should be enclosed ‘only for the private benefit of one gentleman’, especially one whose estate was self-evidently ‘sufficient & competent’. With caustic sarcasm, Baker rejoiced in Newdigate’s augmented status, especially since his wealth and power now seemed to place him beyond the authority of the crown and its laws, statutes and commissions. Baker’s letter has marginal notes in Newdigate’s own hand which pick out particularly sensitive phrases, those idioms – ‘malice and ill will’, ‘commonwealth’, ‘whole parish’, ‘whole towne’, ‘covetousness’, ‘country’, ‘joye’, ‘public hurte’ – which were calculated not merely to touch but to pinch Newdigate’s raw nerve. It may be that Newdigate highlighted these terms precisely because he thought they might be construed as libellous. Indeed, the legal advice offered to Newdigate was that ‘anie letter written to a publicke officer is a libel’.55 Baker’s text also contains a practical proposal of far greater significance than it at first might seem: ‘it is generally expected in the whole parish that you will in a charitable devocion build an hospital in the common fields.’56 In popular perception, therefore, Newdigate had a moral obligation to provide institutional support for those whose livelihoods he had destroyed. It would be difficult to find a more explicit seventeenth-century statement of the relationship between the extinction of common property rights, the increase of the scale and burden of poverty, and the need for institutional support of the destitute.57 By the summer of 1608, it had become clear that the crown was more sympathetic to tenants like Baker than to landlords like Newdigate. From January 1608

  WCRO CR136/b22 (Edward Baker to Sir John Newdigate, 25 November 1607). The letter is quoted in extenso in Walter, ‘Public Transcripts’, p. 136. 55   WCRO CR136/B557/2. 56   WCRO CR136/b22. 57   Buchanan Sharp, ‘Common Rights, Charities and the Disorderly Poor’, Reviving the English Revolution, ed. Geoff Eley and William Hunt (London, 1988), pp. 107–38. 54

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onwards, Attorney General Sir Henry Hobart used the findings of the inquisitions of depopulation as the basis of a series of informations against enclosing landlords, in almost every case reiterating the lists of acreages depopulated and farms decayed and requiring the accused to appear and answer the accusation.58 The rhetorical preamble so characteristic of Star Chamber informations differed slightly in each case, allowing the crown to rehearse its public policy on the perils of depopulation with various shades of subtlety.59 Generally, however, they echo the linguistic flourishes of the royal proclamation ‘for reformation of depopulations’ which had been issued in late June 1607.60 Both that proclamation and the Attorney General’s information reflect the influence of the crown’s recently appointed Solicitor General Sir Francis Bacon, who was at that very moment also working on his celebrated essay ‘Of Seditions and Troubles’, which was circulating in manuscript by the second half of the decade (though it did not find expression in print until 1623).61 Attorney-General Hobart’s information against Newdigate and those other Warwickshire landlords accused of depopulation was filed in June 1608, and its rhetoric rewards close reading.62 Hobart began by noting that the ancient honour of the kingdom had been to ensure that England was ‘over populous and replenished with men sufficient and serviceable for all tymes and occacions of peace and warre’. This commitment had been fulfilled only because royal policy had historically been more ‘favourable and equall to the meaner sort of menn’ than in any other kingdom. Populism of this kind has enabled ‘all sortes of people’ to live ‘in wealth and livelyhode aunswereable to their State and quallitie’. In particular, the ‘originall and fundamentall lawes of this kingdome, and statutes made in severall ages’ had forbidden, condemned and punished as ‘enymyes to human charitie’ the practices of depopulating enclosure, which tended either to ‘dyminnishe the numbers of people’ or ‘destroie oppresse or weaken them in their bodies or estates’. The crown had insisted on the policing and punishment of the conversion of tillage to pasture for several reasons: because towns, villages and hamlets were ‘nothing els but assemblies of menn joined and unyted in the service of Almightie God’; because ‘the entercourse of mutuall conversacion   The informations are [Huntingdon:] TNA, STAC 8/17/16 (Sir Henry Hobart, Attorney General, Pro Rege vs. Sir Robert Cotton et al., 1608); [Lincolnshire:] TNA, STAC 8/17/24 (Sir Henry Hobart, Attorney General, Pro Rege vs. Sir Charles Hussey et al., 1608); [Northamptonshire:] TNA, STAC 8/18/12 (Sir Henry Hobart, Attorney General, Pro Rege vs. Ferdinando Baude et al., 1608); [Warwickshire:] TNA, STAC 8/15/21 (Sir Henry Hobart, Attorney General, Pro Rege vs. Arthur Gregory et al., 1608). 59   See, for instance, the framing of the case against Lincolnshire landlords in TNA, STAC 8/17/24, cited and discussed in Manning, Village Revolts, p. 247. 60   Stuart Royal Proclamations, volume I: Royal Proclamations of King James I, 1603–1625, ed. James F. Larkin and Paul L. Hughes (Oxford, 1973), pp. 154–58 [no. 72] (28 June 1607). 61   Hindle, ‘Imagining Insurrection’, pp. 36–40. 62   TNA, STAC 8/15/21 (Sir Henry Hobart, Attorney General, Pro Rege. vs. Arthur Gregory et al. 1608), m.3 (Attorney General’s information). 58

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and commerce’ ought to be cherished and increased; and because arable agriculture had always been specially regarded as a calling ‘that doth both sett more [men] on worke than [any] other and makes their bodies more lustie and able to susteine hardnes and laboure and their myndes willing and easie to be ruled and governed, and doth mynister foode plentifullie for the sustentacion of life’. To enforce this ‘princely and christian pollicie’ against the decay of tillage, Hobart noted, commissions of enquiry into depopulation had been issued across the Midlands. The net had been cast wide, and entrapped ‘manie knightes esquires gentlemen and yomen’, who had shamelessly forgotten that the realm flourished precisely because of a harmonious combination of the ‘goodnes of almightie God’, the ‘gracious government’ of the King-in-parliament and ‘the mutuall societie of all persons and degrees of men’. Only by ‘a juste distrybucion of all Comodities to all According to their severall estates and quallities, whereby noe partie is oppressed or afflicted’ could such ‘mutual society’ be preserved. Enclosing landlords had, instead, put ‘their private gaine before the generall good of this Common wealth’, and were prevented from recognising the damage they inflicted only because they were ‘wholie blynded with covetousnes and crueltie’. Rhetoric of this kind must have cut Newdigate to the quick. Given his self-fashioning as a defender of the commonwealth against the march of self-interest, it must have been particularly galling to have his name associated with oppression, cruelty and covetousness, especially by the Attorney General. Hobart’s information concluded with the characteristic formula that those who went about to ‘ruynate, decaye, depopulate and waste people, townes, churches, houses and habitacions’ did so ‘to the high displeasure of Almightie God, the weakening and dishonour of your Maiestie and your estate, the oppression of the poorer sorte, the greife of all your Maiesties good and well disposed Subiectes and the perilous example of all others that see soe greate enormyties not punished nor redressed’. The logic of exemplary punishment must therefore be applied to those guilty of depopulating enclosure just as it had been applied to those who had destroyed those very enclosures the previous year. It is, unfortunately, one of the frustrations of research in the archives of the Star Chamber that it is so very difficult to trace the outcome of prosecutions of this kind. Newdigate himself simply denied all the allegations and never seems to have been called to give evidence to vindicate his plea.63 This was characteristic of a system of prerogative justice in which only a tiny proportion of bills and informations ever came to hearing and judgement and fewer still to fines and estreats.64 The difficulties are compounded by the protracted nature of the Star Chamber process, which meant that outcomes were often uncertain some two years after bills were filed.65 In most cases, it seems likely that the defendant   TNA, STAC 8/15/21, m.2.   Steve Hindle, The State and Social Change in Early Modern England, c.1550–1640 (Basingstoke, 2000), pp. 84–85. 65   Martin, ‘Enclosure and the Inquisitions of 1607’, p. 45. 63

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settled out of court, their composition representing little more than a nominal fee for, or tax on, the offence that they had committed. IV

Whether Sir John Newdigate was tempted to cut his losses in the Star Chamber by compounding with the exchequer is unclear, but by October 1608 he had come to realise that he must seek to vindicate his commonwealth credentials in other ways. His strategy of self-exculpation found its ultimate expression at the Michaelmas quarter sessions held at Warwick, where he delivered a jury charge, rehearsing at considerable length the laws against forestallers and enclosers and reporting in detail the providential judgements that inevitably befell hoarders of grain.66 The context of his concern was the dearth that had that summer spread across the countryside of the Midlands in general and Warwickshire in particular. William Combe, the sheriff of Warwickshire, had complained in early June of the ‘gryvances of the common people’, specifically the dearth of corn, caused partly by hoarders holding back produce from the market out of ‘a covetous conceit that corn will be dearer’, and partly by the engrossing of barley by the maltsters in those urban corporations which lay beyond the control of the county justices. ‘These matters’, he wrote, provoked the people ‘arrogantly and seditiously’ to complain about ‘the failure to punish the conversion of arable to pasture by enclosure’. In a nice formulation of Newdigate’s self-perception as an honest public man, Combe claimed to be motivated by ‘zeale to the peace and good of the country’.67 The crown certainly took Combe’s complaints and others like them very seriously and was soon obliged to reissue the dearth orders on market regulation, reinforced by early December with yet another royal proclamation against the abuse of the grain markets.68 Although Newdigate professed to the Warwick jury that he shared the crown’s view that shortages were caused by human greed, he implicitly distanced himself from the offences and dissociated himself from the offenders: sheep-masters and corn-hoarders were apparently to be found almost anywhere but at Arbury. He accordingly noted that ‘one of the great causes of dearth’ is ‘wante of hospitalitie’. In those houses ‘where store of tillage is kept’, he insisted, there were often as many as fifty or so residents, creating very significant demand for agricultural labour. On those (inevitably unspecified) estates where conversion to pasture had occurred, by contrast, ‘only two or three persons and their dogges’would secure employment. Numerous scriptural examples proved that the hospitality and

  WCRO CR136/B711 (Sir John Newdigate’s Jury Charge, 2 October 1608).   TNA, SP14/34/4 (William Combe to the earl of Salisbury, 2 June 1608). 68   On the reissue of 1608 see Paul Slack, ‘Dearth and Social Policy in Early Modern England’, Social History of Medicine 1 (1992), p. 2n.2; Stuart Royal Proclamations, I, pp. 200–2 [no.91] (12 December 1608). See Hindle, ‘Imagining Insurrection’, p. 32 and n. 64. 66 67

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employment associated with arable agriculture was pleasing to God: the problem was that far too many country estates had ‘a fair showe without but nothing within’. At the very time when he was himself being prosecuted for depopulation, therefore, Newdigate exhorted the jurors to‘enquire if any have converted any errable land to tillage’ or ‘decaied or not reedified decaied houses’ according to the 1597 statutes. Depopulation was caused, he argued, by insatiable ‘covetousness’, characteristic of those engrossers and hoarders who, that ‘when the pore have desired to buy [corn] at a reasonable price’, threatened that they would rather that ‘mice and rattes should eate it first’. Newdigate accordingly provided a hierarchy of the five great causes of dearth and unemployment: ‘1 pride 2 hatred 3 covetousness 4 building 5 gluttony’. Historical examples of the providential punishment of engrossers and enclosers, he believed, should inspire all men to suppress the numerous ‘caterpillars’ of the commonwealth. The depopulator, like the forestaller, the regrater and the engrosser, was ‘a manifest oppressor of the poore’and ‘a public enemy of the country’. If the regulation of the grain markets in particular was not ‘carefully handled’, he warned, the magistracy ‘may have just cause to feare the same inconvenience’ that was ‘founde the last yeare’. This euphemistic reference to the Rising of 1607, brought him, eventually to his peroration: however pernicious the evils associated with breach of hospitality, conversion to pasture and marketing abuses, the popular destruction of those enclosures which were thought by many to be the fundamental cause of grain shortage could never be tolerated. Newdigate accordingly closed his exhortation with a restatement of the terms of 1 Mary c.12: due process for riot was to be applied to any offender who sought to ‘overthrowe pales hedges incloasures parkes conduits heads or to destroy dere warren or dove houses and to abate the price of any corne or other vittels’.69 Throughout his jury charge, therefore, Newdigate applied to the legion of unnamed enemies of the people precisely the same language of opprobrium to which he himself had been subject. So was his conscience really that clear? Or was he in denial? V

Within two years of this vigorous defence of the commonwealth, Sir John was dead. But in making peace with his God, he also decided to do something for his neighbours and parishioners. His endowment of an almshouse or townhouse in the parish of Chilvers Coton seems to have been a direct response to the moral pressure heaped upon him by Edward Baker’s letter: by the 1680s, the Chilvers Coton almshouse was accommodating sixteen of the village’s poorest inhabitants.70 Newdigate’s own last will and testament wonderfully encapsulates

  WCRO CR126/B711.   WCRO CR136/V12, p. 68 (household nos. 78 [Shaw], 79 [Morton], 80 [Hill]).

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the tensions inherent in his personal struggle to assert the public good over and above private gain. Among numerous other legacies, he bequeathed £10 to his godson John, the child of his Calvinist clergyman friend William Butterton, and he insisted that his heirs renew any leases held by his estate steward William Whitehall at the currently prevailing rent. He also, moreover, remembered the destitute, giving £10 ‘to the true honest and paynefull decayed poore’ in each of three parishes – in his native Harefield, in Nuneaton and in Chilvers Coton.71 Two generations later, the descendants of those who had opposed Sir John Newdigate’s enclosure took the opportunity to offer their own assessment of his behaviour. When, in 1684, the jurors of the manor of Griff and Coton listed the landed resources available for charitable uses, they itemised nine small estates endowed for the poor of Chilvers Coton over the course of the seventeenth century and were able to refer to the probate documents that testified to the origins of those gifts. One of these small patches of ground was Coton Crofts, the site of the digging and levelling in 1607. Although they could produce no testamentary evidence, the jurors argued that 20 pence a year was payable out of the Crofts which ‘do as we believe in truth belonge to the poore of this towne’. The implication was clear enough: their ancestors had (however temporarily) been expropriated by Sir John Newdigate’s hedges.72 So what, ultimately, are we to make of these contradictions? Conscientious public man or corrupt and hypocritical depopulator? Defender of the commonwealth or enemy of the people? Will the real John Newdigate please stand up! The temptation to play hanging judge in the courtroom of history is one that might best be avoided, but it is encouraged by the frustrating absence of any clear contemporary evidence of the plausibility, still less the truth, of any of the allegations rehearsed in either of these Star Chamber suits.73 Exhaustive searches of the exchequer remembrancer rolls fails to disclose the names of any of the Chilvers Coton rioters or of Newdigate and Whitehall on lists of those sentenced and fined in Star Chamber. Indeed, John Martin found that only three of the sixty-six Warwickshire landlords prosecuted for depopulation in 1608 were ever convicted, a number which he regards as implausibly low given the scale of enclosure in the county.74 The absence of evidence should not, therefore, necessarily be taken as evidence of absence. The fact that Newdigate felt obliged to do something for the poor of the parish in his will, both in terms of a cash dole and the foundation of an almshouse might, equally, be read in both directions – as the characteristic behaviour of a conscientious commonwealthsman, or as the remorseful gesture of a sinner seeking to atone for previous acts of rapacity. So it

  LRO will of Sir John Newdigate (dated 20 November 1609; probate 14 June 1610).   WRCO CR136/V12, p. 58. 73   Cf. the revealing aside that although ‘palpable bitterness surfaced’ at Arbury in 1607, ‘much of the trouble seems to have been the work of ill-informed agitators like “Captain Pouch”’. Larminie, Wealth, Kinship and Culture, p. 15 n. 49 74   Martin, ‘Enclosure and the Inquisitions of 1607’, p. 44. 71

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seems unlikely in light of present evidence that it will ever be possible to reconstruct what actually happened in Chilvers Coton during and after June 1607. That said, as this analysis of the discourses surrounding Newdigate’s conduct has shown, the real value of this kind of material lies in its disclosure of the standards by which seventeenth-century magistrates were judged, and perforce judged themselves.

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8 Gender, agency and religious change in early Stuart England Amanda Flather

The significance of religion in the deepening crisis in church and state during the 1630s and 1640s has been widely discussed by historians.1 Yet consideration of the role of women has not always been adduced in these discussions. We still need to know what meaning Laudian innovation held for women and whether those meanings were different from men. What difference did Laudianism make to the practice of their religion? How often were women involved in campaigns against Laudian policy? Which women? In which types of conflict did they participate and why? What can we find out about women who tolerated or supported Laudianism? These questions have become important and plausible in the light of recent scholarship on gender and the state that has established women as significant agents of political power and authority in early modern England, especially at parish level.2 A gender analysis of the confessional politics of Laudian England contributes to a deeper understanding of the contexts in

  Peter Lake, ‘The Laudian Style: Order, Uniformity and the Pursuit of the Beauty of Holiness in the 1630s’, The Early Stuart Church 1603–1642, ed. Kenneth Fincham (Basingstoke, 1993), pp. 161–85; Judith Maltby, ‘By This Book: Parishioners, the Prayer Book and the Established Church’, in ibid., pp.115–37 and Prayer Book and People in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England (Cambridge, 2000); Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought 1630–1640 (Cambridge, 1995); John Morrill, ‘The Religious Context of the EngIish Civil War’, TRHS 5th Series 33:4 (1984), 16–33; Nicholas Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism c. 1590–1640 (Oxford, 1987); Alexandra Walsham, ‘The Parochial Roots of Laudianism Revisited: Catholics, Anti-Calvinists and ‘Parish Anglicans’ in Early Stuart England’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 49 (1998), 620–51. 2   Michael J. Braddick, and John Walter, ‘Grids of Power; Order, Hierarchy and Subordination in Early Modern Society’, Negotiating Power in Early Modern Society: Order, Hierarchy and Subordination in Britain and Ireland, ed. Michael. J. Braddick and John Walter (Cambridge 2001), pp. 1–42 Laura Gowing, Domestic Dangers: Women, Words and Sex in Early Modern London (Oxford, 1996); Laura Gowing, Common Bodies: Women, Touch and Power in Seventeenth-Century England (New Haven, 2003); Keith Wrightson, ‘The Politics of the Parish in Early Modern England’, The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England, ed. Paul Griffiths, Adam Fox and Steve Hindle (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 10–46. 1

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which female agency was constructed, activated and used. It also offers insights into the way that disputes about the use and meaning of sacred space politicised women as well as men in the decades leading to conflict and helps relate women’s well documented religio-political agency in the Civil War years to their earlier cultural roots. This essay attempts to add to our knowledge through a case study of women’s religious activism in the county of Essex in the 1630s. It draws on micro-historical methods to place evidence within an appropriate regional context to allow for a clearer sense of resistance and/or acceptance of official policy and the different responses of the different sexes. Several features of the region lend themselves to study. Laudian conformity was rigorously enforced in Essex in the 1630s despite its reputation as a Puritan stronghold and a significant proportion of the laity in Essex were exposed to the architectural changes and ritual practices associated with the Laudian campaign for the ‘beauty of holiness’ during the reign of Charles 1.3 The surviving source material is also rich and extensive. The study is based primarily on archdeaconry records which are extant for the whole county for the period, together with testimonies given to the Committee for Scandalous Ministers, set up in 1644. These sources are by no means straightforward to interpret and historians have long recognised the complex mediations by which they were composed. The aim of the Committee was to silence clergy who supported the Royalist regime and testimony was provided primarily by godly opponents of Laudianism.4 Equally, patterns of presentment to the church courts varied according to the local religious and political allegiance of parish elites, and only those who disobeyed ecclesiastical authority appeared in the Act Books, meaning that critics of Laudianism are much more visible in the records than those who approved it. Nonetheless, a regional approach that combines detailed analysis of court evidence with churchwardens’ accounts and wills can recover some evidence of those supportive or at least tolerant of Laudianism. The chapter looks first at women’s roles within the life and liturgy of the Reformation church and the impact of Laudianism upon it. The analysis then considers women’s responses to ceremonialism and the forms and occasions of their resistance. The chapter argues that there was a difference between women’s religious behaviour in reformed and Laudian conventions of worship; that their religious agency was structured differently and more fully in the years that preceded the Civil War. In defence of practices against Laudian reforms, women had the capacity to act publicly as spiritual individuals and parishioners seeking to determine the nature of their religious lives.

  Mary Millicent Egan, ‘Laudians, Puritans and the Laity in Essex c.1630–1642’ (Unpublished PhD diss, UCL, 2001), pp. 136–7. 4   I. M. Green, ‘The Persecution of “Scandalous” and Malignant Parish Clergy During the English Civil War’, EHR 94 (1979), 507–531; Suffolk Committees for Scandalous Ministers 1644–1646, ed. Clive Holmes (Suffolk Records Society 8, 1970), pp. 9–14 3

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The Reformation had a complicated impact upon female participation in parish religion. Women were denied access to positions of formal ecclesiastical authority in the established church and women were not permitted to preach, teach or to administer the sacraments.5 Sacred space was also organised to reflect gender as well as social order. In most parishes in the middle of the sixteenth century women were seated separately from men, with further divisions established according to marital status and rank.6 Many churches also set aside a special pew for women who were to be churched after childbirth, providing them with a prominent but segregated space that echoed older ideas of female impurity and inferiority that still resonated through early modern cultural life.7 The impact of the Reformation was not wholly negative, however, in that arrangements did begin to alter under Protestantism as interest in the godly family encouraged husbands and wives to sit together in church. The taboo against women entering the chancel was also undermined and elite women were occasionally allocated pews in the east end.8 It is also clear that religion was not just an excuse for or a ground of female oppression. Arguments for women’s spiritual equality, even if inconsistently absorbed, were an important strand of early arguments in defence of women.9 Female parishioners also dominated several aspects of religious practice in this period. It seems likely that they formed the numerical majority in many early modern congregations, and although the liturgical organisation of rites of passage abandoned gender distinctions after the Reformation, women continued to be the most prominent participants at baptisms, whether as mothers, gossips or as midwives and churching was a specifically female ceremony performed after a woman had given birth.10 Funeral rituals also had a gendered social character. A

  Margaret Sommerville, Sex and Subjection: Attitudes to Women in Early Modern Society (London, 1995), p. 50. 6    Margaret Aston, ‘Segregation in Church’, Women in the Church, ed. Diana Sheils and W. J. Wood (eds) (Studies in Church History 27, 1990), pp. 237–94, at p. 237; Amanda Flather, Gender and Space in Early Modern England (Woodbridge, 2007), pp. 135–73; Christine Peters, Patterns of Piety: Women, Gender and Religion in Late Medieval and Reformation England (Cambridge 2003), pp. 170–8. 7    David Cressy, Birth, Marriage and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Lifecycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford 1997), p. 211. 8    Aston, ‘Segregation in Church’, pp. 281–94. 9    Sharon Achinstein, ‘Women on Top in the Pamphlet Literature of the English Revolution’, Women’s Studies 24:1–2 (1994), 131–63, pp. 1–13. 10   Christine Peters, Patterns of Piety, p. 19; R. B. Shoemaker, Gender in English Society 1650–1850: The Emergence of Separate Spheres? (London, 1998). 5 

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single woman’s coffin would be carried to church by young spinsters and women often dominated the funerals of small children and widows.11 Women also contributed in distinctive ways to the organisation of parish life. They were closely connected to the material fabric of the church and made gifts to the building and its ministers. Cleaning the church and making, mending and washing clerical vestments was also female work.12 More broadly, recent scholarship has shown how this female constituency wielded considerable informal influence over the politics of the parish, in particular over moral issues that were associated with women’s spheres of influence.13 In terms of organised public life women had more capacity for agency in respect of religion than any other sphere of activity. II

Women’s religious roles were similar in many respects under Laudianism but it is evident that the campaign for holy order took some of its impetus from deep rooted ideas about gender that suggested some anxieties about the power of women in religion. Patriarchal order was reaffirmed spatially through a renewed reverence for the east end of the church and a revival of opposition to the presence of women in the chancel.14 Under the direction of ceremonial Bishops, elaborate pews in several cathedrals were ordered either to be lowered in height or removed if they interfered with the dignity or visibility of the altar and a particular interest was taken in the removal of seats in the chancel that belonged to women. At Durham, pews belonging to the wives of the Dean and prebendaries and of other gentlewomen were removed from the Cathedral choir at the King’s command. Laud gave similar orders at Gloucester, York and Salisbury with Charles 1’s full support and Bishop Wren issued identical instructions for

  Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford, Women in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1998), p. 199. 12   Patricia Crawford, Women and Religion in England, 1500–1720 (London, 1993), p. 56; Maria Hayward, ‘Reflections on Gender and Status Distinctions: An Analysis of the Liturgical Textiles Recorded in Mid-Sixteenth Century London’, Gender and History 14 (2002), p. 420. For Essex examples see Essex Record Office [hereafter ERO] D/P 11/5/1A (1538) Great Dunmow: ‘Item payd to Robert Sturton’swyff for washynge the church lynnen iiiis iiiid (1539): ‘item payd to hawkyns wyff for making oon surplice gatherd xxd’: ERO D/P 44/5 (1639) Heybridge: ‘to Frith (Mrs) for washing ye surplis and ye tablecloth’. The practice appears to have continued despite the introduction of more elaborate vestments under Laudianism. In Chelmsford in 1631 Mrs Fryth was paid 7s 6d to make a new surplice which was made of Holland linen and cost £2 8s. ERO D/P 94/5/1 f.242. 13   Bernard Capp, When Gossips Meet Women, Family, and Neighbourhood in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2003), pp. 353–64; Gowing, Domestic Dangers; Gowing Common Bodies. 14   Aston, ‘Segregation in Church’, p. 290. 11

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removal of seats in Norwich Cathedral.15 Some episcopal visitations also insisted on gender segregation and attempted to reverse the move to family pews in several parishes. Occasional references to the punishment of couples for sitting together in church appear in the records. For example, in 1638 Mr and Mrs Hagger of Bourn in Cambridgeshire were presented to the ecclesiastical court for sitting together in church, and the high pew, which they shared, was ordered to be lowered.16 The same year during the Essex visitation led by Archdeacon Edward Layfield (Laud’s nephew), orders were given to the parishes of Stamford Rivers, Bobbingworth, Stow Marie, Dengie and Loughton to undergo the costly and complicated process of re-seating in order to ‘place the parishioners the men on the one side of the church and the women on the other side of the church’.17 Even after the Restoration, the Laudian Bishop Wren of Ely continued to oppose the ‘promiscuous’ habit of mixed seating: ‘Doe men and women sit together in those seates, indifferently and promiscuously, or as the fashion was of old, do men sit together, upon one side of the church and women upon the other?’18 Laudian approaches to life-cycle ceremonies also stressed gender distinctions and reinforced patriarchal ecclesiastical authority over ordinary women. Visitation articles in the 1630s strengthened Jacobean insistence that baptisms should be conducted by lawful ministers only and that midwives were not permitted to baptise children even in emergencies.19 More controversially, female subjection was emphasised by Laudian changes to the churching ceremony that marked the end of a new mother’s lying in and her reintegration into the community after childbirth. Before the Reformation the service was described as a rite of purification and was derived from Jewish notions about the polluting properties of menstrual and uterine blood. The mother sometimes wore a white veil to symbolise penitence and was ‘sprinkled’ with holy water by the priest in a rite of cleaning. The Protestant Prayer Book of 1552 renamed the ceremony as ‘the thanksgiving after childbirth commonly called the churching of women’ and removed from the rubric the requirement that a woman should wear traditional costume. The site of the ceremony was also left locally negotiable, and was

15   Christopher Hill, Economic Problems of the Church, from Archbishop Whitgift to the Long Parliament (Oxford, 1996), p. 179; M. E. James, Family, Lineage and Civil Society: A Study of Society, Politics and Mentality in the Durham Region 1500–1640 (Oxford, 1974), pp. 123–5; Kevin. Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles 1 (London, 1992), pp. 395–400; Patrick Collinson, The Religion of Protestants The Church in English Society, 1559–1625 (Oxford, 1982), pp. 144–5; Ian Atherton, ‘Cathedrals, Laudianism and the British Church’, HJ 53 (2010), 918. 16   Aston, ‘Segregation in Church’, p. 290. 17   ERO D/AEV 7 ff. 1, 2v, 3. 18   Aston, ‘Segregation in Church’, p. 290. 19   Visitation Articles and Injunctions of the Early Stuart Parish Church Volume II, ed. Kenneth Fincham, Church of England Record Society (Woodbridge, 1998), p. 172.

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conducted in different parts of the church, sometimes in the ‘churching pew’ or even privately at home.20 Laudians reversed Reformation changes and insisted that women should wear the veil for their churching and that the ceremony should be conducted at the altar. These seemingly small alterations carried a wider, gendered political significance because of the association of the ceremony with uncleanness. Early Stuart visitation articles were careful to avoid association with superstition and never referred to the ceremony as ‘purification’, maintaining that the veil was required to promote decorum and patriarchal discipline. But ambiguity always hovered beneath the surface. Laudian insistence on the ritual calendar, for example, emphasised the link between the gendered rite of churching and the Feast of the Purification of the Blessed Virgin celebrated on 2 February and commonly called Candlemas Day.21 High churchmen sometimes used their Candlemas sermons to preach on the vileness of the human condition and while their interest was primarily in the original sin of men and women their extravagant references to the ‘stains of childbirth’ revived associations between women and defilement.22 The term ‘purification’ was occasionally used by Laudians and there is evidence that some ministers continued to believe in the polluting presence of women in sacred space. For example, the Laudian minister of Great Totham in Essex, Ambrose Westrop, was presented by his parishioners in 1640 for refusing to administer communion to a woman after intercourse or ‘at the time of her natural courses’.23 There was probably a good deal of rhetorical hyperbole in all of this and we cannot judge the precise impact of such preaching on the great mass of silent female conformists. David Cressy suggests that most women simply ignored or rejected the negative connotations of churching, regarding it positively as an occasion of thanksgiving and sociability.24 But the gendered aspect of Laudianism deserves some emphasis because it seems to have driven forward or contributed at a time of concern about religious change to an anxiety that encouraged women

20  Cressy, Birth, Marriage and Death, pp. 197–229; David Cressy, ‘Purification, Churching and Thanksgiving in Post-Reformation England’, P&P 161 (1993), 106–46; Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England (London, 1971), pp. 42–3. Patricia Crawford, ‘Attitudes to Menstruation in SeventeenthCentury England’, P&P 91 (1981), 57–65. 21   Ronald Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year 1400–1700 (Oxford, 1994), p. 197. It is worth noting here the political significance of Candlemas for Laudians. It was the date on which the king had chosen to be crowned and it was at Candlemas 1634 that Charles watched a masque to celebrate the publication of the Book of Sports. 22  Cressy, Birth, Marriage and Death, pp. 20; 220–2. There is no evidence in churchwardens’ accounts that Laudian ministers revived the old custom of lighting their church with large numbers of candles. 23   John White, The First Century of Scandalous, Malignant Priests (London, 1643), pp. 50–2. 24   Jeremy Boulton, Neighbourhood and Society: a London Suburb in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 196–7.

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of a variety of religious dispositions, some of whom had previously been law abiding parishioners, to resistance, broadening the way in which female religious agency was commissioned. III

Women in Essex were affected directly by Laudian alterations to churching since ecclesiastical authority attempted to enforce the veil and required that women should be churched at the altar rather than in the pew.25 The views of militant puritans on Laudian revisions to churching are the most visible in the records. Radicals had always violently opposed the ceremony as a popish and Jewish survival and throughout the period godly women refused to be churched. The increased number of presentments of women in the 1630s for neglect of the ceremony was a reflection of the drive for uniformity and an extension of this form of opposition.26 Protest might also be preceded by more peaceful petitioning which authorities ignored. Women participated in such appeals and sometimes led them. When Goodwife Taylor of Saffron Walden was presented by her Laudian minister, William Bayly, for refusing to receive the communion in 1631, Jane Leader, the wife of a Puritan local gentleman, along with twenty four godly women of the parish, petitioned in her defence.27 Assuring the judge of her conformity, the women explained that she was unable to reach the communion table in its new position ‘upon some lofty and bleak stairs’, and asked the commissary to appoint ‘some more convenient place’ for the table ‘whereby all the women of Walden that are childbearing ‘would have cause to pray for him’.28 Relations between the women and their minister did not improve, however, and in 1637 three signatories to the petition, Mary Dowty, Jane Leader, together with Sarah Taylor were presented for refusal to be churched ‘at the rayles neere the communion table’ and Sarah Taylor was excommunicated.29 When parishioners laid information against their ‘scandalous minister’ before Manchester’s committee in the 1640s, Sarah Taylor, widow, said that on being asked by Dr Gray why she would not come up to the rails for her churching, she replied, ‘That God’s people did hold it unlawful to go up to the rayles.’30 But equally significantly for our understanding of the dynamics of female religious agency is evidence that women of a more moderate religious disposition   Visitation Articles and Injunctions of the Early Stuart Parish Church Volume 1, ed. Kenneth Fincham, Church of England Record Society (Woodbridge, 1994), p. 46; Vol. II, p. 233. 26   For examples see ERO D/AEA 40 f. 122; ERO D/AEA 43 f. 10; ERO D/ACA 47 f. 98v. D/AEA 4 1, f. 163v, D/AEA 40, f. 247v 27   ERO D/B 2/4/24., ERO D/ACA 51 f. 228; see also ERO D/ACA 51 f. 237v. 28   TNA SP 16/205 f. 44. 29   ERO D/ACA 52 f. 22v, f. 25v. For a similar case just over the county border in Boxford, Suffolk see Holmes, Suffolk Committees, p. 43. 30   BL Add MS 15672 f.7v. My thanks to Graham Hart for this reference. 25

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were stirred to action specifically against Laudian alterations to the ceremony in the years before the Civil War. The few presentments in the Essex Act Books for outright resistance to churching indicates that the majority of women in Essex as elsewhere did not oppose the ceremony in its traditional form and continued to be churched during the 1630s.31 But women did challenge the setting of the ceremony and the headgear to be worn.32 They regularly refused to go to the rail to be churched. In 1638, for example, the wife of Jacob Malden of Woodham Mortimer was presented to court for: ‘not giving thanks in the usuall place for the women after their childbirth but did sitt in the bodie of the church’.33 Women also refused to wear the veil. In 1638, Elizabeth Cram was cited ‘for being churched without a vaile’ and in 1637 Mary Judd of Haverstock was brought before the Archdeacon’s court, for coming to be churched, ‘without a vaile or kerchief to the ill example of others’.34 John Walker’s wife of Woodham Walter was presented the same year because she was churched ‘havinge no vaile nor linen kercheife on her head’.35 More broadly evidence shows the expansion in prosecution in the 1630s of women’s as well as men’s illegal obstruction or resistance to the entire spectrum of what were regarded as proto-catholic ritual. The majority of protestors were militant puritans who had always refused to accept the rituals and practices of the Church of England since the start of the Reformation but who largely avoided confrontation with authority in the Elizabethan and Jacobean period because authority tended to turn a blind eye to their non-conformity. It was in response to the Laudian drive for liturgical uniformity that clashes between godly parishioners and ecclesiastical authority became more frequent and intense. Women and men were prosecuted for refusing to kneel for prayers, to bow at the name of Jesus or to stand for the creed.36 But women were especially prominent in protests that involved rituals related to their traditional religious roles and responsibilities linking to the idea of female agency in or for the religious realm. Because childbirth and its ritual aftermath was such a powerfully gendered domain, godly women were often involved in local clashes over baptism. They were the ones, more often than not, who initiated disruption and attempted to prevent a baptism or to thwart the signing of the cross which Puritans regarded as a superstitious and contaminated remnant of popery. Men were more often presented for delay or neglect. In Chelmsford in November 1634, for example, the wife of Alexander Knight was presented to court, ‘that she did hinder the clerke from signing the childe of one Millowesw[i]th the signe of the crosse in

 Boulton, Neighbourhood and Society, pp. 196–7.  Cressy, Birth, Marriage and Death, pp. 218–24; ERO D/ACA 21 f. 90v. 33   ERO D/AEA 42 f. 35; ERO D/ACA 54 f. 113. 34   ERO D/AEA 41 f. 181v. 35   ERO D/AEA 42 f. 35r. 36   ERO D/ACA 51 ff 87v, 140r; ERO D/ABA 46 f. 149v. 31

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baptisme by covering the face there before he could signe it’.37 In Radwinter in 1641, disruption of a baptism by two women developed into a minor assault on the curate. The local Rector recorded that on June 12: the wife of Richard Smith at the christening of Giles Albon’s child detained the child when by the rubric it should be delivered into the arms of the parson, though he demanded it of her often. She obstinately refusing so to do, the curate repaired to the reading-pew, expecting their recantation or submission to go out of the church. The service and congregation being disturbed too long, the father of the child moved the said Smith’s wife to deliver the said child to the curate. Butt being it seems of too intemperate a spirit, immediately after the words ‘I baptise thee’ etc she made fresh disturbance, labouring to hinder the signing of the child with the Cross; she covered the child’s face with the linen and kept it down with her hand. Another woman, reported to be Richard Durden’s wife, laid hold on one of the curate’s hands, which was kept behind him by the father of the child.38

In the same way, because of the gendered quality of burial practices, godly women were often at the forefront of conflicts over the conduct of the burial services of other women. Clashes became more common during the 1630s when the Laudian church attempted to enforce conformity to the funeral service prescribed in the Book of Common Prayer. The minister was required to meet the corpse at the gate or stile of the churchyard in his surplice and the burial was to be conducted in ‘decent manner’ with prayers and lessons, ‘for that purpose ordained’.39 To the godly, these rituals were yet another sign of the insidious reintroduction of Catholicism and they believed that they needed to be repudiated, by force if necessary. In 1639, for example, the wife of one Langley, of Chichele St Osyth, was presented to the ecclesiastical court for ‘disturbing divine service being at the buriall of the dead, the minister desiring the people to kneel down at their prayers, she cryed out what make us praye to the dead, and so continued so brawlinge along time together’.40 In another harrowing episode in London in 1636 the wife of Francis Jessop demanded to bury her daughter, ‘without the observance of the order of church burial, declaring herself that they could bury without a minister; and her friends which accompanied the corpse to the grave, so soon as the minister began the form of church burial, left the corpse and went away’.41 Perhaps because of their special responsibility for caring for clerical vestments, women’s voices were also prominent in protest over the surplice which was regarded by the godly as a vestige of popery, a ‘rag of Rome’. Confessional conflict between conformists and radicals during the Elizabethan period had focused on   ERO D/ABA 8 f. 2.   Harold Smith, The Ecclesiastical History of Essex Under the Long Parliament and the Commonwealth (Colchester, 1931), p. 183. 39  Cressy, Birth, Marriage and Death, p. 410. 40   ERO D/ABA 8 f. 17. 41  Cressy, Birth, Marriage and Death, p. 405. 37

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the question of the surplice and the square cap and the issue reignited with the rise of Arminianism and its commitment to ceremonialism during the reign of Charles 1. Puritan parishioners were outraged by the order that the clergy should wear the surplice when ministering and vestments became a target of attack.42 Historians have noticed that although young soldiers and religious radicals in the Parliamentary army committed acts of mockery against the surplice during the 1640s, at parish level it was almost always women who seized the initiative. There was a long tradition of female protest over the issue. At the height of the vestments controversy in 1566, women in London formed a vocal and highly visible part of the movement of opposition, and in the early 1640s popular iconoclastic attacks on the surplice in parish churches seem chiefly to have involved female parishioners.43 Women were open and unequivocal in expressing their beliefs about the ‘polluting’ and ‘popish’ properties of clerical costume. An account of an assault on the surplice at Christ Church in London in 1641 records that an old woman rejoiced in her part in the destruction of what she called the ‘babylonish garment’.44 In carnivalsque rituals of inversion they manipulated gendered notions about the uncleanness and magical power of menstrual and uterine blood in their iconoclastic scatological demonstrations. For example Susan, wife of John Cook of Little Baddow, used menstrual rags to convey her contempt for the surplice in 1636 when she was presented to court by the churchwardens, ‘for hanginge her lynnen in the churche to dry’. When the minister reproached her, she retorted that she ‘might hang her raggs there as well as the surplice and bad him doe his worst’.45 The implication of her action was that the surplice was simply material but in associating it with menstruation she was also ridiculing ritualist beliefs about sex.46 Godly women’s views also found symbolic expression in the violent iconoclasm that erupted in Essex against Laudian innovation during the heightened political tensions of the early 1640s.47 Women intentionally evoked and inverted their

  Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (Oxford, 1990), pp. 71, 94–5; John Walter, ‘“Abolishing Superstition with Sedition”? The Politics of Popular Iconoclasm in England 1640–1642’, P&P 183 (2004), 79–123, p. 183; John Walter, ‘Confessional Politics in Pre-Civil War Essex: Prayer Books, Profanations, and Petitions’, HJ 44 (2001), 677–701. 43  Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement, p. 93; Walter, ‘“Abolishing Superstition with Sedition?”’, p. 90. 44  Anon. An order from the High Conrt [sic] of Parliament, which was read on Sunday last, in every church, being the 19.day of December (London, 1641). 45   ERO D/ACA 68 f. 19. 46   Natalie Zemon Davies, ‘The Rites of Violence’, Society and Culture in Early Modern France, ed. Davies (Stanford, 1965), p. 159. 47   Margaret Aston, England’s Iconoclasts: Laws against Images (Oxford, 1988); Margaret Aston, ‘Puritans and Iconoclasm 1560–1660’, The Culture of English Puritanism, 1560–1700, ed. Christopher Durston and Jacqueline Eales (Basingstoke, 1996), pp. 92–121; Patrick Collinson, From Iconoclasm to Iconophobia: The Cultural Impact of the Second Reformation (Reading, 1986); 42

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role as carers for vestments and destroyed the surplice in symbolic displays of disgrace. In the early 1640s, four women of Great Waltham ripped, cut and tore in pieces the surplice and hood.48 A year later Richard Drake, Arminian rector of Radwinter, suffered a series of violent assaults by female parishioners against the surplice that suggested and/or threatened emasculation. On 10 March 1641, he was attacked while wearing the surplice by ‘the wives of John Mountford and Thomas Cornel [who] conveying themselves closely into the chancel cut the surplice about a foot deep before and behind’. Later in the month a more serious and violent attack was mounted by women armed with knives. Drake recorded that: widow Seaman, the wives of Richard Smith, Henry Smith, Samuel and Henry Reef[?] and Josias Ward, coming impudently upon the curate as he was passing from the grave laid violent hands upon him, drew their knives and near his throat cut and rent off his surplice and hood in a most barbarous manner before the congregation; and so carried away their spoil, triumphing in their victory.49

The single female assault on altar rails in the Laudian parish of Sandon that took place on the day after The Feast of the Purification of the Virgin Mary or Candlemas Day in 1640 also manipulated ideas about female uncleanness. The timing of the action was cleverly chosen. The day was traditionally set aside for the women of the parish to clean the church after the Christmas festivities but Candlemas was also strongly associated with ideas of female purification and revived in importance under Laudianismas, as we have seen.50 In a theatrical act of iconoclastic inversion, the supposedly ‘unclean’ women purged their church of Laudian profanity as well as Christmas greenery as they took out the altar rails and burnt them ‘on the green’.51 Ministers, as well as rituals and symbols, were also sometimes the focus of female attack. Women as well as men were prepared to challenge the power of the minister who led their congregation if they believed his preaching was unsound.

Jacqueline Eales, ‘Iconoclasm, Iconography and the Altar in the English Civil War’, in D. Wood and W. Sheils (eds) The Church and the Arts: Studies in Church History 28 (Oxford, 1992), pp. 313–27; Julie Spraggon, Puritan Iconoclasm during the English Civil War (Woodbridge, 2003); Walter, ‘“Abolishing Superstition with Sedition?”’; Walter, ‘Popular Iconoclasm and the Politics of the Parish in Eastern England, 1640–1642’, HJ 47 (2004), 261–90; Walter, ‘Confessional Politics in Pre-Civil War Essex’, 677–701; John Walter, ‘“Affronts & Insolencies”: The Voices of Radwinter and Popular Opposition to Laudianism’, EHR 122 (2007), 35–60. 48   ERO Q/SR 312/58, 60, 61, 112, 136; Journal of the House of Lords: Volume 4: 1629–42 (1802), pp. 107–8. 49   Cited in Smith, Ecclesiastical History, p. 182. 50  Cressy, Birth, Marriage and Death, p. 20. Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘Women on Top’, Society and Culture in Early Modern France, ed. Davis, pp. 124–51. 51   William Cliftlands, ‘The “Well-Affected” and the “Country”: Politics and Religion in English Provincial Society, c.1640–1645’ (Unpublished PhD diss, Essex 1987), p. 151; HMC, Buccleuch MSS, iii, 395. ERO D/ACA 69 f. 307.

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They sometimes attempted to disrupt services to silence what they believed to be false Laudian doctrine by arriving late for divine service or leaving before the sermon was delivered. In 1637, for example, a group of sixteen parishioners of Rayleigh, six men and ten women, were presented for ‘running unreverentlie out of church in service tyme’.52 Godly women also used words as weapons and could be confrontational, shouting at the minister, inverting expectations of female silence and obedience. Twenty-six of the sixty-two cases of abuse of ministers recorded in the Act books involved female defendants. In 1633 Elizabeth, wife of Roger Kendall of Great Wakering, for example, was punished, ‘for abusing the minister for openlie raylinge at revilinge him from howse to howse givinge most base and filthie language and saying he could make a better sermon in a chimney corner’.53 Prudence Carter of Great Holland was presented in 1632, ‘for using irreverent speeches to Mr Thomas Evans the minister of the s[sai]d p[ar]ish and his wife saying she would not heare him for there were ten persons better than he is’.54 Female hostility occasionally escalated into violence. In Stisted, for example, a long campaign against the Arminian Rector, Christopher Newstead, was conducted by a group of godly parishioners who refused to pay their tithes and to let him officiate. The conflict culminated one Sunday after Michaelmas in 1642 in a clash between Newstead and several women of the parish who ‘threw stones’ at him to prevent him entering his church.55 John Jegon, the Arminian Rector of Sible Hedingham, was also a victim of female violence and indicted three women of the parish for ‘disturbing the peace’ for their attack on him before he was sequestered in 1645 for support of alehouses, popish innovations and professors in general’. Female anger may have been fuelled by his reported comment that ‘it was pity that ever the Bible was translated into English, for now every woman & beggarly Fellow thinke themselves able to dispute with reverend Divines’.56 Other forms of female protest might be less confrontational, but equally undermining of authority. Since the early days of the Reformation zealous or dissatisfied parishioners had sought out sermons in other parishes if the local minister did not preach or if his teaching was perceived to be of poor quality. They also attended additional weekday or evening lectures to supplement

  ERO D/AEA 41 f. 129v.   ERO D/AEA 39 f. 210. 54   ERO D/ABA 6 f. 57v. 55   James Sharpe, ‘Scandalous and Malignant Priests in Essex: The Impact of Grassroots Puritanism’, Politics and People in Revolutionary England, ed. Colin Jones, Malyn Newitt and Stephen Roberts (Oxford, 1986), p. 259. On women and stoning see John Walter, ‘Faces in the Crowd: Gender and Age in the Early Modern English Crowd’, The Family in Early Modern England, ed. Helen Berry and Elizabeth Foyster (Cambridge, 2007), p. 118. 56   ERO Q/SR 332/70; BL Add MSS 5829, ff. 9, 10, 21. 52 53

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the spiritual activities of the established church.57 Although these practices were technically illegal, prosecution was patchy and partial until, during the polarised climate of the 1630s, ‘gadding’, as the offence was termed, began to be interpreted as a politically dangerous critique of established doctrine, and presentments became more frequent. A total of 46 presentments for ‘gadding’ have been identified in the Essex Act Books between 1630 and 1640: 23, that is 50 per cent, of defendants were women, 14 were described as wives, two as widows. Only four female defendants were presented with their husbands, suggesting that godly women made their own decisions about when and where they would go to church. In 1634, for example, Elizabeth, wife of John Eaton of Great Stambridge, was presented to the Archdeacon’s court, ‘for absenting herselfe from sermons and resorting to another place to heare the preachers’.58 Joan, wife of John Croxton of Larkwell, was presented to court in 1632, ‘for ordinary neglect of her owne p[ar]ishe church and stragling to other churches on the Sabothdaye’.59 The wife of Thomas Howes of Goldhangar was accused in 1637 ‘for that having a preaching minister she does often absent herselfe from his sermon (and from divine service) and that she resorts to other places to heare the preacher there’. Her defiant reply was that her minister’s words were ‘as water spilt against the wall’.60 Comparing his preaching to urine, she used a classic scatalogical technique for profaning the sacred. Women were also involved in campaigns conducted in the county by the godly during the early 1640s to assist Parliament in rooting out ministers who were ‘scandalous’ in morals and doctrine, or who were ‘malignant’ in their preaching and conversation or actions. The evidence about them comes from testimonies given to the Committee for Scandalous Ministers, set up in 1644 and they are not straightforward to interpret.61 But recent research on the local circumstances surrounding sequestrations has demonstrated the value of the depositions to historians by showing that while interference could not always be ruled out, most charges against ministers were generated by local disaffection that can be traced back to incidents which occurred often a decade before the turmoil of the Civil War years.62 Events described can also be corroborated by a wide variety of other evidence, indicating that these testimonies were a reasonably accurate account of actions and behaviour. Importantly, accusations of scandal need to be set against the background of social and economic change in the countryside taking place during the period. New standards of moral discipline were beginning to

 Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement, p. 92.   ERO D/AEA 40 f. 84. 59   ERO D/AEA 39 f. 74v. 60   ERO D/ACA 52 f. 250v. 61   Green, ‘The Persecution of “Scandalous” and Malignant Parish Clergy’, pp. 507–31; Holmes, Suffolk Committees, pp. 9–14. 62   Fiona McCall, Baal’s Priests: The Loyalist Clergy and the English Revolution (Farnham, 2014), pp. 15–65. 57

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be imposed by increasingly powerful parish elites composed of the middling and ‘better sort’ of people, much as different standards of personal morality were expected of the local minister, the ‘supreme exemplar’ as well as enforcer of godly behaviour.63 Details of petitions against twenty-seven north Essex clergy submitted to Manchester’s committee set up in the early 1640s to interrogate and if necessary to eject and to replace scandalous or malignant clergy survive.64 Accusations ranged widely from traditional allegations of negligence or general inability, to charges of immoral conduct, notably swearing, drunkenness, and sexual misbehaviour, as well as accusations of doctrinal unsoundness or malignancy towards parliament. Women comprised around 17 per cent of witnesses called to give evidence on political and theological matters, suggesting the constraints perhaps against women speaking in public on such matters. They had a larger role to play in the prosecution of moral offences, making up 31 per cent of deponents in these cases. In 1644, for example, sixteen godly women of Great Maplestead, ‘some of good sort’ petitioned Manchester’s committee to remove their Laudian minister, Edward Shepherd, who they declared to be immoral and ‘altogether unfit’.65 Shepherd survived despite additional allegations made by parishioners about his ‘malignancy’ and the local campaign against him continued. The following year his maidservant, Elizabeth Spurgeon, testified before the magistrate that Shepherd had sexually assaulted her and four of the godly women who had petitioned against him the previous year, together with two men from influential local Puritan families including the Tyndals, wealthy lawyers and landowners connected by marriage to John Winthrop and to the Puritan community in New England, supported her story.66 Shepherd was so incensed that he punched the servant in the mouth at the magistrate’s house, ‘whereupon she bled much’. Unsurprisingly, according to his neighbour the Reverend Ralph Josselin, the story ‘made much against him’. By 1650 he still farmed some of the tythes but the parish had hired another preacher, one William Hicks, described as ‘godly’ and able in the parochial inquisition.67 Married women of the middling and better sort exhibited a major proportion of the articles against William Frost of Great Middleton, John Lake of Great Saling, and Stephen Nettles of Lexden. A long history of sexual impropriety and offence to prominent female parishioners formed a key ingredient in all these cases. A disturbing picture of Lake was painted by four married middling sort

  Cliftlands, ‘The Well-Affected’, pp. 195–257.   BL Add. MSS 5829. 65   Ibid., f. 23. 66   Roger Thompson, Mobility and Migration: East Anglian Founders of New England, 1629–1640 (Amhurst, 1994), p. 180. 67   The Diary of Ralph Josselin,1616–1683, ed. Alan Macfarlane (Oxford 1976), p. 40, 12/5/1645; Smith, Ecclesiastical History, p. 296. 63

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parishioners who described him as ‘notoriously vile in attempting the chastity of his maides and sometimes by violences … using another by such violences that she by her sickness was brought into a dangerous sicknesse and other conveniences’.68 The anger and resentment at indignities inflicted on women is plain. Goodwife Foulsham of Lexden deposed that Stephen Nettles, ‘in his kissing women he putteth his tongue in their mouth as he hath offered to do to [her] more than once’. Margaret Wall, wife of an influential Puritan gentleman, testified on May 1 1644 that William Frost, minister of Middleton, ‘was a man dangerously suspected of incontinencie as may appear by these presumptions … that he hath offered to put his hand under a woman’s clothes in an obscene and uncivill manner’. She made a further submission to the committee on May 11 admitting that, ‘she was the person … under whose cotes he offered to put his hand meeting her alone in a strait entrie to her house’.69 The women of Middleton also deposed that Frost had kept a ‘whore’ in his house and that he had previously appeared before the court of High Commission ‘upon the crime of Bastardy’. All these accusations can be verified from other sources. Frost had appeared at the Court of High Commission for keeping his sister-in-law and her illegitimate child in his house soon after he was married.70 Lake had had to purge himself before the Middlesex archdeaconry court in 1637 on a presentment of incontinency with two of his accusers, Joan Osborne and Bridget Cant.71 The family was held by the godly to be the cornerstone of spiritual discipline and ministers were criticised by women for ‘setting an ill-example’ through neglect of their dependents or by behaving in ways that disrupted order in other households in the parish. Jegon of Sible Hedingham was criticised by one of his female servants for failing to read the scriptures to his family, echoing other complaints about his opposition to women and servants reading and discussing the Bible.72 Frost of Middleton was alleged to have clashed with his wife over his drinking.73 Daniel Falconer of Aldham was also criticised for his merry making and the poor example that he set. It was reported that on one occasion he was drinking with two men of the parish for so long that the wife of one went into the alehouse ‘hirself and brake the Potts’ because the constable was too embarrassed to disturb the minister.74 Pulpit comments about female sexuality also provoked female anger. We have already come across Ambrose Westrupp’s attitudes on ‘matters concerning the secrets of women’, as well as normal sexual intercourse and menstruation as

  BL Add. MSS 5829, f. 15. ERO T/A 42 f. 146.   Ibid., f. 37. Her husband, Bartholomew Wall, was listed as a gentleman and served on the committee. 70   Ibid.,f. 32–3; PRO SP16/31, Cliftlands, ‘The Well-Affected’, p. 220. 71   BL Add. MSS 5829, f. 16; ERO D/ABA 8, f. 142. 72   BL Add. MSS 5829, f. 10 73   Ibid., f. 45 74   Ibid., f. 47. 68 69

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sources of pollution, that undermined his preaching and helped to lead to his sequestration in 1643.75 Guyon of White Colne was described by women of the parish as ‘distemp[er]ed in his Braine’ for remarks made from the pulpit, ‘That the best sport is playd at Night when the candle is out.’76 Personal animosity, as well as principled opposition, no doubt motivated some women to testify against their minister. Yet to dismiss the allegations entirely as petty or malicious is to misunderstand their wider social meaning. The presence of a supposedly ‘scandalous’ minister was believed by the godly to pose a serious threat to local moral and social stability. Cultural shifts in the attitudes of middling men and women about what constituted orderly and ‘respectable’ behaviour, especially in parishes with a Puritan impetus, meant that questions of morality were central to broader issues of social, political and ecclesiastical order in seventeenth-century England. Moral order was the dimension of parish politics in which female influence dominated, and in the context of local confessional conflicts in the early 1640s, women played an especially prominent role in campaigns against ministers who were seen to undermine it. IV

The expansion of female radical protest in response to the Laudian drive for conformity has important implications for the understanding of the significance of women’s religious agency. If we survey the social identity of women engaged in religio-political activism before the Civil War we find that most of the protestors were godly, married members of the middling or better sort, reminding us that several social factors – gender, age, marital and social status, as well as religious allegiance, afforded women different degrees of influence, depending on the context.77 Of the four women indicted for ripping the surplice at Great Waltham, one was described as the wife of a yeoman, two were the wives and one was the daughter of a husbandman.78 The husband of Lydia Barnard, one of the Great Waltham rioters, was indicted for ‘being voluntarily present at conventicles’ in 1647. Grace Poole and her husband, Jonathan, who took part in the incidents at Halstead, were rendered excommunicate for non-attendance at church in 1641.79 Charity Knight, a baker’s wife, who in 1634 (with the wife of another member

 White, First Century, pp. 50–2. For earlier examples see Mark Byford, ‘The Birth of a Protestant Town: the Process of Reformation in Tudor Colchester, 1530–80’, The Reformation in English Towns, 1500–1640, ed. Patrick Collinson and John Craig (London, 1998), p. 41; W. H. Hale, A Series of Precedents and Proceedings in Criminal Causes, Extending From the Years 1475 to 1640: Extracted From the Act Books of the Diocese of London (Edinburgh, 1847: intro. R. W. Dunning, Edinburgh 1973), pp. 248–9 76   BL Add MS 5829, f. 24; White, First Century, pp. 50–2 77   Cliftlands, ‘The Well-Affected’, pp. 150–6. 78   ERO Q/SR 312/58, 60, 61, 112, 136. 79   ERO Ass. 35/88/6/48; Cliftlands, ‘The Well-Affected’, p. 154, n.322 75

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of the godly), tried to prevent the curate from baptising a child, was married to a man who was presented before the court of High Commission in 1619 for refusal to take communion in the form ‘appointed by the book’ and who later left Chelmsford for New England. Tabitha Sharpe, one of the holy wives of Sandon, was the wife of a mercer and the couple followed Thomas Hooker to America in the 1630s although for reasons unknown they did not stay. The impression is of godly women of broadly middling status, with all the power accruing to them as parishioners and Christians, engaged in principled action.80 But equally important is the recognition that it was not just Puritan women who opposed ceremonialism. Some women who wanted to be churched but who opposed the veil or who refused to go to the rail appear to have been respectable married or widowed conformists who had not previously opposed the rituals and practices of the established church but who were drawn into conflict with authority by Laudian policy specifically. For example, Thomas Wybrow refused to give Alicia Cooke communion in 1640, apparently ‘for no cause … although she presented herself reverently on her knees’. It was highly likely that Alice was a religious moderate because she was willing to kneel but objected to the Laudian requirement that she receive communion at the rail.81 Elizabeth Stubbin of Boreham told the Archdeacon’s court that she was ‘troubled in her conscience to come to the raile’ and so ‘did not receive’.82 It is here perhaps that we see female religious agency in its most dynamic form since Laudianism galvanised normally law-abiding women to bring their views about religious practice to public attention. Of course all of this evidence is complicated and hard to evaluate. It is possible that women who resisted authority might have been deliberately selected by churchmen for prosecution in an attempt to discredit the moral status of the godly community as a whole. Individual women may also have been targeted as an effective way to denigrate the honour of their husbands because the preservation of a woman’s honour was crucial both to her and her kin. Equally, female intervention may have been part of a household strategy. It is highly likely that men sanctioned or were behind many of the interventions outlined here because women were less likely to be seen as political actors and because of their relative immunity from prosecution.83 Yet even if female resistance was given encourage80   Hilda Grieve, Sleepers in the Shadows: Chelmsford, A Town Its People And Its Past. Volume II, From Market Town to Chartered Borough 1608–1688 (Chelmsford, 1994), pp. 23, 47, 52. 81   ERO AF 35/81/H9; Egan, ‘Laudianism’, pp. 163–4. 82   ERO D/AEA 42 f. 114v. 83   For details of the long-running conflict at Saffron Walden between a group of Puritans and their Laudian clergyman, Nicholas Gray, throughout the 1630s see Margaret Spufford, Contrasting Communities: English Villagers in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Cambridge, 1974) p. 236; Clergy of Church of England database [hereafter CCEd] Record ID: 193691; CCEd ID: 42556; CCEd Record ID: 119921; CCEd Record ID: 2278; Malcolm Whitehead, Saffron Walden, A History (Saffron Walden, 1991), p. 55; BL, Harleian MSS no. 2013; D/ACA 51 f. 184.

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ment or even orchestrated in some cases by men, I would argue that an older scholarship tends to overemphasise male leadership. Ann Hughes and others have made clear that conscience could be corrosive of female obedience and the women themselves justified their action on the basis of religious conviction.84 Ann Raymond of Littlebury insisted that her resistance to ministerial authority was based on her conscience which was ‘not yet satisfied for the coming up to the rayle’.85 Anna Temple said that ‘she longed to see idolatry and superstition rooted out’.86 It is perfectly possible that some women acted on their own initiative to resist religious policies which they opposed. We should not forget that most women contained their religious beliefs within norms and structures of deference and obedience. Nor should we ignore evidence in wills that hints at a level of female social support for some Laudian ministers. Edward Cherry, who was sequestered from Great Holland and St Osyth in 1643, seems to have been close to Rose Rand, one of his widowed parishioners, who described Cherry as ‘her beloved friend’ and appointed him as overseer of her will in 1637.87 Joseph Long, who held two livings in the county and was sequestered from Fingringhoe in 1644 for innovation, immoral conduct and neglect, kept his position in Great Clacton where he seems to have been well respected by some women of the parish for whom he acted among the witnesses to several wills.88 Though whether esteem provided him with protection or his theological views struck a more positive chord there, it is difficult to tell. In the end, religious allegiance was determined by conscience, but attention to gender does deepen our understanding of the shape, structure and meaning of lay responses to Laudianism. It also contributes to larger questions concerning the relationship of religious change to the agency of women in early modern society. The campaign for the ‘beauty of holiness’ involved an emphasis on holy order that articulated more clearly women’s secondary status through its arrangement of space and ceremony. There is some evidence of female support for Laudianism and these women need to be taken into account in any assessment of its impact locally. But women who tolerated or supported ceremonialism are less visible in the records than those who opposed it. Most prominent were radical female parishioners who intervened regularly, but informally, to defend godly Protestant doctrine. Their targets were the objects and gestures that Puritan women and men had always regarded as ‘popish’ such as the sign of the cross in baptism and the wearing of the surplice, although their interventions were strongest on matters connected to traditional female religious roles and arenas

  Anne Hughes, Gender and the English Revolution (London, 2012), p. 73.   ERO D/ACA 53 f. 17v. 86  Crawford, Women and Religion, p. 78. 87   ERO D/ABW56/99; T. W. Davids, Annals of Evangelical Nonconformity in the County of Essex (London, 1863), p. 237. 88   ERO D/ABW 54/19; ERO D/ABW 56/104; Harold Smith, The Ecclesiastical History of Essex Under the Long Parliament and the Commonwealth (Colchester, 1931), p. 122. 84 85

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of influence. In the later 1630s and early 1640s, women also became involved in disputes that related to specific Laudian issues such as altar rails and the wearing of the veil for their churching. The veil was not simply a Puritan issue, but had gendered implications because of its association with uncleanness, and protest against it involved women specifically. There is some evidence that the liturgical politics surrounding the ceremony not only heightened the hostility of the godly but also animated opposition by more moderate female parishioners that may not previously have existed. In this way Laudianism increased and altered the power, authority and the ability to influence of women in their own religious lives as well as those of others.

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9 ‘A Standard which can never fail us’: the Golden Rule and the construction of a public transcript in early modern England1 J. C. Davis

Characterised by depth and resourcefulness, a willingness to engage with competing contemporary discursive strategies and an insistence of the specificities of time, place and circumstance, John Walter’s archival research has offered a fresh approach to ‘popular’ politics in early modern England. His findings document the crowd’s desire to demonstrate order and rationality, their political savviness and their quest for negotiated outcomes. Designed to secure an appropriate response from the authorities, their actions were informed by considerable knowledge of the law and threatened violence only after the exhaustion of other means. Accordingly, their protests commonly mimicked administrative practice, and they took upon themselves the implementation of existing codes of mutual obligation when their governors failed to do so.2 Underpinning their capacity to act was a sense of mutual obligation as the basis of social cohesion. That sense has been described by the anthropologist James C. Scott, in language adopted by Walter, as the ‘public transcript’. Where coercive and bureaucratic resources are scarce, Scott argues, rulers must seek some degree of cooperation, participation and collaboration from those over whom they bear rule. To achieve this, their ‘rule’may be legitimated and popular collaboration sought through a shared public transcript offering   My thanks for their helpful comments on earlier drafts to Mike Braddick, Phil Withington and Jonathan Scott. 2   For examples see John Walter, ‘Faces in the Crowd: Gender and age in the early modern English crowd’, The Family in Early Modern England, ed. Helen Berry and Elizabeth Foyster (Cambridge, 2007) pp. 96–124; John Walter, Crowds and Popular Politics in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2006), chaps. 2 (especially p. 57) and 6; John Walter, Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution: The Colchester Plunderers (Cambridge, 1999); John Walter, ‘Confessional Politics in Pre-Civil War Essex: Prayer books, Profanations and Petitions’, HJ 44:3 (2001), p. 677; John Walter, ‘Abolishing Superstition with Sedition? The Politics of Popular Iconoclasm in England 1640–1642’, P&P 183 (2004), 79–123, pp. 81, 92–3, 122; John Walter, ‘Gesturing at Authority; Deciphering the Gestural Code of Early Modern England’, The Politics of Gesture: Historical Perspectives, ed. Michael Braddick, P&P 203, supplement 4 (Oxford, 2009), p. 100. 1

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some guarantees of security, protection and even well-being to the ruled. The powerful may also be constrained by reputational needs and their desire to uphold the theatre of power.3 In turn, this bestows some leverage – the weapons of the weak – upon the subordinate in their negotiation and renegotiation of the realities of power. Their collaboration is essential to governance but it comes at a price.4 Both Scott and Walter have emphasised ‘the politics of the everyday’ as the crucible in which the nature and terms of the public transcript have to be worked out and renewed. It is in the quotidian processes of renegotiation and adjustment that the codes of mutual obligation are tested and reinforced. Though they can retain their significance in great social crises, they may also be overwhelmed by violence in such exceptional upheavals.5 What has not been so systematically explored is the construction and dissemination of the public transcript. Out of what material is it made and how is it brought to pervade popular discourse? For it to fulfil its function, the public transcript has to be widely endorsed, condition everyday behaviour and be accessible – and acceptable – to all sections of the community. The exploration of the public transcript may accordingly be pursued in many different directions. This chapter is more narrowly conceived. It argues that throughout the early modern period the Golden Rule was one strand out of which a public transcript was constructed. The first, and longer, part of the chapter attempts to demonstrate the ubiquity of the Rule and to sketch how it functioned in a wide range of public discourses. To further demonstrate the reach of the Rule, the chapter concludes with a brief discussion of its use by Thomas Hobbes, who is often seen as basing his political philosophy on unbridled egotism, contemptuous of the popular and an advocate of uncontested absolutism. The question raised here is whether he also engaged with the reciprocities and mutual obligations of the Golden Rule and its ability to exert leverage on popular political consciousness. In other words, seen from this perspective does the disassociation of elite languages of political thought from popular public discourse, of which Hobbes was once seen as an extreme example, have to be reconsidered.

James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Resistance (New Haven, 1985), p. 288; James Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, 1990), pp. xii, 10, 18, 136. 4 Cf. John Walter, ‘Public Transcripts, Popular Agency and the Politics of Subsistence in Early Modern England’, Negotiating Power in Early Modern Society: Order, Hierarchy and Subordination in Britain and Ireland, ed. Michael J. Braddick and John Walter (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 123–48; Walter, ‘The English People and the English Revolution Revisited’, HWJ 61:1 (2001) esp. p. 174. 5 For a graphic illustration of this point see Scott, ‘Tyranny of the Ladle’, London Review of Books, 44:23 (6 December 2012), 21–6. 3

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On 24 June 1697 Charles Trimnell, one time chaplain to the second earl of Sunderland and later to William III and Queen Anne, preached a sermon on the text of Matthew 7:12, ‘Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even unto them; for this is the law and the prophets.’6 More commonly known as the Golden Rule, this injunction was for Trimnell, as it was for many others, a universal guide, to be had in mind at all times, a kind of ethical ready reckoner. ‘For of that extent and perfection it is, that it reaches every case that can rise between one Man and another, and on that account does highly deserve the Character of a Royal Law.’ It was, he said, ‘a Rule where we have no better view of the fitness of things, so that one way or another by means of this we have always a Guide.’ From its close observance and application, justice, mercy, the relief of the poor and the protection of others – in short, social harmony – would all follow.7 Such an evaluation of the Golden Rule was not uncommon. John Goodman’s exposition of it, published in 1688, noted its universal acceptability. Admired by Jews and Gentiles, as well as Christians, the rule reconciled the laws of nature and the Gospel. ‘It is a Maxim subscribed and owned by the Men of all Ages, Countries, Sects, Qualities and Conditions; for indeed … the Reason of it is as clear as Light, the Date of it is as Ancient as Mankind, and its obligations as Indissoluble as the very Frame of Nature.’ There was no need ‘to consult Books or Philosophers, or Lawyers or Casuists, having a standing Oracle in our own Bosoms, which will as certainly determine us.’ It was ‘a Standard which can never fail us’.8 All that was required was a sympathetic empathy with one’s neighbour: ‘that I both do, or refrain from doing (respectively) towards him, all that which (turning the Tables and then consulting my own Heart and Conscience) I should think that Neighbour of mine bound to do, or to refrain from doing towards me in the like case’.9 For Goodman then, the Golden Rule obliged everyone, however exalted or mean their condition; it was clear and binding; its simplicity cut through the complexities pursued by the doctors of conscience and enabled the most basic moral intelligence to make the right decision; above all, its reciprocity, rooted in fellow feeling, evoked a mutuality and equality of obligation generative

The sermon was published as The Duty of a Christian to his Neighbour Considered (1697). (Place of publication is London unless otherwise stated.) Trimnell rose to become Bishop of Norwich and was regarded as a Whig, well liked even by Tories. 7 Ibid., p. 14. 8 John Goodman, The Golden Rule or The Royal Law of Equity Explained (1688), pp. 2, 4, 8. 9 Ibid., pp. 10, 14, 26. Goodman saw the application of the rule as ending wars and bloodshed, lawsuits and religious persecution and the appearance of religion as irrational. Ibid., pp., 38, 46, 48, 50. 6

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of a moral community. Like kindness, the Golden Rule encouraged individuals ‘to assist one another and hence turned human societies into communities’.10 The Golden Rule’s universal applicability, its summative quality, its accessibility and the great social benefits which would flow from its consistent observance underlined its indispensability. But, despite the frequency with which its great esteem and value were proclaimed, and perhaps because it was so commonly evoked, modern historians have tended to overlook it as so much conventional moralising. II

There were, in fact, many golden rules in early modern England. Examples of them can be found in guides to arithmetic, geometry, gunnery, geography, hydraulics, forestry, navigation and linguistics. In law, it sometimes meant the Magna Carta. In general, the Golden Rule could signify mediocrity or the happy mean, but in each of these contexts the Golden Rule conferred a sense of simplication of process and practical applicability. Its value was in reducing the most recondite of problems and the most complex of calculations, be they moral or technical, to manageable proportions. In an ethical sense it operated as a moral and social rule of thumb, bringing the resolution of conscience, otherwise subject to tortuous deliberations – the territory of the casuists11 – within the capacity of all. More than one golden rule could be elicited from the pages of Scripture. In a sermon to the House of Lords on 15 June 1643, for instance, Edmund Calamy gave the title to the warning that from those to whom much had been given, much would be required.12 Equally, not to render evil for good could be cited as the Golden Rule. In 1653, for John Carter, it was the granting of mercy to those in need of it to which the description could be ascribed.13 ‘[C]ondescend to men of low estate’ epitomised the rule for Phineas Fletcher14 and, while subscribing to Mattthew 7:12 as the Golden Rule in his The Law of Freedom, Gerrard Winstanley could also invoke a second version, ‘Let the wise help the foolish and let the strong help the weak.’15 A common feature of these various injunctions was a reciprocity of obligation, an invocation of our social

  Linda Pollock, ‘The Practice of Kindness in Early Modern Society’, P&P 211 (2011), 136–7, 158. 11   For an introduction to the extensive literature on casuistry see Contexts of conscience in early modern Europe 1500–1700, ed. Edward Vallance (Basingstoke, 2004); Conscience and Casuistry in Early Modern Europe, ed. Edmund Leites (Cambridge, 1988). 12   Edmund Calamy, The noble-mans patterne (1643). The textual reference is to Luke 12:48. 13   John Carter, The tomb-stone (1653), p. 125. The textual reference is to Matthew 5:7; see also Proverbs 17:13. 14   Phineas Fletcher, A Father’s Testament (1670), pp. 182–3. The reference is to Romans 12:16. 15   Gerrard Winstanley, The Law of Freedom (1652), pp. 10, 32. The secondary references cited by Winstanley are Psalms 35:10 and Romans 15:1–2. See also The Complete Works of Gerrard 10

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responsibility for others. It was this which made Matthew 7:12 and its virtually identical expression in Luke 6:31 (‘And as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise’) the most commonly recognised form of the Golden Rule in the period and, of the two, Matthew appears most frequently in print and it is the use of this text on which the present chapter focuses. How was this most common form of an apparently simple rule put to use? III

In the face of recession, rising taxation and wartime distress, Samuel Rogers, preaching in Sudbury on 12 May 1643, urged the maintenance of an annual distribution of charitable relief to the poor. It was essential, he argued, ‘In point of equity, because we must do as we would be done by; this is the golden rule of both the Law and the Gospell, given by our Saviour, Matth. 7. 12. this comes home close to the conscience, and is to all men so cleare and convincing, that none can gain-say or finde fault with it; and in this particular we must consider the distressed condition of other men, as if it were our owne.’16 The rule was both practical and universal in its application.17 It summarised all duties towards others and simplified cases of conscience.18 Guidebooks for parents advised following the rule and drilling it into children19 and parents duly obliged. Facing the scaffold, Richard Nelthorp wrote to his children spelling out their duties as Christians. ‘The summe of the whole is, Fear God and keep his Commandments. Do that to all others that you would they should do to you, is the Golden Rule of the Gospel.’20 Likewise, the Earl of Warrington advised his children, ‘Let all your Dealings be measured by the golden Rule of doing to others as you would be done by. For as without this you cannot be a good Christian, so he that is void of it cannot be a truly moral man.’21 The conduct books similarly advised masters to be ever mindful of the rule in their conduct towards servants.22 Indeed, the force of the injunction extended to all relationships. Mariners were encouraged

Winstanley, ed. Thomas N. Corns, Ann Hughes and David Loewenstein, 2 vols (Oxford, 2009), II, pp. 287, 313. 16   Samuel Rogers, The poore’s pension (1644), p. 29. 17   See, for example, Benjamin Canfield, A profitable enquiry into that comprehensive rule of righteousness, do as you would be done by … being a practical discourse on S. Matt. vii. 12. (1679). There was an earlier edition in 1671. See also Thomas Adams, The main principles of Christian religion in 107 short articles or aphorisms (1675); Richard Allestree, The Whole Duty of Man (1700). 18   For example, Joseph Alleine, Divers practical cases of conscience satisfactorily resolved (1672). 19   For example, James Kirkwood, A new family-book … directions to parents and children (1693), pp. 25, 225. 20   Anon., The Dying Speeches … of those who suffered under Lord Chief Justice Jefferys (1689), p. 6. 21   Henry Booth, Earl of Warrington, The Works of and advice to his children … (1694), p. 34. 22   See, for example, William Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties (1622), p. 693.

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to conduct their seaborne relationships in its spirit.23 Slingsby Bethel urged a foreign policy, specifically in relation to the city states of Genoa and Venice, which observed the Golden Rule.24 In a book dedicated to the revival of trade, John Bland suggested that the rules of conduct for honest trade would be instrumental in achieving that end provided they included the Golden Rule. ‘lastly, that we be righteous in all our ways towards God, and in our dealings one with another, observing carefully and strictly that golden Rule, Let us do to every one and for every one, as we would have them do to us and for us, which is the summe of all that can be said or done.’25 Thomas Gouge, in a guide for young men entering trade, similarly suggested that the first and most effective preventative of unfair dealing would be the Golden Rule of Matthew 7:12.26 And on the vexed question of usury, Samuel Shaw suggested that the moral complexities of its discussion could be cut through by the simple application of the rule.27 When discussing relations between the rich minority and the poor majority, or between those who governed and those who rendered obedience, the Golden Rule was frequently invoked. On the one hand, were those who urged the rich to observe the Golden Rule in their treatment of the poor, both to discharge their Christian social obligations and to prevent ‘Hatred, Revenge, Contempt and all other disorderly Practices’.28 On the other hand, radical social reformers noted that, despite the frequency of injunctions to the rich and powerful to observe the Rule, their failure in this regard acted as a justification for the reordering of society. In his dedication to The Law of Freedom. Gerrard Winstanley began his analysis with the question as to why landlords would not practice ‘that Golden Rule, Do unto another … which God, Christ, and Scriptures, hath Enacted for a Law?’ Later in the same work, calling for the abolition of money, he observed that ‘For where money bears all the sway, there is no regard of that golden Rule, Do as you would be done by.’ The consequences were wars and oppression, and that justice was bought and sold.29 The legitimating power of the Golden Rule is perhaps nowhere more vividly illustrated than in the resort to it by both those who would defend the existing social order and those who would overthrow it. So that, for example, at the height of the English Revolution, a defender of tithes argued that those who threatened to take away the income of tithes   George St. Lo, England’s interest, or, A discipline for seamen (1694), p. 37.   Slingsby Bethel, The Interest of princes and states (1680), p. 237. 25   John Bland, Trade revived (1659), p. 57. 26   Thomas Gouge, The young man’s guide through the wilderness of this world (1676), p. 66. For a further example see Richard Steele, The trades-man’s calling (1684), p. 58. 27   Samuel Shaw, The true Christian’s test (1683), p. 349. 28   Joseph Stevens, The whole parable of Dives and Lazarus explain’d and apply’d (1697), p. 38. For another example from the same period, see Edward Fowler, A sermon preached before the Right Honourable the Lord Maior of London (1688), p. 10; idem., A sermon preached before the Queen at White-hall, on Sunday, March 22, 1690/1 (1691), p. 17. 29   See Winstanley, Law of Freedom, pp. 10, 32 and Chapter VI. Complete Works, ed. Corns, Hughes, Loewenstein (eds.), II, pp. 287, 313. 23 24

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collectors ‘forget that golden Rule, of doing as they would be done unto’.30 But the predominant applications of the Rule were to remind those in authority and positions of privilege of their obligations to the weak and subordinate. The substantial number of office holders, who in early modern England exercised (at least nominal) authority over their neighbours were constantly reminded of it. In 1604, those charged with the responsibility for tax assessments and collection in their locality were advised that this should be their key principle. ‘In all Taxations every man should remember this golden rule, To doe as he would be done to.’31 Writing much later in the century about the sufferings of the Quakers, William Gibson advised the magistrates and citizens of the city of Norwich that their work was to apply the Golden Rule of ‘doing as you would be done by’.32 In a not untypical assize sermon preached at Dorchester on 23 July 1629, John Mayo described his text, Matthew 12:7, as ‘a recapitulation of the second table which concernes our duties towards our neighbours, and by our Neighbour, towards all men’. It was, he told his audience, to be applied by judges, office holders, jurors, plaintiffs and defenders. So central and fundamental was the Golden Rule that it should ‘be written upon the tables of our hearts with the point of a Diamond’.33 Trial by jury, for one commentator, could only be defended as long as juries embodied the Golden Rule.34 In 1687, it was argued that, under a Catholic King, it was especially important that all public and private office holders should be guided by it.35 Thomas Stephens warned the magistrates in an assize sermon at Bury St. Edmunds in 1661, that, if the observance of the Golden Rule in the application of their duties fell short, they would be no better than ‘civilized Mahumetans’.36 Not only in relation to the law courts, but in social performance generally, the Golden Rule was a key to justice.37 In 1646, as the first Civil War drew to a close and the problems of settlement loomed, John Musgrave advised reliance on the Golden Rule. It was a ‘Meet-wand’, invaluable in measuring out ‘Justice to rich

  Anon., An Answer to the severall petitions of late exhibited to the High Court of Parliament (1652), p. 10. 31   Charles Gibbon, The Order of equalitie contrived and divulged as a general directorie for common sessements (1604), p. 17. 32   William Gibson, Good Counsel and Advice unto the magistrates and people of Norwich (1676), p. 4. 33   John Mayo, The Universall Principle (1630), pp. 2, 14. 34   Abraham Lawmind, The juries right (1654), p. 14. 35   Anon., How the members of the Church of England ought to behave themselves under a Roman Catholic King (1687), p. 93. 36   Thomas Stephens, Ad magistratum: three sermons preached before the judges of assize at Bury St. Edmunds in the countie of Suffolk (1661), p. 3. 37   For examples, see the writings of Samuel Lee: The joy of faith (1687), p. 148; The great day of judgement (1692), p. 43. 30

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and poor alike’.38 For the layman it could be the encapsulation of equity.39 As John Scot argued, every man had a right to equitable treatment from every man and the Golden Rule should be the guide ensuring this.40 More rhapsodically, for John Warr, the Golden Rule was ‘the beauty of equity stamped upon the soul’.41 Sergeant Thorpe charged the Grand-Jury at the York assizes in March 1648 to set the Golden Rule alongside ‘the Statutes belonging to this nation’ as the complementary rules which ‘(being duly observed) do really promote the Peace and Plenty of this Commonwealth’.42 In court or out of it, Robert Sanderson advised ‘Let that Golden Rule (commended by the wisest heathens as a fundamentall Principle of morall and civill Justice; yea and proposed by our blessed Saviour himself as a full abridgement of the Law and Prophets) be ever in your eye, and ever before your thoughts, to measure out all your actions, and accusations and proceedings therby.’43 Oaths might be seen as representing a special case in the clarification of duties, obligations and rights, of the fabric of justice between individuals and groups, but even here it was necessary to invoke the legitimating power of the Golden Rule. For Robert Hellier the breach of a promissory oath was ‘an absolute contradiction of that golden rule, of doing unto others as we would they should do to us’.44 Defending oaths against the objections of the Quakers, John Gauden likewise invoked the Rule.45 But the crisis of the mid seventeenth century inevitably put oaths under great strain. Writing in the face of that in crisis, Richard Badiley stressed the agonising confusion that could afflict the conscientious in examining their covenanted obligations. ‘Can conscience of covenant keeping

  John Musgrave, A word to the wise (1646), p. 13.   Fabian Philipps, The ancient, legal, fundamental, and necessary rights of courts of justice (1676), p. 305. For early modern links between equity and the Golden Rule see Mark Fortier, The Culture of Equity in Early Modern England (Farnham, 2005), pp. 4, 5, 39, 40, 165, 175, 186: Dennis R. Klinck, Conscience, Equity and the Court of Chancery in Early Modern England (Farnham, 2010), p. 249. Specifically in relation to Leveller notions of equity and the Golden Rule see J. C. Davis, ‘The Levellers and Christianity’ Politics, Religion and the English Civil War, ed. Brian Manning (London, 1973), pp. 228–30, 236. 40   John Scot, The Christian Life, part III. Wherein the great duties of justice. mercy and mortification are fully explained and inforced (1696), p. 13. For the Rule’s links with equity in the influential work of John Calvin see Guenther H. Haas, The Concept of Equity in Calvin’s Ethics (Waterloo, Ontario, 1997), pp. 2–3, 25–6, 49–50, 63, 68–9, 71, 81–3, 85, chap.7, pp. 121, 123–4; for Luther, Zwingli and Bucer see Haas, Concept of Equity, pp. 40–46. 41   John Warr, Administrations Civil and Spiritual (1648) reprinted in A Spark in the Ashes: The Pamphlets of John Warr, ed. Stephen Sedley and Lawrence Kaplan (London, 1992), p. 32. 42   Francis Thorpe, Sergeant Thorpe, judge of assize for the northern circuit, his charge as it was delivered to the grand-jury at York assizes the twentieth of March, 1648 and taken in short writing (York, 1648), title page. Compare a later assize sermon expressing similar sentiments: Anthony Walker, The True Interest of Nations (1697). 43   Robert Sanderson, Fourteen Sermons (1657), p. 133. 44   Henry Hellier, A sermon preached before the University of Oxford, December 4, 1687 (1688), p. 28. 45   John Gauden, A discourse concerning publick oaths (1662). 38 39

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argue for covenant breaking? Or can religion be pleaded for keeping one Article of the covenant by breaking another? Or is the Covenant against it selfe, that he that resolves to keep it must resolve to break it?’ Such confusion could induce moral paralysis, the worst aspect of which was that ‘then I should have lost the golden Rule, Doe as you would be done by’.46 In the same crisis, the future of the King was closely bound up with the significance and vexed interpretation of oaths and the Golden Rule could be seen as cutting either way. Richard Farrar asked those engaged in what were to be the last ditch negotiations between the King and his captors to ‘Remember the Golden Rule (Whatsoever you would that men should do unto you, do that unto them) and I am confident the King shall be glorious, yourselves and the Kingdom happy.’47 But for John Canne, the same rule was to justify the capital trial of the King.48 Having waged war on his people, the King could only expect a reply in kind. But the reciprocities inherent in the Rule, by and large, excluded such extremes. It more commonly underwrote moderation and peace rather than acts of war and violence. In crises like those of 1653 or 1660 it was precisely in the name of moderation that it was summoned.49 Peace and the avoidance of conflict would also be served by the pursuit of moderation in the observance of the Golden Rule.50 ‘If this golden Rule were but observ’d amongst us,’ declared Thomas Jekyll in 1675, ‘ it would secure Peace to the World, and make all men as happy as it is possible for them to be here, we should be full of Goodness and Pitty, a World of Benefactors, a Society of Saints and Angels; and instead of becoming Wolves and Beasts of Prey, we should be as so many Gods to one another.’51 Its indispensability in the pursuit of peace could be illustrated at both local and national levels. Edward Fowler thought that slander, one of the most disruptive features of early modern community life, was ‘perfectly opposite’ to the Rule.52 For John Northleigh, all that was necessary to preserve national

  R[ichard] B[adiley], The sea-men undeceived (1648), pp. 14, 17–8, 22. On oaths generally see Conal Condren, Argument and Authority in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2006); Edward Vallance, Revolutionary England and the National Covenant (Woodbridge, 2005); David Martin Jones, Conscience and Allegiance in Seventeenth-Century England (Rochester, 1999). 47   Richard Farrar, An expedient for the King or King Charls his peace-offering (1648), p. 21. 48   John Canne, The golden rule, or, Justice advanced (1649). 49   For examples see: Anon., The Companions of good consciences: or an appeal to moderation, justice and equity, or righteousnese, peace and love (1653), esp. pp. 7–8; Anon., A Word in due Season to the Ranting Royalists and Rigid Presbyterians (1660). 50   For examples see Walter Craddock, Gospel-libertie (1648); Farrar, An expedient, p. 21. 51   Thomas Jekyll, Peace and love, recommended and perswaded in two sermons (1675) p. 15: see also Jekyll, Popery a great mystery of iniquity proved in a sermon (1681), p. 18. 52   Edward Fowler, The great wickedness, and mischievous effects of slandering (1685), p. 3. See also Fowler, A sermon preached before the Queen (1691), p. 17; idem., A sermon preached before the Right Honourable the Lord Maior of London (1688), p. 10. 46

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peace in the turmoil of 1688 was the application of the Golden Rule.53 It was, in another and earlier version, a precondition of national unity.54 But when unity was shattered by confessional fragmentation and conflict in the 1640s and 50s, the Golden Rule became a key plank – alongside peace and moderation – in building a case for, at least temporary, liberty of conscience.55 Defending Charles Stuart’s offer of liberty of conscience before his restoration, Theophilus Brabourne announced that, ‘It is against that golden Rule of our Saviour, for the Magistrate to punish, or for the people to desire him to punish, any for his Conscience in matters disputable: For Christ said, Whatsoever ye would that men should do [to] you, even so do you to them, Mat. 7. 12.’56 Likewise, William Bray objected to James Harrington’s proposal for a national ministry (which Bray seems to have misunderstood) because the invasion of the conscience of another was against the Golden Rule.57 By the end of the seventeenth century, it was possible to argue that any restraint on the freedom of the press ‘breaks that golden Rule (the Foundation of all Morality) of doing as they would be done unto’.58 But, while the Golden Rule could be used against persecution and restraint of the press, it could also be used to justify both. By it, we should want true religion for others as well as for ourselves, in which case, the Golden Rule could justify ‘the rectifying of consciences’.59 The point here is that the Rule had become such a touchstone for Christian ethics and Christian rationality that it could be left out of neither the case for persecution and censorship nor that against it. Just as writers from many different backgrounds and political persuasions resorted to the Rule, so did those from very different sectarian persuasions. Non-conformists of all descriptions saw their case for toleration as buttressed by it.60 In a sermon preached to the governor, council and deputies of colonial Massachusetts on 3 May 1676, William Hubbard argued that the protection of

  John Northleigh, Parliamentum pacificum, or, The happy union of King & people in an healing Parliament (1688), p. 73. 54   Ralph Venning, The new command renew’d, or Love one another being an endeavour after unity of the spirit (1652), p. 28. 55   For the link between liberty of conscience, freedom of expression and the Rule see Berean True, An antidote against bigotry in religion (1694), p. 62. 56   Theophilus Brabourne, God save the King (1660), p. 7. Cf. Thomas Monck, Sions groans for her distressed (1661), To the Reader; Thomas Parker, A farewel sermon preached in Wake-field, January 1, 1655 (1656), p. 23; R. C., The Conformists Charity to Dissenters (1689), p. 62; William Tomlinson, Innovations of popery in the Church of Rome, calling for repentance and reformation (1689), p. 36. 57   William Bray, A plea for the peoples good old cause (1659), p. 9. See also, Anon., Englands settlement, upon the to solid foundations of the peoples civil and religious liberties (1659), pp. 17–18. 58   Matthew Tindal, A Letter to a member of Parliament, shewing that a restraint on the press is inconsistent with the Protestant religion, and dangerous to the liberties of the nation (1700), pp. 7–8. 59   Anon., Englands Settlement mistaken (1660), p. 24. 60   See, for example, Matthew Hole, A correct copy of some letters written to J. M. (1698), p. 117; James Jones, Nonconformity not inconsistent with loyalty (1684), p. 10. 53

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conscience could only be made secure if the Golden Rule were applied. ‘The rule given by some others, that whatever may consist with the interest of Religion and safety of the Commonwealth, is too indefinite. For if the Civil Rulers will say then it is not safe to allow any to dissent from the publick profession established by Law, what shall become of the weak and infirme, they must of necessity be driven to suffer ship-wrack of their consciences and of their lives and estates, it being impossible that all consciences can quietly submit to the Religion of the state. Doubtless as much tenderness as may be should be used out of pity to the infirmities of mens understanding, seeing in many things we sin or offend all. That golden Rule laid down by our Saviour is of excellent use if it were attended, Alteri ne feceris.’61 A similar argument had been used three decades earlier in regard to the protection of consciences within colonial congregations.62 So it was that Baptists,63 Quakers,64 Fifth Monarchists,65 even Behmenists,66 despite their differences, could share a common appeal to the Golden Rule. Even more striking, as evidence of the Rule’s indispensability, is the fact that anti-separatists also felt it necessary to use the Rule to bolster their case against separatism.67 Failure to conform, as much as persecution of the non-conformist, could be and were depicted as breaches of the Rule. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, Hannah More designed a broadsheet to be ‘hung up in all shops’ with a verse rendition of the Golden Rule to be absorbed by every apprentice. But living by the Rule had also been an ideal for John Lilburne in the mid seventeenth century and for John Locke towards that century’s end.68 Not only was the Rule fundamental, a ‘short but comprehensive Precept’, it was also a guide for life in whatever the circumstances might be.69 For the morally perplexed, its accessibility and simplicity could   William Hubbard, The happiness of a people in the wisdome of their rulers (1676), p. 38.   John Ball, A tryall of the new-church way in New England (1644), p. 76. 63   For example, in John Tombes, An Addition to the Apology for the two treatises concerning infant-baptisme published December 15, 1645 (1652); Henry Adis, A fannaticks mite cast into the Kings treasury being a sermon printed to the King because not preached before the King (1660). 64   For example, in William Gibson, Good counsel and advice unto the magistrates of people of Norwich (1676), p. 4; Edward Beckham, The Quakers challenge made to the Norfolk clergy (1699), p. 22. Quakers were also exhorted to eschew slavery as a breach of the Golden Rule; George Keith, An exhortation & caution to friends concerning buying or keeping of Negroes (1693), p. 2. 65   For example, in John Rogers, Jehar-Sahadvtha: an oyled pillar (1657), p. 17. 66   John Pordage, Theologica mystica (1683), pp. 55–6. 67   For examples see Thomas Long, The character of a separatist, or, Sensuality the ground of separation (1677), p. 76; John Vicars, The schismatick sifted (1646), p. 8–9; John Nalson, The countermine (1677), p. 214. 68   Hannah More, The Apprentice’s Monitor; or, INDENTURES IN VERSE, Shewing what they are bound to do (1795); John Lilburne, The just defence of John Lilburne (1653), p. 6; John Locke, The reasonableness of Christianity (1695), p. 219. 69 William Cave, Primitive Christianity (1675); John Dolben, A Sermon preached before His Majesty on Good Friday at Whitehall, March 24, 1664/5 (1665), p.20; Francis Roberts, Mysterium & medulla Bibliorum; the mysterie and marrow of the Bible (1657), p. 449; Ralph Robinson, Christ 61

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remove all doubts.70 The simplest and least equipped of citizens could not use their ignorance in civil morality as an excuse, for the duties of an honest man towards his neighbour were readily deducible ‘by that Golden Rule, of doing as they would be done by’.71 It was that ready reckoner which brought Christian social morality within the reach of everyone, the ‘way of wisdome’ for men of all social conditions.72 Though some might bemoan how seldom and how few observed it,73 the primacy of the Golden Rule remained virtually unchallenged. It retained its position as a universally accepted touchstone of Christian social conduct. This, its universal reach, its simplicity and its applicability in all conceivable situations meant that it was an indispensable legitimating benchmark for those wishing to reach the widest possible audience in defence of any political or social course of action. IV

The Golden Rule was then both a guide and a spur to improved performance by every member of the community. To default on it was, as the Earl of Warrington pointed out, not only to cease to be a Christian but to lose any status as a moral person. In a nominally Christian society, these were powerful claims on the attention and responsiveness of those aspiring to be members of, at best, a Christian community and, at minimum, a merely moral society. Such a community was here envisaged as a web of mutual, moral obligations conferring the duty to measure my response to each and every other member of it by my own expectations and aspirations, but equally to anticipate that they should do the same in respect of me. In a society without any considerable, sustainable, coercive or bureaucratic capacity, the shared ideal of such mutual obligation, one where much that was done was done by negotiation, provided vital leverage. The Rule’s power as a force for social morality and cohesion was, then, dependent on a mutuality of obligation and regard. Rather than top-down social ethics in which the subordinate were instructed in their duties, the Golden Rule required some calculation by all members of society in which they were each called upon to envisage treatment satisfactory to themselves in order that they could act in those terms towards others. There was, in this sense, an equality of moral calculation and agency and on, the basis of that mutuality, negotiation could be entered into on terms other than ones determined solely by those in positions the perfect pattern of a Christian’s practice (1658), p. 218; R. Sherlock, The practical Christian (1677), pp. 57–8. 70   Richard Steele, A plain discourse upon uprightness (1672), p. 104. See also Steele, The tradesmans calling (1684), p. 58. 71   James Tyrell, A brief disquisition of the law of nature (1692), p. 294. 72   Thomas Taylor, Circumspect walking (1631), p. 125. 73   For example, Richard Younge, A Christian library, or, A pleasant and plentiful paradise of practical divinity (1660), p. 2.

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of authority. However unequal in status, all members of the community were required to have regard to the needs of others in terms which would have been acceptable to themselves. Negotiation could ideally reinforce mutuality and establish acceptable terms in regard to sets of potentially collaborative and mutually regarding aspirations. Viewed from the perspective of the Golden Rule as a collective ethic there was accordingly an alternative to a ‘society’ of warring antagonisms (be they based on class, regional allegiance or confessional identity); an alternative which drew the powerful to a more self-reflective consideration of the subordinate, as well as to claims by the latter. Given the constraints of space, this chapter can do no more than draw attention to this discourse, noting its relationship to a contemporary context of negotiated power,74 widely dispersed authority,75 and a sense of informed political engagement by a much wider spectrum of agents or participants76 than was once assumed to be the case. But in conclusion, I want to observe the Rule’s reach by noting its place in the thought of a political philosopher often regarded as disengaged from, if not contemptuous of, popular discourse – Thomas Hobbes. V

At first glance, Hobbes seems far removed from the discursive world we have been examining. A proponent of an elite political discourse, suspicious of expressions of popular culture, he is commonly seen as recommending a non-negotiable ‘absolutism’, a sovereignty which brooks no debate, let alone protest. His theory is usually portrayed as rooted in egotism, the overriding natural right of each individual to self-preservation, rather than in a natural mutuality of obligation. All of this appears poles apart from the demands and centrality of the Golden Rule. Yet some modern commentators have been at pains to question this categorisation of Hobbes’s thought. A starting point is the key problem of how Hobbesian natural man could conceive of a mutuality of obligation which sanctioned his entering into the covenant through which he and others might escape the state of nature. As Kinch Hoekstra has argued, ‘If others are similarly disposed, a kind of altruism could arise as the best way to ensure one’s self-interest

  Negotiating Power in Early Modern Society, ed. Braddick and Walter.   See, for example, Patrick Collinson, ‘The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I’, Elizabethan Essays, ed. Collinson (London, 1994) pp. 31–57; Michael J. Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England, c. 1550–1700 (Cambridge, 2000); Steve Hindle, The State and Social Change in Early Modern England, c. 1550–1640 (Basingstoke, 2000); Mark Goldie, ‘The Unacknowledged Republic: Officeholding in Early Modern England’, The Politics of the Excluded, c.1500–1850, ed. Tim Harris (Basingstoke, 2001), pp. 153–94; The Monarchical Republic of Early Modern England, ed. John F. McDiarmid (Aldershot. 2007). 76   For examples, Walter, ‘The English people and the English Revolution Revisited’, pp. 171–3; Walter, Crowds and Popular Politics; Walter, Understanding Popular Violence. 74

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in the long-run.’77 For Tom Sorrell it is in this connection that, in Chapter XIV of Leviathan, Hobbes has to come to terms with the Golden Rule. Hobbes’s second law of nature can almost be read as a variation of that rule, fenced about with caution and calculation: ‘That a man be willing, when others are so too, as far forth, as for peace, and the defence of himself he shall think it necessary, to lay down the right to all things, and to be contented with as much liberty against other men, as he would allow other men against himself.’78 A common response to the question as to what holds the laws of nature together for Hobbes, is that all of them are ways of seeking peace. But as Sorrell points out this is not the answer that Hobbes himself gives in Chapter XIV of Leviathan, ‘Instead he invokes the biblical Golden Rule: ‘Do not that to another, which thou wouldst not have done to thyself.’79 Noel Malcolm has, in addition, emphasised the pivotal importance of consent in Hobbes.80 The sovereign not only ‘bears the collective ‘person’ of his (or its) subjects’ but does so and continues to do so ‘as a consequence of the rational acts of the will of the people’.81 There were in Hobbes, according to Malcolm, two different kinds of obedience; the rational obedience of those who understood the logical implications of having authorised a sovereign over them and the passionate obedience of ‘those who are in “awe” or “terror” of the sovereign’s power’.82 We might take this a step further by noting that the first of these had to be made comprehensible and applicable for the non-logicians; while for the latter, the sovereign would not have force enough to induce awe or terror unless sufficient of his subjects subscribe to the rationality/morality of submission. Alongside the Hobbesian sovereign, whose authority is based on absolute power, we have then to set the sovereign who is virtually dependent on consensus and consent for, as Malcolm argues, consent ‘was what constituted the very authority of the sovereign’.83 What might this have to do with Hobbes and the Golden Rule? First, we might note some considerable modifications of Hobbesian egotism in the direction of mutuality of consideration and reciprocity of obligation. For example, in The

77   Kinch Hoekstra, ‘Hobbes on the Natural Condition of Mankind’, The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes’s Leviathan, ed. Patricia Springborg (Cambridge, 2007), p. 115; see also pp. 117, and 121. 78   Tom Sorrell, ‘Hobbes’s Moral Philosophy’, p.129. The references are to Leviathan XIV, 5, 64–5, 80. 79   Sorrell, ‘Hobbes’s Moral Philosophy’, p. 132. See Leviathan, XV, 35, 78–9, 99. (Hobbes also emphasises that the Rule contracts the laws of nature ‘into one easie sum, intelligible, even to the meanest capacity’, Leviathan, XV, 79.) 80   Reason of State: Propaganda and the Thirty Years War: An Unknown Translation by Thomas Hobbes, ed. Noel Malcolm (Oxford, 2010), pp. 120–1, cf. p. 104. 81   Noel Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford, 2002), pp. 201, 228. 82   Ibid., p. 228. 83   Reason of State, ed. Malcolm, pp. 120–21. Compare Behemoth or The Long Parliament by Thomas Hobbes, ed. Ferdinand Tonnies (London, 1969), p. 16. ‘For the power of the mighty hath no foundation but in the opinion and belief of the people.’

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Elements of the Law, Hobbes notes that while I might have a right to all things so does everyone else. The law of nature requires me to make peace and to this end to join with every other man in divesting myself of my natural right to all things. That law further requires, ‘That no man suffer him, that thus trusteth to his charity, or good affection towards him, to be in the worst estate for his trusting.’84 From trust we move to mutual help and accommodation, the foreswearing of revenge and ‘That every man acknowledge other for his equal’, or, ‘Whatsoever right any man requireth to retain he allow every other man to retain the same.’85 We are moving close to the territory of the Golden Rule, but having canvassed the laws of nature, Hobbes pauses to acknowledge that they may appear, in their complexity and subtlety, difficult to interpret and apply but there is an easy rule to know when anything is against the law of nature. ‘That a man imagine himself in the place of the party with whom he hath to do, and reciprocally him in his.’ ‘And this rule is very well known and expressed by this old dictate, Quod tibi fieri non vis, alteri ne feceris.’86 This is close to both the reciprocity envisaged in the Golden Rule and to its capacity as a ready reckoner available for those unequipped to negotiate the complexities of more abstruse ethical calculation. And a few pages further on we are given familiar scriptural confirmation. ‘Further, the rule of men concerning the law of nature, Quod tibi fieri non vis, alteri ne feceris, is confirmed by the like Matth. 7. 12: Whatsoever therefore you would have men do unto you, that do you unto them; for this is the law and the prophets.’87 In De Cive, Hobbes states much of this even more directly. ‘The fourth precept of nature is that everyone should be considerate [commodus] of others.’ And the ninth dictate of natural law rules that ‘whatever rights each claims for himself, he must allow to everyone else’. But all of the ‘natural precepts’ are ‘derived from just one dictate of reason’. ‘Someone will perhaps say, on seeing this, that the deduction of these laws is so difficult that they cannot be expected to become widely known, and hence are not obligatory.’ Hobbes’s answer: ‘The only rule he needs is that when he is in doubt whether what he proposes to do to someone is in accordance with natural right [jus] or not, he should think himself into the other person’s place. Immediately the passions which were once prompting him to act will now discourage him from action, as if transferred to the other pan of the scales. This rule is not only easy; it has long been famous in the words: Do not do to another what you would not have done to you.’88

  Thomas Hobbes: The Elements of Law Natural and Politic, ed. Ferdinand Tonnies (London, 1968), pp. 72, 75, 84. 85   Ibid., pp. 85, 86, 88, 89. See also p. 91. 86   Ibid., p. 92. The Latin translates roughly as ‘What you do not want done to you, do not do to another’ – a significantly negative take on the Golden Rule. 87   Ibid., pp. 97–8 and chap. 18 generally. 88   Thomas Hobbes: On the Citizen, ed. and trans. Richard Tuck and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 48, 50 53. 84

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The fact that Hobbes had recourse to that ‘famous’ rule which we have been scrutinising in this chapter is significant in a number of respects. It testifies to the ubiquity of the Golden Rule and is, at the very least, an acknowledgement of its broad appeal. For a political theory more dependent on popular consent and complicity and the acknowledgement of mutual obligation than has been commonly recognised, it offered both access to a more popular political culture and a means whereby the least well equipped could recognise those obligations and participate rationally in the construction of a peaceable and stable society. Above all, it tapped into a powerful strand in the fabric of the early modern English public transcript. If popular and public discourse could appear like a chorus commending, recommending and using the Golden Rule, it was not a chorus from which Hobbes detached himself but one with which he engaged.

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10 Religion, anti-popery and corruption1 Mark Knights

This chapter examines the rhetoric of corruption. It argues that the language of corruption in early modern England was religiously inflected; that anti-popery provided an important idiom for the articulation of ideas about corruption; and that this process was political, excluding some from exercising power as well as providing a powerful weapon against enemies, thereby providing a means of delegitimising their authority or reputation.2 Corruption and anti-corruption thus had agency, though the latter was something of a double-edged sword: attacks on corruption could provide powerful legitimation for those who made them, especially when wielded against office holders, but allegations of anti-corruption could also be dangerous when deployed back on those making them. Anti-corruption was thus, like the anti-popery it often incorporated, an enabling and powerful language that had political motivations and consequences. ‘Corruption’ was not a consensual and static category, but rather a contested and fluid one which easily became part of struggles between Catholics and Protestants and also between individuals or partisans contending for power. Corruption was thus one of the many early modern keywords available to both high and low as a means to blacken, castigate, condemn and delegitimise. The chapter therefore builds on John Walter’s insights about legitimation and delegitimation strategies, and about the important role of religion in these. The first section examines anti-popery as a discourse that united many of the different ways of thinking about corruption that prevailed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The second half explores how this discourse was used in practice, underlining not only the power that anti-corruption had to bring down

1   I am grateful to David Chan Smith, Peter Marshall, Adam Morton and Phil Withington for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this chapter. 2   ‘As a form of corruption, grounded in human sin and the fleshly lusts and impulses of a fallen humanity, popery could do duty as a symbol for all sorts of corruption, all sorts of threats to the commonweal’: Peter Lake and Michael Questier, ‘Puritans, Papists, and the “Public Sphere” in Early Modern England: The Edmund Campion Affair in Context’, JMH 72:3 (2000), 587–627, p. 591.

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opponents, but also the risks in using the rhetoric of corruption because it was a weapon that was very difficult to control and monopolise. These themes have a broader significance in relation to recent social science research into the role of religion in shaping perceptions of corruption.3 Building on Weber’s classic thesis about a link between Protestantism and capitalism, such work has explored a possible link between religion and corruption in the modern world. At least six studies have found a correlation between Protestantism and low levels of corruption, and between Catholicism and high levels of it. Robert Putnam has suggested that the Catholic Church had an adverse effect on trust, because vertical bonds of clerical authority undermined horizontal bonds of fellowship.4 David Landes has argued that during the period of economic take-off in Protestant countries, Catholic and Muslim countries acquired cultures of intolerance, xenophobia, and closed-mindedness that retarded their development.5 Rafael La Porta’s team found that Catholic and Muslim countries ‘exhibit inferior government performance’ (‘good government’ here being government which fosters economic development) and suggests the link may exist because religions impose a moral cost on corrupt behaviour and because Protestantism in particular is less hierarchical than other religions.6 Daniel Treisman replicated the finding that countries with a Protestant tradition were perceived as less corrupt, and suggested that this may be due to legal culture, tolerance of challenges to authority, strong individualism, higher economic growth and a separation of Church and state. He also concluded that historical cultures remain important in explaining modern indices of corruption.7 Similarly, Martin Paldam argued that some religions, such as Catholicism and Islam, are perceived as more corrupt than Protestant ones.8 Following this line of argument, Johann Lambsdorff speculated that Protestants were less embedded in social networks that facilitated corrupt behaviour and that they might be more amenable to the

3   Laura Underkuffler argues that corruption’s defining characteristic is its ‘all-consuming evil’, that the ‘religious roots’ of it are discernible today, and that ‘there must be an alternative moral and ethical system which is aggressively advocated’, though she does not make an explicit link with any one religious tradition: Underkuffler, Captured by Evil: The Idea of Corruption in Law (New Haven, 2013), pp. 63–4, 101–2, 243. 4   Robert Putnam, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton, 1993), p. 107. 5   David Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (New York, 1998). 6   Rafael La Porta et al., ‘Trust in Large Organizations,’ American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings 87 (1997), 333–8; La Porta et al., ‘The Quality of Government’, Journal of Law, Economics and Organization 15:1 (1999), 222–79. 7   Daniel Treisman, ‘The Causes of Corruption: A Cross-National Study’, Journal of Public Economics 76:3 (2000), 399–457. Cf. Seymour Martin Lipset and Gabriel Salman Lenz, ‘Corruption, Culture, and Markets’, Culture Matters, ed. Lawrence E. Harrison and Samuel P. Huntington (New York, 2000), pp. 112–24, at p. 112. 8   Martin Paldam, ‘Corruption and Religion. Adding to the Economic Model’, Kykios 54:2/3 (2000), 383–414.

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establishment of ‘more procedurally and legally oriented institutions which in turn help to counter corruption’.9 Others in the social sciences, however, have been less convinced by the correlation, pointing out the weakness of the data and categories, and of the correlations found. Douglas Beets argued that while there is a correlation between perception indices of corruption and the type of religion – confirming that corruption is perceived to be highest where Muslim and Hindu populations were in a majority, and more moderate in Buddhist and Christian countries – it is also the case that citizens of nations with relatively low levels of corruption were also those which, judging from surveys of ‘values’, did not consider religion to be particularly important.10 Weaver and Agle’s summary of the literature found inconsistent conclusions about the relationship11 and Heather Marquette has been even more sceptical, noting that Pippa Norris and Ronald Ingleheart’s study contradicts Paldam and Beets: ‘Any argument that today Protestant societies display higher ethical standards that may be conducive to business confidence and good governance is not supported by this analysis’.12 Marquette instead finds that: there is little evidence to suggest that the religious reject behaviour that is ‘anti-social’ any more than the non-religious. Indeed, there is little evidence to suggest that religion, in terms of religious content, impacts upon individuals’ attitudes to public morality. Membership of a religious community that rejects behaviour seen as being ‘corrupt’ seems more likely to have an impact, but a lot depends upon whether members of the community are encouraged to use religious principles to think through moral issues, or to interpret religious teachings literally.13

Marquette also concluded, from interview research, ‘that religion may have some impact on attitudes towards corruption but is also likely to have little impact on actual corrupt behaviour’. In other words, religion shapes perceptions rather than behaviour. The social science literature, therefore, suggests a possible link between types of religious faith and perceptions of corruption in the modern era, but the data and categorisations used are often very problematic and insensitive to a nuanced understanding of the problem, and there has been more focus on the intrinsic nature of Protestantism than on how Protestant perceptions might be shaped

  Johann Lambsdorff, ‘How Confidence Facilitates Illegal Transactions: an Empirical Approach’, American Journal of Economics and Sociology 61 (2002), 829–53, at p. 843. 10   S. D. Beets, ‘International Corruption and Religion: an Empirical Examination’, Journal of Global Ethics 3 (2007), 69–85. 11   G. R. Weaver and B. R. Agle, ‘Religiosity and Ethical Behavior in Organizations: a Symbolic Interactionist Perspective’, Academy of Management Review 27:1 (2002), 77–98. 12   Pippa Norris and Ronald Ingleheart, Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide (Cambridge, 2004), p. 172. 13   Heather Marquette, ‘Corruption, Religion and Moral Development’, Religions and Development Working Paper 42 (2010), 1, available online at 9 

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by hostility to other faiths. Looking at what religion is ‘dominant’ in a country, as many of these studies do, tells us little about those tensions which were, and perhaps still are, extremely important in shaping perceptions. This chapter argues that religion and perceptions of corruption were indeed linked, in the sense that Protestant hostility to Catholicism was an important factor in shaping outlooks about corruption. This suggests that modern perceptions are also unlikely to be derived solely from the precepts and teachings of one faith but also stem from its antipathies and tensions with rival systems of belief. The following analysis also suggests that modern perceptions have deep historical roots and that some of the sociological literature may itself have been shaped by Protestant or Protestantised ways of seeing and thinking about corruption. A dialogue between past and present, and between history and cognate subjects, also seems an apt tribute to John Walter’s work. The concept of negotiated power that he and Mike Braddick developed owed much to James C. Scott’s anthropological observations about public and hidden transcripts.14 The work by Scott that is relevant for the discussion here is his earlier Comparative Political Corruption (1972). Looking at early Stuart England in the context of developing countries such as Thailand and India, Scott made a case that practices later stigmatised as corrupt might be labelled ‘proto-corruption’, a concept that he believed enables comparative study across time and space. Scott also suggested that corruption was, and remains, a process of informal and unfair influence over those with authority that excludes some from wielding power: corruption is political. Even more relevant to John’s work is the theme of anti-popery. Recognising the strength of confessional politics and popular iconoclasm, John has been sensitive to religious factors and fostered productive discussions across the sub-disciplinary divides between political, social and religious history.15 An intrinsic part of the story he told about the Stour Valley riots in 1642, anti-popery was also an essential part of the popular Parliamentarianism analysed in Understanding Popular Violence.16 Walter has stressed how anti-popery ‘provided the basic language of political analysis’ in popular culture and shaped ‘the

  Negotiating Power in Early Modern Society: Order, Hierarchy and Subordination in Britain and Ireland (Cambridge, 2001); James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance (New Haven, 2001). 15   This helped to make him an ideal participant in our BA-funded project to investigate how the term ‘commonwealth’ was used in early modern Britain. Early Modern Research Group, ‘Towards a Social and Cultural History of Keywords and Concepts’, The History of Political Thought 31:3 (2010), 427–48; ‘Commonwealth: The Social, Cultural and Conceptual Contexts of an Early Modern Keyword’, HJ 54:3 (2011), 659–87. The imagined purity of the commonwealth was, of course, the reverse of the corruption on which I focus here, so the two projects are closely connected. 16   John Walter, ‘Anti-Popery and the Stour Valley Riots of 1642’, Religious Dissent in East Anglia, ed. David Chadd (Norwich, 1996), pp. 121–40; and Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution: The Colchester Plunderers (Cambridge, 1999). 14

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popular vocabulary for the articulation of protest’.17 This chapter takes the vocabulary of anti-popery seriously and suggests that it was important for how Protestant Britons thought about and condemned corruption. The first section argues that in early modernity corruption was a religious term, related to sin, and that anti-popery brought together the word’s wider political, legal, fiscal and moral meanings, making it a powerful, and adaptable, weapon to use against enemies. The Catholic Church was seen by Protestants as an intrinsically corrupt and corrupting institution. The second section of the chapter explores how anti-­ popery’s association with corruption was exploited in practice against Catholics, by crypto-catholics against Protestants, and also, as Protestantism fractured, against rival groups within Protestantism. The charge of anti-popery in association with corruption allegations also became common in highly politicised attacks on a variety of office holders until the late seventeenth century, when some of the power of the rhetoric began to ebb. The chapter concludes by suggesting that despite the growing importance of more secular notions of corruption, its religious connotations, and its association with popery, continued, and perhaps continues, to have an enduring legacy. I

The word corruption was, in early modern Britain, suffused with religious meaning and this religious dimension shaped how Britons thought about what constituted corruption. Linguistic analysis shows that the most common context in which the word was used was religious discourse, in which it meant either original sin or man’s own enacted sin. Corruption had a predominantly theological meaning and Protestants used sin and corruption as almost interchangeable terms, believing that man was naturally sinful and therefore naturally corrupt. Thus Thomas Achelly’s late-sixteenth-century model godly prayer included the recognition that ‘I am but meere corruption because by reason of oure naturall

  Understanding Popular Violence, 319. See also Peter Lake, ‘Anti-Popery: The Structure of a Prejudice’, Conflict in Early Stuart England: Studies in Religion and Politics, 1603–1642, ed. Richard Cust and Ann Hughes (London, 1989), pp. 72–106; Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600–1640 (Cambridge, 2002); Michael Questier, ‘Practical Antipapisty during the Reign of Elizabeth I’, JBS 36 (1997), 371–96; Lake and Questier, ‘Puritans, Papists’; Robin Clifton, ‘The Popular Fear of Catholics during the English Revolution’, P&P 52 (1971), 23–55; Clifton, ‘Fear of Popery’, The Origins of the English Civil War, ed. Conrad Russell (London, 1973), pp. 144–67; Caroline Hibbard, Charles I and the Popish Plot (Chapel Hill, 1983); John Miller, Popery and Politics 1660–1688 (Cambridge, 1994); Michael J. Braddick, ‘Prayer Book and Protestation: Anti-Popery, Anti-Puritanism and the Outbreak of the English Civil War’, England’s Wars of Religion Revisited, ed. Charles Prior and Glenn Burgess (Farnham, 2011), pp. 125–45; Jeffrey Collins, ‘Restoration Anti-Catholicism: A Prejudice in Motion’, in Prior and Burgess, Wars of Religion Revisited, pp. 281–306.

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corruption, which we haue successiuely receued, since the fall of oure great Grandfather Adam, we are all naturally bente and inclined to goe astray.’18 Man was, wrote one godly writer in 1595, ‘a very huge lumpe of horrible corruption’.19 ‘The corruption of the world’ began, Henry Ainsworth noted in 1627, in the garden of Eden when the serpent tempted man to disobedience and ‘Native corruption, which wee commonly call originall, is that sinne, which man draweth with him from his first origine, or beginning’.20 Thomas Adams concurred: ‘The sinfulness of that estate whereunto man fell, consists in the guilt of Adams first sin, the want of original righteousness, and the corruption of his whole nature, which is commonly called original sin, together with all actual transgressions, which proceed from it … corruption of nature is the fountain of all manner of sin, both in thought, word, and deed, therefore it is called original sin.’21 Another late-seventeenth-century writer, citing ‘Divines’, echoed this: ‘Original Corruption is Conveyed unto us in our first Conception by that very substance whereof we are made.’22 Baptism was thus necessary because children were ‘inwardly infected and defiled with Sin and Corruption’.23 Joseph Alleine summarised these ideas in a catechistical dialogue: Q. Is mans nature corrupted? A. Yes. Q. How much of his nature? A. His whole nature. Q What is he all over defiled, and corrupted in every part, and in every faculty of soul, and body? A. Yes. Q. By what is man so universally corrupted? A. By Original sin.24

Alleine thus concluded that ‘A state of sin, is a state of corruption.’25 Corruption, for Alleine, was something against which the good Protestant had continually to struggle: ‘Carnal affections and corruptions’ were everywhere, tempting men to commit sin and so had to be resisted.26 The Presbyterian leader Richard Baxter agreed: of the evil forces working on a person ‘our inward Corruption [is] the 18   Thomas Achelley, The Key of Knovvledge Contayning Sundry Godly Prayers and Meditations [?1572], p. 32. 19   ?T. Scarlet, In the name of Almightie God [?1595], 1 sheet. Cf. ‘Originall synne then is a fulle corruption of the whole nature of man the which corruption is proceded from Adam into all his rase’, A Briefe and Piththie Summe of the Christian Faith (?1565), Théodore de Bèze (trans. By R. F.), unpag. ‘The 3 poynt’, article 15. 20  Henry Ainsworth, The Orthodox Foundation of Religion (1641), p. 31. 21   Thomas Adams, The Main Principles of Christian Religion (1675), p. 31–2. 22  Anon, God’s Judgments against Whoring (1697), p. 41. 23  Anon, The Grounds of Infant-baptism Briefly Explained (1693), p. 2.

  Joseph Alleine, A Most Familiar Explanation of the Assemblies Shorter Catechism (1674), p. 22.  Alleine, Remaines of that Excellent Minister of Jesus Christ, Mr. Joseph Alleine (1674), p. 304. 26   Theodosia Alleine, The Life & Death of Mr. Joseph Alleine (1672), p. 150. 24

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most busie and diligent of all: Whatever we are about, it is still resisting us; depraving our duties, perverting our thoughts, dulling our Affections to good, exciting them to evil.’27 Resistance to corruption was nevertheless difficult for two reasons. First, the devil tempted man. As Thomas Adams put it, ‘The Deuill is herein a Seedesman, but he sowes corrupt seede; that infects and poysons the heart, which receiues it.’28 Indeed, the devil was tireless in his corrupting cause: ‘Hee would be loath that the lustfull eye should want a Harlot, the corrupt Officer a bribe, the Papist an Image, the Vsurer a Morgage, the theefe a bootie.’29 Second, the struggle against corruption was difficult because, as William Attersol remarked, the corrupt man only discerned his own corruption through the grace of God: ‘For, we feele no corruption by corruption, nor sinne by sinne, … but we feele sinne and perceiue corruption in vs by a contrary grace of Gods spirit. The lesser and smaller measure of grace we have, the lesser is our feeling: and the more grace we have the more quick we are in feeling of corruption.’ This was ‘the reason, that many have no light of sinne, no feeling of their corruption’. The godly Protestant thus had to work doubly hard, with God’s grace, against his own corruption.30 ‘This corruption of our nature that hath taken hold on all mankind (for there is none that doth good no not one) must be mortified.’ ‘Repentance therefore consisteth in … suppressing the corruptions of nature in a purpose to obey God.’31 All this had an effect on how Protestants saw the world around them. Aware of their own inner corruption, Protestants built on traditional notions that a worldly life was further corrupting of the attempt to live a godly life and believed they had to be watchful against anything that would prejudice the salvation they sought. Aware of being corrupt within, Protestants had to strive harder for purity; they had to be militant against corruption in spiritual and temporal affairs. Sanctification and ‘righteousness’ necessitated a struggle against corruption in all its forms. We can show, using powerful digital tools, the religious meanings of ‘corruption’ quantitatively as well as qualitatively. The Text Creation Partnership has now transcribed over 44,000 texts published before 1700; and a group of corpus linguists at Lancaster have fed these into a database of almost 1.2 billion words.32 Analyses of the latter can reveal which words are commonly found next to or near ‘corruption’: the most common pairings are ‘corrupt nature’ and ‘natural corruption’ with ‘original corruption’ not far behind. Other common pairings are ‘corrupt humours’, ‘corrupt affections’, ‘corrupt minds’, all of which

  Richard Baxter, The Saints Everlasting Rest (1650), p. 352.   Thomas Adams, The Deuills Banket Described in Foure Sermons (1614), p. 115. 29   Ibid., p. 117. 30   William Attersoll, The Badges of Christianity (1606), p. 62 31   Ibid., p. 85. This occurred in a section attacking ‘popish penance’. 32   https://cqpweb.lancs.ac.uk/. I am very grateful to the Lancaster team for granting me access to the database. 27

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again suggest moral failings and if we look at words slightly further away from our keyword, but within the same sentence, we find that ‘flesh’, ‘lusts’ and ‘depraved’ are similarly important. We can contrast this with the much more secular pairings after 1700 when the earlier religiously inflected phrases declined and made way for new ones, such as ‘system of corruption’, ‘corrupt system’ and ‘political corruption’.33 All of these latter phrases had hardly been used at all prior to 1760. This more secularising trend may also explain why the overall frequency of the word corruption rose (in proportion to total output) in the period 1625–75, but thereafter began to decline. The language of corruption was, of course, much broader than sin and the term was used in a variety of other ways in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. One was legal, denoting justice corrupted by bribes paid to judges;34 another was political, meaning the corruptions of forms of government and the decay of the polity;35 a third was sexual, equating corruption with immorality, debauchery and effeminacy;36 yet another was economic, castigating illegitimate gifts or usury;37 and there was also a literary and intellectual understanding of corruption which identified the corrosive effects of deliberate additions to, omissions from, or mistranslation of texts as well as the perverting consequences of corrupt ideas.38 Corruption was also used widely in medical discourse, as a way of talking about disease and bodily impurity – which, in turn, became a metaphor for describing both religious and political decay.39 Protestants, in choosing to deploy the language of corruption in any context, were thus deliberately invoking a term that had a very wide range of connotations. Yet this

  We do not have such sensitive data for the eighteenth century as for the pre–1700 period, but Google Ngrams can be suggestive. 34   John Noonan, Bribes (New York, 1984). 35   Bruce Buchan and Lisa Hill, An Intellectual History of Political Corruption (Basingstoke, 2014); J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton, 1975); Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1985). 36   David Hayton, ‘Moral Reform and Country Politics in the Late Seventeenth-Century House of Commons’, P&P 128:1 (1990), 48–89; Martin Ingram, ‘Reformation of Manners in Early Modern England’, The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England, ed. Paul Griffiths, Adam Fox and Steve Hindle, pp. 47–88. 37   Benjamin Nelson, The Idea of Usury: From Tribal Brotherhood to Universal Otherhood (Chicago, 1949, 1969); David Hawkes, The Culture of Usury in Renaissance England (Basingstoke, 2010); Laurence Fontaine, The Moral Economy: Poverty, Credit and Trust in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge 2014, first printed in France 2008), especially chap. 7. 38   Some of this is explored in The Transmission of Culture in Early Modern Europe, ed. Anthony Grafton and Ann Blair (Philadelphia, 2010). For an example of the allegation that papists corrupted scripture see Thomas James, A Treatise of the Corruption of Scripture, Councils, and Fathers, by the Prelats, Pastors, and Pillars of the Church of Rome, for Maintenance of Popery (1688). 39   Margaret Healy, Fictions of Disease in Early Modern England: Bodies, Plagues, and Politics (New York, 2001); Bianca Ryan-Lopez, ‘Corruption and Infected Sin: The Elizabethan Rhetoric of Decay’ (Unpublished PhD diss, UCLA, 2009). 33

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broad range of meanings found a common embodiment in Protestant notions of popery. The Pope was an unjust judge and injustice was synonymous with his Church;40 popery was the scarlet whore of Babylon, whose debaucheries were manifold;41 his governance was worldly and his Church a perversion of the original purity of Church government; popery was a grasping religion, interested in money and power rather than spiritual salvation; and it corrupted the purity of the Bible with the man-made teachings of the Church, while simultaneously corrupting lay minds with superstition and ignorance.42 Popery thus fused together religious, political, legal, fiscal and moral meanings, making anti-popery a powerful, and adaptable, weapon that was capable of combining different dimensions of ‘corruption’. The idea of a corrupt Church had a long genesis, and can be found in late medieval critiques, but it was greatly sharpened by the rupture with Rome which came to be predicated on the notion of a Catholicism so corrupt in so many different ways that it was necessary to establish a new, or renewed, purer faith and institution. Popery embodied idolatry (corruption of religion) and usurpation (corruption of power and authority). Popery – a pollution of both doctrine and Church authority – represented the ‘other’ against which Protestantism identified itself and hence anything seen as corrupt was also seen as popish. Protestant understanding of the word corruption was thus not only the result of a positive engagement with Reformation theology’s stress on the innate sinfulness of fallen man, but was also sharpened by the capacity of anti-popery to intertwine allegations of judicial, political, sexual, economic, literary and intellectual corruption. Examples of this process of intertwining abound, and are particularly interesting in showing how economic connotations became fused with religious dimensions of corruption. A graphic satire of 1580 depicted the tree of popish error being nourished by the personification of ‘The Worlde’ who empties a sack of gold into its roots. On the other side the personification of ‘Ignorance’ waters them. Interwined in the roots is Judas, with a bag of money.43 In this image, then, worldly avarice fed the roots of ignorance and superstition. Similarly, The Common Weales Canker Wormes, or the Locusts both of Church and State (c.1625, 1675) depicted greed and fraud on one side of a chain of miscreants (all heading for hell), and popery and deceit on the other.44 The

  Joseph Hall, The True Peace–maker (1624), passim.   Frances Dolan, Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender and Seventeenth-Century Print Culture (Ithaca, 1999); Thomas Taylor, A Mappe of Rome (1620), 10. 42   John Williams, Christianity abused by the Church of Rome, and Popery shewed to be a Corruption of it (1679); John Barker, Popery the Great Corruption of Christianity (1735); Zachary Grey, Popery in its Proper Colours: or, some of the Grossest Fopperies and Corruptions of the Church of Rome (1745). 43   British Museum 1916,0212.2, ‘The tree of the papacy’, c.1580, described in Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety 1550–1640 (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 150–4. 44   The print is discussed by Adam Morton, ‘A Product of Confession or Corruption? The Common Weales Canker Wormes (c.1625) and the Progress of Sin in Early Modern England’, 40 41

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same point was made in pamphlets. Richard Sheldon, a Catholic who turned Protestant polemicist, accused papists of regarding the mass as a vehicle for profit, of promoting idolatry in order to procure gifts, of profiteering from pilgrimages and indulgences, selling the remission of sins and making a ‘trade of purgatory’. Sheldon rhetorically asked the question ‘Rome uncorrupt?’ six times on a single page of a 1616 anti-Catholic tract, exploiting both its religious and fiscal resonances.45 The equation of popery with a grasping worldliness can be found in many other writings. For the Calvinist preacher Thomas Adams, Papists ‘put their salvation in corrupt worldly things’, hoping to unlock the gates of heaven with gold ‘but bribery is rather a key to vnlocke the gates of hell. Let Rome sell what she list, and warrant it like the Seller in the Prouerbs; It is good, it is good. Yet it is naught.’46 Slightly later in the seventeenth century, William Allen drew very similar conclusions and argued that popery and worldliness formed an unholy alliance. Popery was ‘founded in a like Worldly corrupt Interest’ and the ‘close adherence to, and fast holding of such a corrupt Interest … could not be upheld but by corrupting the Christian Religion’. Papists had ‘adopted into their Religion as part of it … Corrupt Doctrine and Practice for worldly advantage sake’; their aim was ‘not to promote Religion and Virtue, but to hook in filthy lucre’.47 Anti-popery thus capitalised on anti-clericalism, portraying Catholicism as corrupted by money and spiritually corrupt.48 And this association between popery and fiscal corruption endured. A satire of Walpole’s proposed excise tax in 1733 showed the prime minister in a carriage being pulled by a six-headed monster that spews money into his hand. The accompanying verse argued that the monstrous tax was ‘first begot’ by the Pope in Catholic France and now intended to plunder Britons.49 A similarly enduring process of combining concepts of corruption can be found in Bishop (and future Archbishop) George Abbot’s attack on the corruptions of the Church. Papists, he said, had indulged in ‘most wicked setting to sale of all Sacramentes, most insatiable avarice, most impudent fornications, most putrified vncleannesses, rottennesses most abominable, Concubines-keeping most polluted, manners most dissolute, most corrupt gestures & behaviours, harlotry every where too too much multiplyed in the Cleargy, wherewith alas the whole earth lyeth corruptly filthy.’ Here Abbot had combined sex, money and spiritual corruption and he went on to call Rome ‘a strumpet, full of corruptions,

Illustrated Religious Texts in the North of Europe, 1500–1800, ed. Feike Dietz, Adam Morton, Lien Roggen, Els Stronks and Marc Van Vaek (Aldershot, 2014), pp. 135–66. 45   Richard Sheldon, A Survey of the Miracles of the Church of Rome (1616), p. 63. 46   Thomas Adams, The Happines of the Church (1619), p. 266. 47   William Allen, The Mystery of Iniquity Unfolded (1675), preface, p. 101. 48   The extent to which anti-clericalism caused or was a result of the Reformation is disputed: see Ethan Shagan, Popular Politics and the English Reformation (Cambridge, 2003), which argues that the Reformation gave traditional anti-clericalism new weapons. 49   Britannia Excisa: Britain Excis’d (c. 1733), BM Satires 1936.

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pollutions, abominations, as the very denne of Antichrist’.50 A play of 1607, The Devil’s Charter by Barnebe Barnes, made similar associations when it adapted the Faustus story to dramatise the story of Pope Alexander VI whose sins are listed as using bribery to become pope, practising usury, murdering six cardinals for their wealth, committing incest with his daughter and seducing a young man before murdering him.51 Indeed, the anti-papal trope of the Whore of Babylon brought together several concepts of corruption. The book of Revelation described her as astride a seven-headed beast, arrayed in fine clothing ‘and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication’.52 As Frances Dolan has noted, anti-popery played a part in shaping Protestant attitudes to women, associating them with lust, opulence, monstrosity and fornication, and many of these characteristics found their way into depictions of corruption.53 A 1741 graphic satire thus depicted ‘bribery and corruption’ as a young woman, dispensing her favours to a lawyer and a cleric, standing on a pile of money bags, places, pensions and benefices.54 For Protestants, then, in early modern England (as well, it would seem, in the minds of some of those compiling the data on modern corruption) the Catholic Church was an intrinsically corrupt and corrupting institution, both in terms of belief and practice. Thus although Protestantism had a strong sense of personal sin as corruption, it also viewed Catholicism as a corrupting institution. Two further dimensions of anti-popery are worth noting. One is that the Catholic corruption was thought by Protestants to be intrinsically oppressive, tyrannous, arbitrary, and based on persecution and force. Foxe’s Book of Martyrs exemplified this tradition and William Warburton’s A Faithful Portrait of Popery (1745) was just a later example of a long line of works that attacked the persecuting Inquisition as ‘an infernal Butchery under the Name of the holy Office’ and ‘the Tricks, the Treacheries, the Frauds, the Rapines, the Delays, the Horrors of Imprisonment, the Tortures of the Rack, the Bloodshed, the Murders practised there’.55 This notion of popery as intrinsically linked with illegitimate threat of force is important since oppression was frequently linked with fiscal and political corruption: the tie was inherent in the crime of extortion, which was one of the main ways in which corrupt office holders were brought to book.   George Abbot, The Reasons vvhich Doctour Hill hath brought, for the vpholding of Papistry … The first part (1604), pp. 43, 301. 51   Katherine J. M. Carey, ‘John Webster’s The White Devil: a Literary Artefact of the Jacobean Struggle for Power by King, Pope, and Machiavel’ (Unpublished PhD diss, The University of Georgia, 2006), pp. 140–1. For a list of the ‘whores’ enjoyed by Popes see John Baillie, The Nature and Fatal Influence of Popery on Civil Society (Newcastle, 1780), pp. 23–25. 52   Revelation 17:4. 53  Dolan, Whores of Babylon, passim. 54   The Grounds (1741), BM Satires 2484. 55   William Warburton, A faithful Portrait of Popery: by which it is seen to be the Reverse of Christianity (1745), p. 24. Cf. Thomas Bray’s Papal Usurpation and Persecution (1712) which was ‘design’d as supplemental to the Book of Martyrs’. 50

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The second is that popery was associated with the vices of avarice, ambition and hypocrisy, all elements that would become keystones of representations of corrupt individuals. Particularly interesting, given the secretive and hidden nature of corruption, is the equation of popery with deception, veiling and hypocrisy. An illustration for Hugh Broughton’s anti-Catholic work of about 1590 portrayed ‘Rome’ riding the seven-headed monster, holding a magnificent cup aloft, with the legend ‘The empire of Rome, that crucified our Lorde and serveth Satan in might and hypocrisy.’56 Protestants saw themselves as unmasking the hypocrisy of papists in much the same way that crusaders against corruption, as we shall see in the next section, saw themselves as unveiling abuses that would otherwise remain hidden. The Catholic Church was thus the embodiment of the ancient dictum ‘Corruptio optimi pessima’ (the corruption of the best is the worst of all).57 Rome’s early Christianity had initially been pure but it had become corrupted; and papists possessed the attributes of those who were corrupt. By contrast, the self-representation of the ideal Protestant was the reverse of the papist: a member of a pure Church with a reformed theology and form of worship, obedient to the uncorrupted word of God, unpolluted by worldly greed, avarice, ambition, hypocrisy, and sexually immorality. The Protestant Church, by contrast with popery, its champions claimed, was one purged of corruption: ‘So hath our Church so neare as shee could abridged the ranke superfluities, and excrescent corruptions, which the Traditionall ceremonies, and ceremoniall Traditions of Rome had brought in’. And a Protestant was represented as possessing the necessary personal attributes necessary to resist corruption: He still denyes himself, not greedily gripes for Pelf, Doth neither pole nor pill, his Chests or Barns to fill, His Neighbours Good, not Goods, doth seek, he’s honest, harmless, loving, meek.58

Besides, or in addition to, a Weberian explanation that might stress the link between ascetic Protestantism and economic development, a focus on anti-popery thus helps to explain why Protestants saw Catholics as corrupt (and may still do so), and how the Protestant self-perception as uncorrupt was the result of their antagonism with the Catholic ‘other’. The sociological explanation for some of the preconceptions underlying The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism may have origins in a very long-standing propaganda campaign. Weber’s work is primarily based on pamphlets and sermons rather than on empirical data in

  The Empire of Rome (1590–1604), BM 1922,0117.7.  Baillie, The Nature and Fatal Influence of Popery, p. 34. 58   Abiezer Coppe, A Character of a True Christian (1680), single page. Coppe was not an orthodox Protestant but his sentiments expressed here were conventional. 56 57

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rather the same way that modern corruption indices are based on perceptions rather than a good deal of evidence about Catholic corruption (though recent scandals in the Vatican may have only reinforced such associations). II

Perceptions, of course, were one thing; practice was another. The following section of the chapter explores how anti-popery’s association with corruption could be exploited against Catholics, by crypto-catholics against Protestants, and also, as Protestantism fractured, against rival groups within Protestantism. Antipopery was, as Peter Lake and others have argued, a flexible doctrine that could be manipulated for a variety of ends, and this was certainly the case with allegations of corruption.59 We shall see that the link between popery and corruption was exploited for political ends and that increasingly allegations of popery carried implications of personal financial gain at the expense of the public good. Anti-popery became fused with economic and political as well as religious critiques. From the mid seventeenth century onwards, the slogan of ‘popery and arbitrary power’ included allegations of fiscal corruption. Yet we shall also see Catholics or alleged crypto-Catholics, resisting the Protestant stereotype. These challenges, from within and outside the Protestant fold, together with the defeat of popery in the fifty years after 1688, reduced the potency of the Catholic/ corruption stereotype, though its residual cultural effects remained embedded in the Protestant psyche. An interesting example of how the papist-corruption stereotype could be deployed is the early seventeenth century ‘corruption hunter’, Sir Stephen Proctor, who has also been the subject of Andy Wood’s study of the constraints on popular protest.60 Proctor was zealously Protestant, but his family came from Nidderdale in Yorkshire where there was still, in the early seventeenth century, a sizeable Catholic community, protected (at least in Proctor’s eyes) by crypto-Catholics, the powerful Mallory, Yorke and Ingleby families, who were the largest landowners in the area. Proctor, who had bought Fountains Abbey by 1597 and the same year was appointed a justice of the peace, became very active against fugitive seminary priests, his Catholic neighbours and many local inhabitants, whose common land he sought to enclose for his coal-mining activities. Certainly Sir John Mallory resented the parvenu, disruptive Proctor who ‘in the short time he has been a justice, has bred more faction and sedition than many

  Lake, ‘Anti-Popery’.   Christopher Howard, Sir John York of Nidderdale (London, 1939); J. W. Morkill, The Parish of Kirkby Malhamdale (Gloucester, 1933); Andy Wood, ‘Subordination, Solidarity and the Limits of Popular Agency in a Yorkshire Valley c.1596–1615’, P&P 193 (2006), 41–72. 59 60

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of our justices have made unity’.61 Sir Stephen, in turn, regarded the Mallories as corrupt in the religious, fiscal, legal and political senses of the word. In 1602 Proctor brought a Star Chamber case against Sir William Mallory, who reported the allegations that by his ‘countenance and remissness, the county hereabouts had relapsed into disobedience in religion and that myself, my sons, and servants dealt corruptly in causes of musters and soldiers’.62 In 1608 Proctor fostered another case in Star Chamber against Sir John Mallory and Sir John Yorke for using their office of justices of the peace to extort money from one Richard Southiell, who had appealed to the Archbishop of York for help. Mallory and Yorke were alleged to have called a meeting of local inhabitants in order to incite a riot.63 In 1614, Proctor further underlined his enemies’ popery by helping to reveal that Sir John Yorke had allowed a company of players to exalt Catholicism and deride the Protestant Church.64 Yorke was also accused of harbouring (or planning to harbour) Jesuits in secret chambers in his house and of using bribery (mainly offers of places and money to Stubbs and his wife) and intimidation in order to try to silence witnesses against him. The same crimes were also levelled against another magistrate, Mallory’s kinsman, Sir William Ingleby, whom Proctor also accused of corruption, having earlier arrested a seminary priest in Ingleby’s park at Ripley. Ingleby was also accused of being involved in the Gunpowder Plot and being ‘possesst with divells’.65 In 1614 Proctor also began proceedings against Thomas Ingleby, Sir William’s nephew, for having been bribed to procure Proctor’s own arrest. Proctor thus fused his zeal against the remnants of popery in Yorkshire with a desire to clamp down on what he saw as corrupt abuse of office. Proctor combined popery and corruption in other ways too. In 1607, he obtained a commission to collect fines under the penal statutes against Catholics, which had been levied since 1588.66 The revenue from recusants was an ambiguous area, since the regime had the diverging objectives of maximising revenue and reducing recusancy, a dichotomy which created a tension in which allegations of being sympathetic to popery could be levelled both against those administering central policy and those collecting revenue on the ground.67 Proctor was one of those who exacerbated this tension and injected his own anti-popery into the mix by linking the issues of fraudulent collection and religious impurity. Proctor

  Calendar of the Manuscripts … at Hatfield House MSS (1910), pp. xii. 161 (John Mallory to Sir Robert Cecil, 20 May 1602). 62   Ibid., pp. 452–3 (William Mallory to Sir Robert Cecil, 23 Oct. 1602). 63  Howard, Nidderdale, pp. 52–4. 64   The incident is explored in Phebe Jensen, ‘Recusancy, Festivity and Community: The Simpsons at Gowlthwaite Hall’, Reformation 6 (2002), 75–102; Howard, Nidderdale, pp. 20–46. 65  Howard, Nidderdale, p. 40. 66   Ibid, pp. 55–6. 67   Michael Questier, ‘Sir Henry Spiller, Recusancy and the Efficiency of the Jacobean Exchequer’, Historical Research 66:161 (1993), 251–66. 61

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thought the penal laws were being corruptly applied, with informers often acting in collusion with their ostensible Catholic targets in order to reduce the penalties that were imposed. Proctor had even larger ambitions for his anti-corruption activities. In June 1606, he proposed that he could increase crown revenue by £10,000 and in April 1607 submitted a ‘project’ to the Crown to take on the collection of crown debts which, he suggested, were being pocketed by sheriffs, JPs and clerks of the peace, whom he also accused of extorting money from those who ought to have paid but who were let off or had their prosecutions ameliorated.68 He thought that ‘fraudulent composi[ti]ons’ were being ‘corrup[t]ly’ made ‘and so the King deceyved’ of his money. Some sheriffs, Proctor suggested, ‘have from very meane estates advanced their Livings unto two thousand pounds by yeare’.69 His project thus sought a ‘course of Reforma[ti]on’ to address what was depicted as widespread and systematic corruption. Proctor thus seems to have extrapolated from his experience of popish corruption in Yorkshire, to project a major scheme to eradicate systematic corruption in relation to fines and debts owed to the crown. Proctor sought a patent ‘to prevent as much as may bee, such remisness in the Justices, and all negligence, fraud and corrupcon in other aforemd offycers in the Countrey, the better to advance Justice, inrich his Matie and weed out all extorconers & oppressors from among his good subjects’. Proctor first received a commission to act in Yorkshire, where he began a zealous campaign against recusants – he boasted that he raised about £300 from ‘the meanest sort of recusants’70 – and in 1609 he was duly appointed ‘Collector and Receiver of Fines on Penal Statutes’ for England and Wales.71 Proctor promised the government that ‘in convenient tyme the benefite’ of his project would be greeted ‘with great aplause and quiete’72 but the Nidderdale crypto-Catholic community did not accept the charges against it without a fight and sought to turn the corruption charges back on Proctor, resisting the logic of the correlation between popery and corruption by suggesting

  BL Lansdowne MS 167, f.92 Proctor to Queen Anne, 14 Feb. 1607.   BL Lansdowne MS 167, f. 92, ‘The project … concerning the fines forfitures issued and amercimenents inquireable before the Justices of peace and Clerke of the markett to bringe the revenue better in charge and more plentifully into the Kings coffers and also to reforme manye grevances in the comon welthe.’ See also BL Lansdowne MS 167, f. 113, ‘Abuses discovered by the late Commissions’ [21 Dec. 1607]. 70   BL Lansdowne MS 167, f. 86, Jo. Bristol and Proctor to Sir Julius Caesar, 29 Sept. 1608. 71   Calendar of State Papers Domestic: James I, 1603–1610, p. 533, grant to Proctor, 31 July 1609. See also HMC Historical MSS 6th Report, p. 351, detailing a volume said to be by Proctor on ‘Certayne Speciall projects for the discovery of abuses and misdemeanours in officyers, tradesmen and merchants, which will bring infinyte summes of monye to his Majesty’s coffers and much satisfaction and good to the Commonwealth’. I have so far been unable to consult this to see what further light it might shed on Proctor’s outlook. 72   BL Lansdowne MS 167, f. 90 Proctor to Caesar, 24 Aug. 1607. 68 69

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that the Protestant crusader was himself corrupt.73 In 1610 a bill was introduced against him in the House of Commons (where Mallory sat) in which Proctor was ‘charged with intollerable abusing, vexing and grieving many thousands, taking many bribes presuming to dispense wth penall lawes, seazing theire persons and theire goods, and searching their houses, Coffers and Trunks, and spoyling them of their money and goods; and taking uppon him the office of Justice of peace where he was none’.74 Proctor denied such allegations, claiming that he had never ‘gone without the limitts of his Commissions for any thing to the value of a pin’ and saw the charges as inspired by Sir John Mallory, since those prepared to give evidence against him were his associates.75 But he made the mistake of alleging that Mallory ‘had a purpose to murder him because he informed against him’, and Proctor was imprisoned in the Tower for contempt of parliamentary privilege.76 Although the Lords intervened and he escaped punishment, he was left ‘greatly discuraged’ by his treatment which offered him ‘no other reward then ruyne and disgrace’.77 Proctor began the prosecution for the Catholic theatrical interlude soon after out of revenge, seeking to remove the smear of his own corruption by alleging the religious (and then administrative) corruption of his enemies. But when in 1614 Proctor was accusing his popish neighbours of bribery and intimidation, they again countered that Proctor had bribed witnesses to revive charges of treason against Ingleby. Proctor was himself prosecuted, though his judges were split and he was acquitted.78 The Yorkshire Catholics had nevertheless been successful in neutralising Proctor as (depending on how one viewed him) a reformist or oppressive force. Proctor had tried to drive home against crypto-Catholics the association between popery and corruption. He had been successful for a while, almost toppling the vested interests stacked against him, before falling victim to political forces that overwhelmed him and which challenged the stereotype on which he had relied. The case had also shown how anti-popery became easily politicised and how the language of corruption could be applied to cases that could be defended, either by counter-accusations or (as was Mallory’s position)

  An earlier instance of Catholics turning the allegation of corruption back against Protestants is The Copie of a Leter wryten by a Master of Arts of Cambrige (1584) – later known as Leicester’s Commonwealth. This accused the earl of Leicester of murder, a monstrous sexual appetite and systematic extortion. 74   BL Lansdowne MS 167, ff. 27–8 ‘Sr S P [sic]. A Breveat of the Bill and Answers’; Commons Journal i. 423–4 (2 May 1610). The proceedings against Proctor are discussed by Colin Tite, Impeachment and Parliamentary Judicature in Early Stuart England (London, 1974), pp. 64–72. 75  Tite, Impeachment and Parliamentary Judicature, pp. 64–72 and BL Lansdowne MS 167, f. 83 Proctor to Caesar, 12 Dec. 1610. For Mallory’s involvement in the accusations see History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1604–1629, ed. Andrew Thrush and John Ferris (Cambridge, 2010). 76  Howard, Nidderdale, p. 26; History of Parliament, Sir John Mallory. 77   BL Lansdowne MS 167, f. 103 Proctor to Sir Julius Caesar, 15 Dec. 1610. 78  Howard, Nidderdale, pp. 42–3. 73

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claims that moderation in enforcing a policy might not necessarily be a sign of corruption and a system of lenient compounding might actually be in the best interests of the crown. ‘Efficiency’ in terms of revenue maximisation might not necessarily require zealous enforcement of recusancy fines. But this was disputed and, as Michael Questier puts it, in James’s reign the ‘clash over administrative policy extended to one on religion as well’.79 The association between popery and corruption could thus, in practice, be tested and even overturned, but it nevertheless remained potent and was deployed against other ‘papists in disguise’. The discourse of corruption could thus be applied extensively wherever the charge of popery seemed credible. A number of the libels against the duke of Buckingham after his assassination in 1628 described him as both a friend of the Pope and highly avaricious, a man who sold commissions and whose greed ‘consum’d the Kingdomes store’.80 The popish duke was said to have abused his ‘excessive power’81 and exploited his place as Lord High Admiral for personal gain and to enrich his friends.82 He was The Flatterers deitie of State, Advancer of each money-mate, The divells Factor for the purse The Papists hope, the Commons Curse.83

Archbishop Laud was also accused in 1641 of attempting to set up popery, subvert fundamental laws, accept bribes, and sell justice in the court of high commission – the most ‘corrupt Court in the world’ – as a ‘tryannicall Oppressour’. In 1641, in preparation for impeachment proceedings, Sir Harbottle Grimston called him ‘the Stye of all pestilential filth, that hath infected the State, and government of the Church, and Common-wealth’, because he corruptly ‘truck’d and chaffer’d’ in the early Stuart court’s dubious financial projects, such as the monopoly on tobacco. Laud was, he said, ‘the corrupt Fountain, that hath infected all the Streams’.84 According to another pamphlet, again invoking the fountain metaphor used in the book of Proverbs, ‘These Popish Prelates have corrupted the pure fountaine rather then they would be depressed in power’, for they were ambitious and so infected ‘with the cursed love of lucre and covetousnesse, that they would be glad with all their hearts, to see the Parliament dissolved, hoping thereby to recover what they have lost, or at least to hold fast what they

  Questier, ‘Recusancy and the Jacobean Exchequer’, p. 265   Early Stuart Libels, at www.earlystuartlibels.net, Pi15 ‘Great Buckingham’s buried under a stone’; Pi16 ‘Pride lies heere, Revenge and Lust’. 81   Ibid., Pi22 ‘Pale death, with Iron hand, hath struck a blowe.’ 82   Ibid., Pi24 ‘Thou that on topp of Fortunes wheeles did mount’; Pi32 ‘Away, away, great George, o come not here.’ 83   Ibid., Pi17 ‘Fortunes Darling, Kings Content.’ 84   Law Unknown, or, Judgement Unjust (1662), p. 8. 79 80

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have got.’85 The prelatical party were, it was claimed, ‘for the most part men of mean estates, odious lives, and desperate fortunes: whose end is to plunder and pillage wheresoever they come, and enrich themselves upon the spoils of any’.86 One tract depicted the abuses of the spiritual court as just so many attempts to make money. Laud, thinly veiled as the character ‘Sponge’ in the dialogue, listed a series of oppressive measures all designed ‘to fetch in coine’.87 The City of London’s petition against episcopacy in December 1640 also blamed the clergy for the growth of popery, ‘the multitude of monopolies and pattents’, heavy taxation, and ‘the great increase and frequencie of whoredomes and Adulteries, occasioned by the Prelates corrupt administration of Justice, in such Cases, who taking upon them the punishment of it, doe turn all into moneyes for the filling of their purses’.88 An important effect of these allegations was that the religious, political, economic and social dimensions of corruption became ever more tightly interconnected and hence that they became extremely effective weapons against office holders of all sorts, but especially against the clergy. This is evident in Puritan attacks on tithes, which were seen as popish means to enrich the clergy. The Protestant critique of popish corruption could thus be used against the Church of England when Protestant sectarians claimed that the half-reformed national Church contained too many corruptions. A tract of 1653 highlighted ‘the great oppression of tythes, unjust justices, and corrupt magistrates’.89 Its pages reveal the extent to which hostility to tithes, like the larger discourse of anti-popery of which it was a part, brought the various strands of corruption together. Having given examples of the severe oppression meted out to some who had refused to pay tithes, the author observed that the unjust prosecutors ‘took what they pleased of the mony for Assessment pretended to repair their Bethel-like Highplace, wherein they worship to their Drag, & to their Net, committing therein all their abominations of Idolatry and profaneness, being taught so by their Reverend and ancient Holy Fathers the Popes and Bishops … and compel others towards the repairing and beautifying of their holy and sacred house of Dagon’.90 The invocation of anti-papal rhetoric was clear. Another tract, the title of which – The Reign of the Whore Discovered (1659) – again indicated the application of anti-popery, attacked the false church set up under the Republic: ‘long hath her golden Cup passed up and down the Nations, which is full of abominations of her Fornication, whereby the Nations have been corrupted’.91 Tithes, it

  The Lively Character of the Malignant Partie (1642), p. 3.   Ibid., p. 7. 87   The Proctor and Parator their Mourning (1641), unpaginated. 88   The Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution 1625–1660, ed. S. R Gardiner (Oxford, 3rd edn 1906), p. 142. 89   No Age like unto this Age (1653), subtitle. 90   Ibid., p. 7. 91   William Smith, The Reign of the Whore Discovered (1659), p. 1. 85 86

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was claimed, were popish and part of the ‘tyrannicalnes’ of the Church state, a damaging pursuit of private interest over public good, that should now be swept away. A Tithe did ‘enrich some particular persons but it doth oppress the whole Comm[unity]’.92 The association of popery with fiscal and political corruption, used against Protestant ‘papists in disguise’ can also be seen in the restoration era against ministers of state and other office holders, as well as against MPs. The attempted impeachment of the earl of Clarendon in 1663 accused him of encouraging papists and having ‘wickedly and corruptly Converted to his own use, great and vast Summs of publick Money’.93 Andrew Marvell’s The Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government (1677) also set out the linkage: the advancement of popery and French-style absolute government was coming about, he warned, through the political corruption of Parliament by crypto-papists and the systematic bribing of MPs.94 Members were so intent on ‘Perpetuating themselves those advantages which they have swallowed or do yet gape for’ that they had become ‘abject’ allies of the popish ‘Conspiratours’.95 That alliance was presided over by Lord Treasurer Danby, and when the earl was impeached in 1678 the indictment again linked popery with fiscal corruption: he was accused of being ‘popishly affected’, concealing the Popish Plot and corruption in the Exchequer, advancing money ‘for private use’ and procuring great gifts to enrich himself.96 Similarly, when Samuel Pepys was imprisoned in 1679 for his alleged involvement in the Popish Plot, he too was accused of accepting bribes and enriching himself;97 and the Catholic royal mistress, the duchess of Portsmouth, was also indicted for prostitution, her pernicious religious and political influence (which included protecting the earl of Ranelagh from accusations of defrauding the state) and her acceptance of bribes and largesse.98 III

This chapter started by noticing a case for a residual perception that Protestant countries are less corrupt than Catholic ones and has sought to explain some of

  No Age like unto this Age (1653), p. 17   The proceedings in the House of Commons, touching the Impeachment of Edward, late Earl of Clarendon (1700), p. 150. 94  Marvell, The Growth of Popery (1677), pp. 78–81. 95   Ibid., p. 150. 96   Articles of Impeachment of high treason and other high crimes, misdemeanours and offences, against Thomas Earl of Danby [1679], pp. 1–3. 97   A Hue and Cry after P and H., which had Plain Truth, or a Private Discourse between P. and H. (1679). I discuss this further in ‘Samuel Pepys and Corruption’, Parliamentary History 33:1 (2014), 19–35. 98   Articles of treason and other high-crimes and misdemeanors against the Dutches of Portsmouth [1680], pp. 1–2. Ranelagh was found guilty of corruption by Parliament in 1702. 92 93

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this correlation by exploring the strength and nature of anti-popery. Corruption was a term that had a strongly religious meaning, and anti-popery brought together political, fiscal, cultural, legal, economic and literary ways of thinking about corruption. Popery was not just a religious corruption, or a political one; it was also inherently bound up with venality, greed and self-enrichment at the expense of the public good. Its priests had sold indulgences; and crypto-Catholics were similarly intent on enriching themselves and selling the nation to Catholic enemies. Anti-popery was thus a powerful tool in fostering notions of corruption that embraced the religious meanings of the term but also increasingly placed them in the context of fiscal and political malfeasance. That pushed the language in a more secular direction. The development during the seventeenth century of the fiscal-military state, and the many attempts to profit from the increased resources and opportunities it provided, also began to push the language of corruption that way. But for much of the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the association between popery and a variety of different manifestations of corrupt behaviour – sexual and legal, as well as political and economic – was powerful, and this made it a useful political and polemical tool against enemies, even if it was one that, as the Proctor case shows, could be contested. Again and again, popery was associated with arbitrary and oppressive power, and with the pursuit of personal self-interest at the expense of the public good. That association was played out in many attacks on corruption across the century. The religious connotations of corruption were not entirely spent even when the rise of fiscal corruption associated with the unprecedented scale of war on the continent began to gain a higher profile. The evangelical revival of the later eighteenth century helped to reanimate concerns about the moral and religious health of the polity, in turn shaping attitudes to a ‘reformation’ of manners and a programme of ‘reform’ of the state. Eric Evans’s study of tithes and anti-clericalism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century notes a resurgence of the divisions apparent during the civil wars and Interregnum.99 Once more in that later period, a corrupt clergy were seen by some as parasitically feeding off the Church-state. As Arthur Burns has recently pointed out, demands for reform of the Church paralleled those for reform of the political system. Indeed, as Jo Innes has observed, the language of ‘reform’ was itself a secularised version of the demand for reformation, dating from the early 1780s when the clergy were prominent in the campaign for economical reform.100 Even in the nineteenth century the legacy of a correlation between popery and corruption lived on. Lord Acton’s famous dictum that ‘power tends to corrupt and absolute power

  Eric Evans, The Contentious Tithe: The Tithe Problem and English Agriculture, 1750–1850 (1976). 100   Rethinking the Age of Reform: Britain 1780–1850, ed. Arthur Burns and Joanna Innes (Cambridge, 2007), introduction and chap. 2. 99 

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corrupts absolutely’ was made in relation to historical attempts to absolve late medieval popes and the inquisition from criticism.101 Large questions about the relationship between religion and corruption nevertheless remain beyond the scope of this chapter. There has not been space to consider how far a Weberian explanation for perceptions of Protestant ‘cleanliness’ might hold good: such an account might consider the Protestant work ethic, restraining notions of the virtue of thrift, and the self-policing of asceticism. The extent to which Protestantism shaped factors restraining corruption such as the legal culture, the early establishment of a free press, Protestant attitudes to gift-giving, and the culture of office-holding, all deserve more extensive consideration, as does the impact of particular sectarian groups within Protestantism and the effect of a perceived decline in religiosity and the incidence of corruption. Nevertheless, this chapter has shown a link between Protestant perceptions of ‘popery’ and corruption in early modern Britain. How far such perceptions continue to colour perception indices of contemporary corruption remains an open question, but it seems likely that inter-faith rivalries in the present, as they did in the past, complicate and distort the ‘measurement’ of corruption.

101   BL Add. MSS. 6871, Acton to Mandell Creighton, 5 April 1887, reproduced on the Liberty Fund website, letter 1 of the Acton-Creighton correspondence: http://oll.libertyfund. org/pages/acton-creighton-correspondence–1887.

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11 An ‘Aristotelian moment’: democracy in early modern England Phil Withington

‘Democracy’ is not a word that appears too often in early modern historiography – not in political histories of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; not in histories of political thought, where it perhaps might be expected to crop up; not in social histories of politics, of which John Walter has been such an important and influential exponent. One exception is debates about the democratic credentials, influences, and ambitions of the London Levellers.1 Others are studies of the trope of mixed government during the 1640s and claims about the democratic potential of the revolutionary ‘public sphere’.2 But even in works committed to establishing political consciousness and practices outwith the monarchical paradigm, democracy is mainly notable for its absence. Since the revisionism of the 1970s, political historians have preferred to talk in terms of principles rooted in common law and positions based on religious ideology.3 From this perspective, to talk of ‘democracy’ seems an anachronistic and dangerously ‘Whiggish’ thing to do. Intellectual historians have drawn out the ‘republican’ elements Versions of this chapter were given at the universities of Reading, Cambridge, York and Tokyo Metropolitan, where I received valuable feedback. Thanks in particular to Quentin Skinner and Mark Philp for comments on earlier drafts. 1   C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (Oxford, 1962); Keith Thomas, ‘The Levellers and the Franchise’, The Interregnum: the Quest for Settlement, ed. G. E. Aylmer (London, 1972), pp. 57–66; David Wootton, ‘Leveller Democracy and the Puritan Revolution’, The Cambridge History of Political Thought 1450–1700, eds. J. H. Burns and Mark Goldie (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 412–43; Russell L. Hanson, ‘Democracy’, Political Innovation and Conceptual Change, eds. Terence Ball, James Farr and Russell L. Hanson (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 73–4. 2   Michael Mendle, Dangerous Positions: Mixed Governments, the Estates of the Realm, and the Answer to the XIX Propositions (Alabama, 1985); David Zaret, Origins of Democratic Culture: Printing, Petitions, and the Public Sphere in Early-Modern England (Princeton, 2000). 3   J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: a Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 1987); Rachel Foxley, ‘John Lilburne and the Citizenship of Free-Born Englishmen’, HJ 47:4 (2004), 849–74; Michael J. Braddick, God’s Fury, England’s Fire: a New History of the English Civil Wars (London, 2008).

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and moments of early modern political thought and traced the conceptual rise of ‘the state’, but they have not discerned an especially ‘democratic’ imaginary or way of thinking; quite the opposite.4 In the meantime, social historians have observed the increasing participatory extent of local governance, especially from the later sixteenth century, and observed its ‘quasi-republican’ qualities.5 They have also noted the forms of political agency available to social groups on the wrong side of material inequalities and asymmetries of power: riots, rumour, petitioning, and, in some instances, popular print.6 In his reconstruction of ‘the Colchester plunderers’, John Walter does both.7 What he and others have not done, by and large, is regard these politics as ‘democratic’ in any meaningful sense of the term. The main aim of what follows is to establish just what a historically meaningful sense of democracy might be. It does so not in order to unearth the origins of modern democratic culture or to impose retrospectively modern democratic principles and practices – most obviously universal suffrage – onto early modern actors. On the contrary, the impulse behind the discussion is historicist.8 The chapter looks to establish whether or not English people living in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries knew the term ‘democracy’, in what contexts they did so, and what they meant by it. Utilising new digital technology, it finds that the word ‘democracy’ in the Aristotelian sense of the term – as government by the many as opposed to the one or the few – entered the English printed vernacular over the course of the sixteenth century and that from the 1590s it became a fairly familiar term of print culture. Building on this analysis, the chapter then outlines some of the practices from everyday urban politics that clearly corresponded to and resonated with these conceptions of democracy in printed texts. Taking these two aspects of political culture together – the texts

J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, 2003); Quentin Skinner, ‘The State’, Political Innovation, eds. Ball et al., pp. 90–126; Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government 1572–1651 (Cambridge, 1993); Hanson, ‘Democracy’, p. 72. 5   Keith Wrightson, English Society 1580–1680 (London, 1982), pp. 155–9, 224–5; Mark Goldie, ‘The Unacknowledged Republic: Office Holding in Early Modern England’, The Politics of the Excluded c. 1500–1850, ed. Tim Harris (New York, 2001), pp. 153–94; Phil Withington, The Politics of Commonwealth: Citizens and Freemen in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2005). 6   John Walter, ‘A “Rising of the People”? The Oxfordshire Rising of 1596’, P&P 107 (1985), 90–143; Keith Wrightson, ‘The Politics of the Parish’, The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England, ed. Paul Griffiths, Steve Hindle and Adam Fox (Basingstoke, 1996), p. 12; Andy Wood, Riot, Rebellion and Popular Politics in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, 2002). 7   John Walter, Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution: the Colchester Plunderers (Cambridge, 1999). 8   Goldie, ‘The Unacknowledged Republic’, p. 174; Withington, Politics of Commonwealth, 66; Joanna Innes and Mark Philp, ‘Introduction’, Re–imagining Democracy in the Age of Revolutions: America, France, Britain, Ireland 1750–1850, eds. Joanna Innes and Mark Philp (Oxford, 2013), pp. 1–6. 4

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of vernacular print and the tasks of urban citizenship – the chapter argues that the linguistic and institutional imprint of democracy was more significant than historians have recognised. By approaching democracy in these ways, the chapter addresses two processes of political cultural formation that should be flagged from the start. The first of these is early modern vernacularisation: the emergence of the ‘modern’ English language over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.9 This was, of course, an extremely complicated process involving a host of variables and factors and experienced by nations and regions across Europe. In England, as elsewhere, a key characteristic was the wholesale translation and assimilation, into the vernacular, of foreign terms and concepts, whether from classical Greek and Latin or other, more ‘modern’ languages.10 One index of this particular facet of vernacularisation was the burgeoning number of classical and foreign texts translated into English from the 1560s; another was the proliferation of English dictionaries to guide readers in the uses and meanings of Latin vocabulary and, by the 1600s, what were termed English ‘hard words’.11 When viewed in conjunction with other developments, such as increasing literacy rates and the growth in the market for print, then these literary initiatives marked a trend of enormous cumulative significance: nothing less than the social redistribution, and often appropriation, of words and concepts previously restricted to Grecian and Latinate speakers. Taken initially from the Greek, ‘democracy’ – usually alongside its normative alternative, ‘aristocracy’ – was a term that underwent just such a process. The second process concerns the importance of practical experience – the range and kind of ‘tasks’ they do on a regular basis – in shaping early modern personhood. As the anthropologist Tim Ingold puts it, the ‘kinds of task that a person performs are an index to his or her personal and social identity: the tasks you do depend on who you are, and in a sense the performance of certain tasks makes you the person who you are’.12 Crucial to the performance of tasks are ‘skills’, which for Ingold take on the kind of bodily significance that Pierre Bourdieu identified in habitus – the nexus of dispositions and sensibilities that orient the behaviour and feeling of the person, and which is engendered by the various and habitual moments of experience and social interaction to which each   Richard Foster Jones, The Triumph of the English Language: a Survey of Opinions Concerning the Vernacular from the Introduction of Printing to the Restoration (Oxford, 1953); Cathy Shrank, Writing the Nation in Reformation England, 1530–1580 (Oxford, 2004); Jenny C. Mann, Outlaw Rhetoric: Figuring Vernacular Eloquence in Shakespeare’s England (Ithaca, 2012). 10   Phil Withington, Society in Early Modern England: the Vernacular Origins of Some Powerful Ideas (Cambridge, 2010). 11   The Culture of Translation in Early Modern England and France, 1500–1660, eds. Tania Demetriou and Rowan Tomlinson (Basingstoke, 2015); Ashgate Critical Essays on Early English Lexicographers, The Seventeenth Century, Vol. 4, ed. John Considine (Aldershot, 2012). 12   Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (London, 2000), p. 325. 9 

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person is subject.13 As Ingold puts it, skills are not ‘an attribute of the individual body in isolation’ (a simple ‘technique of the body’) ‘but of the whole system of relations constituted by the presence of the artisan in his or her environment’. They are learnt ‘through practical experience’ rather than simply through ‘the transmission of formulae’. And ‘skilled workmanship serves not to execute a pre-existing design, but actually to generate the forms of artefacts’: the act of doing is integral to the meaning, function, and intention of the practice.14 What follows considers some of the political tasks and skills associated with one kind of environment in particular. This is urban corporate citizenship, whereby heads of household who were enfranchised to their urban communities (as freemen, burgesses, or citizens) at once participated in communal self-governance and enjoyed privileged representation in national institutions: in courts of law, the privy council, Parliament.15 This culture of corporate citizenship was medieval in origin and, until the sixteenth century, was much more prominent in the heavily urbanised regions of Italy and the Low Countries. But what is significant about England, certainly insofar as corporate citizenship is concerned, is that it experienced rapid structural and cultural urbanisation in the hundred years after 1540. The number of communities able to institutionalise corporate citizenship rose from the 50s before 1540 to nearly 200 by 1700; in the meantime, citizenship itself became a more extensive, standardised, but also contested set of practices.16 More to the point, just as ‘democracy’ and ‘aristocracy’ had a purchase in vernacular printed texts by the early 1600s, so they were deeply embedded in the tasks of corporate citizenship. This juxtaposition of printed vernacular texts and practical urban tasks points to an important and dynamic interface. On the one hand, the printed history of democracy can be understood primarily as the translation of Aristotelian political ideas and categories into the vernacular – a process that reached a kind of watershed with the publication of the English translation of the French commentary of Aristotle’s Politics in 1598. On the other hand, starting from central and northern Italy in the thirteenth century, urban communities and their governments were increasingly cast in Aristotelian terms.17 England’s experience of this process was relatively late and truncated. Moreover, whereas in Italy, the Holy Roman Empire, and the Low Countries cities often claimed degrees of

  Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge, 1977), p. 87.  Ingold, Perception, p. 291. 15  Walter, Understanding Popular Violence, pp. 71–84; Withington, Politics of Commonwealth, pp. 8–15. 16   Robert Tittler, The Reformation and the Towns in England: Politics and Political Culture, c.1540–1640 (Oxford, 1998), pp. 149–81; Phil Withington, ‘Urbanization’, The Cambridge Social History of Early Modern England, ed. Keith Wrightson (Cambridge, forthcoming). 17   Oliver Dowlen, The Political Potential of Sortition: A Study of the Random Selection of Citizens for Public Office (Exeter, 2008), pp. 169–79; Guido Ruggiero, The Renaissance in Italy: A Social and Cultural History of the Rinascimento (Cambridge, 2015), pp. 14–16, 450–1. 13 14

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sovereignty, English urban citizenship operated within the framework of a larger national polity.18 But there seems little doubt that the brand of English corporate citizenship revivified during the sixteenth century was predicated on Aristotelian assumptions and categories of ‘commonwealth’, of which democracy and aristocracy were key components. At the very least, existing indigenous practices could be re-described in the vernacular in Aristotelian terms. This chapter contends, then, that the early modern history of English ‘democracy’ is closely linked to vernacularisation and urbanisation. More, that at once reading about and doing democracy – and sometimes both together – reflected the survival, adaptation, and revivification of Aristotelian ideas and practices into the seventeenth century: what might be styled an ‘Aristotelian moment’. It follows that talking about the democratic aspects of early modern politics is not anachronistic, but rather a faithful rendition of political concepts, language, tasks, habits and skills prevalent at the time. To make these arguments, the chapter divides into two sections. The first briefly outlines some of the key features of the printed vernacular history of ‘democracy’ to 1640. The second section then looks at two examples of how democratic practices were institutionalised and contested through urban citizenship. These include political conflict in the Shropshire borough of Ludlow in the 1590s and political pacification in the fenland borough of Cambridge in the 1610s. I

The basic story of democracy’s assimilation into the English printed vernacular is described in Figure 11.1. This charts the number of appearances of ‘democracy’ and ‘aristocracy’ (and their respective variants) in printed texts catalogued and searchable on Early English Books Online (EEBO).19 The picture is by no means definitive – EEBO does not catalogue all printed texts published in the period (surviving or otherwise); not all catalogued texts are keyword searchable; not all keyword searches are accurate; and in two instances at least, ‘democracy’ and ‘aristocracy’ were defined in extremely influential English texts without the terms themselves being anglicised and so are not represented on the chart (see below).20 Nor can the social reach, impact, and semantics of these uses be simply extrapolated from the bald figures: clearly the type of text – in terms of genre, cost, availability, print runs and new editions, and intended audience – all had an influence on readership and reception, and so who got to learn about democracy first hand.

  Withington, ‘Urbanization’.   The site used was http://eebo.chadwyck.com.eresources.shef.ac.uk. 20   Thomas Elyot, The Boke Named the Governor (1531), sig. 6r; Thomas Smith, De Republica Anglorum (1583), p. 3. 18

19

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Figure 11.1 Number of appearances of ‘democracy’, ‘aristocracy’ and variants in English printed texts, 1500–1680

For all these caveats, the basic story of democracy and aristocracy in vernacular print is fairly clear. While there was relatively little direct translation of the terms before the 1580s, in the 1590s both words, and especially democracy, become much more visible. They continued as part of printed discourse in the Jacobean and Caroline decades, more than doubled in usage during the Civil War and revolutionary era, and subsided somewhat at the Restoration. The same kind of story emerges when the percentage of EEBO texts containing the terms is considered (a crude way of accounting for the general increase in print over the period). For most of the sixteenth century, the percentage of texts in which either term appears is negligible. There are then peaks of 0.8 per cent in the 1590s and almost 1 per cent in the 1640s and 1650s (when many ostensibly more common words experienced a proportional slump in usage). For the rest of the seventeenth century the proportion of texts in which the words appear is between 0.4 per cent and 0.6 per cent. To put this in some kind of comparative perspective, the percentage of texts containing ‘monarchy’ never dropped below 4 per cent across the seventeenth century and reached as much as 7 per cent in the 1640s and 1650s. Democracy and aristocracy never enjoyed that level of visibility. However, from the 1590s they were present and sometimes even commonplaces nonetheless. 21

  For some diachronic comparisons see Withington, Society, 81–3, 112–5, 153; ‘The Semantics of “Peace” in Early Modern England’, TRHS, 6th Series 23 (2013), 127–53; Ian Sabroe and Phil Withington, ‘Language matters: “Counsel” in Early Modern and Modern Medicine’, The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities, eds. Anne Whitehead and Angela Wood (Edinburgh, forthcoming). 21

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Throughout this period it was democracy in the Aristotelian sense of the term that was used in printed English, usually in conjunction with the constitutional alternatives of aristocracy and monarchy. Driving this trend were English Renaissance humanists: classically trained writers – often legally trained or working in the law – who were familiar with public office and who deliberately looked to transpose ancient language and concepts into the vernacular.22 The Henrician courtier, magistrate, autodidactic writer Thomas Elyot set the template in The Boke Named the Governor, which went through numerous editions between 1531 and 1580. He explained that in the many cities of ancient Greece there were numerous kinds of polity ‘governed by multitudes’. The ‘most tolerable’ of these permitted ‘governance and rule’ by those who ‘excelled in virtue, and was in the Greek tongue called Aristocratia, in Latin Optimorum Potentia, in English the rule of men of best disposition’. These were much more preferable to cities like Athens, where all the citizenry participated equally in their ‘public weal’ in what was ‘called in Greek Democratia, in Latin Popularis Potentia; in English, the rule of the commonalty’.23 These terms were anglicised in the decades that followed and elided with more familiar language: aristocracy with ‘the best’, ‘the few’, the ‘better sort’, ‘the lords’; democracy with ‘the commons’, ‘the people’, ‘commonweal’, ‘multitude’, ‘free men’. Richard Taverner wrote of ‘a Democracy, that is to say, a governance of the people or commons, instead of the governance of the lords’ in 1539.24 An abridged version of Polydore Vergil outlined the history of Roman and Hebrew democracies a decade later.25 In 1556, the reformer John Ponet noted the trinity and argued that ‘a mixed state … to be the best sort of all’.26 But most influential in fixing these concepts into the Tudor political imaginary were two Elizabethan texts.27 Thomas Smith’s De Republica Anglorum went through eleven English and four Latin editions between 1583 and 1641, Smith observing that any ‘commonwealth’ was inevitably characterised by the ‘manner of ruling by one, by the fewer part, and by the multitude or greater number’. But Smith also emphasised the moral basis of each system of government and, as importantly, their ‘unjust’ antonyms: as where one rules, the one they call a King … the other … a Tyrant: where the fewer number, the one they name a governing of the best men … the other of the usurping of a few Gentlemen, or a few of the richer and stronger sort … and where the multitude

 Mendle, Dangerous Positions, p. 3.  Elyot, The Boke, sig. 6r. 24   Richard Taverner, The Garden of Wisdom Wherein Ye May Gather Most Pleasant Flowers (1539), sig. A8. 25   Polydore Vergil, An Abridgement of the Notable Work of Polydore Vergil … Compendiously gathered by Thomas Langley (1546), contents. 26   John Ponet, A Short Treatise of Politike Power and of the True Obedience which Subjects Owe to Kings and other Civil Governors, with an Exhortation to all true Natural Englishmen (1556), sig. A5. 27  Mendle, Dangerous Positions, p. 56. 22 23

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These insights were carried into the single most extensive vernacular iteration of the Aristotelian lexicon: the English translation of Louis Leroy’s French translation of Aristotle’s Politiques.29 Published in 1598, the identity of the translator, ‘JD’, has long been obscure. However, Gavin Alexander has recently established that it was James Dickenson whom the publisher, Adam Islip, commissioned to do the work.30 This provenance is important. Islip was primarily a publisher of legal texts, specialising in best-selling handbooks in law that included printed copies of Magna Charta.31 Dickenson was an ambitious Cambridge humanist who used the translation to advertise his talents to potential patrons in the influential circle based around the household of Sir Robert Sidney.32 The point here is that, like The Boke Named the Governor and De Republica Anglorum, Aristotle’s Politiques was written from the very epicentre of English political power. More, the publisher who commissioned it was intent on disseminating legal knowledge to a wider audience. Dickenson restated the Aristotelian lexicon at great length, using ‘democracy’ and its variants over 300 times in 393 pages of text. Although the translation can be opaque, the moral imperative of government was clearly restated throughout. On the one hand, so long as government was just and for the ‘weal’ and ‘profit’ of all, then the form it took hardly mattered: ‘when one, or a few, or many, in time of his or their government, tend to the profit of the Commonweal; necessarily, these Commonweals are indifferent [i.e. similar] and right Commonweals’.33 On this basis he explained that ‘when the multitude governeth, tending to the common profit, it is called a Commonweal, by the Common name of all commonweals’.34 On the other hand, ‘those Commonweals which seek the particular profit either of one, or of a few, or of a multitude, are transgressions and contrarieties of the same’. But what is most striking about Dickenson’s translation is that while he used ‘Commonweal’ to describe the rule of the ‘multitude’ as the   Ibid., p. 3.   John Dickenson, Aristotle’s Politiques, or Discourses of Government (1598). 30   Gavin Alexander, ‘Dickenson, John (c.1570–1635/6)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2008: www.oxforddnb.com/view/ article/7601, accessed 27 July 2015. 31   Islip’s roster included Magna Charta (1602); William Lambarde, The Duties of Constables (1606); Eirinarcha, or the Office of Justice of the Peace (1607); John Rider, Rider’s Dictionary, Corrected and Augmented (1606); John Rastell, An Exposition of Certain Difficult and Obscure Words, and Terms of the Laws of this Realm (1607); Edward Coke, A Book of Entries (1614); Michael Dalton, The Country Justice (1618). 32   Alexander found Dickenson’s name as author on the presentation copy to Sidney, now in Shrewsbury School. 33  Dickenson, Aristotle’s Politiques, p. 150. 34   Ibid. 28 29

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normative alternative to aristocracy and monarchy, he deployed the anglicised ‘democracy’ to depict its ‘contrariety’ or ‘transgression’: Tyranny is the transgression of the kingdom: the Oligarchy is the transgression of the Aristocracy; and the Democracy or the popular state, is the transgression of the Commonweal: for tyranny is … having respect only to the monarch or party that reigns: The Oligarchy regards the profit of the rich only; and the Democracy or popular state tends to the commodity of the poor only.35

Or as he also put it: the ‘government of many where the community is directed by the laws, is termed and that rightly, a Commonweal, according to Aristotle’s opinion’; but ‘a Democracy or popular state is that where there is nothing but liberty and disorder in the people’: ‘The Democracy are where poor and free men rule without any respect had of riches, nobility, or virtue, to the attaining of public offices, but rather of liberty only’.36 Semantically, then, democracy was a somewhat ambiguous and confused term by the end of the sixteenth century. As a normative category ‘directed by the laws’, it could quite easily be regarded as ‘right’: unstable and unpredictable, perhaps, but plausible nonetheless. This was especially the case when it was conflated with the term ‘commonweal’ or combined with monarchical and aristocratic governance into ‘a mixed state’. But as an Aristotelian transgression, democracy was even more sinister than oligarchy or tyranny: it invoked the rule of a lawless and disorderly multitude or ‘free men’ obsessed by ‘liberty’ and the ‘commodity of the poor only’. Either way, what is clear is that ‘contemporary political theorists’ who debated these issues by no means ‘presupposed a rigid social polarity, in which the gentry and nobility were born to command and the common people to obey’, as some social historians have claimed.37 On the contrary, the Aristotelian categories of monarchy, aristocracy, democracy and mixed government offered a fluid spectrum of principles and forms with which to imagine, characterise, and organise politics. Likewise, the moral imperatives upon which political legitimacy was based offered immensely powerful tools of political and social critique – against both individuals who lacked the qualities to govern as a King, aristocrat, or democrat, and against regimes that served factional or class interests rather than the common weal. Nor were these ideas debated in a discursive bubble, protected from political realities. Tudor authors of vernacular democracy were public men involved in the practical business of politics – men who developed their ideas in political and legal handbooks expressly designed for England’s burgeoning ranks of lawyers, attorneys, and magistrates. From Elyot to Dickenson, they and their readers lived with the prospect of violent democratic politics – democracy as

  Ibid.   Ibid., p. 151. 37   Andy Wood, The Politics of Social Conflict: the Peak Country, 1520–1770 (Cambridge, 1999), p. 4. 35 36

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transgression – in the form of riots, camps, commotions, and rebellions.38 Indeed Aristotle’s Politiques was published two years after the aborted Oxfordshire Rising of 1596 and in a London seething with rumours of aristocratic coups and popular uprisings.39 But the same cadres of lawyers and statesmen who knew their Aristotle also encouraged forms of what they understood to be legitimate democracy, or commonwealth, within a mixed polity: through more representation of the commons in the mixed polity; through the massive expansion of legal provision, advice, and arbitration; and through increased office-holding in the localities.40 II

Aristotle’s Politiques marked the full and emphatic arrival of democracy in vernacular print. It also coincided with the beginning of the end of democracy as a category of what are now regarded as the canonical political-philosophical traditions of the seventeenth century. On the one hand, Aristotle was the emblematic target of those theorists of the ‘new science’ of politics that have subsequently monopolised the attention of historians.41 Certainly the most dominant of these new philosophers, Thomas Hobbes, contrasted ‘Aristotelity’ – the unthinking acceptance of Aristotelian orthodoxies – with real ‘philosophy’ and was a profound opponent of ‘democracy’ at once ideologically and philosophically.42 On the other hand, historians have tended to corral contemporary proponents or defenders of the lexicon under the general label of ‘classical republicanism’, with ‘aristocratic’ permutations most usually stressed.43 The result is that ‘democracy’ as a term and normative concept gets elided. But even as Jean Bodin and Hobbes were denigrating democracy for modern theories of ‘state’, so the word and its Aristotelian connotations began to spread

  Walter, ‘A “Rising of the People”?’, p. 143; Andy Wood, The 1549 Rebellions and the Making of Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2007). 39   Ian W. Archer, The Pursuit of Stability: Social Relations in Elizabethan London (Cambridge, 1991). 40   C. W. Brooks, Pettyfoggers and Vipers of the Commonwealth: the ‘Lower Branch’ of the Legal Profession in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 52–57, 278–80; Wrightson, English Society, 181; Michael J. Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England, c. 1550–1700 (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 9–10; Wood, 1549 Rebellions, p. 197; Withington, Politics of Commonwealth, pp. 37–46. 41   Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government 1572–1651 (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 29–30; Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics Volume II, Hobbes and Civil Science (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 14–15. 42   Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), p. 370; Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 401–3. 43   Jonathan Scott, Commonwealth Principles: Republican Writing of the English Revolution (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 22–3. 38

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in other, more accessible directions.44 Indeed, a complaint of Hobbes by 1651 was that Aristotelian commonplaces had ‘crept into the minds’ of the ‘vulgar’ and of ‘ignorant men’.45 New printed genres presented and defined democracy for more socially varied audiences. It figured in books of ‘hard words … borrowed from the Hebrew, Greek, Latin, or French &c. with the interpretation thereof by plain English words, gathered for the benefit and help of all unskilful persons’.46 These ‘unskilled’ readers learned that democracy was ‘A kind of government wherein the people bear rule without other superiors saving such as they appoint’ or ‘a common-wealth governed by the people’.47 Democracy was listed in popular printed miscellanies: books of quotes, aphorisms, and other information that were published with recreation and learning in mind. Trawling the ancient past, for example, Robert Albott explained the usual categories (Democracy was ‘where free men, being the greater number, are Lords of the estate’) and added ‘Timocracy’ for good measure (‘the power of mean or indifferent wealth, governing by some laws taken from Oligarchy and Democracy, which are two extremes’).48 Popular moralists like William Vaughan and Francis Rous evaluated Athenian democracy as a mode of governance – for Vaughan (a professed follower of Bodin) it was ‘the very worst’; for Rous it represented the hazardous and risky pursuit of ‘freedom’.49 And the term regularly appeared in the increasing number of histories and geographies that brought varieties of government – ancient and modern, indigenous and foreign – to a vernacular readership.50 These histories, such as Lewis Lewkenor’s translation of Gaspar Contrarini’s De Magistratibus et Republica Venetorum, served as templates for more accessible representations of democracies and aristocracies on the popular stage.51 Most contentiously, the Aristotelian lexicon was used to describe Church governance and the organisation of ecclesiastical power. The complexity of confessional politics by 1600 meant that the language could be applied to support numerous ideological positions: by Catholic apologists who traced papal authority

  Jean Bodin, The Six Books of a Common-weal, translated by Richard Knolles (1606), pp. 720–1; Thomas Hobbes, Eight Books of the Peloponnesian War written by Thucydides the Son of Olorus (1629), sig. A–A2; Tuck, Philosophy, pp. 26–7; Skinner, ‘State’, pp. 116–21. 45   Thomas Hobbes, Philosophical Rudiments Concerning Government and Society (1651), pp. 189, 197–8. 46   Robert Cawdrey, A Table Alphabetical (1609), title page. 47   John Bullokar, An English Expositor Teaching the Interpretation of the Hardest Words Used in Our Language (1616). 48   Robert Albott, Wits Theatre of the Little World (1599). 49   William Vaughan, The Golden-Grove Moralized in Three Books (1600), sig. Q6–Q7, S3r–S4r; Francis Rous, Archaeologiae Atticae (1637), p. 29. 50   John Stow, ‘Apologie’ in A Survey of London (1598), p. 478; Lewis Lewkenor, The Commonwealth and Government of Venice. Written by the Cardinal Gasper Contarini (1599), preface; John Speed, The History of Great Britain Under the Conquests of ye Romans, Saxons, Danes and Normans (1611), p. 278. 51   Andrew Hadfield, Shakespeare and Republicanism (Cambridge, 2005), p. 43. 44

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back to St Peter’s ‘monarchy’ over the other apostles (a ‘usurped monarchy’, according to their opponents);52 to the conflation of episcopal and monarchical ‘hierarchy’ against the threat of Calvinist ‘anarchy’ and Puritan ‘democracy’;53 to treatments of the Church as part of a unified ‘city’ subject to monarchical, aristocratic or democratic government;54 to ecclesiastical government as ‘a mixed form compounded of all three states, as many worthy divines do confidently maintain’.55 But the most expansive and certainly most interesting characterisation of confessional politics in these terms was by the civil lawyer and Calvinist, William Stoughton, in 1604. In An assertion for true and Christian church-policy, Stoughton used the full lexicon, both normative and pejorative, to characterise forms of Church government in order that certain politic objections made against the planting of pastors and elders in every congregation – i.e. the establishment of parish presbyteries – are sufficiently answered.56 Stoughton’s discussion is suggestive for at least four reasons. First, like other confessional theorists he was clear that the Aristotelian lexicon was not restricted to sovereign polities. On the contrary, many different kinds of community could be conceived of in these terms, so long as they involved governance and common good. The Church was one such community and, for contemporaries, cities – with their corporate institutions and powerful sense of commonwealth – were another.57 Second, it was equally clear to Stoughton that political ideas and practices associated with these smaller communities could shape how people viewed their sovereign politics. Indeed, the main objection to what both he and his opponents styled aristocratic and democratic Church governance was its revolutionary potential: that ‘the common people will easily transfer Monarchy unto Democracy and Aristocracy, if the principles and reason thereof, by experience, were made familiar in their minds’.58 His response to the objection involved, thirdly, disaggregating the word democracy from the concept: polities could be democratic even if they did not have the terminology. This enabled him to interpret English political history in ostensibly alien classical terms. He reassured his audience that ‘the Nobles, and commons, may no more be scared, with the

  John Fisher, The Answer Unto the nine points of Controversy, Proposed by our late sovereign (of famous memory) (1626), p. 111; John Howson, Certain Sermons Made in Oxford (1622), p. 161. 53   Matthew Kellison, A Treatise of the Hierarchy and Divers Orders of the Church against the Anarchy of Calvin (1622), pp. 60–1; Thomas Powell, A Welch Bayte to Spare Provender (1603), p. 6. 54   William Laud, A Sermon preached on Monday, the Sixth of February, at Westminster at the Opening of the Parliament (1625), pp. 43–5. 55   Richard Sheerwood (attributed), A Reply Answering a Defence of the Sermon, Preached at the Consecration of the Bishop of Bath and Welles (1614), p. 106. 56   William Stoughton, An Assertion for True and Christian Church-policy Wherein Certain Politic Objections Made Against the Planting of Pastors and Elders in Every Congregation, are Sufficiently Answered (1604). 57  Dickenson, Aristotle’s Politiques, pp. 1–4. 58  Stoughton, An Assertion, pp. 359–61. 52

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strangeness of these uncouth, and unknown Greek names, of Democracy, and Aristocracy’.59 This was because ‘the government of the Church by Pastors and Elders … is none other manner of government, nor form of policy, then such as they, and their progenitors and Ancestors, for many hundred years together, without interruption, have used and enjoyed in the common weal’.60 It followed that because the English already had democratic and aristocratic sensibilities within the framework of monarchy, there was no danger of Church democracy and aristocracy precipitating revolution. Finally, and related to this, Stoughton privileged doing over reading as a way of knowing. Although the language of democracy and aristocracy was largely unfamiliar to the English, ‘ever since the time they first began to be a people, [they] have had their wits long exercised, with the sense and feeling, of the reasons & principles, as well of Democracy, as also of Aristocracy’.61 The practices of law and Parliament were two sources of this democratic ‘sense and feeling’; likewise was not ‘the sense, and feeling of the reasons, and principles of Aristocracy … already in the minds of the Peers, the Nobles, the Judges, and other great men of the Realm’. As such, just what ‘translation then is there greatly to be feared, out of the Church to be made into the common weal, when the minds of all sorts of our common wealth-men, be already seasoned’?62 Stoughton was by no means unique in assuming a symbiotic relationship between social practices and human psychology. The pedagogue Richard Mulcaster observed in 1581 that, just as ‘there be three kinds of government most noted among all writers’ – ‘monarchy’, ‘oligarchy’, and ‘democracy’ (‘where every one of the people hath his interest in the direction, and his voice in elections’) – so ‘these three be best maintained by those kinds of wit, which are most proper for that kind of government, wherein they live’.63 Living in a monarchy, Mulcaster accordingly focused on monarchical wit. Significantly, however, he also bemoaned the dissonance between the prevailing form of government and the widespread propensity for ‘eloquence’ – a wit that was altogether better suited to democracies: ‘For while the Athenian, and Roman popular governments did yield so much unto eloquence, as one mans persuasion might make the whole assembly to sway with him … now must it obey, because it deals with a prince’.64 Likewise in the ‘Apologie’ for London, printed by John Stow in his 1598 Survey of London – the same year as Aristotle’s Politiques – a close relationship is assumed between behaviour and urban environments. For the author of the ‘Apologie’, ‘the nearness of conversation’ and ‘the facility of common and often assembling’

  Ibid., p. 363.   Ibid., p. 364. 61   Ibid., p. 362. 62   Ibid., p. 363. 63   Richard Mulcaster, Positions Wherein those Primitive Circumstances be Examined, which are Necessary for the Training Up of Children (1581), p. 150. 64   Ibid., pp. 242–3. 59 60

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induced civility, orderliness, and godliness on the part of urban citizens. It was on these grounds that he somewhat idealistically argued that ‘whereas commonwealths and kingdoms cannot have (next after God) any surer foundation, then the love and good will of one man towards another, that also is closely bred and maintained in Cities, where men by mutual society and companying together, do grow to alliances, commonalties and corporations’.65 Indeed, if histories revealed anything it was that ‘these societies and assemblies of men in Cities and great Townes, are a continual bridle against tyranny’: ‘(being well tempered) they are a strong fort and bulwark not only in the Aristocracy, but also in the lawful kingdom, or just royalty’.66 The ‘Apologie’ was composed twenty years before Stow published it, in around 1578; at the time its author – probably the lawyer James Dalton – was careful to avoid applying the Aristotelian lexicon to London politics.67 As Dalton noted, ‘It is besides the purpose, to dispute, whether the estate of the government be a Democracy, or Aristocracy’ when English cities had no claims to sovereignty.68 By 1598, there remained obvious reasons to be cautious. Widespread popular discontent, the threat of aristocratic politicking, a looming succession crisis, religious conflict, constitutional tensions between London’s aldermen and common council: in such circumstances, claims to urban aristocracy and democracy were as inflammatory as the application of the lexicon to religious politics. However, the very fact that Stow even chose to raise the subject by including the text in his History suggests that the intervention was timely. Not only was the Aristotelian lexicon increasingly prominent in the vernacular. It was through the practice of urban corporate citizenship that the ‘common people’ had long acquired the ‘wit’, the ‘experience’, the ‘sense and feeling’, and the ‘reasons & principles’ of democracy and aristocracy – even when they did not know the words. This was true in terms of the importance of incorporated cities and boroughs to the national polity: they formed the majority of parliamentary constituencies and were key ‘rivulets of justice’.69 But it was also true for governance within cities and towns: in the array of councils, assemblies and corporations by which freemen, burgesses and citizens across England ensured ‘Commonwealth among themselves’.70 Indeed, it is more than likely that the normative English translation of democracy – ‘commonweal’ – was first coined in cities during the fifteenth century.71 It is time  Stow, Survey, p. 468.   Ibid., p. 469. 67   I would like to thank to Ian Archer for these points on the dating and authorship of the ‘Apologie’. 68   Ibid., p. 478. 69   Thomas Widdrington, Analecta Eboracensia, ed. C. Caine (London, 1897), 7p. 8. 70   Thomas Wilson, ‘The State of England Anno Dom. 1600’, ed. F. J. Fisher, Camden Misc., XVI (1936), p. 20. 71   John Watts, ‘Public or Plebs: the Changing Meaning of “the Commons”, 1381–1549’, Power and Identity in the Later Middle Ages, ed. Watts (Oxford, 2007), pp. 242–61, at p. 248; Withington, Society, pp. 138–9. 65 66

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now to consider some of the urban practices and tasks by which the Aristotelian typology and its synonyms could be affixed to urban politics and the requisite wit, sense, feeling and experience engendered. III

English boroughs and cities were places in which the Aristotelian lexicon made sense. They were not the only such places – indeed historians have generally paid more attention to parishes and counties as foci for what has been termed England’s tradition of ‘monarchical republicanism’.72 But in terms of the density and relative autonomy of urban governance, the traditions of corporate citizenship, the proximity of law courts and book sellers, and the range and intensity of conflicting social interests centred in towns, the vocabulary had especial purchase and resonance.73 This becomes especially clear when the institutions of urban citizenship are conceived of less as the local and somewhat arcane detritus of constitutional history, more as part of the ‘totality of tasks making up the pattern of activity of a community’: what Ingold terms a ‘taskscape’.74 During the post-Reformation period, this taskscape underwent considerable expansion and strain. As is well known, hundreds of towns and cities either established themselves as incorporated communities or reconfirmed and extended their urban privileges, freedoms and liberties by charter. In this way a normative culture of aristocratic or oligarchic governance was established nationally, across the English urban network.75 The spread of urban aristocracy, in which common councils and aldermanic benches facilitated governance by the ‘best men’ or powerful few (depending on your perspective), was accompanied and legitimated by the imperatives of public good and personal probity. It was also sanctioned by royal sovereignty and the expectation of good magistracy and parliamentary representation. In this way the ‘better sort’ of urban freemen, burgesses and citizens governed locally while also participating, as monarchical subjects, in a national political culture. But while the institutionalisation of urban aristocracy is well known, less appreciated is the democratic reaction it could precipitate. Nor is its convergence with the vernacularisation of the Aristotelian typology and its synonyms generally noted. The Shropshire borough of Ludlow, which witnessed pronounced conflict over material and institutional resources very similar to the struggles found by Walter in contemporary Colchester, dramatically illustrates the point.76 In

  John McDiarmid, The Monarchical Republic of Early Modern England: Essays in Response to Patrick Collinson (Aldershot, 2007). 73   Goldie, ‘Unacknowledged Republic’, pp. 176–7. 74  Ingold, Perception, p. 325. 75  Tittler, Reformation and the Towns, pp. 183–87. 76  Walter, Understanding Popular Violence, pp. 80–4. 72

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Ludlow, two ‘parties’ of freemen vied for power: the Thirty-Seven aldermen and common councillors on the one hand, and the majority of burgesses (freemen who did not hold high office) on the other. Both parties were led and advised by lawyers and it was the courts that provided ultimate arbitration.77 The depositional material so generated reveals a straightforward clash of aristocratic and democratic ‘reasons and principles’ articulated in the vernacular. The ‘councillors’ claimed that, long before the grants and charters of the sixteenth century, government lay with the ‘better, wiser, and worthier sort called the common council of the said town and representing all the rest of the burgesses’. This had continued into the incorporated era, the charters confirming that ‘Twelve and Twenty Five of the ablest wisest and worthiest of the burgesses should represent and supply the room of all the rest of the burgesses and commons of the said corporation.’78 As Alderman Richard Benson explained to the Court of Exchequer in 1598: ‘all lands privileges and commodities of the said Town rested in [the common council] only’; the ‘residue of burgesses’ were ‘plebs’; and ‘martial law’ was the best strategy for ending contention.79 The ‘burgesses’ party described an alternative history in which the charter of Edward VI devolved these powers onto ‘the burgesses themselves and amongst themselves’: the twelve and twenty-five were to have ‘no more power than the rest of the burgesses over land’ nor ‘exclude the rest of the burgesses from their free elections’. More to the point, previous governors ‘had greater regard to their oaths and the benefit of the whole corporation than the now twelve and twenty-five termed councillors have’.80 The warring parties not only told contrasting ‘aristocratic’ and ‘democratic’ histories of the town. They also used vernacular language to paint each other’s position as an Aristotelian transgression. The ruling party argued that there was ‘no contention’ in Ludlow until certain burgesses, ‘thirsting after more of the town lands’ became ‘aggrieved that they were not called to some place of the government in the town’.81 The ringleader John Crowther ‘was a person who do know how easy a matter it is to raise a multitude of the inferior sort against the head, when they shall be persuaded rather to be free men and rulers than to be ruled’.82 His compatriot John Bradford was styled a ‘common barrator’ who would ‘publicly speak … and persuade divers other burgesses to disobedience’: a populist ‘wholly given to faction … and bring all in common’ through the agitation of the ‘meaner sort’. Their allies were ‘certain troublesome and mutinous young persons not fit to govern in any good commonwealth’; ‘very light and disordered persons’; ‘secret enemies to the poor town’; ‘ignorant

77   The conflict is explored in detail in Withington, Politics of Commonwealth, pp. 69–74, 103–7. 78   Shropshire Archives (SA), LB7/773b. 79   TNA, E134/39 and 440 Elizabeth/Mich. 37, depositions of Richard Benson. 80   SA, LB7/768. 81   SA, LB/7/773a. 82   SA, LB7/736.

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and simple people’.83 But the democrats could stigmatise too. They claimed that ‘some of their 37 burgesses greedily coveting to enrich themselves with the Lands and Revenues of the said town by drawing into their number their sons and kinsmen and such as they can procure to give voices with them’: they ‘have gotten a great part of the best lands and commodities at small fines and rent and do misspend the Treasures and Revenue of the said town and neglect the public weal of the same’.84 The democrats belittled the aristocratic pretensions of their opponents as ‘the late called common councillors’, ‘the persons terming themselves common counsellors’, the ‘supposed common counsellors’, the ‘supposed governors’.85 The common council was, in effect, a faction that ‘determined causes for their own profits and commodities rather than for the good and public wealth of the corporation’; that looked to ‘their own private wealth and the wealth of their friends before the commonwealth’.86 Even as Islip published Dickenson’s Aristotle’s Politiques, therefore, the Aristotelian lexicon structured endemic conflict between Ludlow’s councillors and burgesses. In Cambridge a decade later, Aristotelian reasons and principles were deliberately embedded within corporate tasks as a way to engender consensus rather than express conflict. The context in Cambridge was a political struggle between an incoming mayor, the well-connected fishmonger Thomas French, and the aldermanic bench, which, since an order of 1582, had exerted effective control over the business and governance of the corporation.87 By at once appealing to the broader body of freemen and utilising the support of the city’s High Steward, Lord Ellesmere, French was able to pass a series of orders that enabled him to purge the aldermanic bench and reconstitute the common council by co-option.88 In so doing, French presented himself as the opponent of oligarchy and populism. The aldermanic bench had grown in size and power ‘to serve some private ends’ and at the risk of ‘popularity and confusion’; elections to the common council induced ‘much repugnancy’.89 In order to counteract these Aristotelian ‘, the bench was pruned back to its customary number of twelve, and twenty-four named common councillors were endowed with a monopoly of electoral power within the corporation. But what was especially striking was the kind of electoral culture prescribed to induce ‘quiet and peaceable government’. Like burgesses in contemporary Great Yarmouth, those in Cambridge adopted the method of sortition: the mode of democratic lottery first developed in ancient Athens and more recently revivified,

    85   86   87   88   89   83

84

SA, LB7/765; LB7/741. TNA, E134/39 and 440 Elizabeth/Mich. 37, item 12, 17. SA, LB7/766. Ibid., items 9, 10. Cambridgeshire Archives, City Box II 9, f. 1 Ibid., ff. 6, 7. Ibid., ff. 6, 7r.

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in various forms, by Italian city states.90 The task of electing civic office holders accordingly entailed precisely the sense and feeling invoked by Stoughton. The skills expected of freemen, as well as the materiality and tactility of the electoral task, make it worth describing in full. It was agreed that councillors as shall be present in the hall shall bring his name written in a little piece of paper and the same shall lay down upon the table before the Mayor and Alderman which names so written shall be enclosed in several balls of wax of one colour and quality by two such Aldermen as the Mayor shall appoint.

With the wax balls placed in a box ‘another Alderman [is] to take out one of the said balls for the Bench and the burgesses or the more part of them being neither Aldermen nor of the Twenty Four shall appoint one burgess to take forth one other ball’. The two balls were then ‘to be delivered to the Mayor [ … ] to be opened And these persons whose names in the said two balls are written shall choose twelve burgesses [for] the election that is to say out of every ward three burgesses dwelling in the said ward’. It was noted that: if any of the Twenty Four be absent then he [ … ] to bear no office for the year to come And that the said two burgesses so chosen shall go together unto some place within the house as shall choose twelve burgesses [ … ] of the which two and twelve burgesses non shall be eligible to bear any office of Bailiff for the year to come.

Moreover – if the two cannot agree of the choosing of the said twelve then either party to choose six and this is to be done within one hour next after their going together, the same hour to be tried by an hour glass, upon pain any man making default to forfeit for any such default £3 6s 8d.

If consensus was still unforthcoming then the whole process started again from the beginning; otherwise the twelve burgesses now embroiled in the process ‘then choose a further six to make eighteen’. They were then empowered to ‘choose one Mayor, four Bailiffs, four Counsellors, 2 Coroners, and 2 Supervisors’ within ‘the compass of an hour’.91 In contrast to Ludlow, then, the task of elections in Cambridge entailed wax ball, names on notes, hourglasses, separate spaces; they distinguished freemen by office but also integrated them through carefully choreographed ritual; they replaced partisanship and private interest with lottery; and they required degrees of conversational civility, discretion, and local knowledge on the part of the electorate. Across the country urban electoral practices would have differed in terms of both the structuring of the tasks and the politics surrounding them: despite some distinguished studies, the full extent and nature of these tasks

 Dowlen, Political Potential, pp. 138–41, chap. 3.   Ibid., ff. 8v–9.

90 91

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remains barely known.92 But we do know that in each town and city elections extended downwards – to urban parishes, companies and guilds – and outwards, encompassing common councils, aldermanic benches, and parliamentary selection. We also know that they held the key to the considerable material and institutional resources that formed city commonwealths, as well as access to parliamentary representation. In both respects there was plenty of opportunity for freemen and inhabitants to think of themselves in Aristotelian terms. IV

The method of electing Cambridge office holders closely resembled the Venetian system of sortition outlined by Lewkenor in 1599. Unlike Stow, Lewkenor was not shy in extolling his city as the epitome of Aristotelian mixed governance: Venice combined monarchical, aristocratic and democratic elements in perfect equilibrium.93 It is difficult to know, of course, whether the Venetian electoral culture of pots, balls, lots, and sub-committees was the actual template for Thomas French, and Oliver Dowlen has shown that the principles of sortition were relatively well known in English by the 1610s.94 But like Dickenson’s Politiques and the politics in 1590s Ludlow, what it does suggest is something of an ‘Aristotelian moment’ in fin de siècle England – a convergence of vernacular texts and urban tasks that made democracy and its transgressions much more visible and quotidian than Pocock’s ‘Machiavellian moment’ ever allowed. It is a moment that illuminates many of the themes familiar from the work of John Walter. One is the bodily dynamics of early modern politics: that it was experienced, sensed, gestured, and felt as well as thought and reasoned. A second is the complicated interrelationship between local and national politics: how the principles and feelings engendered in urban or religious communities could only inform the way national politics was viewed and experienced. A third is the interplay between print and practice: how in this instance the vernacularisation of old words enabled people to describe their behaviour and the behaviour of others in new ways. A fourth is the role of lawyers in brokering this process, both in terms of translating classical and foreign texts into English and advising on political arrangements within urban communities. A fifth is the longer provenance of Civil War politics: how political polemics after 1642, including the proliferation in print of the Aristotelian lexicon, marked an intensification and appropriation of inherited discourse and practice rather than a sudden

  Derek Hirst, The Representative of the People? Voters and Voting in England under the Early Stuarts (Cambridge, 1975); Mark Kishlansky, Parliamentary Selection: Social and Political Choice in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1986). 93   Lewis Lewkenor, Commonwealth and government of Venice (1599), preface. 94  Dowlen, Political Potential, pp. 141–5; the key text is Thomas Gataker, Of the Nature and Use of Lots (1619). 92

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discontinuity. Finally, the Aristotelian moment raises the issue of how to conceptualise the very subject of popular politics. This outline of printed democratic texts and tasks has shown that democracy was used less to describe specific constitutional arrangements, more to invoke a ‘cluster of political phenomena’.95 It depicted crowds, riots and demagogy – usually pejoratively; it encompassed commonweal, litigation, and orderly and just modes participatory and electoral governance – usually normatively. These are precisely the phenomena that the new social historiography has done so much to recover and understand. Given the synonymy at work here, it may well be the case that John Walter has been a historian of democracy all along.

  Innes and Philp, ‘Introduction’, p. 1.

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12 John Lilburne and political agency in revolutionary England Michael J. Braddick

Two themes central to John Walter’s work on popular politics have been the analysis of practical measures of organisation, tactics and mobilisation, and of the legitimating languages which could be appropriated and deployed in support of popular action. This chapter considers John Lilburne’s public career in order to explore how the possibilities for this kind of action were extended during the Revolution, as John Walter has done in his more recent work.1 Lilburne himself was not, of course, of the lower orders, and would certainly have resented the suggestion. But he was deeply involved in forms of political mobilisation which did offer opportunities for those normally excluded from political power to exercise political influence. By exploring how Lilburne sought to achieve political agency, and what that might tell us about the English Revolution, this chapter aims to throw light on broader changes in English political culture in the mid seventeenth-century crisis. Lilburne was undoubtedly a significant public figure and, although he was clearly not a ‘plebeian’, his political role did not derive from conventional sources. One of the Lincolnshire fenlanders who took him on as their advocate in the early 1650s said they had done so because he ‘was a powerful man & having friends would give a sooner end to the business’.2 He was certainly by then someone with a high profile: he had stood trial for his life in 1649 and would again in 1653, and both trials were interpreted as tests of the legitimacy of the regime, the latter indeed as a trial of strength between him and Cromwell. He did not hold any public office, however, and was not by birth or background a natural member of the national political elite. He was the younger son of a gentleman, apprenticed into the cloth trade and at other stages in his life was able to enter highly capitalised trades, first brewing with the support of his family and then soap-boiling, but he never established for himself a trade or 1   See in particular John Walter, Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution: The Colchester Plunderers (Cambridge, 1999); Walter, Covenanting Citizens: The Protestation Oath and Popular Political Culture in the English Revolution (Oxford, 2016). 2   TNA, SP 18/37, f. 82 [66].

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landed estate and never held public office. After his death, his wife was forced to petition for continued payment of a state pension. His political profile was not therefore achieved by the established means – of secure gentry, professional, trade or merchant status, or through public office. Instead, it arose by virtue of his mastery of the techniques of political mobilisation. This mastery is analysed here in terms of ‘social practice’: Lilburne encountered material and institutional conditions which constituted a realm of possibility; within that realm of possibility he was able to achieve agency by accessing effective political discourses and the skills to use them, taking advantage of the opportunities open to him.3 The limits and possibilities of his agency were set by ‘real’ social conditions and also by the linguistic resources available to him, and his agency arose from the extent to which he was able to master the skills necessary to exploit those possibilities. The linguistic and institutional context in which he exercised his skills was rapidly changing. Over three generations prior to 1640 it had become increasingly common to mobilise opinion outside formal institutions of government in order to influence conduct within them.4 During the 1640s, however, this process accelerated alarmingly, culminating in open attempts to make partisan use of proceedings in quarter sessions, assizes, militia musters and at Westminster. Parliament was lobbied by crowds, often supporting partisan petitions. In permanent session, its committees were open to the same techniques of mobilisation, so that their politics became something of much wider significance. In taking advantage of these opportunities, individuals had unprecedented access to print in order to publicise, argue and agitate for their cause.5 Lilburne’s career reveals how these emerging and evolving opportunities could be exploited. Finally, Lilburne’s innovative political practice – his skill in political mobilisation – was closely entwined with the evolution of his political thought and his gift for deploying existing political languages in innovative ways. He was, in fact, closely associated with some of the more original political arguments of the decade, most obviously in the Leveller campaigns for a peace based on an Agreement of the People. But this Leveller phase was just one of a number of public campaigns to which Lilburne committed himself. His own thinking was closely tied to the common law tradition, and the reinterpretation of the parliamentary cause as set out in 1642, than other Leveller leaders, such as Overton, Walwyn or Wildman. His successive campaigns sharpened his thinking as he came to see

  Andreas Reckwitz, ‘Toward a Theory of Social Practices’, European Journal of Social Theory 5 (2002), 243–63; Theodore R. Schatzki, Social Practices (Cambridge, 1996). 4   Peter Lake, ‘Post-Reformation Politics, or on Not Looking for the Long-Term Causes of the English Civil War’, The Oxford Handbook of the English Revolution, ed. Michael J. Braddick (Oxford, 2015), pp. 21–39. 5   Jason Peacey, Print and Public Politics in the English Revolution (Cambridge, 2013); Michael J. Braddick, ‘England and Wales’, The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, I: Cheap print in Britain and Ireland to 1660, ed. Joad Raymond (Oxford, 2011), pp. 17–30. 3

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himself as the champion of the rights of all Free-born Englishmen (a term he interpreted inclusively according to Rachel Foxley).6 It was on this basis that he supported the interests of relatively disempowered groups – the rank and file of the soldiery, commoners in the Lincolnshire Fens, mariners stranded in the Low Countries and anyone who might be asked to incriminate themselves in a court of law. It also gave him the ammunition he used to defend his right to express his views about the settlement of the kingdom. But it also underpinned causes that contemporaries (and later generations) found less high-minded – his fight for his uncle’s rights to coal mines in the north-east and his own claims to arrears of pay, for example. Lilburne’s career therefore illustrates the proliferation in revolutionary England of opportunities for partisan political engagement, the resulting opportunities to exercise new forms of political agency, and the relationship of both to intellectual creativity. The narrative of his serial public campaigns also reveals the rapid evolution of these new possibilities: a narrative account of his political action, considered as a kind of social practice, throws light on the long-term history of the changing possibilities for political agency and of linguistic innovation.7 I

Lilburne’s first entry into politics came through what were by then conventional forms of connection in the early Stuart Puritan underground. Between 1637 (the date of his first arrest) and 1642, however, the Scottish crisis, the summoning of parliament and the collapse of censorship greatly expanded the opportunities for someone with Lilburne’s interests and developing skills. He had been apprenticed to Thomas Hewson, a London cloth merchant with roots in County Durham, where Lilburne had been brought up. Hewson’s will reveals impressive Puritan connections: for example, with the wife of Edward Montagu, the prominent Northampton peer and noted patron of Puritan clergy (Hewson may have been a kinsman of her previous husband, Robert Wyncoll); and Edward Gurdon, a parliamentary committeeman during the 1640s, whose father was a friend of John Winthrop and whose brother John Gurdon was an activist MP for Ipswich, parliamentarian colonel and recruiter MP for Sudbury. Hewson’s son-in-law, Daniel Butler, was examined and imprisoned for importing prayer books from Scotland in 1638, perhaps in cahoots with Maurice Thomson’s brother, William. George Willingham, who figures prominently in the will, was referred to by Cromwell in 1641 as ‘his loving friend’, in a letter

6   Rachel Foxley, The Levellers: Radical Political Thought in the English Revolution (Manchester, 2013), chap. 3. 7   Unless otherwise stated, the details of Lilburne’s life referred to here are derived from Michael Braddick, John Lilburne and the English Revolution (forthcoming).

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asking for more information about Scottish politics. The trade connections and religious sympathies of Hewson’s associates can therefore be said to link him to sympathisers with the Covenanters.8 Hewson was also a founder member of the New England Company, and an active member of the Massachusetts Bay Company. He supplied bacon for a voyage in 1629 and may have been the owner of a ship that sailed to the colony in 1630. In this context it is clear that he knew John Winthrop, and Tolmie attributed this connection to Henry Jessey, who was chaplain to the Gurdon family and close friend of the Winthrop’s.9 Hewson was also described as a friend of Edward Rosier, whose congregation Lilburne later joined. Finally, Hewson possessed the lease of a rectory in Banbury, held in trust for him by, among others, Robert Vivers, who seems to have had connections to William Fiennes, Viscount Say and Sele (himself also interested in the New England settlements).10 In the house of this godly master Lilburne read widely in the Reformed tradition, and in Protestant martyrology and when Hewson and Rosier introduced him to John Bastwick, then in prison in the Gatehouse, it led him into the world of illicit print. Lilburne was arrested in 1637, along with John Wharton, accused of arranging for works by Bastwick and Prynne to be printed in Amsterdam. In one of the subsequent examinations, William Laud claimed ‘this fellow [Lilburne] … hath been one of the notoriousest disperser of Libellous bookes that is in the Kingdome, and that is the Father of them all (pointing to old Mr Wharton)’.11 Wharton was a veteran of the world of illicit print and of opposition to the Court of High Commission. Lilburne and Wharton refused to take the ex officio Oath (which would have committed them to answer questions truthfully, although they could not know in advance what they were going to be asked), and were punished and imprisoned for contempt. All this was quite familiar political practice. Indeed, Lilburne explicitly identified himself with a longer tradition of agitation for reform and the associated sufferings of reformers. He was also able to continue his campaign from prison using the familiar channel of the Amsterdam presses, this time John Canne’s. His pamphlets appeared at crucial moments in the unfolding of the Covenanting crisis, and made connections between that crisis and the fate of

  For the will see TNA, PROB/11/187, ff. 129r.–131v. The connections summarised in this and the following paragraphs are traced more fully in Braddick, Lilburne, chap. 1. 9    Murray Tolmie, The Triumph of the Saints: the Separate Churches of London, 1616–1649 (Cambridge, 1977), pp. 36, 44. 10   For these Puritan connections and their relationship to colonial projects see Karen Kupperman, Providence Island, 1640–1641: The Other Puritan Colony (Cambridge, 1993); and for their importance to the opposition to Charles I see John Adamson, Noble Revolt: The Overthrow of Charles I (London, 2007), esp. for example, pp. 21–5, 36–45. 11   John Lilburne, The christian mans triall (London, 1641 edn), p. 8; John Lilburne, Come out of her my people (Amsterdam, 1639), p. 30. 8 

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anti-Christian religion at large.12 Lilburne also made public appeals in order to influence the condition of his imprisonment, threatening, for example, to ‘make the Kingdome ring with his [jailors] and the Prelaes [sic] cruelty towards mee’, and as a new Parliament approached he published an open letter to his jailors.13 He also engaged directly in street politics from prison, writing a letter to the magistrates of London, ‘and one sheet to the prentices thereof, which was thrown among them one day when they were at their recreations in Moor-fields, which had like to have necessitated the Bishop of Canterburies ruine’.14 The Covenanting campaign was a great catalyst for these arguments, and also for this kind of activity, and was associated with a rapid growth of pamphleteering – the first round in the explosion of British print.15 In this rapidly expanding press output, Lilburne’s appeal was only one half of a battle for public support: he reported reading one night in close confinement ‘a pamphlet sung in the streets of London, in which I was joyned as a Traytour with the Scots at their first comeing into England’.16 The use of print and the appeal to a wider public to put pressure on institutions, however, continued to run alongside the deployment of more conventional networks – Sir Richard Grosvenor, in prison for debt in the Fleet, mediated with the warden on Lilburne’s behalf.17 A meeting of Parliament in 1640 and the loosening of press controls greatly increased the opportunities for public mobilisation, and Lilburne was now able to publish in London rather than Amsterdam, with the support of William Kiffin and William Larner, both of whom had connections with the world into which Hewson had introduced him. At the same time, crowds began to exert a direct and unprecedented influence on proceedings in parliament, delivering petitions or demonstrating directly about current debates. Lilburne was quick to join them: ‘I with thousands more were instantly ready on all occasions to adventure our lives in defence of so just, and pious an Authority: which we frequently and successefully testified at Westminster in the most dangerous and doubtfull times, to the terror of their enemies’.18 He was in the crowds demanding justice on the earl of Strafford, was denounced and brought before the House of Lords, a case in which the King himself seemed to show some interest, and he stood with his sword in his hand against Colonel Lunsford in the December days of 1641.

  For the longer history of such activity see Keith L. Sprunger, Trumpets from the Tower: English Puritan Printing in the Netherlands, 1600–1640 (Leiden, 1994). 13   John Lilburne, The poore mans cry (Amsterdam, 1639), p. 7; John Lilburne, A coppy of a letter written by John Lilburne, close prisoner (London?, 1640?). 14   John Lilburne, Innocency and truth justified ([London], 1645), p. 74. 15   Joad Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge, 2003), chap. 5. 16   John Lilburne, An answer to nine arguments (London, 1645), p. 44. 17  Lilburne, Poore mans cry, p. 6. 18   John Lilburne, The Reasons of Lieu. Col. Lilbournes sending his Letter ([London], 1647), p. 2. 12

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Connections rooted in the 1630s probably also led him to sign up in Lord Brooke’s regiment, along with his brothers. Hewson had at least a tangential connection with Say and Sele, and with colonising ventures, as did Brooke, co-sponsor of the Saybrook settlement. Brooke had also supported Lilburne in trying to get reparations for his maid, Katherine Hadley, wrongly imprisoned for helping him agitate among the apprentices from jail, and had also tried to help Kiffin when he was in trouble for supposedly seditious preaching.19 Lilburne served alongside Robert Vivers, the neighbour and defender of Say and Sele who was named in Hewson’s will. He may also have had other powerful friends too: while a prisoner in Oxford castle he had activated personal connections in parliament, and he later attributed his release in a prisoner exchange to the personal intervention of the Earl of Essex. He had entered the battle with the bishops informed by standard Puritan works, developing a distinctive but quite recognisable position within the spectrum of Protestant argument at that time. He had become convinced that the civil and clerical ‘states’ should be separate; and that episcopal power had deformed the English Church during the 1630s, leading the secular regime to contravene its own constitution in ways that also violated divine and natural law. He published pamphlets arguing that the Church of England was not a true church and which pointed in a strongly anti-Erastian direction: while the civil state was a national institution, the ecclesiastical state was not.20 He thought Bishops anti-Christian, therefore, but his campaign was based on criticism of the corruption of the civil state – he went to prison for contempt of Star Chamber, having claimed that the attempt to make him take the ex officio Oath contravened his common law rights. Prison reading cemented these views, but also his commitment to the martyrological tradition, as both inspiration and political model.21 Lilburne’s interpretation of the relation between the civil and ecclesiastical states, and his analysis of what had gone wrong in the 1630s, sat very comfortably with the parliamentary cause as it was being defined in the spring of 1642. It was also compatible with a particular but not outlandish reading of the threat of popery, and certainly with a standard reading of the Protestation, which he may have taken. He acted on these beliefs through Puritan networks, which took him to Amsterdam, and placed him close to sympathisers with the Covenanters, as well as on the fringes of the Atlantic world. His skills allowed him to sustain his political activism from jail, despite considerable privations and restrictions on

19  Lilburne, Innocency, p. 74; John Fielder, The humble petition and appeal of John Fielder (London, 1651), pp. 18–19; Remarkable Passages in the Life of William Kiffin, ed. William Orme (London, 1823), pp. 16–19. 20   John Lilburne, A light for the ignorant (Amsterdam, 1638); Lilburne, Answer to nine arguments. 21   For Lilburne and the martyrological tradition see Braddick, ‘The Sufferings of John Lilburne’, Suffering and Happiness in England 1550–1800: Narratives and Representations, ed. Michael J. Braddick and Joanna Innes (Oxford, forthcoming 2017).

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his freedoms. When Parliament met in 1640 the range of options open to him increased, and he was able to draw on these established connections to participate in the crowd politics of 1640–2. They also seem to have led him into the army under the command of a man closely associated with the milieu in which Lilburne had come of age. II

Lilburne was largely absent from national politics during his military service between 1642 and late 1644, although his incarceration in Oxford had attracted some national attention. When he left the army in 1644, however, he re-entered the world of political mobilisation, but in conditions that had changed considerably in the intervening two years. Increasingly open and bitter partisan division within the parliamentary coalition was being fought on London’s streets, in the institutions of parliamentary and city government, and through the presses. More strikingly, the rapidly expanding world of parliamentary committees, and a parliament in permanent sitting, created a new arena in which activists in these battles had to be adept in order to thrive. Following his release from Oxford in 1643, Lilburne had signed up again, but this time in the Eastern Association army, partly in response to persuasion by Cromwell and partly because he was alarmed by reports of religious intolerance in Essex’s army. During his service in the earl of Manchester’s army, however, he became increasingly involved in its internal partisan divisions, entering into a rancorous dispute with Colonel King, which was partly driven by religious difference, and eventually with Manchester himself. He testified in the famous dispute between Cromwell and Manchester, in which overlapping conflicts over military strategy and the shape of a future religious settlement began to break apart the parliamentary coalition. By that time, though, Lilburne had left the army, having been subject to withering and humiliating rebuke by Manchester for capturing Tickhill Castle without orders to do so. It was the final straw for a man increasingly disillusioned with the strategy of his commanders and their war aims. Lilburne returned to London expecting, so he said, a warm welcome but instead found himself and his religious fellows under attack from the magistracy and on the streets. This he blamed on ‘sundrie invective and provoking language divulged both from the Pulpit and Presse’. These attacks made him fear in fact that it was not safe to walk the streets.22 By contrast, those who could in good conscience take the Solemn League and Covenant (which defined the parliamentary cause very differently from the terms in which it had been defined in 1642) were well rewarded whatever their previous record of support for the parliamentary cause had been. These political disappointments sharpened his sense

 Lilburne, Reasons, pp. 4–5.

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of what the real political problem was, while wartime London afforded him a richer environment for political action. Lilburne entered this battle through an illegal press run by Richard Overton, who was also working with William Walwyn and Lilburne’s old associates, Kiffin and Larner. It had an established role in the public debate of fundamental religious debates, and in particular opposition to what was seen as the growing threat of Presbyterian intolerance.23 Lilburne’s own publications were sufficiently high profile and provocative that he was brought before parliamentary committees five times during 1645, taken into custody and suffered imprisonment by their orders. At the same time, he was trying to secure settlement of a compensation claim for his sufferings during the 1630s and his pursuit of pay and arrears. In these encounters with the Committee of Examinations, and the Committees controlling parliamentary resources, he gained a rapid, first hand education in the working of this rapidly developing world. Parliament was in continuous session, and in order to fight the war had rapidly developed a complex committee structure while the pressure of business meant that contacts were essential in order to get things done. At one point Lilburne complained that: I have indeavored, by all the wayes and meanes I possible could, for these divers weekes together, to get my Petition presented and, read in this honorable Assembly: but by reason of multitudes of Publique businesse, I have not been able to get my desire effected.24

After five years’ effort, he later complained, he could not get anywhere ‘by all the interest I have.’25 This growing machine had, by 1644, acquired extensive powers over property and lives. Fears about the powers of this administration intersected with an increasingly open and complex public debate about the war and its purposes; at the same time Lilburne’s own experience led him to think parliamentary government was open to manipulation by oligarchic, corrupting interests. He often blamed his frustrations on particular enemies and their creatures rather than simply the pressure of business. At one point, for example, he claimed that Bastwick had manipulated a ‘thinne and emptie’ house to secure a vote to reduce the scale of his damages.26 Seeking to get the money actually paid, he twice attended the Speaker at his house ‘But so lofty and high was hee, that 23   H. Plomer, ‘Secret Printing during the Civil War’, The Library, 2nd series 5 (1904), 374–403; David R. Adams, ‘The Secret Printing and Publishing Career of Richard Overton the Leveller, 1644–46’, The Library, 7th series 11:1 (2010), 3–88; David R. Como, ‘Secret Printing, the Crisis of 1640, and the Origins of Civil War Radicalism’, P&P 196 (2007), 37–83; Como, ‘Print, Censorship, and Ideological Escalation in the English Civil War’, JBS 51:4 (2012), 820–57. 24   John Lilburne, To the honble. the House of Commons now assembled in the high court of Parliament (London, 1646?). 25  Lilburne, Innocency, p. 72. 26   Utter Barrister, England’s miserie ([London], 1645), p. 3.

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hee would not so much as looke upon me or speak with me though I waighted upon him to his very Coach.’ As a consequence, he had copies of his petition published and delivered 150 of them to MPs at the door of the House.27 As a last resort, he had travelled to see Cromwell during the New Model’s campaign in the West Country in the summer of 1645, in order to get a letter in support of his claim for reparations, damages and arrears, a letter which he reprinted on several occasions. Frustrated by the unjust treatment of loyal servants of the parliamentary cause such as himself, Lilburne increasingly identified individuals who stood in his way as exemplars of the wider tyranny of a self-perpetuating oligarchy. In fighting these corrupt interests he appealed through the very loosely controlled presses to a potentially unrestricted public audience. In exposing the corruption of good government, he revealed the workings of the parliamentary regime, publishing accounts of committee meetings and legal hearings, as well as more informal contacts with influential people. This was a more general feature of the political culture of the 1640s – that official records were no longer the only, or chief, source of knowledge about official business. In fact, the most often-cited accounts of Lilburne’s trials in 1649 and 1653 were not official records at all, but private publications. He was at the heart of the new public politics, in which the proceedings of Parliament and the conduct of individual politicians were open to detailed public scrutiny and reproach.28 Both Henry Vanes, senior and junior, Sir Arthur Haselrig and Cromwell himself were common targets of this wrath. Campaigners and those seeking redress had increasingly intimate contact with the detail of parliamentary operations, both directly through their efforts to get their concerns addressed, and indirectly through the publicity given to parliamentary business by Lilburne and many others. Getting business done often involved a presence ‘at the door of the house’ from which to influence the work of Parliament and its committees. In 1648, pressing his case, Lilburne had an address printed ‘and the next day (as I remember) with my own hands presented it to every Member that would receive it, as they went into the House’.29 A year later he ‘arrived with other of my friends at Westminster, and being not long at the House door (where was many friends come downe from London and Southwark to hear and see how things went) I addressed my self to the Sergeant of the House’.30 His wife Elizabeth was active in this way, and was harshly treated while waiting at the house for an answer to a petition, accompanied by eight gentlewomen in

  John Lilburne, The Copy of a letter … to a freind (London, 1645), pp. 5–6; Lilburne, Innocency, pp. 63–4. For similar tactics in 1648 see Lilburne, A preparative to an hue and cry ([London, 1649]), p. 19; John Lilburne, To every individuall member of the Honourable House of Commons (London, 1648). 28   See, in general, Peacey, Public Politics. 29  Lilburne, Preparative, p. 19. 30   John Lilburne, An impeachment of high treason against Oliver Cromwell (London, 1649), p. 17. 27

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1646.31 Such pressure was effective, or at least so Lilburne said: he attributed his release from one detention in 1648 in part to the effects of petitioning.32 This reflected a key transformation in petitioning during the 1640s: the presentation of petitions on behalf of partisan communities.33 Rather than representing the supposedly consensual views of an established interest, institution or jurisdiction – such as soap boilers or the inhabitants of Buckinghamshire, for example – petitions were presented on behalf of ‘well-affectors’ to particular partisan statements or causes. Lilburne mobilised support among ideological friends rather than his neighbours or kin: members of the same interpretive community fostered in print and public meetings. It was claimed that such groups coded their membership, for example, by wearing blue ribbons in their hats.34 In fact, a petition might now be printed in such numbers that it seemed intended more to publicise a particular political position than to get redress from parliament. Some petitions were therefore regarded as seditious papers, and a key question in assessing whether or not this was the case might be whether copies had been given to people who were not members of the House.35 Petitioning campaigns therefore did not simply express solidarities but also helped to form them and these ‘virtual communities’ could quickly acquire a real political existence at the door of the House. Print became integral to practical political mobilisation, used to circulate, mobilise and organise. Arrested at 6 a.m. on 11 June 1646, Lilburne was already at work on the printed text that would be the basis of his public campaign against this imprisonment. En route to the Lords he contrived (without any help he claimed) a protestation and appeal, which he gave to an unnamed Lord, asking him to circulate it. In the examination that followed, Lilburne was questioned, among other things, about a letter to Justice Reeve which had been printed and left at Reeve’s house, the contents of which the Lords found offensive. Before the Lords though, Lilburne said he had nothing to add to his printed paper: ‘my Lord, in that paper in Master Smiths hand is my answer to the question, and to all others whatsoever that you shall ask me, and no other answer I have to give you’.36 Letter-writing and personal mediation remained crucial to political action, but moved into and out of print. For example, he wrote to the Sheriff of London:   John Lilburne, Londons Liberty In Chains Discovered (London, 1646), pp. 32–3.   John Lilburne, To all the Affectors and Approvers ([London, 1649]), p. 1. 33   See, in general, David Zaret, Origins of Democratic Culture: Printing, Petitions, and the Public Sphere in Early-Modern England (Princeton, 2000), esp. chap. 8. 34  Lilburne, Impeachment, p. 10. 35   This was an issue in the discussion of Primatt’s petition, which Lilburne said a little non-committally he had give to ‘divers as desired to read it’: Common Journals, VII, p. 55, 23 December 1651. For Primatt see below, pp. 240–1. 36   [John Lilburne], The free-mans freedome vindicated ([London, 1646]), pp. 3–4. For the autograph manuscript copy of the Protestation see Parliamentary Archives, HL/PO/ JO/10/1/210, ff. 102–3. 31

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LILBURNE AND POLITICAL AGENCY Which Letter I sent by my wife, and a friend; but they not finding Mr. Wollaston within, I ordered them to carry it to Mr. Kendrick, and Mr. Foot, the Sheriffes of London his Masters, whom they found at Guild Hall, at the Court of Aldermen; to whom they delivered the letter, with my Protest against the Lords, and appeale to the House of Commons therein mentioned; who (as they told me) carried it in to the Court of Aldermen: and, as they judged, there read them.37

But such letters were often in print at a later date, and it is clear that letters that appeared in that way might be part of a longer chain of correspondence. Lilburne often wrote to people and then published the letter if he had not received an answer in due time, or published letters he had written or received at a later date, as part of a later campaign.38 Even letters addressed to his wife moved between the realm of interpersonal communication and public declaration.39 Control over what was printed led to raids and searches and it is no surprise, in such a climate, that many publications displayed signs of rapid production, including, for example, material added at the final stage in order fill unused space and the clarifying of errors (which were evidently of some importance to public reputation). The postscript of England’s birth-right, for example, contained ‘divers sentences belonging to severall passages of this Book, which were in their due places omitted, and here at last remembered’, while the Outcry of the youngmen included a petition at the end since there was spare space. The postscript to Innocency and truth justified apologised that the raids and searches by the stationers meant that ‘for want of freedome through feare of them to come to the presse to looke after this my coppie, many faults hath escaped the Printer, which I desire thee with thy pen as thou readst to amend, but especially these which follow’.40 In Londons Liberty he encouraged the reader to correct the mistakes he had not been able to deal with due to his imprisonment ‘with thy pen, what in sence or quotations may be wanting, or false’. The main point was that such errors should not detract from his political credibility. In The charters of London he apologised for errors in his understanding of technical Latin, but sought to assure the reader he was ‘thy true and faithful Country-man’.41 Westminster gossip was a source of information crucial to effective action and this too might move quickly into print as evidence of the direction and meaning of events. Thomas Chaloner was said to take delight in this, arriving in the morning to ‘tell some strange story (Sham) and would come thither again about

 Lilburne, Londons Liberty, p. 25.   Most obviously, John Lilburne, A copie of a letter, written … to Mr. William Prinne ([London, 1645]). 39   John Lilburne, l. colonel iohn lilburne His letter to his dearely beloved wife ([1652]) 40   John Lilburne, England’s birth–right Justified ([London], 1645), p. 48; Anon., An outcry Of the youngmen and apprentices (London, [1649]), p. 19; Lilburne, Innocency, p. 76. See also the postscript to Lilburne, Impeachment. 41  Lilburne, Londons Liberty, quotations at p. 72; John Lilburne, The charters of London (London, 1646), p. ii. 37

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11 or 12 to have the pleasure to heare how it spred: and sometimes it would be altered, with additions, he could scarce know it to be is owne’.42 Lilburne’s involvement in the charges against Speaker Lenthall in 1646 reveals the connections between print, gossip and a relatively open Parliament. While there about his normal business (so he claimed), Lilburne passed on gossip about Lenthall. This he did ‘without any designe in the world’. He also went into the garden with Colonel Roe to speak with three prominent citizens who had been giving evidence against Lenthall. All this, he said, was already common knowledge ‘to many thousands of Citizens by the hearing of the eare’,43 but passing it on earned him a charge of slander. On another occasion, he claimed that Colonel Russell and Henry Ireton were about to be committed simply for talking to him in the Court of Requests on suspicion that it was an Independent plot, although not a word of the conversation had been reported.44 The charge carried by such gossip reflected how intimately those outside Parliament were connected with its work, and the public understanding of its work. These worlds of topical gossip, print and mobilisation intersected in London’s taverns. It was in the Dogge tavern that Lilburne fell into conversation with Robinson, an encounter which may or may not have been the origin of a conspiracy against William Lenthall.45 Lilburne was infuriated by Manchester’s continued insistence that he had been a poor soldier at Tickhill, not least in ‘a meeting at the Beare at bridgefoot, before two Lords, and five eminent men of the House of Commons’.46 At another point, Wildman and Sexby apparently met Cornelius Holland at a ‘private Table’ at the George in Channel-Row, in an attempt to broker political peace.47 By the mid 1640s, tavern meetings could be the basis for more concerted collective political action too. That at the Windmill in 1645, for example, was prompted by fears that the royalist capture of Leicester would be a prelude to an advance on the Eastern Association, which would threaten total defeat of the parliamentary cause. The great parliamentary victory at Naseby a few weeks later made this fear seem misplaced, but at the time 200 or 300 people, including ‘divers persons of severall quallities, Citizens of London, and divers of them of very good quallitie’ met at the Windmill, choosing a committee of sixteen to draw up a petition to present to the House. Lilburne was one of the committee, and claimed that he did not know more than one-third of the others – this was

  Aubrey’s Brief Lives, ed. Oliver Lawson Dick (Harmondsworth, 1972 edn), p. 221.  Lilburne, The Copy of a letter … to a freind, pp. 6–8. 44   Ibid., p. 10. 45   Ibid., p. 7. 46  Lilburne, Innocency, p. 26. 47  Lilburne, Impeachment, p. 7. 42 43

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a group drawn together by a particular concern with a particular end in mind: ‘I had never conversed with them before in my life, nor scarce knew their faces.’48 The organisation of a petitioning campaign in early 1648 reflects the power of these intertwining developments. Lilburne and his allies ‘caused some thousands of that Petition to be printed’ (a sure sign to its opponents that it was a ‘cloak’ for a seditious campaign rather than a genuine petition). They then worked to ‘set up constant meetings in severall places in Southwark to promote the Petition’. This meant that all scruples and doubts could be discussed and Lilburne could turn his powers of oratory to the promotion of the petition. ‘Trustees’ of reliable political beliefs were appointed in every parish ‘to take the especial care to promote the Petition effectually and vigorously’. Once it was under way Lilburne began organising meetings in London, calling ‘diverse cordial, honest, faithful, and Noun substantive English-men’ to meet at the Whalebone, behind the exchange, where they ‘met openly’. There, a committee was chosen, which withdrew to another room, to agree how to ‘promote it in every Ward in the City, and out-parishes, and also in every County in the Kingdome’. In order to allow a vigorous campaign, treasurers and collectors were appointed to receive voluntary contributions, varying from 2 d. to half a crown per week: the money necessary for the printing of copies of the petitions and the costs of messengers between London and ‘our friends’ in the counties.49 It is clear that such tavern meetings were of interest to the authorities and in 1650, and later, when Lilburne was keen to demonstrate that he was no threat to the regime, he avoided such events: ‘to the distast of some of my faithfull friends, [I] avoided to come at all manner of meetings, that might give [my enemies among those in power] ground in the least to grow jealous of me’.50 Lilburne’s public image was crucial to his effectiveness in this world. He entered reputational battles with Bastwick, Prynne and Haselrig, as well as launching violent public attacks on Vane and Cromwell. He fell in and out with a host of lesser characters such as Kiffin or Canne, and responded irritably to lies about him spread by Henry Walker.51 His first public dispute with Prynne – about religious toleration and the treatment of Independents – was also centrally about public reputation: who was the more reliable spokesman for the public good? Lilburne claimed, for example, that he got his money more honestly, reporting directly the word on the street: ‘an Essex Minister, proclaimed openly upon the Exchange … [that Prynne] was a Knave and he would prove him so; for said he,

 Lilburne, Innocency, p. 4. His emphasis on the ad hoc nature of this meeting was in part a response to a charge that it was a conspiracy. 49  Lilburne, Impeachment, pp. 21–2. This associational life perhaps prefigures the reported origins of the Royal Society in meetings at the Bull Head tavern in Cheapside or the practice of James Harrington’s meeting at the Turke’s Head coffee house in New Palace Yard: Aubrey’s Brief Lives, ed. Dick, pp. 480, 283–4. 50  Lilburne, Lieut. Colonel J Lilburns, apologetisch verhael (Amsterdam, 1652), p. 14. 51  Lilburne, Preparative, p. 38. 48

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he hath taken fees one [sic] both sides, and therefore deserves to be turned over the Bare’.52 Prynne and his persecuting Presbyterian allies, by contrast, had set about ‘to make me and my friends odious to the people that so … we might by the rude multitude, be either stoned to death, or pulled in pieces’.53 For similar reasons, Lilburne was very resistant to being known as a Leveller, a nickname which misrepresented their aspirations, although he used it with scare quotes.54 But he also tried his hand at launching a rival term of abuse: ‘personal treaty men’, those who even after the second Civil War were willing to deal directly with Charles, and who resisted a peace based on an Agreement of the People.55 This was a sophisticated game, in which particular publications could be commended for their worth, for example, Mercurius Politicus.56 This rough and tumble reveals a political world much changed from that Lilburne had entered in 1637: permanent parliamentary session, a complex committee structure with extensive powers, lobbied directly and by means of rapidly evolving uses of print, the development of a politically partisan associational life in London’s taverns, marked by affiliation to particular public statements and badges of loyalty. Much of this was not new in itself but reflected the development of features of the post-Reformation public sphere.57 However, the increase in the volume of print and greater ease of access to the presses led to a rapid development in the intensity with which print was used to intervene in the life of political institutions and to foster politically partisan communities of interest among broad publics. This intersected with an equally rapid development of the parliamentary administration, creating a culture in which the detail of institutional political life was much more open to public scrutiny and to public influence. In this world it was not only those in public office who had political influence – people like Prynne and Lilburne who were effective in these ‘public politics’ could become politically significant figures. III

These conditions offered new means to foster ideological solidarities and to mobilise opinion. At the same time, taking up these opportunities, and exercising these skills in lobbying and mobilisation, involved the articulation of clear political positions in an often chaotic public debate: innovative political practice was reciprocally related to innovative political thinking. Lilburne was not a great or systematic political thinker, but he was extremely creative (if  Lilburne, Innocency, p. 7.  Lilburne, Londons Liberty, p. 31. For similar examples see Lilburne, Innocency, pp. 28–9; Lilburne, England’s miserie, pp. 6–7. 54   For example Lilburne, Preparative, pp. 10, 30; Lilburne, Apologetisch verhael, pp. 68–9. 55   For example, John Lilburne, The picture of the councel of state (London, 1649), p. 3. 56  Lilburne, Apologetisch verhael, p. 61. 57   Lake, ‘Post-Reformation politics’; Braddick, ‘England and Wales’. 52 53

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perhaps also a little relentless) in polemical argument. In particular, he gave new and radical readings to the Common Law tradition, as set out in Coke’s recently published Institutes, and of the parliamentary position laid out in the course of the paper war of 1642. His experience of political mobilisation, and of attempts to muzzle him, led him to conclude that the real enemy was tyranny and vested interests, not monarchy, and in making that case he set out very novel view of the Free-born Englishman’s birthright. In doing so, he drew increasingly on Parliament’s own declarations to demonstrate the gap between the definition of the parliamentary cause in 1642 and the practice of parliamentary government a few years later.58 In prison again in the late 1640s, he seems to have read deeply in Coke’s Institutes under the tutelage of David Jenkins, and emerged with a strong conviction that the law offered a defence against executive abuse – it enshrined a negative freedom, securing individuals from interference in the enjoyment of their rights.59 His career was shaped, in other words, by the interdependent evolution of his ideas and of the possibilities afforded him to express them; by the intersection of the immediate political problems he faced with the skills he had in using the resources (linguistic and practical) available to him address them. His expertise in the world of parliamentary committees, his knowledge of London’s presses, his personal charisma and the effectiveness of his public self-presentation were the basis for his influence. This is clear in details of his part in the Leveller mobilisation, which in itself exemplifies many of the changes in the potential for political mobilisation being discussed here. In the mid 1640s, Lilburne and Overton encountered each other through the print trade, and Walwyn and Lilburne seem to have discovered they were fellow travellers by reading each other’s works. Access to and control of print was crucial, hence the emphasis the Levellers placed on the Stationer’s Company monopoly as one of the most egregious examples of the dangers of monopolies. Leveller mobilisation was strongly associated with particular places – notably the Whalebone, Nag’s Head and Saracen’s Head taverns – and made sophisticated use of varieties of print such as pamphlets, fliers and petitions.60   For his use of the common law tradition, and its relationship to the thought of other Levellers see Andrew Sharp, ‘John Lilburne’s Discourse of Law’, Political Science,40:1 (1988), 18–33; Sharp, ‘John Lilburne and the Long Parliament’s Book of Declarations: a Radical’s exploitation of the words of authorities’, History of Political Thought 9:1 (1988), 19–44; Foxley, Levellers, chap. 3; Nigel Smith, ‘Legal Agency as Literature in the English Revolution: the Case of the Levellers’, Oxford Handbook of English Law and Literature 1500–1700, ed. Bradin Cormack and Lorna Hutson (Oxford, forthcoming 2016), and the works cited there. 59   D. Alan Orr, ‘Law, Liberty and the English Civil War: John Lilburne’s Prison Experience, the Levellers and Freedom’, The Experience of Revolution in Stuart Britain and Ireland: Essays for John Morrill, ed. Michael J. Braddick and David L. Smith (Cambridge, 2011), 154–71; Gregg, Free-Born John, chap. 17. 60   See, more generally, John Rees, ‘Leveller Organisation and the Dynamics of the English Revolution’ (Unpublished PhD diss., Goldsmiths, University of London, 2014). 58

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Lilburne’s continuing criticism of the corruption of English freedoms by oligarchic and self-interested MPs sat well with the campaign for a settlement based on an Agreement of the People, which would subordinate the representative authority properly to those it represented. His common law arguments were not fully consistent with Walwyn and Overton’s more abstract reflections on primitive freedom, self-propriety and natural law, but they were fully compatible with the peace proposal for which the Levellers campaigned. The intrusion on the civil state was now identified, not just with the Bishops but with a wider range of ‘prerogative powers’ – monopolistic trading companies, the Lords and the Stationers, for example. However, Lilburne’s view of these issues, as far as it can be disentangled from those of the other Levellers, owed more to Coke than to classical republican sources.61 For the Levellers, of course, the army was a crucial resource, offering an increasingly independent source of power in the struggle to shape the peace. This too reveals an important element of the changing political culture of revolutionary London. Service had equipped Lilburne with status – he achieved the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel, something to which he continued to attach significance after he left the army, as a badge of his service to the public good. It had also given him connections. That he had some continuing influence in the army is suggested by the constant traffic between the army and Lilburne during his imprisonment in the Tower in 1648, which gave him a role in the agitation leading to the army debates at Putney and Whitehall. The soldiery remained interested in his fate in their official demands in 1648, and the influence of his publications on soldiers who mutinied in 1649 was a key element in the treason charges brought against him that year. A key piece of evidence in the trial related to a casual encounter with soldiers in 1649, one of whom he knew, which led to a drink in a nearby tavern, where Lilburne engaged them in political conversation, handing over a copy of a pamphlet.62 Lilburne’s role in the agitation for a peace based on an Agreement of the People therefore drew not only on his ideas, but also on the skills of political mobilisation honed after he left the army in 1644, and his continuing connection with the soldiery. Both were distinctive products of the crisis of the 1640s, and Lilburne’s prominence rested on his skill in taking advantage of these new opportunities. IV

Lilburne deployed these skills across a long political career, however, and not just in the Leveller phase, his skills and his rhetoric developing as the world of public politics became more sophisticated. Following the regicide and the defeat

  For a fuller discussion of these issues see the works cited in nn. 58 and 59 and Braddick, Lilburne. 62   Theodorus Verax, The triall, Of Lieut. Collonell john lilburne (Southwark, 1649), p. 72. 61

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of the Levellers he returned to more limited claims about legal right, and to life outside the metropolis. Following election to London’s Common Council he was required to take the Engagement. This he did, but engaged himself to the commonwealth defined in terms that owed a lot to his common law convictions – ‘all the good & legall people of England’ and their established legal rights.63 It was this view of freedom that justified, if it did not motivate, his advocacy in relation to smaller issues. In the early 1650s, he used his skills in less inspiring battles for his reparations, to defend his family’s interest in sequestered lands in the north-east and, frustrated by his political campaigns in London, turned it to business advantage by serving as an advocate. In 1651 he became, with John Wildman, an advocate for the commoners of Epworth in Lincolnshire on the promise of substantial reward –1000 acres of land – at a time when the future security of his family was clearly on his mind. This episode is better seen as an extension of his activism, the work of a man experienced in a certain style of political and legal intervention, than as the fag-end of his Levellerism. He published a pamphlet, and advised on a lobbying campaign, which was designed to get a definitive hearing of the legal rights of the commoners after twenty years of wrangling, failed settlements and cross-suits. In this campaign his rhetoric was finely tuned – making no Leveller declarations but rather claiming that the commoners sought a definitive and rapid legal resolution—and he seems also to have tried to restrict the violence of the dispute.64 The commoners’ cause belongs to a rural political culture built around the politics of custom and subsistence. It was, on the face of it, some way away from Lilburne’s urban world of partisan political mobilisation, but such battles were not entirely unaffected by metropolitan developments. John Walter has shown how in 1641 partisan politics overlapped with the politics of subsistence and of the parish. A connection was at that time drawn between the crisis in the cloth trade and the continuing failure to achieve political stability, which was blamed on popery and in particular on the influence of the bishops in the House of Lords.65 As has often been noted, war weariness and a desire for a return to normality drove much political engagement from at least 1645 onwards,66 and Lilburne himself made a similar connection. In 1650 he reported news from Wiltshire Clothiers, heard at the Saracen’s Head in Friday Street,

  John Lilburne, The engagement Vindicated & Explained (London, 1650), pp. 1–2.   Admittedly this was in some contrast with the more inflammatory claims of the petitioners in nearby Hatfield Chase, which did make much more threatening claims about the nature of the regime, and in which Lilburne was thought to have had a covert hand: if he did, however, it was anonymous. What he did put his name on made much more limited claims for a legal hearing. This interpretation is argued at fuller length in Braddick, Lilburne, chap. 6. 65  Walter, Popular Violence, chap. 7. 66   The classic statement is John Morrill, Revolt in the Provinces: The People of England and the Tragedies of War 1630–1648, 2nd edn (Harlow, 1999), esp. chap. 3. 63

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MICHAEL J. BRADDICK that the poor peoples necessities were growne so great in that Country, that they already begin in companies of six, ten, 12. 20, &c. to meet together in the Market Roads, and to take away the Country-mens Corne, as they carried it to sell at the Market, and before their faces to divide it amongst themselves, but give them their Horses and Sacks againe; and withall tell them, that meer hunger forced and necessitated them to do what they did.67

It was not just in Epworth, therefore, that a connection could be drawn between Lilburne’s common law concerns and the legal culture of provincial and popular politics.68 In fact, Lilburne himself was on the receiving end of this provincial exploitation of the new possibilities for political engagement: his own tenant, William Huntington, unhappy at Lilburne’s treatment, printed a petition and walked to London to stand at the door of the House in order to present it. In doing so he may have had the active support and advice of Arthur Haselrig, reflecting the ways in which local battles could be inflected by national politics.69 This was at least partly true of the Clubmen, often presented as exemplars of the old customary politics, now mobilised in opposition to national partisan politics. They too resorted to print as well as protest, when the Oxford Treaty negotiations had failed and war seemed set to continue for a long time: those publications reflect awareness of the negotiations.70 Lilburne’s provincial battles during the 1650s demonstrate how the forms of political agency which marked his more celebrated political engagement were also transforming the way he and others pursued such apparently parochial concerns.71 Lilburne’s career in advocacy ended in banishment, in circumstances that seemed to confirm that such little businesses were indeed connected with abstract issues of justice and good government.72 Representing his uncle George, he had become involved in a dispute over ownership of a very valuable colliery in the north-east sequestered from royalists. In this he was partly in conflict with Sir Arthur Haselrig, a powerful figure on the relevant parliamentary committees. When the Lilburnes lost out, Josiah Primatt, another party to the dispute, petitioned Parliament about Haselrig’s tyrannous and arbitrary power,

 Lilburne, Impeachment, pp. 37–8. Wildman had lodgings at the Saracen’s Head: Rees, ‘Leveller Organisation’, p. 77 and note. 68   The Leveller view of government has been related to that of the participatory system of local government at large: Philip Baker, ‘The Levellers, Decentralisation and the Agreements of the People’, The Agreements of the People, the Levellers and the Constitutional Crisis of the English Revolution, ed. Philip Baker and Elliot Vernon (Basingstoke, 2012), pp. 97–116. 69   John Lilburne, As you were (n.p., 1652), p. 30. 70  Braddick, God’s Fury, pp. 413–21. 71   See Michael J Braddick, ‘“The Tranquility of this Common-wealth in my Little Sphere”: John Lilburne and Provincial Politics in the 1650s’ (forthcoming). 72   David Harris Sack, ‘The Corporate Town and the English State: Bristol’s “Little Businesses” 1625–1641’, P&P 110 (1986), 69–105. 67

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claiming that he had corrupted proceedings in the Sequestration Committee. It was judged seditious and Lilburne was banished for his role in producing and circulating it. In fact, many people seem to have thought that the punishment was in gross disproportion to the nature of his offence, and the sentence was subsequently regarded as of dubious legality: it was a measure which really does seem to confirm that the issue at stake had become the potential for parliamentary tyranny, not just the Lilburne family’s claims on the spoils of war. That a man who had never held public office, and was not in the army, could be worth banishing because ‘worse was feared of him’,73 reflects particularly clearly the political agency afforded to those with the skills to navigate this emergent civic culture; and also how those skills could intersect with the standard fare of provincial disputes over legal title, as well as the momentous politics in play in metropolitan tavern talk. V

Following a conversion to Quakerism in a final quest for a personal redemption, Lilburne seemingly withdrew from direct political engagement. Prior to that he had been involved in a series of campaigns over twenty years: against the church policies of the 1630s; in favour of parliamentary reform and restraint of the King between 1640 and 1642; in favour of a decisive military victory between 1644 and 1645; for a peace settlement based around religious toleration and an Agreement of the People between 1647 and 1649; and for an active citizenship enjoying the rights promised by the revolutionary regimes during the 1650s. The ideas that animated these campaigns had also evolved, notably through the integration of Coke with his Puritan piety. In exile in the 1650s, he seems belatedly to have read Machiavelli, as well as Plutarch and Polybius, giving him better access to the republican arguments against oligarchy that can be detected in earlier writings associated more with other Leveller writers. Certainly, this belated and rather limited encounter with classical histories seems to have been less important to his legacy than his creative reading of Coke and Parliament’s declarations. The result of that was a highly distinctive view of the rights of the Free-born Englishman, which clearly carried a significant charge at times during the 1640s and in the subsequent centuries.74 This intellectual trajectory took shape in dialogue with practical campaigning, in the context of a rapidly changing political culture. In each phase of Lilburne’s career, his ideas and practices had been elaborated, and his political agency depended on the constant development of both. Key features of political life – a remarkably open press, a relatively open and rapidly developing parliamentary

 Gregg, Free-Born John, pp. 310–11.   For this legacy see Edward Vallance, ‘Reborn John?: the Eighteenth-century afterlife of John Lilburne’, HWJ 74 (2012), 1–26; Braddick, Lilburne, chap. 8.

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administration, a lively news culture and active crowd politics – created new opportunities and new hazards, and required new skills from those who sought to navigate them. They also enabled new, more flexible and more plural forms of solidarity. Communities of interpretation could develop among those who had never met, forming the basis for solidarities among fellow travellers. Conversations now took place that could never otherwise have occurred, by those brought together by the war, by parliament or through print. In the process, alliances formed and broke up, forcing individuals to sharpen their own beliefs, and decide what was really important to them. This was primarily a metropolitan world, but connections were being forged between the localities and the language of partisanship, the use of the courts, committees and presses.75 As a result, it created new possibilities and demanded new skills of mobilisation in provincial England too. Lilburne was, of course, unusual in almost every way, but he was far from alone in encountering these challenges and opportunities. His enemies deployed established discourses in similarly creative ways and had rapidly developed the same skills of mobilisation: William Prynne, for example, but also in a less dramatic way, Lilburne’s tenant, William Huntington. Lilburne was distinctive both in the political positions he reached and the skill with which he exploited the emerging possibilities for mobilisation. Thinking about Lilburne’s practice though – its context and how that context shaped his thought – allows us to understand something more general, to put this richly documented life back into our understanding of the Revolution. His biography illustrates a more general relationship between mobilisation and intellectual creativity. Historians of the Restoration public sphere or popular politics describe a world in which many of Lilburne’s practices were entirely commonplace76 – something much less true of the Parliament time of the 1620s, for example. Figures like Lilburne, lacking land, trade or office, could now enjoy public influence without a peasant army at their backs. In that respect, the particular and distinctive form of political agency he achieved, considered as a kind of social practice, reveals something not just about the English Revolution but also an important moment in the longer history of political agency, which John Walter has done so much to illuminate.

  William Cliftlands, ‘The “Well-Affected” and the “Country”: Politics and Religion in English Provincial Society, c.1640–1645’ (Unpublished PhD diss., Essex, 1987); and for the national and parliamentary context, Thomas Leng, ‘The Meanings of “Malignancy”: the Language of Enmity and the Construction of the Parliamentary Cause in the English Revolution’, JBS 53:4 (2014), 835–58. 76   See, for example, Tim Harris, Politics under the Later Stuarts: Party Conflict in a Divided Society, 1660–1715 (Harlow, 1993); Mark Knights, Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain: Partisanship and Political Culture (Oxford, 2005). 75

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13 An Irish Protestation? Oaths and the Confederation of Kilkenny John Morrill

I

John Walter’s book, Covenanting Citizens: The Protestation Oath and the Making of a Popular Parliamentarian Culture in the English Revolution,1 transforms our view of the popular background to the civil wars that broke out in England in 1642. It also offers a gripping account of the high political struggle to divide the nation along religious lines and to consolidate a very broad Protestant coalition against the catholicising actions of Charles I (at the very least his indifference to the threat of popery) and to put Ministers of the Word in charge of a mass mobilisation of hearts and minds. It is a story of progressive radicalisation. It began in early May 1641, at a moment of supreme stress that coincided with separate failed and foiled coups by the King and by the queen and that were intended both to save the Earl of Strafford from the axe, and also in the long run to shake the king free from a new dependence on a Parliament that he could not legally dissolve. Amid much acrimony and mutual suspicion, the Protestation was passed by the Commons on 3 May and was printed in slightly different versions two days later.2 Then, in the late winter of 1641/2 it was reissued and was made a campaign of mass subscription, with full sets of subscribers (and lists of non-subscriber) returned to Parliament. The taking of the Protestation was to be a bond that inspired and shaped the political choices of many people of all social groups throughout the 1640s.3   When this chapter was written, John was still making changes to his manuscript in the light of comments from the Press’s readers and from friends like myself. I will not therefore be referencing a work not yet in its final state. My own interest in the Oath of Association was stimulated by discussions with John, who shared references to it that he had already accumulated. John and I also share a love of Ireland and of Irish history so I hope this chapter is an appropriate tribute to a historian whom I greatly admire. 2   For the published text see below, p. 246. Footnotes 7 and 8, also on p. 246 give the main variants. 3   The availability of the Protestation both in pamphlet from and as a folio single sheet make it all the more likely that it had reached Ireland by the outbreak of the Rising or soon after. 1

JOHN MORRILL

This chapter is intended as an adornment to John’s great book. It examines the Oath (or, as it turns out, oaths) taken by the ‘rebels’ in Ireland in the years 1641–7. It shows how, from March 1642 onwards, the English Protestation was (at least as a mirror image) an inspiration to Irish Catholics, who intended their fierce loyalty to the House of Stuart and modest claims to religious liberty, as a rebuke to Puritan-parliamentarianism. The chapter explores why the Confederate Catholics were unable to agree on a single form of the Oath and it explores the ethnic and social tensions revealed by that failure. The Irish Protestation was, in many respects, more radical than the English Protestation, but – partly as a result – it was far less effective in meeting its immediate and longer-term purposes. II

Between the initial formulation of the Protestation in May 1641 and the mass subscription campaign of early 1642, there was a general rising in Ireland, beginning in Ulster during the night of 22/23 October 1641 and spreading across the whole of Ireland by the spring and summer of 1642.4 In due course, a great majority of the Catholics of Ireland came into an association – the Confederation of Kilkenny – which had as its purpose an attempt to bring together mutually suspicious men from Old Irish and Old English backgrounds to make common cause against a King and English Parliament committed to the mass appropriation of a quarter (later half) of all the land previously held by Catholics5 and to a severe repression of Catholic worship and of the Church itself. It was also intended to bring an end to the rising within the rising, a popular orgy of violence directed at Protestant settlers (and which provoked counter-violence and hence a cycle). In order to bind together all the Catholics – native Irish, old English, Scots, new English, Welsh – an Oath was imposed on all of them. It is the argument of this chapter that this particular Oath – the Catholic Oath of Association – both in form and content, took its inspiration from the English Protestation.

  There is now a vast literature on the origins and course of the Rebellion. For starters, readers will find much enlightenment in M. Perceval-Maxwell, The Outbreak of the Irish Rebellion of 1641 (Montreal, 1994); Micheál Ó Siochrú, Confederate Ireland 1640–1649 (Dublin 1999, 2008); Eamon Darcy, The Irish Rebellion of 1641 and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms (Woodbridge, 2013); The 1641 Depositions And the Irish Rebellion, ed. Eamon Darcy, Annaleigh Margey, Elaine Murphy (London, 2013); John Gibney, The Shadow of a Year: the 1641 Rebellion in Irish History and Memory (Wisconsin, 2013); Ireland 1641: Contexts and Reactions, ed. Micheál Ó Siochrú and Jane Ohlmeyer (Manchester 2013). For tensions among Catholics in the period March to October 1642, important alternatives are provided by Demetri D. Debe, ‘The Fifth Earl of Clanricarde and the Founding of the Confederate Catholic Government, 1641–43’, Irish Historical Studies 36 (2009), 1–18. 5   Karl S. Bottigheimer, English Money and Irish Land: the ‘Adventurers’ in the Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland (Oxford, 1971), chaps. 1–2 4

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On the next pages is the version of the Protestation as published on 5 May 1641,6 side by side with a version of the Irish Oath printed in late March 1642, published just as the subscription campaign in England was ending; The passages in bold are common to both. There can be no doubt that the Irish Oath is a Catholic version of the English Protestation. The differences are equally striking. Loyalty to God comes first in both, but note the open-endedness of the Protestation vow: a defence of the true Reformed Protestant Religion, expressed in the Doctrine of the Church of England, against all Popery and Popish Innovations within this Realm, contrary to the same Doctrine’, compared with the modest language of the Irish Oath in relation to the Church to ‘mainetaine and defend, as farre as I am may with my life, Power and Estate, the Publique and free exercise of the true and Catholique Roman Religion against All Persons that shall oppose the same’.

  In John Walter’s Protestation Oath (forthcoming) he will show at length (chap. 2) the political strife and administrative muddle over the final wording.

6

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I A. B. do in the presence of Almighty God, Promise, Vow, and Protest, to maintain and defend, as far as lawfully I may,7 with my life, power, and estate, the true Reformed Protestant Religion, expressed in the Doctrine of the Church of England, against all Popery and Popish Innovations within this Realm, contrary to the same Doctrine, and according to the duty of my Allegiance, His Majesties Royall Person, Honour, and Estate;8As also the Power and Priviledges of Parliament; The lawfull Rights and Liberties of the Subject, and every person that maketh ffthis Protestation, in whatsoever he shall do in the lawfull pursuance of the same. And to my power, and as far as lawfully I may, I will oppose, and by all good wayes and means indeavour to bring to condigne punishment, all such as shall either by Force, Practise, Councels, Plots, Conspiracies or otherwise, do any thing to the contrary of any thing in this present Protestation contained. And further, that I shall in all just and Honourable wayes indeavour to preserve the Union and Peace between the three Kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland; And neither for hope, fear, nor other respect, shall relinquish this Promise, Vow, and Protestation.9

  Both this and the following ‘as far as I lawfully may’ were late additions.   This is the crucial struggle. In the original version a second ‘to’ was added, committing the swearer to uphold ‘the true Reformed Protestant Religion … according to the duty of my Allegiance to His Majesties Royall Person, Honour, and Estate’ which transforms the meaning. The final version removes the second preposition. 9   BL, Thomason 669.f. 3[5], Wing E2609: Die Mercurii: 50 Maii. 1641. It is this day ordered by the House of Commons now assembled in Parliament, that the Preamble, together with the Protestation, which the Members of this House made the third of May, shall be forthwith printed, and the copies printed brought to the clark of the said House. In this chapter all 1640s publications have been read on Early English Books Online (EEBO). EEBO relies on Donald Wing, Short Title Catalogue … 1641–1700 and the British Library Thomason Tract catalogue and use of their numbers helps to find the online tract. For this reason, Wing and Thomason catalogues are preferred to English Short Title Catalogue, catalogue numbers from which are not deployed in EEBO. 7

8

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I, A.B. do in the presence of Almighty God, and all the Angels and Saints in Heaven, Promise, Vow, Swear, and Protest to mainetaine and defend, as farre as I am may with my life, Power and Estate, the Publique and free exercise of the true and Catholique Roman Religion against All Persons that shall oppose the same. I further sweare, that I will beare Faith and Allegiance to our Soveraigne Lord King Charles, his heires and Successours, and that I will defend him and them, as farre as I may with my life, power and estate, against all such Persons as shall attempt any thing against their Royall Persons, Honours and Estates or Dignities, and against all such as shall directly or indirectly endeavour to suppresse their Royall Prerogatives, or do any Act or Acts contrary to Regall Government. As also the Power and Priviledges of Parliament, the lawfull rights and Privileges of the Subject and every Person that makes this Oath and Protestation in whatsoever he shall doe in the lawfull pursuance of the same. And to my power, as farre as I may, I will oppose, and by All waies and means endeavour to bring to condigne punishment, even to the losse of life, liberty and estate, all such as shall by force practice, councels, plots, conspiracies, or otherwise doe or attempt any thing to the contrary of any Article, clause Or any thing in this present Vow, Oath and Protestation contained, So help me God.10

  [BL, Thomason E.136[20]]: N.B., A copie of the oath taken by the papists, as it was given to the governour and captaines by Fryer Darcy, lately guardian of the Franciscans in Ireland, and imployed by the rebels upon a treaty. With a short glosse upon the confused oath of the pretended Catholiques for this religious rebellion (1642). We can date the tract to the period of the siege of Drogheda (Feb–Mar 1642), since a gloss by the author refers to the siege as still being in progress (ibid., p.4). This version of the Oath is the one printed (and ascribed to the same date) in [Wing / S646] Sir William Sanderson, A compleat history of the life and raigne of King Charles from his cradle to his grave (London, 1658), p. 454.

10

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In contrast, the English Protestation could not have been more pusillanimous in its clenched-teeth vow of loyalty to the King: to maintain and defend ‘His Majesties Royall Person, Honour, and Estate’. The Irish version was a great deal more fulsome: I will beare Faith and Allegiance to our Soveraigne Lord King Charles, his heires and Successours, and that I will defend him and them, as farre as I may with my life, power and estate, against all such Persons as shall attempt any thing against their Royall Persons, Honours and Estates or Dignities, and against all such as shall directly or indirectly endeavour to suppresse their Royall Prerogatives, or do any Act or Acts contrary to Regall Government.

Irish Catholic Royalism was to remain far more royalist than English parliamentarianism. We need to take note of other smaller differences. Those taking the English Protestation twice say they will ‘Promise, Vow, and Protest’; those taking the Irish version ‘Promise, Vow, swear and Protest’; and twice the English ‘Protestation’ becomes the Irish ‘Oath and Protestation’.11 In promising to ‘indeavour to bring to condigne punishment, all such as shall either by Force, Practise, Councels, Plots, Conspiracies’, the Protestation only commits those who take it to ‘as far as lawfully I may’, whereas the Irish swear ‘as far as I may’, and the Irish Oath adds the phrase ‘even to the losse of life, liberty and estate’ to the vow to act against all conspirators and plotters, the very phrase used in the Protestation but only in relation to the defence of the Protestant religion. The English Protestation was one of highly conditional loyalty to a Catholicising King; the Irish Catholic Oath was one of completely unconditional loyalty to a Protestant King. III

Under parliamentary direction, the Protestation was administered within every parish in England in January and February 1642. The response of Irish Catholics was not only to adopt the text of the Protestation, but also to seek to bind Catholic communities just as tightly together. On around 22 March 1642 in a series of ‘Propositions for settlement’, it was agreed by the clergy and gentry of the Pale ‘to settle a perfect Union and an oath thereof’ and two days later it was agreed that ‘all that had taken arms should be united by a common oath of Association’.12 It was probably at this meeting that the form of words of the Oath

  Did the framers of the English Protestation think of it as an oath? John Walter and I have discussed this at length and at time this chapter goes to press, I am not sure what decision he has made in addressing this question. The changes made in the Irish version suggests its framers were convinced the English had stopped short of making it an oath. 12   Sir John Gilbert, History of the Irish Confederation and the War in Ireland 1641–9, 3 vols (Dublin, 1882), I, pp. 289–90 11

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printed above was agreed. In any case, at a great meeting of clergy and nobility from all the provinces in late May 1642, this commitment was taken further: whereas no family, citie, commonwealth much less any kingdome may stand without union and concord, without which this kingdome for this this kingdome for the present standeth in most danger, we think it therefore necessary that all peeres, magistrates, noblemen, cities and provinces may be tyed together with the only bond of union and concord and that they frame an Oath of Union and agreement which they shall devoutly and Christianly take and faithfully observe.13

Between this meeting and the full coming together of representatives from all over Catholic Ireland, also in Kilkenny, in October 1642, there was no further development. But in the Articles of Association (creating the Confederation of Kilkenny), promulgated on 23 October 1642, the anniversary of the original Rising, the taking of an oath was central: indeed the culminating and 33rd article is very specific about how ‘the Oath of union’ was to be administered and about how records of those who took the Oath were to be preserved. it is ordered and established, that to preuent the springing vp of all Nationall distinctions, the Oath of Association, or Vnion be taken solemnely, after Confession and receauing of the Sacrament, in the Parish Churches throughout the Kingdome

It went on to lay down that the names of Persons [n.b. persons, not males], in euery parish, who takes the same, be enrolled in Parchment, and be returned, signed and sealed by the Parish Priest, to the Ordinary of euery Diocesse, who is to keep the same in his Treasury, and to certifie a coppy therof vnder seale to the Metropolitan, who is to keep that, and to certify a true coppy therof vnder his Metropolitan Seale to the Rolles of the Kingdome, where the same is to be enrolled.14

The Oath was intended to be taken in the late autumn ‘after confession and receiving the sacrament’. This gave complete control to the clergy, of course, for they had a canonical right and duty to exclude anyone they thought unworthy. Records were to be stored not in counties but in the thirty-two diocesan and four metropolitan chanceries, as well as in ‘the rolls of the kingdom’, an interesting phrase which seems to imply a post-war life for the oath. For the present, of course, the Confederates had no Chancery and no access to the Chancery in Dublin. Remembering that while attendance at Mass was enjoined weekly and on major feasts, reception of holy communion in early modern Ireland was an annual sacrament at Easter, or at most a twice-yearly sacrament at Christmas and Easter, the requirement of confession and communion in preparation for the taking of the Oath would have involved a huge logistical effort. In consequence, however, it gave an additional empowerment to, and imposed a much deeper   Ibid., II, pp. 35–42 (article 3).   ‘Orders of the general assembly’, BL Additional MS 4781, ff. 4–11 at f. 13; as printed in [BL Thomason E60[19]], Orders establisht in the popish generall assembly (London, 1643), p. 13.

13 14

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sense of obligation on, all those who took it. The Protestation was, as John Walter has shown, most characteristically administered after divine worship and especially after a sermon. In seeking to trump the liturgy of the Word, Catholics in Ireland rooted their oath-taking in sacrament. IV

At a crucial point in its development, then, the Irish Oath of Association took its main inspiration from the English Protestation. But there was an important pre-history and a complicating later history which we must consider in turn. The March 1642 version of the Oath, created so soon after the high-publicity subscription campaign for the English Protestation, was preceded by a number of oaths developed by different groups of ‘rebels’, mainly in the areas around the edges of the Pale. Although there are big differences in these early versions, they have one thing in common that was only to change in and after May 1642 – they placed loyalty to God and/or the Church first and loyalty to the King second.15 Between December 1641 and March 1642, we have a number of versions all emanating from within the Pale or at least from Old English sources and which have the following characteristics.16 Firstly, these versions required loyalty to the Catholic Church in these or similar words: I A.B. doe with firme faith believe all the singular the Articles which the Catholique and Apostolique Roman Church beleeveth and confesseth and to my dying day will by God’s grace maintaine, and defend the same faith against all sectaries, Iews, Atheists and enemies whatsoever.17

We can take this final wild phrase as intended to mean ‘Puritans’. Secondly, they all proclaim loyalty to Charles and his successors with phrases like ‘sovereign lord’ and ‘imperial crown’ prominent. These are, in fact, words

  See below pp. 252–4. There is just one version of the oath, with several unique but not puzzling features and dated on the manuscript 25 March 1642, which does put the King first. It is attached to ‘A declaration of the Lords gentry & others of the Provinces of L[e]inster and Mounster of the[ir] intentions towards the English and Scottish Protestants inhabitants of this Kingdo[me].’ There is a very similar version to be found at 1641.tcd.ie/ MS840 ff. 023–024. 16   Examples: BL Thomason E.181[4] A copy of a letter sent by the rebells in Ireland to the Lord Dillon, to declare to His Majestie the cause of their taking up arms … together with a coppy of the oath … (London, 1641); BL Thomason / E.181[5] The Last News from Ireland (London [Dec] 1641); BL, Thomason / E.145[7] A Declaration sent to the King of France and Spain from the Catholiques of Rebells in Ireland with a manifesto of the Covenant or Oath they have made (London, 1642), and said to have been previously published in Paris on 24 April 1642. 17   Headed ‘this oath was found in a trunck in Kilbrittaine Castle neer Kinsale, after the rebells were fled from thence, June I.1642’, and printed in BL,Thomason / E.151[9], Tristram Whetcombe, A true relation of all the proceedings in Ireland from April last to this present (London, 1642), p. 2, having already appeared in BL, Thomason / E.181[5] The Last News from Ireland … together with a true relation of the Rebels Oath (London, 1641 [=1642]), p. 5. 15

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never used in parliamentary proclamations, and surprisingly rarely in English royalist ones. But they are not new to Ireland. It was, of course, the case that the Catholics of Ireland had spent more time resisting oaths than taking them since the days of the Reformation – and specifically resisting the Oath of Supremacy.18 For the most part, that Oath affected those seeking public office, but it was then imposed by the Court of Wards on all those members of Catholic families seeking to administer the estates of those who inherited as minors. As one of the key changes sought by the Old English in 1628 and accepted by the Crown (in exchange for a parliamentary grant) – i.e. as one of ‘The Graces’ – a new Oath was administered by the Court of Wards, which began: I A.B. do truly profess, testify, and declare in my conscience, before God and the World, that our sovereign lord King Charles is lawful and rightful king of this realm, and of other his majesty’s dominions and countries. And I will bear faithful and true allegiance to his majesty, his heirs and successors.19

One of the early versions of the Oath, dated 10 March 1642, reads: I do profess, testifie and declare in my conscience, that our Soveraigne Lord King Charles is the lawfull Soveraigne Lord of this Kingdome; And that I will bear true Faith and Allegiance until Him, his Heires and lawfull successors, and him and them in the lawfull Rights and Prerogatives of his Crowne.20

This seems near enough a paraphrase. Thirdly, all Confederate oathtakers were to promise to respect Catholics of whatever ethnic background (some versions spoke of Old Irish and New Irish, others of mere Irish and those of the Pale, others again of Irish, English, Scots, Welsh). They promise to respect the common law of England (some adding Magna Carta), and all promise to respect the property rights of those settled before 1610 – so these early versions envisage the reversal or at any rate realignment of the Ulster Plantation. They also commit to free Ireland of bondage and grievous government by ministers disloyal to the King.21 Then in March 1642 comes the version printed above.22 This still puts the Church first, but now only in the form of a promise to defend ‘the Publique and free exercise of the true

  The Oath of Allegiance, which was much more focused on Catholic political obedience, was introduced by the English Parliament following the Gunpowder Plot in 1606 but was never passed by an Irish Parliament and so the only oath imposed on Catholics prior to 1641 was the Oath of Supremacy under the Irish Act of Supremacy (1560). 19   Aidan Clarke, The Graces 1625–41 (Dublin, 1968), pp. 17–18. Note that that Oath is very coy on matters religious: it is to be sworn ‘upon the true faith of a christian’. 20   BL, Thomason / E138[5] A true copy of the Lawes and Rules of government, agreed upon and established by the Nobles of the severall Counties of Ireland, now risen in Armes for the maintaining and settlement of the Ancient Romish and Catholike Religion, the upholding of His Majesty’s rights and prerogatives, and the libertie of a free Nation (London, 1641 [=1642]), p. 5. 21   See above nn.16–17. 22   See above p. 247 and nn. 8 and 12. 18

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and Catholique Roman Religion’. There is little change to the language of how they will defend Charles and his heirs, or how they will defend the privileges of Parliaments, the lawful rights and of (but only of) those who take the Oath and to seek, or how they will seek to punish anyone who challenges any of the above. This is the version that is the Protestation seen in a Catholic mirror. I have found no copy of the Oath dated to April or May 1642, but a new version, clearly based on the March text but with the clauses relating to the Crown promoted above those relating to God and the Church emerged from the meetings of the clergy and nobility at the end of May and early June. This laid down a new template and all subsequent versions were to be variants on that adjusted text. But they are all different from one another. Only after the Cessation of the late summer of 1643 are all versions essentially similar. No version was printed in Ireland until 1647,23 and all surviving copies are in manuscript collections or were printed in England for English purposes.24 There is no evidence of it ever being written down and signed in Irish although it is tempting to think it might have been.25 At this point it is worth stressing that when the Articles of Association of the Confederation of Kilkenny were agreed in October 1642, they specified that ‘the Oath of Association, or Vnion be taken solemnely’ (and they laid down very elaborate arrangements for the taking of the Oath), but they did not specify which version of ‘the Oath’ was to be administered. Was this oversight or the result of an inability to agree a text? Be that as it may, as a result, different versions continued to proliferate. Let us return to the version that has been said to have been agreed and promulgated in early June 1642 at Kilkenny with its one major difference from the March Oath: I, A.B., do promise, swear and protest before God, and his saints and angels, during my life to bear true faith and allegiance to my sovereign lord Charles by the grace of God, king of Great Britain, France and Ireland, and to his heirs and lawful successors;

  See below p. 255n.37; I have checked all Kilkenny and Waterford imprints for 1642–7 listed in Ireland and the Printed Word: a Short Descriptive Catalogue of Early Books, Pamphlets, Newsletters and Broadsides Relating to Ireland 1475–1700, ed. Tony Sweeney (Dublin, 1997) and found no printed copies of the Oath. For a possible exception see By the Generall Assembly of the Confederate Catholics of Ireland (Waterford, 1644), not in EEBO (or in Wing or Thomason). See the description in Ireland and the Printed Word, ed. Sweeney, item 3660 which implies that it contains a version of the Oath as well as penalties for breaches of it. For discussion of the new Oath in 1647 see Tagdh Ó hAnnraccháin, Catholic Reformation in Ireland: the Mission of Rinuccini, 1645–1649 (Oxford, 2002), pp. 148–9. 24   Thus in the version modelled on the Protestation (above at n.10) the text of the Oath appears in the margins accompanied by a much longer hostile commentary. 25   I am grateful for an extended discussion of this matter at a workshop based on this chapter delivered at a Masters’ class in Trinity College Dublin in February 2016. Crucial was the suggestion that most literate Irishmen were bilingual and monoglot Irish would need to have it read in translation anyway. 23

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I suspect that this version is later than the June 1642 date firmly attributed to it by Corish and accepted by all historians hitherto,27 but it is the one that is always cited as the Oath, so I will offer a brief discussion of all versions from June 1642 in relation to this one.28 I have found twenty-three different versions of the Oath in manuscript and printed sources from the years 1642–7, all laid out in the sequence King, Church, kingdom and all recognisably variants of one another.29 The differences are neither negligible nor are they fundamental. All make strong claims of unconditional loyalty to the King; all call for free exercise of the Catholic religion, all promise obedience to the Supreme Council, all promise not to accept pardons or protections unless negotiated by the Supreme Council, and all promise to act in strict unity with all others who take the oath. More than 70 per cent of the words in each can be found in most others. But there are differences. Twenty versions promise loyalty to Charles as King of Great Britain, France and Ireland; but three promise loyalty only to him and his successors as King of England (in one case Kings and Queens of England).30 Most talk of Charles’s   The memoirs and letters of Ulick Burke, marquiss of Clanricarde (London, 1757), p.325, as printed by Fr Patrick Corish in A new history of Ireland: III. Early Modern Ireland 1534–1691, ed. T. W. Moody, F. X. Martin, F. J. Byrne (3rd impression, Oxford, 1991), p. 298. The only version which is effectively identical with this one is the one contained in manuscript among the 1641 depositions online at 1641.tcd.ie, MS812 f. 243r. For a discussion of the depositions see below pp. 260–4 and n. 57. Most of the first half of this version is derived directly or in paraphrase from the March 1642 version given above, p. 247. 27   There is nothing in Corish’s source to validate his claim, and references to the Supreme Council suggest to me a date not earlier than October 1642. 28   Indeed, many versions are very similar, perhaps most importantly the version to be found as an undated standalone document amongst the 1641 depositions. See 1641.tcd.ie. MS 812, f. 243. 29   For an example of one very close to the wording of the version printed above see Wing / A3259, Another Extract of Several Letters from Ireland (London 1643), dated by Thomason as received by him on 26 Aug. 1643. 30   BL, Thomason / E.44[13], The Impudence of the Romish Whore … discovered by a particular of certaine motives by them divulged … as also by their Oath of Association (1644), p. 9 (Thomason 26

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‘heirs and lawful successors’ but a few of the ‘heires of his body’ or ‘successors of his body begotten’ only.31 All speak of defending his ‘just prerogatives, estates and rights’ but a few add ‘honour’ after ‘prerogatives’.32 All speak of defending the ‘fundamental laws of Ireland’, but some gloss that phrase (for example, ‘to be assistant to the members of this Commonwealth for redresse to be had of the grievances and pressures thereof’).33 The religious commitment is the one that is the most stable, but again there are some notable discrepancies especially in a version taken from the ‘declaration and oath entered into the Councell Book in Kilkeney’ in 1644 which is strikingly more radical.34 It commits the swearer to ‘joyn with the said Irish or any other, to recover his [=Charles’s] estate, royal prerogatives, wrested from him by the Puritanes in the Houses of Parliament in England’ and it also prefaces the commitment to ‘the free and publike exercise of the Romish Catholick Religion in any His Majesties dominions’ by swearing to ‘maintaine Episcopall jurisdiction, and the lawfullnesse thereof in the Church, powers and privileges of prelates’. This version of the Oath is dated 1644 and so this addition is clearly a response to the Solemn League and Covenant which committed all its adherents to the destruction of Protestant episcopacy and a common Presbyterianism across all three kingdoms.35 I do not have space to explore the differences further. The crucial point is that there was never a single version of the Oath. The failure to specify it in the Articles of Association led to continuous instability. Only with Rinuccini’s expansion of the Oath in 1647 to include a binding commitment on all who took the Oath to desist from any private treaties36 was there a single version which all were required to (re-)take. For the first time it was printed and included an additional, emphatic promise not to seek or to accept any peace settlement

records receipt of his copy on 30 April 1644). 31   Ibid.[BL, Thomason / E.17 [14], A declaration made by the rebels in Ireland (1644), p.3, also to be found in the Huntington Library, Hastings Irish Papers box 8, HA 15000, f. 1. 32   Wing / I108 The Impudence of the Romish Whore, p. 9 33   BL, Thomason / E.17 [14], A declaration made by the rebels in Ireland (1644), p. 3; the Huntington Library, Hastings Irish Papers box 8, HA 15000, f. 1. 34  Gilbert, Irish Confederation, II, pp. 35–42. There is an almost identical version in the Huntington Library, Hastings Irish Papers box 8, HA 15000, f. 1. This is more specifically dated 10 May 1644. 35   BL, Thomason / E.17 [14], A declaration made by the rebels in Ireland (1644), p.4. A final striking difference in this version is that those taking it swear ‘in the presence of Almighty God, and all the Angels and Saints, and the contents of the Bible’. This is in the first line and replaces the otherwise standard final words: ‘So help me God and his holy gospel’. 36   For the career of GianBaptista Rinuccini, papal nuncio to the Irish Confederation (1645–9) see Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin, ‘Rinuccini, Giovanni Battista (1592–1653)’, ODNB: www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/23660, accessed 26 March 2016, or Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin, ‘Rinuccini, Giovanni Battista (1592–1653)’, Dictionary of Irish Biography, ed. James McGuire and James Quinn (Cambridge, 2009). In 1647, Rinuccini excommunicated all those who had supported ‘the First Ormonde Peace’ and required fresh subscription to a strengthened oath.

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without the assent not just of the Supreme Council but also of the General Assembly.37 V

By the autumn of 1642, and certainly by the time of the meeting of the first General Assembly at Kilkenny which agreed the Articles of Association of the new Confederation of Kilkenny, as far as the Oath was concerned Rex trumped Deus. From henceforth the first loyalty of those who took the Oath was to the King not to God (or more precisely, to the Body of Christ, the Church). This is, I would suggest, a crucial condition of wholehearted Old English adherence to a movement that had begun overwhelmingly among the Old Irish. This fault line about primary loyalty, reflected in the tension between the emphasis in the motto/mission statement of the Confederates and the Oath which bound them together, was to remain at the heart of Confederate politics for a decade.38 Nothing reveals this tension better than the image on the seal of the Confederation of Kilkenny (figure 13.1 on the next page), created at the same time as the Articles of Association in Kilkenny in October 1642.39 It consisted of a bold central cross, with an imperial crown, placed beneath the bar of the cross to the left, and the Irish harp (symbol of Irish nationhood),40 placed beneath the bar of the cross to the right, with an motto in a circle round the symbols that read ‘pro deo, rege et patria: hiberni unanimes’ – Irishmen united first for God, then for the King and then for the homeland. If we replace ‘Hiberni’ by ‘Anglici’ and the harp by the unicorn, this could have served as a motto for those bound by the Protestation.41 1640s Irish Catholic loyalism, like Elizabethan English Catholic loyalism, was between a rock and a hard place. Across the 1640s and early 1650s, the tension between primary loyalties inexorably led to stress fractures within the Confederation and eventually to its disintegration.

  For the printing history in Ireland see above n. 15. For the 1647 printed version see BL, Thomason / E.386[16] The Bloody Diurnall from Irelands, being Papers of Propositions, Orders, an Oath … printed by the Originall Papers from the Irish Commissioners which were first printed at Kilkenny and now Reprinted at London, Anno Dom. 1647. 38   For the classic statement of these see Ó Siochrú, Confederate Ireland. 39   For the order to create it, and its form see Gilbert, History of the Irish Confederation, II, p. 84. 40   Seamus Ó Brógáin, The Irish Harp Emblem (Dublin, 1998). It was first used as a symbol of Ireland on the reverse of a half-crown minted for Ireland in 1534, with Henry VIII on the ‘heads’ side of it. 41  Image downloaded from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confederate_Ireland. For an identical but not downloadable image see Michaeál Ó Siochrú, ‘The Confederation of Kilkenny’, History Ireland (Summer, 1994), p. 53 (online at http://1641.tcd.ie/learning/ wp-content/uploads/2015/01/The-Confederation-of-Kilkenny.pdf). 37

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Figure 13.1 Seal of the Confederation of Kilkenny, [reproduced from The Council Book of the Corporation of Kinsale 1652–1800, ed. Richard Caulfield (Guildford, 1879), plate ii] VI

The Oath confers rights and responsibilities. First, rights. The confederation created an administrative structure based on popular elections. ‘At the election of the county’, shire councillors were to be chosen who would act as elected JPs, administering justice and regulating economic and social policy. These county councils were to choose two of their elected members to serve on provincial councils which were to meet at least four times a year, each under a president appointed from among its members with power to try felonies and to act as local courts regulating title and use of land. Although the General Assembly was initially chosen by small meetings of local elites, the intention was, from early on, once the Oath had been universally administered, that future assemblies were to be chosen by and from among those who had taken the Oath.42 This was fully articulated a decade later in an order by the earl of Clanricard when he

  Orders made and established, clauses V–VIII.

42

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took over as Lord Lieutenant: he called a General Assembly to Jamestown and told the sheriffs of the areas under his control to hold ‘General Meetings’ of all the countrymen, and of ‘all the inhabitants of the burroughs’ to elect representatives.43 This was a devolved popular participation that endured throughout the life of the Confederation when it was brutally suppressed by the heroes of the Putney Debates. Elected JPs and sheriffs, an executive appointed by and fully answerable to popularly elected representatives, a bottom-up political system with a high level of accountability: I appear to speak of an Agreement of the Irish People, hammered out in Kilkenny in October 1642, which created a structure of government which was not to be significantly changed until the collapse of the Confederation in 1652. In reality, popular elections of representatives were conducted by ‘shout’ or by ‘view’.44 Thus conceptualising representative government was not the preserve of radical Protestant sectaries; it was also the preserve of Irish Catholic priests. And, as we will see, not everyone cheerfully signed up to secure these rights. The responsibilities were equally clear. The article calling on all Catholics to take the Oath begins: ‘it is ordered and established, that to preuent the springing vp of all Nationall distinctions, the Oath of Association, or Vnion be taken solemnely’.45 Historians are not agreed on how far the rebellion of 1641 was a pre-emptive strike against the Long Parliament’s plans for religious persecution, further plantation and the placing of the Irish kingdom directly under statutory governance made in the Palace of Westminster not Dublin Castle, and how far it was a settling of old scores and for the reversal of old policies and plantations.46 A majority view is that those who launched the pre-emptive strikes in Dublin and the North from late October 1641 were driven by the former, certainly and explicitly mindful of the promise in the Scottish National Covenant to ‘extirpate’ popery and Catholicism in all three kingdoms (‘extirpate’, a word that was haunt Ireland and Irish rhetoric down to and beyond Cromwell’s assault

  A Contemporary History of Affairs in Ireland from 1641 to 1652, Now for the First Time Published with an Appendix of Original Letters and Locuments, ed. John T. Gilbert (Irish Archaeological and Celtic Society, 1879–1880), III, Pt. 2, pp. 253–4. 44   Ibid., p. 256: that is, members of the elite would propose names which would be decided on by acclamation or by visual inspection as supporters of each candidate separated out from the rest. 45   Orders made and established, clause 33. 46   For three classic statements see Aidan Clarke, ‘The genesis of the Ulster rising of 1641’, Plantation to Partition: Essays in Ulster History in Honour of J. L. McCracken, ed. Peter Roebuck (Belfast, 1981), pp.29–45; Nicholas Canny, ‘What really happened in Ireland in 1641?’, Ireland: from Independence to Occupation 1641–1660, in ed. Jane Ohlmeyer (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 24–42; David Edwards, ‘Out of the blue? Provincial unrest in Ireland before 1641’, Ireland, 1641: Contexts and Reactions, ed. Micheál Ó Siochrú and Jane Ohlmeyer (Manchester, 2013), pp. 95–114. 43

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on Drogheda and Wexford).47 That same majority view sees this pre-emptive strike being overtaken by a popular insurrection that threatened to overwhelm a controlled elite coup, introducing elements of massacre, revenge and even the overthrow of Stuart monarchy itself. In at least 100 of the 8,000 depositions of survivors now accessible online, we find evidence of insurgents speaking disparagingly of Charles I and boasting of setting up a Catholic monarch. It matters less that some wanted an O’Neill (Owen Roe or Phelim), some a McGuire, some a King of Spain or even of France than that there were some frayed edges to Catholic loyalism in 1642.48 One reason for the Oath was certainly to commit all Catholics to the House of Stuart. Why, we cannot stop to ponder here. But that an Oath taken in the context of two solemn sacraments would stop this fraying at the edges of Stuart loyalism is undoubted and it worked. The only serious threat to Charles as King of Ireland over the next seven years came from priests like Conor O’ Mahony, formed on the missions and brooding in continental universities and whose ‘Argument defending the right of the kingdom of Ireland’ was burnt by the hangman by order of the Supreme Council in 1645.49 Far more important was the welding together of the fragile alliance of Old English and Old Irish, of the septs of the north and the west and the anglicised nobility, gentry and lawyers of the Pale. As the latter came to throw in their lot with the insurgents, they demanded something in return. That something was an acceptance of plantation and of the institutions of a kingdom of Ireland rooted in English forms with Irish accents, a Catholic Ireland operating under the rules of English common law, property law, inheritance customs. The Old Irish were willing at least for the present to abandon the demand that the results of the Tudor conquest be reversed in return for guarantees on what was left of their property and Catholic religious practice going forward. This, too, the Oath promised to make more secure. And by tying it into the very English frame of local and national governance, the fissiparous component of the insurgency, the threat of social disintegration was also contained. To ram this home, the

  Many of the 1641 depositions claim either that the rebels intended to ‘exirpate’ the Protestants of Ireland or that the Catholics claimed that they feared being ‘extirpated by Protestants’. For a few examples see 1641.tcd.ie MS817 ff. 38v, 818; ff.112r, 833; fo.99, 839 ff. 99, 840; f. 23. In 1649, the Catholic clergy accused Cromwell of coming to ‘extirpate’ the Catholic population, a claim he fiercely rebutted: Wing C1683, unpag. Certaine acts and declarations made by the Ecclesiasticall Congregation of the Archbishops, Bishops, and other Prelates met at Clonmacnoise, the 4 day of December 1649 together with A declaration of the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, for the undeceiving of deluded and seduced people, Cork, Dublin 1650. 48   For stubborn Irish loyalism see the work of Breandán Ó Buachalla, especially The Crown of Ireland (Galway, 2006), and ‘James our True King: the Ideology of Irish Royalism in the Seventeenth Century’, Political Thought in Ireland since the Seventeenth Century, ed. D. George Boyce, Robert Eccleshall and Vincent Geoghegan (London, 1993) pp. 7–35 49   Conor O’ Mahony, An argument defending the right of the Kingdom of Ireland, ed. and trans. John Minuhane (Millstreet, Cork, 2010). 47

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‘ethnicity’ clause of the early versions was detached from the Oath and placed at the heart of the Articles of Association: there shalbe no distinction, nor comparison betwixt old Irish, and old or new English, or betwixt septs and families, or betwixt Cittizens or Townesmen, and Contrymen ioyning in this vnion, on paine of the highest punishment.50

and even more strikingly: euery Roman Catholike as well English, as Welsh, and Scottish, who was of that profession before these troubles, and who will come, and please to reside in this Kingdome, and ioyne in the present vnion, shalbe preserued, and cherished in his life, goods and estate, by the power and authority, and force if need require it, of all the Catholikes of Ireland.51

These come from articles placed just after the power given to all sheriffs to act as provost-marshalls with uncontrolled freedom to enforce the Articles of Association. So this is very much an oath that aimed to create and not reflect on the association and unity that it aspired to. I asked why the insistence on an Oath of Association, and I have suggested it bound together a movement with immense centripetal tendencies. VII

Did all Catholics freely take the Oath? Evidence is scarce, but we have one frustrating general indication, and a source that gives tantalising glimpses of what happened at a local level. In 1643, during the crisis over the truce between the King and the Confederation of Kilkenny, the Irish clergy excommunicated those who were refusing to take the Oath. How many were affected is not known, but some further detail is provided in a statement of John de Burgo, the Bishop of Clonfert. He denounced the gentry of county Longford who had queried the oath, saying they were ‘bound under pain of mortal sin, to take the Oath of Association, thereunto required by their Ordinary and are, in their default, liable to censure of excommunication’. This may have been a localised problem, because Clonfert included the heartland of the Marquis of Clanricard, the most prominent of all the Irish nobility to prefer to work with the King’s Lord Lieutenant than with the Confederation. No further information is available.52

  Orders made and established, clause 14.   Ibid., clause 15. 52   I am grateful to Joan Redmond of St John’s College Cambridge for this information. Her source is the Commentarius Rinuccianus in an English translation and is discussed her forthcoming (2016) Cambridge PhD on religious violence in seventeenth-century Ireland. 50 51

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More generally, what evidence there is for the taking of the Oath comes mainly53 from examinations taken for in 1653 and 1654 to assist with the land settlement proposed in two pieces of Commonwealth legislation intended to confiscate almost half of the land of Ireland from Catholics living in Ireland for distribution to English Adventurers and demobilised English troops.54 They are the papers of the ‘delinquency commissions’,55 later incorporated into what are now known as the ‘1641 Depositions’.56 For county Wexford there are 513 such examinations taken before the delinquency commissions.57 The process they used was in marked contrast to that of the much larger series of depositions taken in the early and mid 1640s, in that deponents were now asked to give evidence against a particular individual in respect of specific war crimes.58 The 1653/4 examinations (they are not depositions in the formal sense) thus took the form of answers to a common interrogatory consisting of thirteen questions, the seventh of which asked whether the examinee knew that the person under investigation had at any time sworn the Oath of Union or Association.59 In a clear majority of the 513 Wexford cases, answers to the seventh question were

  But see also Cal.St.Papers Ireland, 1633–1647, 362–3, dated 7 June 1642: ‘a copy of the Oath of Association now taken by the said Lords and gentry to be sent to every metropolitan and archbishop within the kingdom, who are hereby ordered, either by themselves or their parish priests, to minister it to all persons within their jurisdiction.’ 54   John Cunningham, Conquest and Land in Ireland: The Transplantation to Connacht, 1649–1680 (Woodbridge, 2011), pp. 22–42. For the Acts see Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum 1642–1660, ed. Sir Charles Firth and R. S. Rait (3 vols, London, 1911). II: 598–602 (12 August 1652, Act for the Settling of Ireland); II, pp. 722–52 (24 September 1653, Act for the speedy and effectual satisfaction of the Adventurers for land in Ireland, and of the Arrears due to the Soldiery there; and of other public Debts, and for the encouragement of Protestants to plant and inhabit Ireland). 55   For the background to, and operation of, these commissions see John Cunningham, ‘Anatomising Irish Rebellion: the Cromwellian Delinquency Commissions, the Books of Discrimination and the 1641 Depositions’, Irish Historical Studies 40:257 (May 2016), 22–42. They were used to try those guilty of treason in the High Court of Justice in 1653–5, for which see Jennifer Wells, ‘English Law, Irish Trials and the Cromwellian State Building in the 1650s’, P&P 227 (2015), 77–118. 56   All now freely available online at 1641.tcd.ie. 57   Cunningham, ‘Anatomising’, p. 22. And for a general explanation of the different clusters of documents that make up the ‘1641 depositions’ see Aidan Clarke, ‘The 1641 Depositions’, Treasures of the Library: Trinity College Dublin, ed. Peter Fox (Dublin, 1986), pp. 111–22; and Clarke, ‘The 1641 massacres’, Ireland 1641, ed. Ó Siochrú and Ohlmeyer, pp. 37–51 58   Thus one William Stafford swore 60 separate depositions against almost as many men, more than one against a few. Each one consisted of specific answers to some or all the questions in the interrogatories. He is described in the examinations of being of ‘Tamon in Wexford gent’ and in at least one of them he admits that he had been ‘clerk of the county of councell’ tcd.1641.ie, MS818 f. 324v. For Stafford see Cunningham, ‘Anatomising’, pp. 28, 36. 59   For the thirteen questions see Ireland under the Commonwealth, 2 vols, ed. Robert Dunlop (Manchester, 1912) II, pp. 378–9. 53

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formulaic: ‘[he] did take the oath of association, it beinge generally imposed’, or ‘it being a general imposition on all persons’.60 Two words need comment here: ‘imposed’/‘imposition’ and ‘general[ly]’. First, ‘imposed’. Does this mean that some Catholics were coerced? The examinations give a few clues. Just occasionally the element of threat is added: ‘[it] could not be avoided with safety’,61 ‘the said Cheeuers did in the yeare 1641 take and subsist the oath of association, his Cause of Knowledg is because it was a general thinge and Could not be avoided without exposing himself to plunder’;62 and something akin to a threat is contained in two separate statements that ‘Andrew Scurlocke of great Codds towne in the Countye of Waxford Gentleman’ had to take the Oath or ‘he Could not have benn permited to haue stayd in the Quarters’/ ‘none was suffred to liue in the Irish quarters Except did take the said Oath’.63 More often – and this is not surprising – anyone already active in a military or civil capacity in supporting the Irish/Catholic cause in 1642 found that their past record was not enough for them to keep their offices: the Oath was clearly insisted on for all office holders: ‘[William Browne] being an emenent man could not act in the seuerall capacities except he had taken the same’;64 another man ‘could not haue been imployd in the Irish service’.65 ‘John [Roch] did take and subscribe the oath of Association in the first yeare of the war otherwise he had not been imployed in the miletarye seruice of the Irish.’66 Only rarely do we find something more intimidatory in the records, and when it does it tends to come from accounts of event that took place in the early months of the Rising before the formation of the Confederation. Thus, David Devereux of Knockhowlin testified that his neighbour (and estranged relative?) Thomas Devereux must have subscribed the Oath because ‘he had heard from his wife, that the masse doores of the parish of Taminshane, wherein the said Thomas liueth were shut, & noe man permitted to departe till he & they respectiuely had taken the said oath’.67 This seems to be confirming that the Oath was taken during Mass and perhaps the doors were locked to prevent irruption from without. But more powerful is the testimony of Robert Browne, a farmer from Knickgangle, Co. Wexford that

  Just a few examples: 1641.tcd.ie, MS818 ff. 199, 200, 237, 254; MS819, ff. 017, 058, 059, 241. 61   1641.tcd.ie, MS818 f. 246. 62   1641.tcd.ie, MS818 f. 224. 63   These are from Dublin examinations and relate to a late taking, or perhaps re-taking of the Oath after it was changed at the insistence of Rinuccini in 1646 to prevent private peace treaties. MS818 ff. 249, 250. 64   1641.tcd.ie MS819 f. 073. 65   1641.tcd.ie MS819 f. 262. 66   1641.tcd.ie MS 819 f. 261. 67   1641.tcd.ie MS 818, ff. 275r–275v. 60

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JOHN MORRILL the said [John] Wadding68 bearing a sword & ffyerlock as a voluntiere with the Irish forces that laie before Duncannon ffort the within four dayes after Christmas 41 And also saith That the said Wadding did hold the priests booke to seuerall Irish that tooke the oath of Association & kept a doore not suffering any of them to passe out till they were all sworne This examinants cause of knowledge is for that hee was present at Baldenstowne about the begining of March 41 [=1642] when & where the said Wading did hold the said booke & keepe the doore, while the priest adminstred the said oath & did see & observe what hee hath declared.69

There are many curiosities here, beginning with the very early date. Note the accusation that Wadding forced people to take the Oath on two occasions, both times ensuring that they swore ‘on the priests book’, presumably his missal. The priest may have administered the Oath on both occasions, but this is only made explicit on the second occasion in March 1642. Secondly, what does ‘generally imposed’ mean – imposed everywhere or imposed on everyone (or both). There are a whole series of variants which suggest that it is more ‘everyone’ than everywhere: ‘it beinge a general imposistian [sic] on all persons’;70 ‘a general thing imposed vppon all’;71 ‘a thing imposed on the whole Country’.72 However sometimes, a degree of social selectivity is implied as in ‘he tooke the oath of Association being imposed vppon all men of his reputation as he conceiveth & not to bee avoided with safety’;73 or of Walter Roch, who ‘did take and subscribe the oath of association as others of his ranke & equality generally did’.74 Perhaps William Stafford’s testimony against Robert Deveraux of Ballishanan sums it up best: ‘that hee beleeveth that hee tooke the Oath of Association being generally imposed, on all men and especially on Assembly men and supreame Councellors’. All were to be sworn but some were to be insistently sworn than others.75 Finally, the depositions tell us something of the content of the Oath. William Stafford, in testifying against William Esmond of Johnstowne esq., said that

  In all probability part of the prominent Wadding merchant family of Wexford town, and many members of his family were priests (see the entry for Wadding, Luke (1628–87), Catholic Bishop of Ferns in Dictionary of Irish Biography, eds. McGuire and Quinn, or Ignatius Fennessy, ‘Wadding, Luke (1588–1657)’, ODNB: www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/28369, accessed 3 March 2016; Patrick J. Corish, ‘Wadding, Luke (1631–1687)’, ODNB: www.oxforddnb.com/ view/article/68236, accessed 3 March 2016. 69   1641.tcd.ie MS 819 f. 059v, In the separate examination of William Stafford relating to John Wadding, it is claimed that Wadding defected to ‘the English’ later in the year (f. 059r), something perhaps implied in Browne’s careful claim that Wadding was in arms ‘all the tyme of the Rebellion’ (1641–2?), but also says this was just ‘the first year’. 70   1641.tcd.ie MS 818 f. 254 and cf. MS819 f. 017. 71   1641.tcd.ie MS 819 f. 206. 72   1641.tcd.ie MS 818 f. 269–70. 73   1641.tcd.ie MS 818 f. 246. 74   1641.tcd.ie MS 819 f.242. 75   1641.tcd.ie MS 818 f. 282. 68

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‘the said Esmond did take the oath of association in the yeare 1641 [=1642] & alsoe an oath of the Country Councell both which oaths were to this effect that hee should be true to the King and vphold his rights and vphold the Roman Catholick religion And defend his Countrye against all opposers’.76 Now this is testimony from memory in December 1653 but there must have been some reason for him breaking his usual terseness and specifying, in this particular examination, the content of the oath.77 And certainly the fact that he refers to a second Oath specified by the county council is worthy of comment – he can hardly have been alone in taking it. The evidence of the depositions, even if we cannot be sure that Wexford was representative, was that the Oath and the swearing of it was taken very seriously. Maybe the elaborate plans for whole communities to gather for confession and Mass before they took the Oath were found to be impractical. Certainly the evidence points to a major effort to achieve widespread subscription. VIII

There is one further deposition, this one sworn in February 1645 and relating to events in county Kerry which is important here. It is sworn by ‘Stephen Love late of the Towne and parish of Killarny in the barony of Mogunihy and within the County of kiery student (a brittish protestant)’ and is a 3,500 word account of the social, political and religious violence in the area around Killarney from the start of the rising to the time the deposition was sworn.78 At the heart of this narrative of ethnic and religious violence is an account of what happened when, in November 1642, Florence MacCarthy and his supporters demanded the surrender of the castle at Ballycarty from the English settler, Robert Blennerhasset: he likewise then produced a rough draught of seuerall acts concluded in the said assembly; namely that all manner of persons of what degree state or condition soeuer should take the oath of vnion an[d] association in this generall cause (as they tearme it)’.

The Oath was to be tendered before anything else, and the Catholic sheep separated from the Protestant goats. Those who took the Oath were to ‘mainteine the Catholick Cause to the vttermost of their sk[ills] and endeauor’while nont-akers would ‘otherwise be dealt with all as enemyes an[d] anointed of the malignant partie’. MacCarthy also made clear that the Oath would require all to took it   1641.tcd.ie MS 818 f. 202.   Cf. the testimony of William Stafford against Thomas Rosceter of Rothmacknee esq. that he would ‘be true to the King and the Roman Catholick religion and defend the countrye against all opposers’. 1641.tcd.ie MS819 ff. 265–6. 78   1641.tcd.ie, MS828 ff. 124–7. 76

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JOHN MORRILL not to embrace any particular pardon till such time as a generall pardon were granted for the whole kingdome … and that all manner of persons should mainteine the kinges Prerogatiue and the Statute of Magna Charta, they haue repealed (as much as in them layd) the statutes of form in England against papists as that of 2 Eliz: & inforceing & strengthning other acts long since repealed as that of Poyninges & thother of Oyier and Terminer.

Here in a nutshell is the programme of the Old English. It also suggests that a month after the General Assembly at Kilkenny had approved the taking of an Oath of Association, the one being tendered in Kerry had features not found in any surviving version. Only after all this, did Florence MacCathy produce a list of two or three & thirtie statutes then inacted in the said parliament79 by them they were inabled to choose name Two out of euery province & these Two out of euery province had power to choose a vic-roy or a Superintendent of their nationall Counsell, likewise to establish a provinciall counsell consisting of Two able men out of euery County; who by the said acts had power in themselues to elect a president within each Province respectiuely; It was inacted likewise that there should be erected a County Counsell consisting of Two out of euery barony in each County respectiuely.

The bottom-up relationship between county councils, provincial councils and a National Assembly and Supreme Council were vivid in the memory of a Protestant who was present. But the Oath came first. IX

Lack of space prevents discussion of the reasons why the Oath of Association was so unstable. What I hope to have shown is that at a crucial moment in the creation of what became the Confederation of Kilkenny, the English Protestation Oath proved an inspiration. And like the Protestation Oath, forms of that oath were to prove a rallying cry across a decade of civil war and revolution. The Irish Oath was even more heavily freighted than the English Oath. It was intended to contain the extreme violence of the popular wing of those who had gone far beyond what those who planned the October 1641 Rising had intended. In this it largely succeeded – popular violence was contained and largely brought under control. It was also intended to weld together the historically deeply antagonistic Old English and Old Irish and to make Catholicism transcend all ethnic divides, and in this it failed. But perhaps most of all, it was intended to push the Old English Catholics of the Pale into revolt. Terrified by what the English Parliament had in store for them, goaded beyond endurance by   Protestants were quicker to name the General Assembly a Parliament than the Confederates were: it was part of their respect for the royal prerogative that only he could call a Parliament. For the paradoxes of all this, Ireland from Independence to Occupation, ed. Ohlmeyer, chaps. 1 and 5.

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paranoid provocations from Dublin Castle, the Old English looked to the King to protect them. It is no surprise that the ‘Irish Protestation’ was promulgated within days of news reaching Ireland that the English Parliament had passed the Adventurers Bill, borrowing money from London’s venture capitalists and from wealthy Puritans with their visceral anti-popery to crush the rebellion on the promise of seizing more Irish land than was owned by the native Irish.80 The exaggerated royalism of the Oath is as much an appeal to Charles I to show that they were the most loyal of rebels and could be a foundation stone of his restored authority. For surely, they thought, in the long run the King would win the wars in his three kingdoms. So the Irish Oath both looked to overlay the ethnic, social fissures within Irish Catholicism – and to contain very different politics of memory – and to reach out to a distant King who would not allow them personal access to him. We really are a united people, they pleaded, and we really want a Protestant King in our Catholic kingdom. It was a doomed project.

  Patrick Little, ‘The English parliament and the Irish constitution, 1641–9’, Kingdoms in crisis: Ireland in the 1640s. Essays in honour of Donal Crógan, ed. Micheál Ó Siochú (Dublin, 2001), pp.106–21.

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14 ‘Whereat his wife tooke great greef & died’: dying of sorrow and killing in anger in seventeenth-century Ireland1 Clodagh Tait

In 1642, Anne Read’s husband died of grief. In the same year, Sir Con Magennis died tormented by his evil deeds and ‘much … affrighted with the apprehension and conceipt that … Mr Tudge [a minister he had slain] was still in his presence’.2 Early modern people attributed huge consequence to ‘passions’ (they would not have used the word ‘emotion’) like grief, anger and fear. When uncontrolled, ‘passion’ started wars and ended life. Little wonder that contemporaries urged the restraint of potentially damaging feelings. However, there were times when emotions were particularly difficult to check. John Walter’s recent work on the collection of documents called the 1641 Depositions has assisted in building a new understanding of the outbreak of waves of violence in Ireland in 1641–2 and subsequently.3 The depositions contain testimonies from about 3,000 people, mostly British Protestant settlers, who had been dispossessed of their lands, homes and goods by Catholic rebels.4 Some had been confronted by crowds of local people, though as the rebellion continued, gentlemen tended to take over the leadership of these attacks. Either way, most of the deponents could identify at least some of those involved. The majority had been threatened with violence, and many bore tales of loss of property, personal injury and the torture and violent deaths of their family members, friends and neighbours. There were also accounts of incidents of desecration of sacred space and iconoclasm and of the deliberate humiliation of victims, who were routinely stripped and insulted. The depositions also contain

1   Many thanks to Bill Frazer and to the editors for their comments on earlier versions of this chapter. 2   From MSS deposited at Trinity College Dublin (thereafter TCD): TCD MS 837, ff 4r, 11r–11. 3   John Walter, ‘Performative Violence and the Politics of Violence in the 1641 depositions’, Ireland, 1641: Contexts and Reactions, ed. Micheál Ó Siochrú and Jane Ohlmeyer (Manchester, 2013), pp.134–52. 4   The documents are now online: see ‘The 1641 Depositions Project’, www.tcd.ie/ history/1641.

CLODAGH TAIT

a later set of ‘examinations’, usually conducted to probe particular crimes that had occurred in the early 1640s. The testimonies here included those of both settler and native witnesses and alleged perpetrators.5 It is no surprise, therefore, that Nicholas Canny should have described the depositions as ‘a body of material which is emotional’.6 Historians of the period often reflect on the emotional state of the Gaelic Irish and Old English participants, to paint a picture of simmering humiliation, shame, resentment, hostility, fear, hatred, anxiety and despair that led to outpourings of vengeful rage. Though economic and other grievances are pinpointed as arousing these emotions, they are regularly fathered above all on religion: Inga Jones argues that ‘religion has the capacity to arouse passions which go beyond what political and localist concerns can stimulate, a passion which … could and did spill over into unrestrained slaughter’.7 The historiography of the 1640s was also emotional: printed accounts of the rebellion were highly emotionally charged from the start, and passionate debates about the events of the period and the veracity of the evidence of the depositions have continued until very recently.8 Indeed, Ethan Shagan’s recent acute essay on the meaning of early modern violence in the present day reflects on different approaches to past violence, and on the notion that in the course of creating history that ‘can transcend memory’, for historians ‘abandon[ing] emotion for cool, analytic reason’ may not always be a comfortable or desirable process.9

5   On 1641 and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms in Ireland see especially Nicholas Canny, Making Ireland British, 1580–1650 (Oxford, 2001); Canny, ‘Religion, Politics and the Irish Rising of 1641’, Religion and Rebellion, ed. J. Devlin and R. Fanning (Dublin, 1997), pp. 40–70; Ulster 1641: Aspects of the Rising, ed. Brian MacCuarta (Belfast, 1993); M. PercevalMaxwell, The Outbreak of the Irish Rebellion of 1641 (Dublin, 1994); Ireland from Independence to Occupation, 1641–1660, ed. Jane Ohlmeyer (Cambridge, 1995); Ireland, 1641, ed. Ó Siochrú and Ohlmeyer; Eamon Darcy, The Irish Rebellion of 1641 and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms (London, 2013); Kingdoms in Crisis: Ireland in the 1640s, ed. Micheál Ó Siochrú (Dublin, 2001); The 1641 Depositions and the Irish Rebellion, ed. Eamon Darcy, Annaleigh Margey and Elaine Murphy (London, 2012); Age of Atrocity: Violence and Political conflict in Early Modern Ireland, ed. David Edwards, Pádraig Lenihan and Clodagh Tait (Dublin, 2007). There are also numerous local studies. 6   Nicholas Canny, ‘What really happened in 1641’, Ireland from Independence to Occupation, ed. Ohlmeyer, p. 27. 7   Inga Jones, ‘A Sea of Blood? Massacres During the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, 1641– 1653’, Theatres of Violence: Massacre, Mass Killing and Atrocity through History, ed. Philip G. Dwyer and Lyndall Ryan (Oxford, 2012), p. 73. 8   John Gibney, The Shadow of a Year: The 1641 Rebellion in Irish History and Memory (Madison, 2013); Toby Barnard, ‘1641: A Bibliographical Essay’, Ulster 1641, ed. Brian MacCuarta, pp. 173–228; Barnard, ‘“Parlour Entertainment in an Evening”: Histories of the 1640s’, Kingdoms in Crisis, ed. Ó Siochrú, pp. 20–43; Kathleen M. Noonan, ‘“Martyrs in Flames”: Sir John Temple and the Conception of the Irish in English Martyrologies’, Albion 36:2 (2004), pp. 223–55. 9    Ethan Shagan, ‘Early Modern Violence: from Memory to History’, Ireland, 1641, ed. Ó Siochrú and Ohlmeyer, pp. 17–38. See also Clodagh Tait, David Edwards and Pádraig

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Given the acknowledged importance of ‘emotion’ to the violent course and contested interpretation of the 1640s in Ireland, and in light of Barbara Rosenwein’s call that ‘the study of emotions should not … form a separate strand of history but rather inform every historical inquiry’, it is worth considering the topic in greater detail.10 Violent actions and expressions of emotion have been described by historians as performing similar roles: both can reflect past values and ‘mentalities’; both are forms of communication; and both can be ‘generative’ of new social relationships.11 Though early modern violence has received increasing attention, emotion has been less studied, especially in an Irish context. Investigation of emotions in the past is fraught with difficulty. At the most basic level, when people talked about feelings like ‘love’, ‘fear’, ‘anger’ and ‘grief’ what did these words mean to them? How have understandings of the nature of emotions and how it is appropriate to express them changed over time? Michael Woods points out that while emotions ‘are rooted in human biology and do have physiological manifestations’, they are also ‘fundamentally shaped by cultural norms’.12 It is not that people feel things differently in different cultures – though they may – but that cultures differ on how it is appropriate to express emotion. ‘Emotional communities’, as Rosenwein calls them, are fashioned by ‘shared vocabularies and ways of thinking’ about emotion.13 Meanwhile, ‘emotional epithets and characterisations may be used by one group (self-defined by race, class, estate, and so on) for or against another’.14 Usually the implication is that we are rational and in control of our feelings while they are unstable and irrational in theirs. The contexts in which emotions are spoken and written about also shape their representation. It is perhaps surprising to find that, despite the horrors they relate and their undoubted cumulative emotional impact, the 1641 depositions actually do not have much to say directly about emotion. After all, they were legal documents and their compilers were concerned more with establishing losses and recording crimes than probing trauma. The deponents themselves were concerned to prove their reliability and respectability. Their testimonies therefore reveal little directly about their emotional states either on occasions Lenihan, ‘Early modern Ireland: a History of Violence’, Age of Atrocity, ed. Edwards, Lenihan and Tait, pp.9–33. 10    Barbara H. Rosenwein, ‘Problems and Methods in the History of Emotions’, Passions in Context 1 (2010), p. 24; Rosenwein, ‘Worrying about Emotions in History’, AHR 107 (2002), 821–45; Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (London, 2006); Ute Frevert, Emotions in History: Lost and Found (Budapest, 2011); William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge, 2001). 11   Shagan, ‘Early modern Violence’; Rosenwein, ‘Problems and Methods’, pp. 1–32. 12   Michael E. Woods, Emotional and Sectional Conflict in the Antebellum United States (Cambridge, 2014), p. 12. 13  Rosenwein, Emotional Communities, p. 25. 14   Rosenwein, ‘Problems and Methods’, p. 13.

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that they suffered ill-treatment, at the time of their swearing the deposition, or in the period in between. Yet words like ‘grief’, ‘fury’ and ‘joy’ do appear, and this chapter seeks to consider the contexts in which they are applied, in order to reveal how the attribution of emotion might actively be employed by deponents to recast their experiences of defeat and disaster. Furthermore, given that the actions of perpetrators of violence are largely represented by their victims, by hostile onlookers, or, in the case of the examinations, by individuals keen to downplay their own culpability, we see the beginning of a process of negotiation over meaning wherein representations of emotional states were also influenced by the desire to allocate blame, or to avoid it. Moreover, representations of emotion could also have real effects. Material from the depositions was subsequently used as anti-Irish and anti-papist propaganda in the British press. This chapter also explores how that move to print was accompanied by a dialling up of their emotional content and emotive impact. These texts were designed to provoke an emotional as well as a rational response. Having said this, and despite their conscious suppression of certain emotions and the difficulties for the historian in disentangling actual emotional experience from the performance and representation of emotional states, it is nonetheless possible to use the depositions to recover something of the ‘real’ emotions of those caught up in violent events. Firstly, we shouldn’t assume that self-interested accounts cannot reveal actual emotional responses. Secondly, certain linguistic elements that indirectly reveal emotion can be isolated. For example, John Wilson and Heather Walker have analysed the use within the depositions of modal adverbs (like verily, commonly, credibly, instantly, dangerously, and so on) that indicate the attitude of deponents to events that they relate, ‘providing a window through which the values and emotions of the speaker may be viewed’.15 We can also begin to explore the active role of emotion within episodes of violence. Drawing on work on the sociology of violence and emotion, particularly Randall Collins’s insights into how violent confrontations unfold, can meanwhile help us to consider ways in which the emotional state of attackers and victims shaped the patterns of violence seen in the early 1640s. John Walter’s calls for the contextualisation of violent events sit well with Collins’s assertion that ‘the dynamics of situations are crucial in explaining what violence [violent people] actually do’.16 By combining Collins’s insights with case studies from the depositions, it is possible to begin to understand how and why people

  John Wilson and Heather Walker, ‘Pragmatic Markers as Implicit Emotive Anchoring: Modality as Evidence of Trauma in the 1641 depositions’, Pragmatic Markers in Irish English, ed. Carolina P. Amador-Moreno, Kevin McCafferty and Elaine Vaughan (Amsterdam, 2015), pp. 248–69. See www.abdn.ac.uk/1641-depositions/ for a project aiming at further linguistic analysis of the depositions. 16   Randall Collins, Violence: A Micro-Sociological Theory (Princeton, 2008), p. 3. Note that Collins supports his theories by reference to historical examples from different regions in very different eras. 15

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t­ ransformed their ‘feelings’ of anger, betrayal, fear, and so on, into actual attacks on other human beings. I

Fear and confusion are of course very evident in the 1641 depositions, but the emotion-word most often used by deponents is grief. Quite a large number of deponents attributed the deaths of those close to them to grief as much as to their injuries, or described their own grief and testified to its enervating effects. For example, Martha Mosley of Carlow deposed that she and her husband had been obliged early in the rebellion to flee to Carlow castle ‘where they remained for about one yere or thereabouts, and there endured much greefe and calamity and such in deed that as she thincketh was the death of her said husband and alsoe of her mother’.17 Miles Jenkinson described the killing of his brother William near Athy, Co. Kildare, about Easter 1642 ‘whereat his wife tooke great greef & died leaving 4 or 5 children’.18 Martha Chesman of Desertlin, Co. Derry, alleged that her husband had been beaten, imprisoned and excoriated by the rebels, and that he had died shortly afterwards ‘through greefe casting vpp much blood’.19 Elizabeth Peirce of Newry, Co. Down, likewise claimed that her husband ‘about the xvth of December last dyed of a sicknes which she thincketh was procured by greefe & occasion of the Rebellion: & by a blow he had’. James Shaw of Markethill, Co. Armagh was imprisoned for six months along with his family: during this time ‘his wiff dyed of greefe & his 3 children dyed alsoe’.20 Elizabeth Bradley of Co. Kildare was ‘verely perswaded the cold which her husband tooke in such his passage to Castle Jordan & greefe for his & this deponents losses and disasters did drive him into that sicknes whereof he (languishing) died’.21 Anne Read of Co. Leitrim deposed to the robbery of her family and that her six-year-old son had been beaten to death by a group of other children, while an infant child who had been cared for by an Irish nurse had been stripped and rejected by her and so died. ‘And further sayth that this deponents husband comeing out of England to dublin & hearing of the Rebellion & being tould that this deponent & her children were robbed stript and dead in a ditch: Hee being overcomen with greef & beleeveing the same to be true fell into sicknes whereof he soone after dyed And this deponent haveing soe lost her husband 2 of her children & being robbed and stripped of all her meanes is now by greefe and extreame want become the miserable object of pittie.’22 John Light from Co.

    19   20   21   22   17

18

TCD MS 812, ff. 90r–v TCD MS 815, ff. 340r–v TCD MS 839, ff. 98r–v TCD MS 836, ff. 112r–v TCD MS 813, ff. 303r–304v TCD MS 831, ff. 39r–40v.

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Fermanagh described the sad fate of members of the Seagrave family: ‘althoughe the said Mr Seagrave fledd away & soe escaped with his liffe yet he takeing and harbouring too much greefe dyed about March then next after and quickly after his wiffe dyed: leaveing behynd them twoe children’. Light further deposed ‘That Ann Adlin widow sister of the said Charles Seagreave … was alsoe by the Rebells deprived and Robbed of her meanes goodes & Chattells worth seven hundreth poundes or thereaboutes And takeing over much greefe for the same and the dispoyleing of her frendes shee therewith alsoe dyed, about the said month of March 164[2].’23 In the first instance, the use of ‘grief’ as a description of people’s states of mind in such accounts helps us better to understand the contemporary meaning of the term. It is obvious that nowadays we might expand on the range of labels covered by the seventeenth-century term ‘grief’ to include conditions such as depression and post-traumatic stress. People were understood to suffer deeply from the effects of grief, and death might ensue when grief became excessive and all-consuming: ‘takeing and harbouring too much greefe’ or ‘over much greefe’, as it is described in Light’s deposition.24 But the term is significant in other ways as well. Grief is the ‘feeling’ most frequently attributed by deponents to themselves and their co-religionists. It is presented as a very passive emotion. In other contexts this submission to grief might have been viewed in a negative light: Sir William Temple, for example, argued that those who allowed themselves to be so consumed by grief that they died were essentially guilty of suicide.25 But in the context of the onslaught faced by the victims of Ireland’s rebels, dying from grief was something perpetrated on victims rather than perpetrated by them: murder rather than suicide. By contrast, Protestant deponents only rarely attributed what we might term more active emotions to themselves. They rarely allude to their own anger, either that felt at the time or in retrospect, though a certain level of indignation breaks through in the adjectives used to describe the rebels – barbarous, bloody, cruel, brutish, inhuman, murderous, merciless, ‘rogueish’, and so on. This comes across especially clearly in depositions directly written by the deponents themselves, rather than dictated to one of the commissioners, and in the   TCD MS 835, ff. 209r–v.   Clodagh Tait, Death, Burial and Commemoration in Ireland, 1550–1650 (Basingstoke, 2002), pp. 25–8; Ann Laurence, ‘Godly Grief: Individual Responses to Death in Seventeenth-Century Britain’, in Death, Ritual and Bereavement, ed. Ralph Houlbrooke (London, 1989), pp. 62–76; Ralph Houlbrooke, Death, Religion and the Family in England, 1480–1750 (Oxford, 1998), pp. 220–54; Erin Sullivan, ‘A Disease Unto Death: Sadness in the Time of Shakespeare’, in Emotions and Health 1200–1700, ed. Elena Carrera (Leiden, 2013), pp. 93–102; Patricia Phillippy, ‘“I might againe have been the Sepulchre”: Paternal and Maternal Mourning in Early Modern England’, in Grief and Gender, 700–1700, ed. Jennifer C. Vaught (Basingstoke, 2003). 25   ‘To the Countess of Essex; upon her Grief’, The Works of Sir William Temple (4 vols, London, 1814), III, pp. 519–30. 23 24

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testimonies of women, whose gender may have licenced more emotive presentations of their experiences.26 Those whose actions were observed and reported by other deponents are almost never described as swearing at or railing against their persecutors, they are calm when faced with imminent death, and are depicted in the majority of cases as refusing to be provoked into rash or violent actions. In the few places where deponents note their friends and colleagues displaying anger, that anger is usually implied to be a momentary and reckless lapse. Grace Smith of Inchloghcore, Co. Laois, described how her husband, Captain Smith, had been captured by rebels following a skirmish. On being offered quarter, the Captain ‘as it seemeth being over inflamed by their wickednes sajd vnto them what shall I take quarter from a company of Rogues: Wherevpon they then and there most barbarously killed him … & cutt of his head: & slew alsoe the most of his men.’27 Surprisingly, the Protestant victims do not engage in ritual cursing, the classic response of the powerless to the misdeeds and violence of the powerful.28 Instead, the peaceableness of the settlers is usually stressed. John Goldsmith, parson of Burrishrule, Co. Mayo, described how the‘Rebells began against the English in the time of their sleepy security Lying at their mercie Like lambes in the hands of the shearer’.29 Nor were there calls for vengeance, except from the ghostly apparitions that supposedly haunted the sites of massacres at Portadown and Belturbet. Naomi McAreavey has discussed the accounts by women of a female apparition at Portadown as playing a role in allowing them to deal with the trauma of their experiences.30 In some of the depositions, the victims are described as heroically overcoming emotions of grief, terror or anger to achieve heights of martyr-like calm. Thomas Richardson admiringly recalled the stoicism of his young daughter who, when the family fled for safety ‘naked in the frost … seeing him and her mother grieve and cry for their misery, in the way of comforting them said she was not cold, nor did cry, although presently after she died of cold and want’.31 In her vivid and oft-cited account, Elizabeth Holliwell of Roscommon town deposed to the treachery of Charles O’Connor of Ballinafod, who promised his English and Scots Protestant tenants that they would be protected, but then allowed them to   Naomi McAreavey, ‘Re(-)membering Women: Protestant Women’s Victim testimonies During the Irish Rising of 1641’, Journal of the Northern Renaissance 2:1 (2010), 72–92; MarieLouise Coolahan, Women, Writing, and Language in Eartly Modern Ireland (Oxford, 2010), pp. 141–79. 27   TCD MS 814, ff. 163r–165v 28   Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England (London, 1991 edn), pp. 599–611; John Walter, Crowds and Popular Politics in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2006), pp. 203–4; Clodagh Tait, ‘“Irish Curses are Always Picturesque”: Malediction, Oaths and Vengeance in Early Modern Ireland’, forthcoming. 29   TCD MS 831, f. 197r. 30   McAreavey, ‘Re(-)membering Women’, pp. 86–8. 31   TCD MS 837, f. 13r. 26

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be killed. The victims included one women who, in the midst of torture, having seen her husband and children die, became soe resolute & Careles of death to herself That smileing she advised others tha[t were] to suffer with her not to greeve or be affrayd o[f death] ffor shee hoped to supp with God that night. Insoemuch (as the Rebells themselves confessed) they were angry That she smiled & greived not for the death which she suffered.32

In the depositions, therefore, anger or ‘passion’ is attributed mostly to the rebels. Even leaders like Phelim O’Neill were described as committing atrocities out of rage: angry at the loss of one of his men, O’Neill ordered that ‘the Country called Ederaown’ be preyed and burned, and any men, women and children found be killed.33 Such immoderate anger might be presented as proceeding from demonic or diabolical inspiration. Attackers were regularly portrayed as being in the grip of rage or fury so strong that it bordered on frenzy or obsession. Anne Sherring who witnessed the massacre of her husband and other Protestants at Silvermines, Co. Tipperary, at the hands of Hugh Kennedy and his followers, alleged that such fury might lead to madness and even suicide: ‘such was Gods Judgment vpon the said Hugh Kennedy for that bloudy fact, That he fell into a most desperate madnes & distraccion & could not rest day nor nighte yet Coveting to doe more mischeefe vpon the English, but being prevented & denyed to doe it He about a weeke after drowned himself’.34 When Grace Smith destroyed gunpowder and ammunition before it could be seized by the rebels, ‘they were all soe inraged & exasperated with anger’ that she was forced to flee to Birr, Co. Offaly. There she heard ‘That the Rebells had taken an oath att Masse to mince the deponent to peeces for distroying the powder (if ever they could meet with her)’.35 Other deponents described the ‘bloody’, ‘implacable’ or ‘bedlamlike’ fury of the rebels: they attacked, maimed and killed ‘furiously’ – even Turks and Jews would have more compassion, claimed John Bringhurst of Co. Mayo.36 Fury made men like beasts. Significantly, the only time that fury is attributed to the Protestant side concerns not people but horses. At the battle of Lisnegarvey one witness observed such strong fury and rage in the very horses of the protestant Ryders that they with great eagarnes and with strang Nayings & vnaccustomed roreings rushed amongst the Rebells bore them downe under their feete and took divers of their pykes in their very mowths and furiously rushed them out of the Rebells hands & trampled them under theire feete … In soe much as those very horses destroyed many of them.37

32

    34   35   36   37   33

TCD MS 830, ff. 35r–35v. TCD MS 836, f. 134v. TCD MS 821, f. 181r. TCD MS 814, f. 165v. TCD MS 831, ff. 201r–208v. TCD MS 836, f. 92v.

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The question could be asked as to how much of the emotional passivity imputed to victims by the deponants and the commissioners who shaped their testimonies was a rhetorical strategy, a means of supporting a picture of overwhelming and savage violence, of absolving the victims of the guilt they may have felt in not offering more resistance,38 and of finding meaning in catastrophe by casting victims as martyrs. However, it is also useful to consider such accounts within the context of seventeenth-century ideas about the virtues of ‘Christian passivity’ in Protestant tradition, wherein passivity before the will of God was seen as potentially active in its effects. By ‘self-sacrifice and passive obedience’ to God, people became his instruments and both personal and political reformations were possible.39 At the very least, the stoicism of young women and children in the face of death was a message to others that they too could endure hardship. Women and children were often the focus of publications in the ‘ars moriendi’ (arts of dying) tradition, which presented their exemplary deaths as an example for all to follow.40 Meanwhile, the absence of stoicism in grown men implied the absence of divine guidance. These were not manly men. The early modern period increasingly saw normative constructions of masculinity that enjoined ‘civil’ men to strive to attain self-mastery – a man who was not master of his own passions and appetites was not fit to be a master of others.41 And, as Daniel M. Gross points out, in the seventeenth century, mental illness was often understood to derive from the ‘mismatch of emotion to circumstance’: fury and lack of compassion might therefore signify that self-control was impossible. The ventriloquising of the victims’ anger through the ‘unaccustomed roreings’ of horses and the unearthly shrieks of ghosts meanwhile affirmed that both the natural and supernatural world affirmed their right to vengeance.42

38

  A point made by Walter in ‘Performative Violence’, p. 136.   Daniel M. Gross, The Secret History of Emotion (Chicago, 2006), pp. 85–112. 40  Tait, Death, Burial and Commemoration, pp. 1, 15. 41   See Elizabeth Foyster, Manhood in Early Modern England: Honour, Sex and Marriage (London, 1999); Alexandra Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2006). 42   On fury in an Irish context see Patricia Coughlan, ‘“The modell of its Sad Afflictions”: Henry Burkhead’s Tragedy of Cola’s Furie, Kingdoms in Crisis, ed. Ó Siochrú, pp. 192–211. On anger, Anger’s Past: The Social Uses of an Emotion in the Middle Ages, ed. Barbara H. Rosenwein (London, 1998); Michael Potegal and Raymond W. Novaco, ‘A Brief History of Anger’, International Handbook of Anger: Constituent and Concommitant Biological, Psychological, and Social Processes, ed. Michael Potegal, Gerhard Stemmler and Charles Spielberger (New York, 2010), pp. 9–24; Discourses of Anger in the Early Modern Period, ed. Karl A. E. Enenkel and Anita Traninger (Leiden, 2015); Kristine Steenburgh, ‘Emotions and Gender: the Case of Anger in Early Modern English Revenge Tragedies’, A History of Emotions 1200–1800, ed. Jonas Liliequist (London, 2012), pp. 119–34. On self-mastery see Shepard, Meanings of Manhood. 39

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While emotional passivity might generate political messages, it was counterproductive in practical terms. When attacked, those settlers not resident in defensible castles, or urban strongholds, seem to have relied on strategies of non-resistance aimed at damping down the aggression of attackers. This may have worked in some cases, with rebels intimidated by the thought of actually carrying through their threats to kill and contenting themselves with robbing, terrifying and humiliating their victims instead. However, recent sociological work on the dynamics of how violent atrocities and massacres unfold has highlighted the ‘extent to which emotional responses of the victims help shape the cruelty exhibited by the attackers’. With reference to examples from a variety of different historical contexts, Randall Collins and others have noted that in cases where victims, for whatever reason, remain passive in the face of their attackers, this passivity can serve to enflame rather than restrain the enemy. Collins’s account of the phenomena he calls ‘forward panic’ and the ‘hysteria zone’ seem to describe many of the incidents that happened in Ireland in 1641/2, and, indeed, on a number of later occasions, such as the sieges of Drogheda and Wexford, and countless other similar events. Pointing out that ‘most violence is bluster and standoff, with little actually happening’, Collins notes that for real damage to occur, pathways around people’s inbuilt reluctance to harm others – and to risk being harmed themselves – must be found. ‘The ability of human beings to carry out violence against another person depends not only on the social pressure and support in the background that pushes them into this situation, and that will reward them after they have gotten through the situation, but also on the social characteristics of the confrontation itself.’ In his description of forward panic, the emotional state of the actors as well as the victims is foregrounded. ‘First comes a buildup of tension, which is released into a frenzied attack when the situation makes it easy to do so.’ Attackers become ‘highly aroused, steamed up’ in ‘an aggressive frenzy, usually centred on rage. But it is a successful rage, an attack which is succeeding … It can have a note of elation’, expressed in laughter, jeering and cheering. Those involved become entrained collectively into the ‘mood of frenzy and hysterical elation’. Finally, Collins points out that forward panic leads to overkill: it is ‘violence that for the time being is unstoppable’. As the attackers’ dominance becomes clear, ‘the losing side feels despairing, helpless, frozen, suffocated’. Demoralisation sets in, and they too become ‘trapped in a collective emotional atmosphere’ of ‘helpless shock and depression’, and slide into ‘the paralysis of the defeated’. Forward panic is thus fed by the ‘panic paralysis’ of the other side, and the greater that paralysis, the more likely it is that overkill will occur. In certain circumstances, as in Ireland in late 1641/early 1642, a pattern of repeated episodes of forward panic may emerge, creating a ‘hysteria zone’ involving ‘both massive solidarity

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and widespread hysteria about enemy danger; episodes of atrocity in both milder and stronger forms typically happen in the hysteria zone’.43 Discussing the comedic mistreatment of the bodies of the dead in 1640s Ireland, John Walter notes that ‘killings might begin as exemplary but end as euphoric’. Gestures and words of glee, exultation and derision on the part of attackers are recorded in numerous depositions and fit in with Collins’s picture of the emotional environment of the forward panic, as well as Donald Horowitz’s accounts of ‘malevolent frivolity’ and ‘sadistic gaiety’ in ethnic riots.44 Elizabeth Crooker of Newry, Co. Down, contrasted the pious words of the Protestants with the mocking blasphemy of their persecutors: And whenas the deponent & the rest of the protestantes would call vpon god almighty to save help and deliuer them: the Rebells or some of them In a most scornfull contempteous & blasphemous manner: Did bidd this deponent and her distressed company Call downe their god & see if hee would save them & their clothes & speaking other prophane wordes The women from tyme to tyme being more scornfull and cruell then the men: Swearing & vowing they would kill them becawse they were of English kind.45

On more than one occasion dead preachers were given bibles and told to preach. Andrew Adair of Magownoghe Co. Mayo testified that before the hanging of a minister, Mr Oliphant, in Mayo in February 1642, he was taunted by ‘a great multitude singing with derideing voices about him some of the psalms’.46 Violence accompanied by music is noted on several other occasions as well. When he stripped and beat the wife of John Greg, one of the O’Donnells of Co. Armagh carried on ‘in a triumphing and rejoicing maner and with singing’.47 There was also piping and singing at the massacre at Shrule as corpses were mocked, and a piper played in Fethard-on-Sea in Co. Wexford while rebels danced on the minister’s books.48 The heads of seven Protestants killed at the siege of Ballinakill castle were carried in procession ‘pipes for joy playing before them’ to Kilkenny town, where they were further abused.49 Ruth Martyn, along with her husband and several other Protestant families, was besieged in Lord Aungier’s house in Longford from the end of October to the start of December 1641, and despite subsequently surrendering on quarter

 Collins, Violence, especially chaps. 2 and 3: pp. 32, 89, 92–4, 102–4, 115–21; Collins, ‘Micro-interactional dynamics of violent atrocities’, Irish Journal of Sociology 15 (2006), 40–52; A. J. Vetlesen, ‘Atrocities: A case of Suppressing Emotions or of Acting Them Out’, Passions in Context 2 (2011), 35–66. 44   Walter, ‘Performative Violence’, p. 140; Collins, Violence, pp. 119–20; Donald L. Horowitz, The Deadly Ethnic Riot (London, 2001), pp. 2 and 114. 45   TCD Ms837, ff. 4r–v. 46   TCD MS 831, f. 175v. 47   TCD MS 836, f. 4r. 48   TCD MS 836, f. 4r; MS 820, f. 174v; MS 818, f. 88r. 49   TCD MS 812, f. 202; Canny, ‘Religion, Politics and the Irish Rising’, p. 52. 43

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most of the men in the party were murdered in front of their families. Ruth’s 3-year-old child was also killed as she held him in her arms. One of the victims, Matthew Baker, described as ‘a corpulent and fatt man’, shrieked and groaned as fat and blood issued from his wounds ‘whereat the said Rebells would exceedingly Laugh and Rejoice’. When another man, Mr Trafford, asked for a ‘chirurgeon’ (surgeon), one of the rebels mockingly offered his services ‘and immediately killed him’.50 Joan Constable told the story of Ellen Millington who was ‘half killed’ at Kinnard, Co. Tyrone, placed in a deep hole, and weighted down with stones ‘the rebels bragging how many of them went to see her, and laughed to see her kick and tosse in that hole.’51 Martha Pigot of Disert, Queen’s Co., witnessed her husband being murdered by rebels who sat his mutilated corpse in a chair and called him ‘puritan and round head’. She, her daughter and other women were paraded through a rebel camp ‘to be viewed and Laughed at by their Rebellious kernes’.52 Julian Johnson of Athenry, Co. Galway, described how Paul O’Molloy, a friar, after the Irish were successful in a skirmish ‘in a triumphant rejoicing manner’ said, ‘It was a brave sport to see the yong men (meaning some of the yong English then slaine) defending themselues on euery syde and their twoe eyes burning in their heads.’53 Black humour and laughter, as well as being a symptom of forward panic, helped both to bind the perpetrators together, and to induce their victims to despair. Humour, therefore, could be a tool of emotional dominance. III

One of the key messages of John Walter’s work has been his focus on reconstructing and ‘contextualising crowd actions’. While Walter’s inimitable close readings of acts of violence and protest are largely impossible in an Irish context, in some cases the depositions provide several witness statements about the same event. The killing of John Ware in early March 1642 provides us with an unusually detailed picture of the escalation of a violent incident, and a series of representations of the emotional states of those involved. In 1644, William Potter told the commissioners about the circumstances of the death of his former master, John Ware, of Castletownemeloughe, near Trim, Co. Meath, at the beginning of Lent 1642. On the day in question, ‘One Christopher Hollywood (eldest sonne of Mr Holliwood of Artain in the County of Dublin Esquire)’ arrived at the house accompanied by ‘Andrew White Late servant and Cleark to Sir James Ware knighte’ – John’s brother, a celebrated historian and Auditor-General of Ireland. With them were ‘tenn souldjers more 50

    52   53   51

TCD MS 817, f. 210r. TCD MS 836, f. 88v. TCD MS 815, ff. 374v, 376v. TCD MS 830, f. 140v.

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musketeers pykemen & one fyrelock’. John Ware spotted them from the top of his castle, and ‘cawsed the gate to be opened & them to be lett in & then & there fearing noe evill (as this deponent is perswaded) entertained them with all alacrity & cheerfulnes & gave them beare, & strong water & dranck with them reioyceing much they would come to see him, & expressed soe much in words & withall invited them to stay [to] supper’. The visitors refused to sit, and Andrew White in particular ‘began to pick quarrells concerning twoe wolf doggs which the said John Ware had bredd from whelpes & were in his howse The said White saying they were none of the said Mr Wares but another mans: hee the said White & the said Hollywood & the rest then looking with stormy &angry lookes Thereby betraying some mallice or discontent’. Ware’s wife was clearly frightened: she called Ware aside and suggested the visitors were up to no good. ‘But he (as it seemeth) suspecting noe such thing answered her … to the effect following: Goe goe you talk lyke a foole, My Brother Christy Holliwood will doe me noe harme: He will sooner doe himself mischeef then mee any: & of that being confident, went amongst them againe dranck to them and made them very freely welcome’. Hollywood proposed that Ware show them his horses, and the company went out to the stables. Then the said Cristopher Holloywood said: Well John Ware I am comen for your twoe horses, and I will have them: Whereunto the said John Ware answered you shall not haue them (if that be your intent) vpon which the said Holliwood with both his hands pushed off from him the said John Ware and then speaking to him with the fyrelock sayd Now you Roague hitt your mark there it is Noe sooner were those words spoken but that souldjer (soe comanded by the said Holliwood discharged his peese (which was laden with a brase of bulletts) at the said John Ware & with one bullett shott him into the brest & with thother shott him quite through the shoulder soe as the bullett stuck in the wall And the said John Ware falling downe with the shott rose againe with much difficulty, & foulding his hands over his wounds staggared into his howse, & there fell downe dead: And that done those bould and cruell Rebells forceibly tooke away those twoe horses & soe departed the Castle But before they went away the said Hollywood cockt his pistoll & gave fyre to it seuerall tymes against the said Mris Ware as she stood crying & bewayleing over the body of her said murthered husband.

The pistol did not fire, but Hollywood threatened the household ‘that if they cryed out or sayd any thing, he would come back & serve them as he had done the fellow at the Castle’. Meanwhile, ‘Andrew White (standing with the other Rebells all guarded & in a posture of doeing execucion) published divulged and expressed theis wordes vizt Well John Ware now thou wilt never piss in the skabbard of my sword any more.’54 The property was ransacked, and at least three of John Ware’s three children made their way to Dublin where, we learn from

  TCD MS 816, ff. 233r–234v.

54

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other sources, they were given assistance by relatives. John’s wife Elizabeth Ware subsequently remarried.55 These accounts provide an unusual number of adjectives that indicate emotions: Ware is cheerful and confident, on the surface at least (perhaps he was acting in a confident manner to diffuse the tension), though his wife is fearful. White, Hollywood and their ‘crew’ give the impression of being ‘stormy and angry’ as they look for excuses to quarrel. Emotions are also implied by the speakers in their descriptions of actions. Hollywood seems suddenly enraged by Ware’s stubbornness: first he pushes him and then he orders the soldier to fire. We see the confrontation building up to its emotional crescendo as Hollywood and his men tumble into the tunnel of forward panic: they fire at Ware’s wife as they depart; they threaten onlookers. Several examinations of witnesses taken in 1652 and 1653 corroborated aspects of Potter’s account, focusing in particular on White’s involvement in picking a quarrel over the dogs, his presence (armed) at the killing, and the fact that he had received a share of the proceeds of the robbery.56 White himself, by then a prisoner in Dublin’s Marshalsea, identified his father, Garrett, as a retainer of James Ware’s. He had allegedly been dispatched to collect rents in the ‘Country’, but had been unsuccessful. He claimed he had only accidentally ended up in the company of Hollywood, and that he had warned Ware that there might be a plot to take his horses. He further claimed he had been inside and unarmed when Mr Ware was shot, that he had angrily upbraided the soldier who had fired (he ‘toke him by the Coller of the neck, and asked him what a divell madest thou to kill the gentleman’), and that he had sympathised and wept with Mrs Ware on the loss of her husband, though this is not mentioned by that lady in her testimony. He repeatedly referred to his emotional responses to give an impression of veracity to his alternative version of events. He said that he was worried for Ware’s safety, angry with the soldier, and regretful of Ware’s death. Andrew White also claimed that he was frightened. He said that after the attack on Ware he ‘went away presently with an intention to goe to Dorranstowne [a residence of Viscount Jones, Lord Ranelagh] to shun the Company of the sayd Hollowood & the rest, but being a strainger in that Country and not haueing the Irish tongue feareing least he should be knocked in the head by some of the Irish partie’, he stayed with them.57 While this was a good excuse for his continued association with rebels, allowing him to present himself as a victim rather than

  In 1663 Mary, Jane and Anne Ware, daughters of John Ware, petitioned for a ‘livelihood’, for themselves from the forfeited estate of the Hollywood family. They claimed that they had been relieved since their father’s murder and the pillaging of his property by Sir James Ware. Eighth Report of the Royal Commission of Historical Manuscripts (London, 1881), pp. 519–20; TCD MS 816, ff. 278r–v. 56   TCD MS 816, ff. 278r–90v. 57   TCD MS 816, ff. 284r–v. 55

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as a collaborator, it does not do to dismiss White’s fearfulness too quickly. A man who was a clerk by profession had somehow ended up in the company of Christopher Hollywood, a prominent rebel leader, and some ruthless soldiers. He allegedly could not speak Irish, and feared some of his own associates might kill him if he did not go along with them. He was a ‘stranger’ in Meath and knew that personal connections would not save him. After all, connections had not saved John Ware, a man whose wife, Elizabeth Piers, had Catholic relatives, who employed both Irish and British servants, who seems to have colluded in cattle thefts early in the rebellion, and whose hailing of Christopher Hollywood as ‘brother’ (White calls them ‘swore brothers’)58 indicates longstanding associations. The idea that the Irish rebels of 1641/2 acted in part out of fear or anxiety is often accompanied by the assumption that the fear was visited upon them by external factors – the increasing pressure of cultural change, economic woes, political persecution and religious marginalisation.59 But as the rebellion gathered pace, the Irish and Old English had reason to fear and suspect one another. Many of those classed as rebels may have become involved in violent acts in large part because they were afraid of what would happen to them if they refused. IV

In his own testimony, Andrew White omitted his strange comment to the dying Ware that indicates deep resentment, perhaps long held: ‘Well John Ware’, he said ‘now thou wilt never piss in the skabbard of my sword any more.’ (In perhaps the mildest reading of this comment, White may be pleased that he has come to be in a higher position than Ware, having previously been downtrodden by him and/or his brother. There may also be a sexual innuendo here, given contemporary allusions to the vagina as a ‘scabbard’.) We also note a tone of exhultation, one of Collins’s characteristics of the forward panic. The mockery of victims by the rebels was the element that most prompted condemnation on the part

  On the creation of ‘gossiprid’ alliances in Ireland see especially F. Fitzsimons, ‘Fosterage and Gossiprid in Late Medieval Ireland: Some New Evidence’, Gaelic Ireland c.1250–c.1650, ed. Patrick J. Duffy, David Edwards and Elizabeth FitzPatrick (Dublin 2001), pp. 138–49. Elizabeth Piers-Ware was the daughter of Sir Henry Piers of Tristernagh, Co. Westmeath, a convert to Catholicism, and later remarried William Fitzgerald, of Gortine, Co. Offally, who was probably a Catholic. Her examination reveals her to be living back at Tristernagh in the 1650s. TCD MS 816, ff. 278r–v; J. Lodge, The Peerage of Ireland, ed. W. Archdall (4 vols, Dublin, 1789), II, pp. 201–2. On the receiving of stolen cattle by Ware and his wife see TCD MS 816, ff. 95r–v; 185r–86v. 59   For example, Darcy, The 1641 Rebellion, refers to the ‘fears’ of Irish Catholics ‘for their prospects’, of attacks by English or Scots forces, of being encircled by a Protestant alliance, of ‘further persecution’, and of being forced to attend Protestant services: pp. 5, 49–51, 63, 75, 176. 58

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of deponents. Joan Constable, for example, contrasted the ‘great greefe, terror, and amazment’ of Protestants at the burning of ‘martired’ victims in a church with the ‘hardned harts of their murderers’ who, on hearing their lamentations, ‘most bouldly made braggs thereof and tooke pride and glory in Imitateing these cryes: and in telling the deponent and others how the children gaped when the fyre began to burne them’.60 The victims’ ‘amazement’ was to be amplified in later accounts of their experiences. The depositions were not just used for legal purposes in Dublin. Some, especially the more lurid ones, also made their way into print. Pamphlets describing the events of the early part of the Irish rebellion, were followed by longer works, most notably John Temple’s The Irish Rebellion. Temple in particular used the tactic of transcribing excerpts from the depositions side-by-side with a gloss on the enormities contained therein. Unlike the depositions themselves, his commentaries painted a picture of the emotional impact on survivors and highlighted the callousness and brutality of the attackers: Alas, who can comprehend the fears, terrours, anguish, bitteness and perplexity of their souls, the despairing passions and consternations of their mind! What strange amazed thoughts must it needs raise in their sad hearts to find themselves so sodainly surprized without remedy, and inextricably wrapt up in all kind of outward miseries which could possibly by man be inflicted upon any humane creatures! What sighes, groanes, trembling, astonishment! What scriches, cryes, and bitter lamentation of wife and children, friends and servants, howling and weeping about them, all finding themselves without any manner of hope or deliverance from their present misery and paine! How inexorable were their barbarous tormentors, that compassed them on every side without all bowels of compassion, any sense of their sufferings or the least commiseration and pity, the common comforters of men in misery. It was no small addition to their sorrows, to hear the base reviling speeches used against their country and country-men, some loudly threatning all should be cut off and utterly destroyed that had one drop of English blood in them … How grievous and insupportable must it needs be to a true christian soule, to hear a base villaine boast, that his hands were so weary with killing and knocking downe Protestants into a bogge, that he could not lift his arms up to his head? … it is not to be imagined, much lesse expressed, with what scorn and derision they acted these great cruelties upon al British which they had gotten into their power; with what joy and exultation their eyes did behold the sad spectacle of their miseries; what greedy delight and pleasure they took in their bloody executions, what malice and hatred they expressed towards them.61

Such commentaries therefore both originated in and subtly recast the depositions for other purposes, filling out their legalistic emotional restraint with imaginings of the grief and impotence of the victims and imputing an inhuman

  TCD MS 836, f. 87v.   John Temple, The Irish Rebellion (London, 1646), pp. 104–7. See Joseph Cope, England and the 1641 Rebellion (Woodbridge, 2009); David A. O’Hara, English Newsbooks and Irish Rebellion 1641–1649 (Dublin, 2006).

60 61

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pantomime villainy to their persecutors. This imagined emotional landscape was itself designed to appeal to the emotions of readers, principally with the purpose of arousing compassion towards one group and disgust and indignation towards the other. V

The implication that historical actors were ‘emotional’ (whether because of fear, religious passion, or some other vaguely defined motivation) when they became involved in violent acts has tended to be accepted as a satisfactory explanation for their actions. Such an analysis – or lack of analysis – erases agency from the lived experience of fraught situations. The fears and anger of Ireland’s Catholic inhabitants certainly created a climate wherein violence became possible in 1641–2. However, considerable, context-specific, work was needed to transform a grievance into action. Closer attention to the emotional dynamics of individual confrontations as they developed into violence allows us better to understand both ‘what happened’ and why crowds might find satisfaction, and even hilarity, in the aftermath of atrocity. Memories of the violence of the 1641 rebellion were reproduced and reinterpreted in texts that reveal cultural norms surrounding the appropriate expression of emotion, and how these might be employed in times of crisis. John Walter points out that ‘the meaning of performative violence is contested in a negotiation’ between performers, victims, witnesses, and audiences. ‘Both the act of deposing and the shaping of events described therein can be seen as a form of competitive “othering”.’62 The circumstances and conventions of deposing facilitated the elision of their own anger and panic in the testimonies of the 1641 survivors. In line with classic narratives of martyrdom, the victims of Irish violence are presented as calmly and stoically accepting their fate, turning passivity into protest and reclaiming agency in the act of its surrender. Temple talks of them ‘triumphing and insulting with their last breath, over the insolency, rage and malice of their most inhumane and cruell persecutors’.63 Taking their place within a long tradition of writing depicting the Irish as diametrically opposite to the civilised British in their language, manners, morals, religious views and lifestyles, the depositions characterised the Irish as emotionally ‘other’ too. This rhetorical strategy made use of long-held stereotypes of angry Irish men in particular: as early as 1550 Andrew Boorde attributed to the Irish a tendency to be ‘angry and testy without cause’, and later writers punned that Ireland was a ‘land of ire’.64Accounts of Irishmen surrendering to

  Walter, ‘Performative Violence’, p. 142.  Temple, Irish Rebellion, p. 110. 64   Andrewe Borde, The First Boke of the Introduction of Knowledge [c.1547], ed. E. J. Furnivall (London, 1870); Andrew Hadfield, Edmund Spenser: A Life (Oxford, 2014), p. 208. 62 63

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such passionate fury that even their solemn oaths at Mass were fuelled by it, therefore presented violent rebels not as rational agents of legitimate grievance, but as passion-ridden blasphemers, incapable of appropriate human empathy and compassion. Furthermore, the erasure of anger from victims’ accounts, and its attribution solely to the rebels (and to phantoms and animals), held particular meaning at a time when public expression of anger was increasingly seen as incompatible with sane and civilised self-mastery. It was unnecessary to bother interpreting the motives of those so afflicted by emotional incoherence. Little space was left for accounts like that of Andrew White which reveal (even if it is special pleading) the possibility that some rebels themselves experienced extreme emotional discomfort. Inevitably, the amplification of the emotional content of the depositions in their literary redactions was to have very real consequences in intensifying the violence of subsequent decades.

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Index References to footnotes consist of the page number followed by the letter ‘n’ followed by the number of the note, e.g. 72n94 refers to note no. 94 on page 72. References to tables are shown in bold. References to figures are shown in italics. Abbot, George, Bishop (later Archbishop) 190–1 Achelly, Thomas 185–6 ‘activist mothering’ 86 Acton, John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton 200–1 Adams, Thomas 186, 187, 190 African-American communities, and ‘othermothering’ 86 age, and dating referents 104–5, 104 agency   and corruption/anti-corruption 181   and folklore 121–2   and people’s senses of time 106–7   and social practice 224, 242   and stereotyping of emotions 283–4   see also gender, agency and religious change (Amanda Flather); Lilburne and political agency (Michael J. Braddick) Agle, B. R. 183 agrarian enclosures see enclosures Agreement of the People 12, 224, 236, 238, 241 agricultural/seasonal referents 95–6, 102, 103, 104, 105 Ainsworth, Henry 186 Albott, Robert 213 Alexander, Gavin 210 Alexander VI, Pope 191 Alleine, Joseph 186 Allen, Elizabeth 80 Allen, William 190 almanacs, and astronomical/calendrical time 91 Amsterdam presses 226, 227, 228 anger 272–3, 274, 275, 283–4   see also sorrow and anger in 17th-century Ireland (Clodagh Tait) anthropology, and ‘new social history’ 4 anti-clericalism, and anti-popery 190 anti-popery   and anti-clericalism 190

  and Stour valley riots (1642) 30–1   and women 191   see also papacy/Pope; religion, anti-popery and corruption (Mark Knights) arbitristas (Spain) 70 aristocracy   appearances of term in EEBO 207–8, 208   English variants of term 209   in James Dalton’s ‘Apologie’ for London 216   in James Dickenson’s Aristotle’s Politiques 211   Ludlow’s burgesses-councillors conflict 217–19   urban aristocracy and governance 217   in William Stoughton’s An Assertion for True and Christian Church-policy 214–15   see also gentry Aristotle 71, 211, 212   1598 translation of Politiques (J. Dickenson) 206, 210–11, 212, 215, 219, 221   see also democracy in early modern England (Phil Whithington) ars moriendi, and women 275 Attersol, William 187 Bacon, Francis, Sir, ‘Of Seditions and Troubles’ 138 Badiley, Richard 172–3 Bailey, Mark 45 Baker, Edward 133, 135, 136–7, 141 balance of trade theory, and 1620s financial crisis 55–6, 57–8, 59, 60, 61–2, 70 Bannockburn, Battle of (1314), and grain supply 37 baptism, and female protest 147, 149, 162 Baptists 175 Barber, Sarah 99n40 Barcroft, Nicholas 117 Barcrofte, John 117 Barnes, Barnebe, The Devil’s Charter 191

INDEX Bastwick, John 226, 230, 235 Baxter, Richard 186–7 Beaumont, Thomas, Sir 128, 129 Beets, Douglas 183 Behmenists 175 Bell, Karl 122 Benson, Richard 218 Berry, Dorothy 88 Bethel, Slingsby 170 Bland, John 170 Blennerhasset, Robert 263 Bodin, Jean 212, 213 Bohstedt, John 23 Books of Orders 23, 39 Boorde, Andrew 283 Bourdieu, Pierre 4, 205–6 Bourne, Henry 121 Brabourne, Theophilus 174 Braddick, Michael J.   central statutory measures and local power 40, 49   concept of negotiated power 177n74, 184   distributive vs collective power 39–40   English state as ‘network of agencies’ 40   introduction chapter 1   Lilburne chapter 11, 223   see also introduction (Michael J. Braddick and Phil Withington); Lilburne and political agency (Michael J. Braddick) Bradford, John 218 Bray, William 174 breadwinning, definition 76 Brewer, John, An Ungovernable People (Brewer and Styles) 25 Brooke, Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke 119 Brooke, Robert Greville, 2nd Baron Brooke 228 Broughton, Hugh 192 Brown, A. T. 106–7 Buckingham, Edward Stafford, 3rd Duke of Buckingham 119 Buckingham, George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham 197 Buddhism, and corruption 183 Bullein, William 26n48 Burgo, John de, Bishop of Clonfert 259 Burgwash, Henry, Bishop of Lincoln 120–1 burial practices, and female protest 146–7, 153

Burns, Arthur 200 Bush, Michael 42 Butler, Daniel 225 bye-laws 43, 49–50 Caesar, Julius, Sir 60, 62 Calamy, Edmund 168 Calvinism, and use of Aristotelian lexicon 214 Cambridge   election of office holders by sortition 219–20, 221   Garden House riot (1970) 16 Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure 4, 16–17 Canne, John 173, 226, 235 Canny, Nicholas 268 Captain Pouch see Reynolds, John (‘Captain Pouch’) Carew, Thomas 81, 87, 88 Carter, Ann 19, 24, 73, 77, 88 Carter, John 168 casuistry, and Golden Rule 168 Catholicism   and Charles I 243   and corruption 182, 184   and Protestant view of corruption 189–93, 199–200   and use of Aristotelian lexicon 213–14   see also anti-popery; An Irish Protestation (John Morrill); papacy/Pope; religion, anti-popery and corruption (Mark Knights) Cawdrey, Robert 213 Chaloner, Thomas 233–4 charity   and Christianity 22   vs credit to buy grain 84   and extinction of common property rights 137   and Golden Rule 169   John Locke on 23–4   John Walter on 20, 22   see also poor relief Charles I, King of England   and Catholicism 243   and earl of Strafford 227   and Golden Rule 173

292

INDEX   and Irish Protestation 250–1, 252–4, 255, 257–8, 265   and Laudianism 146, 148, 150n21, 154   and liberty of conscience 174   and monetary policies 60   and standing commission on trade (1622) 64 Charles II, King of England 174 Christianity   and charity 22 Christian calendar 105   and corruption 183   and Golden Rule 169, 170, 174, 176   see also Catholicism; Protestantism Church of England   and English Protestation Oath 245   Lilburne on 228   and Protestant critique of popish corruption 198   and Puritans 152   see also Protestantism churching ceremony 147, 149–50, 151–2, 162 churchwardens 40, 43, 49, 50–1, 52–3 citizenship see urban corporate citizenship City of London, petition against episcopacy (1640) 198 civic humanism, and gentry 123 Civil War see English Civil War/Revolution Clanricard, Ulick Burke, 5th Earl and 1st Marquis of Clanricard 256–7, 259 Clarendon, Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon 199 Clark, Peter 74 Clarke, William 131–2, 133 classical republicanism 212, 238 Cleaver, Robert, A Godlie Forme of Householde Government (Dod and Cleaver) 82 clock time   and dating practices 105   and industrialisation 94 Clubmen 240 Cobb, Richard 18 Cokayne, William 62 Coke, Edward, Sir 59, 134, 237, 238, 241 Colchester plunderers 10, 30–1, 204, 217 Cole, G. D. H. 16 Collectors of the Poor 49, 53 Collins, Randall 270, 276–7, 281

Collinson, Patrick, ‘History with the politics put back’ 25 Combe, William 140 Committees for Scandalous Ministers 146, 157–60 Common Law, and Lilburne’s thinking 224, 237, 238 common rights 32, 114–15, 117, 128–9, 137 The Common Weales Canker Wormes 188 commoners’ cause, and Lilburne 239–40 the commons, and popular rebellion 42–3 conduct books, and Golden Rule 169–70 Confederation of Kilkenny 244, 249, 252, 255, 259, 264   seal 255, 256 confessional politics   and popular politicization 31   and use of Aristotelian lexicon 213–15 Contrarini, Gaspar 213 Cooper, Margaret 86 Coppe, Abiezer 192n58 copyholds 46–7 Corish, Patrick 253 corn markets see grain markets corporate citizenship see urban corporate citizenship corruption   and agency 181   and medical discourse 188   and religions/countries   Buddhism 181    Catholicism 182, 184   Christianity 183    Hindu populations 183   Islam 182     Muslim countries 182, 183    Protestantism 182–4, 186–7, 188–93, 199–201  types/areas    economics 188, 189, 190, 198–9, 200    fiscal 190, 191, 199, 200    intellectual 188, 189    justice 188, 189, 200    literary 188, 189    politics 188, 189, 191, 198–9, 200    sexuality 188, 189, 190, 200   see also religion, anti-popery and corruption (Mark Knights) Cotton, Robert   agrarian enclosures 67–8

293

INDEX   Malynes vs Mun debate 57, 59, 60   monetary policies of Dutch Republic 71–2   moral argument against currency devaluation 70   standing commission on trade (1622) 64 courts see ecclesiastical court depositions; Star Chamber; witnesses’ ‘worth’ statements Covenanters 226–7, 228 coverture 76–7, 78 Cranfield, Lionel, 1st Earl of Middlesex 60 credit, and grain marketing 83–4 creditworthiness (of women) 76–7, 78   see also wives and mothers in early modern England (Alexandra Shepard) Cressy, David 28, 150   England on Edge 30 Cromwell, Oliver 223, 225–6, 229, 231, 235, 257–8 Crowch, Elizabeth 78 crowd behaviour studies 18 Crowther, John 218 cursing see spectral lordship and Towneley Hall (Andy Wood) Cust, Richard 123, 126 custom, and popular protest/memory 106 Dalton, James, ‘Apologie’ for London 215–16 Danby, Thomas Osborne, 1st Earl of Danby 199 Darnton, Robert 4, 121 dates as time referents 96, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105–6 Davis, J. C. 9, 165   see also The Golden Rule and public transcript (J. C. Davis) Davis, Natalie Zemon 75, 99 Dawson, ‘Captain’ Dorothy 24 De Santis, Marc’Antonio 71 dearth orders 68–9, 140 democracy in early modern England (Phil Whithington)   background and issues    democracy and early modern historiography 203–4    historicist approach 204–5    ‘modern’ English language and vernacularisation 205

   tasks and urban corporate citizenship 205–6    vernacularisation, urbanisation and Aristotelian ideas 206–7   printed vernacular history of ‘democracy’ (up to 1600)    ‘democracy’ and ‘aristocracy’ terms in EEBO 207–8, 208    democracy in Aristotelian sense 209    English variants of terms 209–10    James Dickinson’s translation of Aristotle’s Politiques 210–11, 212    semantic confusion 211–12   printed vernacular history of ‘democracy’ (up to 1640)    aristocratic classical republicanism vs new philosophers 212    Aristotelian lexicon and popular printed genres 213    confessional politics and Aristotelian lexicon 213–15    confessional politics and Stoughton 214–15    Mulcaster and democratic vs monarchical wit 215    Stow/Dalton, urban environments and democracy 215–17   urban practices and tasks    institutionalisation of urban aristocracy 217    Ludlow’s burgesses-councillors conflict 217–19, 221    sortition and Cambridge office holders’ election 219–20, 221    urban elections and Aristotelian terms 220–1   Walter, popular politics and the ‘Aristotelian moment’ 221–2  depopulation    1607 commission of inquiry into enclosure and depopulation 67–8, 131, 134–40    depopulation sites in Midland 127 Derby, James Stanley, 7th Earl of Derby 23   the deserving poor, and poor relief 51 The Devil’s Charter (Barnebe Barnes) 191 Dickenson, James, Aristotle’s Politiques, or Discourses of Government (translation) 206, 210–11, 212, 215, 219, 221 Diggers 32–3, 126–7, 132, 136

294

INDEX   see also Reynolds, John (‘Captain Pouch’) Digges, Dudley 61n34 Dod, John, A Godlie Forme of Householde Government (Dod and Cleaver) 82 Dolan, Frances 191 domestic conduct literature 81 Dowlen, Oliver 221 Drake, Richard 31, 155 draperies, and regulation 67 Durham, Consistory Court of the Bishopric of 94–5 Dutch Republic, economic miracle and political economy 71–2 Dyer, Christopher 48, 50, 51, 52n58, 53n62, 54n64 Dymock, Henry, Sir 130, 136 Early English Books Online (EEBO), appearances of ‘democracy’ and ‘aristocracy’ terms 207–8, 208 East India Company 57–8, 66 Eastern Association army 229, 234 ecclesiastical court depositions 94–5 ecclesiastical feasts 95, 96, 102, 103, 104, 105 economics   and corruption 188, 189, 190, 198–9, 200   see also English political economy in 1620s (Paul Slack) Edward VI, King of England 218 EEBO see Early English Books Online (EEBO) ‘elite’ politics, vs ‘popular’ politics 1–4 Ellesmere, Thomas Egerton, 1st Baron Ellesmere 134, 219 eloquence, and monarchy vs democracy 215 Elyot, Thomas, The Boke Named the Governor 209, 210, 211 emotions   investigation of in history 269   see also sorrow and anger in 17th-century Ireland (Clodagh Tait) enclosures   1607 commission of inquiry into enclosure and depopulation 67–8, 131, 134–40   imparkment movement 111–12, 118–19   memory of enclosure and working-class politics 111

  see also Midland Revolt (1607); Sir John Newdigate in the Court of Star Chamber (Steve Hindle); spectral lordship and Towneley Hall (Andy Wood) English Civil War/Revolution   Civil War politics and ‘Aristotelian moment’ 221–2   and Lilburne 223, 242   and popular political engagement 3, 28, 29   and Protestation Oath (1641–2) 32   and women’s religio-political agency 146 English historiography (1970s–80s), and ‘elite’ vs ‘popular’ politics 1–2 English political economy in 1620s (Paul Slack)   chapter overview 5–6   1620s as turning point in economic thinking 55–6  crisis    foreign exchange (Malynes) vs balance of trade (Mun) 56–60    government’s and monarchs’ responses 60–1    political vacuum and ascendancy of Mun’s theory 61–2   crisis and political process    conflicting expert advice and public debate 62    consultation and committees 63–4    creation of standing commission on trade (1622) 64–6, 72    private gain and public interest 66, 70   loosening of regulatory restraints    agrarian enclosures 67–8    dearth orders 68–9    free trade campaign (1604–24) 66–7    usury 67, 70   specificity of English crisis and response    comparison with Dutch Republic 71–2    comparison with Serra-De Santis Neapolitan debate 71    comparison with Spain and France 70–1    monarchy, market and ‘acts of state’ 72 English Renaissance humanists 209 equity, and Golden Rule 172 Essex, Robert Devereux, 3rd Earl of Essex 228

295

INDEX Essex parishes, anti-Laudian popular sentiment 31 Essex Record Office 17–18 Estgate, John (‘Roughneck’) 113, 117–18 Evans, Eric 200 events, as time referents 96–7, 102, 103, 104, 105

free trade campaign (1604–24) 66–7, 72 Free-born Englishman’s birthright 225, 237, 241 freedom of the press, and Golden Rule 174 French, Thomas 219, 221 Fuller, Thomas 120–1

family books, and Golden Rule 169 famines   ‘famine without dearth’ (1622–3) 69   Great European Famine (1315–22) 36   Great Famine (1315–17) 37   see also susceptibility to famine (Richard M. Smith) Farrar, Richard 173 feminism, and early modern women protestors 86, 89 Fiennes, William, 1st Viscount Saye and Sele 226, 228 Fifth Monarchists 175 Fillamore, Elizabeth 79 Firth, Charles H. 15–16 fiscal corruption 190, 191, 199, 200 fiscal seigneurialism 117, 126 Flather, Amanda 8–9, 145   see also gender, agency and religious change (Amanda Flather) Fletcher, Phineas 168 folklore   and agency 121–2   Lancashire folklore 110 food riots   and female political agency 73–6   Maldon grain riots (1629) 19, 24, 73, 88   and middlemen’s refusal to sell corn on credit 83–4   Oxfordshire rising (1596) 19–20, 24, 124, 212   see also riots and revolts foreign exchange theory, and 1620s financial crisis 56–7, 58, 59–62, 63, 70 foreign policy, and Golden Rule 170 Forest of Dean riots (1631–2) 24 ‘forward panic’ 276–7, 278, 281 Foucault, Michel 25 Fowler, Edward 173 Foxe, John, Book of Martyrs 191 Foxley, Rachel 225 France, 1570s monetary reforms 70–1

gadding 157 Garden House riot (Cambridge, 1970) 16 Gardiner, Samuel Rawson 27 Gauden, John 172 Geertz, Clifford 4, 19 gender   and dating referents 103–4, 103   and popular protest 24   see also gender, agency and religious change (Amanda Flather); wives and mothers in early modern England (Alexandra Shepard); women gender, agency and religious change (Amanda Flather)   chapter overview 8–9   agency, women and Laudianism 145–6   Essex case study and source material 146   female roles in Reformation church 147–8   female roles under Laudianism 148–51   women’s anti-Laudian protest over baptism 152–3    burial practices 153    churching ceremony 151–2   ministers 155–7    proto-catholic ritual 152    ‘scandalous’ ministers 157–60   surplice 153–5   women’s social identity and agency    godly/Puritan married women 160–1    married/widowed conformists 161    men’s influence on female resistance 161–2    Puritan/godly and gender-related issues 162–3 gentry   and civic humanism values 123   oppressive dealings of 117–18   see also aristocracy gesture, and politics 16, 26 ghost stories see spectral lordship and Towneley Hall (Andy Wood) Gibson, Williams 171 Glennie, Paul 92, 94, 100

296

INDEX A Godlie Forme of Householde Government (John Dod and Robert Cleaver) 82n42 The Golden Rule and public transcript (J. C. Davis)   chapter overview 9   background and issues    ‘popular’ politics (Walter) and public transcript (Scott) 165–6    public transcript and Golden Rule 166   concept and different forms    Charles Trimnell 167    John Goodman 167–8    law and Magna Carta 168    moral/ethical sphere 168   Scriptures 168–9   multiple uses   charity 169    conduct/family books 169–70    law, justice and equity 171–2    liberty of conscience/press freedom 174   non-conformism 174–5   oaths 172–3    peace and moderation 173–4    relations between rich/powerful and poor/subordinate 170–1   taxes 171    trade/foreign affairs 170   usury 170   mutual obligation and negotiated power 176–7   Thomas Hobbes and Golden Rule 166, 177–80 Goodman, John 167–8 gossip, and print/political mobilisation 233–4 Gouge, Thomas 170 grain markets   and credit 83–4   and dearth orders 68–9, 140   inefficiency of 37–8   John Newdigate on 140–1   regulation of 55–6   see also food riots Great Contract (1610) 62 Great European Famine (1315–22) 36 Great Famine (1315–17) 37 Greville, Fulke, Sir 126 grief 271–2   see also sorrow and anger in 17th-century Ireland (Clodagh Tait)

Grimston, Harbottle, Sir 197 Gross, Daniel M. 275 Grosvenor, Richard, Sir 227 Gurdon, Edward 225, 226 Gurdon, John 225, 226 habitus 4, 205–6 Hadley, Katherine 228 Halsted, William 113, 114 Hanbury, Helen 85 Harger, Henry 114 Harrington, James 174 Harrison, Stephen 84 Haselrig, Arthur, Sir 231, 235, 240–1 Haworth, John 116–17 Hellier, Robert 172 Henry III, King of France 71 Herbert, George 82–3 Hewson, Thomas 225–6, 227, 228 hidden transcript (James C. Scott) 20–1, 117–18, 184 Higgens, John, 1551 case (Hereford City Records) 21 Hiland, Margaret 81–2 Hill, Christopher 16 Hill Collins, Patricia 86 Hills, Anne 81 Hilton, Rodney 28, 41 Hindle, Steve 7–8, 22, 52n58, 123   see also Sir John Newdigate in the Court of Star Chamber (Steve Hindle) Hindu populations, and corruption 183 historians, social origins of 15–16 historicism 204 Hobart, Henry, Sir 124, 131, 134, 138–9 Hobbes, Thomas   on affability and power 23   on democracy 212–13   and Golden Rule 166, 177–80 Hobsbawm, Eric 18 Hodder, Ian 116 Hoekstra, Kinch 177–8 Holland, Cornelius 234 Holmes, Clive 30 Holmes, Richard 132, 135 Hooker, Thomas 161 horological revolution 94 Horowitz, Donald 277 Hosford, W. H. 120n50 Houlbrooke, R. A. 74

297

INDEX Hubbard, William 174–5 Hubringham, Hugh 114 Hughes, Ann 162 humanism   civic humanism 123   English Renaissance humanists 209 humour, as tool of emotional dominance 278 Huntington, William 240, 242 Huntley, George, Sir 119–20 Hussey, Edward 120 ‘hysteria zone’ 276–7 imparkment movement 111–12, 118–19 industrialisation, and clock time 94 Ingham, William 116 Ingleby, Thomas 194 Ingleby, William, Sir 194, 196 Ingleheart, Ronald 183 Ingold, Tim 116n36, 205–6, 217 Innes, Joanna 200, 222n95 Inquisition 191 intellectual corruption 188, 189 introduction (Michael J. Braddick and Phil Withington)   ‘elite’ vs ‘popular’ politics 1–3   John Walter and ‘new social history’ 3–4   overview of essays    Alexandra Shepard 6    Amanda Flather 8–9    Andy Wood 7    Clodagh Tait 12–13    J. C. Davis 9    John Morrill 11–12    Keith Wrightson 6–7    Mark Knights 9–10    Michael J. Braddick 11    Paul Slack 5–6    Phil Withington 10    Richard M. Smith 5    Steve Hindle 7–8 Ireland   1641 Depositions 12, 260, 267–8, 269–70, 282–3   1641 Irish Rebellion 31–2, 244, 257–8, 264   1653/4 examinations 260   see also An Irish Protestation (John Morrill); sorrow and anger in 17thcentury Ireland (Clodagh Tait)

An Irish Protestation (John Morrill)   chapter overview 11–12   background and issues    civil wars and Protestation Oath (Walter) 243, 248n11    English Protestation 243    Irish Rebellion (1641) 244, 257–8, 264   Protestation Oath    English text 245, 246, 248    Irish text 245, 247, 248   response of Irish Catholics    adoption of Protestation (March 1642) 248–9    Confederation of Kilkenny and Articles of Association 244, 249, 252, 255, 259, 264    oath-taking and sacrament 249–50    pre-March 1642 versions of oath 250–2    version of June 1942 (Kilkenny) 252–3    versions from 1642–7 (manuscripts and printed) 253–5   Rex-Deus tension 255    seal of Confederation of Kilkenny 255, 256   rights and responsibilities (from Oath)    commitment to Charles as King of Ireland 257–8    popular elections of representatives 256–7    unity, ‘ethnicity’ clause and Articles of Association 258–9, 264–5   taking of the Oath    cases of excommunications 259    ‘imposed’ and ‘generally imposed’ 260–3    Kerry violence and Oath of Association 263–4   unstable and doomed project 264–5 Islam, and corruption 182 Islip, Adam 210, 219 James I, King of England 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 197 Jekyll, Thomas 173 Jenkins, David 237 Jerrot, Margaret and Edward 84 Jessey, Henry 226 Jones, Inga 268 Joyce, Patrick 111n9 justice

298

INDEX   and corruption 188, 189, 200   and Golden Rule 171–2 Kerridge, Eric 134 Kett, Robert 24 Kiffin, William 227, 228, 230, 235 King, Colonel Edward 229 Knights, Mark 9–10, 181   see also religion, anti-popery and corruption (Mark Knights) Kümin, Beat 51 La Porta, Rafael 182 Lake, Peter 181n2, 193 Lambsdorff, Johann 182–3 Lancashire   folklore 110   working-class politics and enclosures 111 land tenure, and parish politics 44–7 Landes, David 182 landscape, and labour, memory and entitlement 115–17 Larner, William 227, 230 Laslett, Peter 16–17 Lasswell, Harold D. 25 Laud, William, Archbishop 148, 197–8, 214n54, 226 Laudianism   anti-Laudian popular sentiment 31   and politicisation of lower classes 27, 30   see also gender, agency and religious change (Amanda Flather) law, and Golden Rule 171–2 law and order, and village elites 49–50 Layfield, Edward, Archdeacon 149 Le Goff, Jacques 93 Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel 93, 99 Leafe, Jane 79 leet courts (or View of Frankpledge) 43, 49 Leland, John 119 Lenthall, William 234 Leroy, Louis, Aristotle’s Politiques 210 letter-writing, and print/political mobilisation 232–3 Levellers   John Walter on 16, 32–3   and Lilburne 224–5, 236, 237–9, 241   London Levellers 203   vs ‘public men’ 126   their view of government 240n68

Lewkenor, Lewis 213, 221 liberty of conscience, and Golden Rule 174 Lilburne, Elizabeth 231–2 Lilburne, John   and Golden Rule 175   see also Lilburne and political agency (Michael J. Braddick) Lilburne and political agency (Michael J. Braddick)   chapter overview 7, 11   background and issues    legitimating languages and mobilisation tactics (Walter) 223    Lilburne’s political profile and mobilisation skills 223–4    Lilburne’s political thinking 224–5    linguistic and institutional context 224    social practice and agency 224, 242   political life (1637–44)    association with Thomas Hewson 225–6, 227, 228    commitment to martyrological tradition 228    first arrest (1637) 226–7    incarceration in Oxford Castle (1643) 228, 229    military service in Lord Brooke’s regiment 228    popular demonstrations 227    for separation of civil and clerical ‘states’ 228   political life (1644–49)    1646 arrest 232    1648 imprisonment in Tower 238    military service in earl of Manchester’s army 229, 234    Overton’s illegal press and imprisonment 230    Parliament and reparations claim 230–2    petitioning 231–2, 235    print, letter-writing, gossip and political mobilisation 232–4    public image and reputation 235–6    tavern meetings and political action 234–5   political thinking    common law arguments 224, 237, 238    Free-born Englishman’s birthright 225, 237, 241

299

INDEX    Levellers 224–5, 236, 237–9, 241    Puritans 225–6, 228, 241   republicanism 241    separation of civil and clerical ‘states’ 228   post-1649 activities    advocacy for commoners 239–40    advocacy for defense of family’s interest 239, 240–1    London’s Common Council, Engagement and legal rights 239   summary and assessment    conversion to Quakerism 241    ideological evolution 241    political culture, practice and agency 241–2 Lincolnshire fenlanders, and Lilburne 223, 225 literary corruption 188, 189 The Lively Character of the Malignant Partie (pamphlet) 198n85 Lloyd, Timothy 130, 131 local self-government   and ‘middling sort’ 38–9   and popular political culture 29–30   see also parish Locke, John 23–4, 175 Logue, Kenneth 75 London   ‘Apologie’ for London (James Dalton) 215–16   Levellers 203   London’s Common Council and Lilburne 239   Survey of London (John Stow) 215–16, 221   see also City of London lordship, symbolism of and imparkment 118–19 Lucas, John, 1st Baron Lucas of Shenfield 30, 30n74 Ludlow (Shropshire), burgesses-councillors conflict 217–19, 221 Lunsford, Colonel Thomas 227 McAreavey, Naomi 273 MacCarthy, Florence 263–4 McDiarmid, John 217n72 Macfarlane, Alan 25 Machiavelli, Niccolò 241 McIntosh, M. K. 49, 52, 53

Maddicott, John 37–8 Maddison, Ralph   1620s crisis and ‘public agitation’ 62   1620s events as model for later years 72n94   1622–23 ‘famine without dearth’ 69   foreign exchange and ‘act of state’ 61   Malynes vs Mun debate 57, 58, 59–60   MPs’ economic knowledge 65   standing commission on trade (1622) 64 Magna Carta, and Golden Rule 168 Malcolm, Noel 178 Maldon grain riots (1629) 19, 24, 73, 88 Mallory, John, Sir 193–4, 196–7 Mallory, William, Sir 194 Malynes, Gerard   comparison with Serra-De Santis debate 71   foreign exchange theory 56–7, 58, 59–60, 61, 63   ideal of monarchical ‘absolute government’ 65   ideal of ‘par’ vs fairness 70   merchants 65–6   standing commission on trade (1622) 64   usury 67 Manchester, Edward Montagu, 2nd Earl of Manchester 229, 234 Mandrou, Robert 92 Mann, Michael 39 Manning, Roger B. 74n5 manorial court records 43 Marquette, Heather 183 Martin, John 134, 142 martyrological tradition, and Lilburne 228 Marvell, Andrew, The Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government 199 masculinity   early modern norms 275   and popular protest 24 Massachusetts Bay Company 226 ‘maternal activism’ 89 ‘maternal politics’ 86 Mayerne, Louis Turquet de 71 Mayo, John 171 medical discourse, and corruption 188 memory   and custom 106   and landscape, labour and entitlement 115–17

300

INDEX   and oral tradition 111 Merchant Adventurers 58, 62 Mercurius Politicus 236 Merton, R. K. 92 middling sorts 20, 39, 43–4, 52, 53–4 Midland Revolt (1607) 8, 24, 67–8, 123–4, 126–8   see also Sir John Newdigate in the Court of Star Chamber (Steve Hindle) Misselden, Edward 58, 59, 65, 66, 67 mixed governments (1640s), and democracy 203 moderation and peace, and Golden Rule 173–4 monarchical republicanism 217 monarchy   and confessional politics 213–14   and democracy as Aristotelian notion 211   and logic of the market 71–2   Malynes’ ideal of monarchical ‘absolute government’ 65   monarchical wit and human psychology 215   term in EEBO texts 208–9   vs tyranny (Lilburne) 237 Montagu, Edward 68, 69, 225 Montagu, Henry 64, 68, 69 Montchrestien, Antoine de 71 Moore, John 120 Moran, G. T. 93 More, Hannah 175 Morrill, John 11–12, 17, 243   ‘Order and Disorder in the English Revolution’ (Morrill and Walter) 17n8, 29n68   see also An Irish Protestation (John Morrill) motherhood   and women rioters/court witnesses 85–6, 88–9   see also wives and mothers in early modern England (Alexandra Shepard) Mountford, Henry 133, 135 Mulcaster, Richard 215 Mun, Thomas   balance of trade theory 55, 57–8, 59, 60, 61–2, 70   borrowing of political language 65   comparison with Serra-De Santis debate 71

  foreign imports controls 66   private gain as a ‘necessity’ 66   standing commission on trade (1622) 63–4   usury and low interest rates 67 Musgrave, John 171–2 Muslim countries, and corruption 182, 183 Naples, Serra-De Santis debate 71 Navigation Acts 72 Naworth, George (pseud. of George Wharton), New Almanacke and Prognostication 91–2, 100 ‘necessity hath no law’ slogan 23 negotiated power, concept of 177n74, 184 Nelthorp, Richard 169 New England Company 226 ‘new social history’ 1, 4, 222 Newdigate, John see Sir John Newdigate in the Court of Star Chamber (Steve Hindle) No Age like unto this Age (tract) 198n89, 199n92 non-conformists, and Golden Rule 174–5 Norris, Pippa 183 Northampton, Henry Howard, 1st Earl of Northampton 67–8 Northleigh, John 173–4 Oath of Supremacy 251 oaths, and Golden Rule 172–3 O’Mahony, Conor 258 O’Neill, Phelim 274 ‘othermothering’, and African-American communities 86 Overton, Richard 224, 230, 237, 238 Overton, Valentine 131 Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, popular protest key figures (Walter) 24 Oxfordshire rising (1596) 19–20, 24, 124, 212 Paldam, Martin 182, 183 papacy/Pope   and Protestant view of corruption 189   The tree of the papacy’ 188   see also anti-popery; Catholicism; religion, anti-popery and corruption (Mark Knights) Paper War (1642) 237

301

INDEX parish   lord-tenant/serf relations 41–2, 43   popular revolts and the ‘commons’ 42–3   village and middling sorts 39, 43–4   village elites and charitable provision 50–3   village elites and law and order 49–50   villeinage, copyholding and landholding elite 44–7   vills, state and taxes 47–9, 50–1 parks see imparkment movement peace and moderation, and Golden Rule 173–4 Peasants’ Revolt (1381) 28, 42 Pennington, David 75 Pepys, Samuel 199 petitioning 231–2, 235 Phelips, Robert 63 Philp, Mark 222n95 pirates, and popular political culture 30 pluritemporalism 100–1 Plutarch 241 poaching, as form of agency 119 Pocock, J. G. A. 221 political economy see English political economy in 1620s (Paul Slack) political revisionism 1, 10, 203 politics   and corruption 188, 189, 191, 198–9, 200   ‘elite’ vs ‘popular’ politics 1–3   and gesture 16, 26   popular political culture 28–30   and public protest 24–8   and social history 25–8   see also confessional politics; working-class politics politics of subsistence 2, 5, 6, 41, 73   and John Walter 3, 8, 36, 38, 39, 239 Polybius 241 Ponet, John 209 Poor Laws 21–2, 23, 69 poor relief   central measures and local power 40, 49   village elite and charitable provision 50–3   see also charity popery see anti-popery; religion, anti-popery and corruption (Mark Knights) Popish Plot 199 popular political culture 28–30 ‘popular’ politics, vs ‘elite’ politics 1–4

popular senses of past time 1615–31 (Keith Wrightson)   chapter overview 6–7, 11   background and issues    astronomical/calendrical time and Naworth’s New Almanacke 91    astronomical vs social terms of reference 92    characteristics of time consciousness 92–3    church/merchant/lawyer’s time 93    horological revolution and clock time narratives 93–4    research into timing practices/ vocabularies 94   dating practices survey    ecclesiastical court depositions as source 94–5    ecclesiastical feasts 95, 96    references to other events 96–7    seasonal and agricultural referents 95–6    specific dates (day, month, year) 96, 101    use of units of time 97–8   qualitative analysis    approximation 92, 98    dating by association 93, 98–9    paucity of reference to political events 93, 99–100   pluritemporalism 100–1   wills 101   quantitative analysis    approach and methodology 102    dating referents by age 104–5, 104    dating referents by gender 103–4, 103    dating referents by type 102–3, 102    ecclesiastical feasts 102, 103, 104, 105    events 102, 103, 104, 105    seasonal/agricultural referents 102, 103, 104, 105    specific dates 102, 103, 104, 105–6    time of day and clock time 105    units of time 103, 104, 105   survey conclusions    coexistence of various practices 105–6    people’s senses of time and agency 106–7 Portsmouth, Louise de Kérouaille, Duchess of 199

302

INDEX power   and affability 23   distributive vs collective 39–40   negotiated power concept 177n74, 184 press freedom, and Golden Rule 174 Primatt, Josiah 232n35, 240–1 Proctor, Stephen, Sir 193–7, 200 The Proctor and Parator their Mourning (pamphlet) 198n87 profit-taking (private gain), and public good 66 Protestant Calendar 100 Protestant Prayer Book (1552) 149–50 Protestantism   attitudes to women and anti-popery 191   and Christian passivity as virtue 275   and corruption    corruption and popery 188–93, 199–201    corruption and sin 186–7    social science literature on 182–4   and popular political culture 29   see also Church of England Protestation Oath (1641–2) 32, 243–4, 245, 246, 248, 250   see also An Irish Protestation (John Morrill) provisioning   definition 76   see also wives and mothers in early modern England (Alexandra Shepard) Prynne, William 226, 235–6, 242 public good, and profit-taking (private gain) 66 ‘public men’ 123, 126 public sphere, demographic potential of 203 public transcript (James C. Scott) 20–1, 23, 165–6, 184   see also The Golden Rule and public transcript (J. C. Davis) Puritans   attacks on tithes 198–9   and Irish Protestation 244, 250, 254, 265   and John Lilburne 225–6, 228, 241   and Laudianism 146, 152–4, 160–1, 162–3   and use of Aristotelian lexicon 214 Putnam, Robert 182 Putney Debates 238

Quakers 171, 172, 175, 241 Questier, Michael 181n2, 197 Ranelagh, Richard Jones, 1st Earl of Ranelagh 199 rebellions see riots and revolts The Reign of the Whore Discovered (tract) 198 religion, anti-popery and corruption (Mark Knights)   chapter overview 9–10   background and issues    agency and corruption/anti-corruption 181    legitimation and delegitimation strategies (Walter) 181    overview of social science literature 182–4    relevant works by Walter, Braddick and Scott 184–5   corruption, sin and anti-popery    corruption and sin 185–8    corruption in non-religious contexts 188–9    popery and corruption 189–93   practical use of popery-corruption charge    attacks against Archbishop Laud 197–8    attacks against office holders and MPs 199    libels against 1st duke of Buckingham 197    Puritan attacks on tithes 198–9    Stephen Proctor’s anti-popish corruption activities 193–7, 200   summary and conclusions 199–201 republicanism   classical republicanism 212, 238   and Lilburne 241   monarchical republicanism 217 revisionism 1, 10, 203 revolts see riots and revolts Reynolds, John (‘Captain Pouch’) 24, 126–8, 129, 130, 131–2, 133, 135 Rinuccini, GianBaptista 254, 261n63 riots and revolts   Forest of Dean riots (1631–2) 24   Garden House riot (Cambridge, 1970) 16   Maldon grain riots (1629) 19, 24, 73, 88   Midland Revolt (1607) 8, 24, 67–8, 123–4, 126–8

303

INDEX   Oxfordshire rising (1596) 19–20, 24, 124, 212   Peasants’ Revolt (1381) 28, 42   Stour valley riots (1642) 30–1, 184   Wealden riots 74   see also food riots Robinson, Ann 84 Rogers, Samuel 169 Rollison, David 42, 113 Rosenwein, Barbara 269 Rosier, Edward 226 Roughneck see Estgate, John (‘Roughneck’) Rous, Francis 213 Rudé, George 18 Sanderson, Robert 172 Sanderson, William 57, 59, 60, 67 Say and Sele see Fiennes, William, 1st Viscount Saye and Sele ‘scandalous ministers’ 146, 157–60 Schofield, Roger 4, 53   ‘Famine, Disease and Crisis Mortality in Early Modern Society’ (Walter and Schofield) 21n21, 22n23, 35n1, 38n12, 39n15   Famine, Disease and the Social Order in Early Modern Society (Walter and Schofield, eds) 17, 21n21, 22n22, 22n23, 35n1, 38n12, 39n15 Scot, John 172 Scott, James C.   Comparative Political Corruption 184   and John Walter’s work 20–1, 23   and new social history 4  transcript    hidden 20–1, 117–18, 184    public 20–1, 23, 165–6, 184   weapons of the weak 8, 26, 166 Scott, Joan 25 Scriptures   and corruption 188n38   and Golden Rule 168–9 seasonal/agricultural referents 95–6, 102, 103, 104, 105 Sen, Amartya 38 serfdom 41–2, 43 Serra, Antonio 71 Sexby, Edward 7, 234 sexuality, and corruption 188, 189, 190, 200 Shagan, Ethan 268

Shakespeare, William, Coriolanus and Midland Revolt 124 Sharp, Buchanan 23, 74 Shaw, Samuel 170 Sheerwood, Richard 214n55 Sheldon, Richard 190 Shepard, Alexandra 6, 9, 24, 73   see also wives and mothers in early modern England (Alexandra Shepard) Sidney, Robert, 1st Earl of Leicester 210 sin, and corruption 185–8 Sir John Newdigate in the Court of Star Chamber (Steve Hindle)   chapter overview 7–8  background    Arbury enclosure riot and Newdigate 123–4, 125    Midland Revolt (1607) 123, 124   biographical details and Newdigate’s Arbury estate 125–6   diggers, levellers and Midland Revolt 126–8   diggers and Arbury estate riot    common rights vs enclosures and coal mining 128–9    diggers-led Chilvers Coton riot 129–30   judicial proceedings    four separate proceedings 130–1    Newdigate’s indictment of rioters 131–3    Warwickshire depopulation enquiry and Newdigate 134–40    Warwickshire grain shortages and Newdigate’s jury charge 140–1   Newdigate’s will and legacies 141–2   value of material analysed 143 skills, and performance of tasks 205–6 Skinner, Quentin 17 Slack, Paul 5–6, 22, 40–1, 55   see also English political economy in 1620s (Paul Slack) slander, and Golden Rule 173 Slavin, P. 37 Slingsby, Henry, 1st Baronet 23 Slodden, Thomasina 78–9 Smith, Adam 61 Smith, Anna 78 Smith, Richard M. 5   see also susceptibility to famine (Richard M. Smith)

304

INDEX Smith, Thomas, Sir 23   De Republica Anglorum 209–10 Smyth, John 119 social history   John Walter on 18   ‘new social history’ 1, 4, 222   and politics 25–8   see also Walter and social history of early modern England (Keith Thomas) social practices, theory of 224, 242 Sorokin, P. A. 92 Sorrell, Tom 178 sorrow and anger in 17th-century Ireland (Clodagh Tait)   chapter overview 12–13   background and issues    1641 Depositions and emotions 267–8, 269–70    historiography of 1640s and emotions 268    investigating emotions in history 269  emotions    anger 272–3, 274, 275, 283–4   grief 271–2    martyr-like calm 273–4, 275    masculinity and self-mastery 275    mental illness and anger 275    passivity as Protestant virtue 275   women and ars moriendi 275   emotions and dynamics of violence    comedic mistreatment of bodies 277    failure of non-resistance strategies 276    forward panic and hysteria zone 276–7, 278, 281    humour and emotional dominance 278    music, revelry and violence 277–8, 281–2   example of John Ware’s killing    account of William Potter 278–80    examinations of witnesses 280–1    victims’ and attackers’ emotions 281–2   print works    commentaries on Depositions and readers’ emotions 282–3    extract from J. Temple’s The Irish Rebellion 282, 283   stereotyping, emotional ‘othering’ and agency 283–4 sortition method 219–20, 221 Spain, arbitristas 70

Sparrow, Ester 82 spectral lordship and Towneley Hall (Andy Wood)   chapter overview 7   boggart of Towneley Hall 109–10   enclosure of Horelaw, Hollinhey and Hollinclough    enclosures, memory and working-class politics 111    John Towneley and imparkment 111–13    popular complaint and rioting 113–15    popular memory, landscape and entitlement 115–17    popular trespass and poaching 119    symbolism of lordship and imparkment 118–19    Towneleys and fiscal seigneurialism 117    Towneleys’ corrupt and oppressive dealings 117–18   ghost stories and cursing of enclosers    Duke of Buckingham (Gloucestershire) 119    Edward Hussey (Lincolnshire) 120    George Huntley (Gloucestershire) 119–20    Henry Burgwash, Bishop of Lincoln 120–1    Lord Brooke (Cambridgeshire) 119    significance of stories and dispossession 120–1 standing commission on trade (1622) 64–6, 72 Star Chamber   cases as result of popular complaint 26   John Lilburne’s imprisonment for contempt of 228   John Newdigate’s case 124, 125, 131–3, 135, 138, 139–40, 142   Stephen Proctor’s cases 194 Steer, Bartholomew 19, 24 Stephens, Thomas 171 Stevens, Joseph 170n28 Stoughton, William, An Assertion for True and Christian Church-policy 214–15, 220 Stour valley riots (1642) 30–1, 184 Stow, John, Survey of London 215–16, 221 Strafford, Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford 227, 243

305

INDEX Styles, John, An Ungovernable People (Brewer and Styles) 25 sumptuary laws, repeal of 66 Supple, Barry E. 55, 56 surplice, and female protest 153–5, 160, 162 susceptibility to famine (Richard M. Smith)   chapter overview 5   comparison between early 14th- and late 16th-century 35   environmental vs institutional/political factors 35–6   Great European Famine (1315–22) 36   Great Famine (1315–17) and inefficiency of grain marketing 37–8   local government politics    John Walter and ‘politics of subsistence’ 38, 39    local self-government and ‘middling sort’ 38–9    role of central policy initiatives 39–40    state and localities 40–1   pre-1550 parish/village developments    lord-tenant/serf relations 41–2, 43    popular revolts and the ‘commons’ 42–3    village and middling sorts 43–4    village elites and charitable provision 50–3    village elites and law and order 49–50    villeinage, copyholding and landholding elite 44–7    vills, state and taxes 47–9, 50–1   resource redistributions and reduced susceptibility to famines 52–3   revisiting questions of chronology 53–4 Sutcliffe, Thomas 117 Tait, Clodagh 12–13, 267   see also sorrow and anger in 17th-century Ireland (Clodagh Tait) tasks, and skills 205–6 ‘taskscape’ 116, 217 tavern meetings 234–5 Taverner, Richard 209 Tawney, R. H. 16, 46 taxes   and Golden Rule 171   and vills 47–9, 50–1 Temple, John, The Irish Rebellion 282, 283 Temple, William, Sir 272

tenants, and parish politics 44–7 Text Creation Partnership 187 thefts, and ‘necessity hath no law’ slogan 23 Thomas, Keith 3, 4, 15   see also Walter and social history of early modern England (Keith Thomas) Thompson, E. P.   cursing of enclosing landlords 119n45   grain rioters and ‘moral economy’ 23   Lancashire working-class politics 111   middle-class historian of the common people 16   ‘The moral economy of the English crowd in the eighteenth century’ 18   ‘Time, Work-discipline, and industrial capitalism’ 94   women’s participation in riots 74 Thomson, Maurice 225 Thomson, William 225 Thorpe, Sergeant Francis 172 Thrift, Nigel 92, 94, 100 tillage statutes 68, 69 Tilly, Charles 18 time   units of time as time referents 97–8, 103, 104, 105   see also popular senses of past time 1615–31 (Keith Wrightson) tithes, Puritan attacks on 198–9 Tolmie, Murray 226 Towneley, John, Sir 110, 111–14, 116, 117–18   see also spectral lordship and Towneley Hall (Andy Wood) Towneley, Richard 114 trade   balance of trade theory and 1620s financial crisis 55–6, 57–8, 59, 60, 61–2, 70   free trade campaign (1604–24) 66–7, 72   and Golden Rule 170   standing commission on trade (1622) 64–6, 72 transcript (James C. Scott)   hidden 20–1, 117–18, 184   public 20–1, 23, 165–6, 184 ‘The tree of the papacy’ 188 Treisman, Daniel 182 Trevelyan, G. M. 25 Trimnell, Charles 167

306

INDEX Turner, Thomas 110 Underdown, David 32 Underkuffler, Laura 182n3 An Ungovernable People (Brewer and Styles) 25 units of time as time referents 97–8, 103, 104, 105 University of Essex, John Walter’s posting 17–18 urban corporate citizenship, and democracy 206, 207, 216, 217 usury 67, 70, 170, 188 Vane, Henry (senior and junior) 231, 235 Vaughan, William 213 Vause, Clare 84 Venice, and Aristotelian mixed governance 221 Vergil, Polydore 209 vernacularisation, and democracy 205, 206–7, 221 vestments controversy (1566) 154   see also surplice View of Frankpledge (or leet courts) 43, 49 village see parish villeinage 44–6 vills, and taxation 47–9, 50–1 violence   and emotions    comedic mistreatment of bodies 277    failure of non-resistance strategies 276    forward panic and hysteria zone 276–7, 278, 281    music, revelry and violence 277–8, 281–2   John Walter on 12, 31–2, 267, 270, 275, 277–8, 283   sociology of 270–1 Vivers, Robert 226, 228 Walker, Heather 270 Walker, Henry 235 Walpole, Robert 190 Walter, John (as discussed by contributors)   ‘Aristotelian moment’ and themes from his work 221–2   charity 20, 22   Colchester plunderers 30–1, 204, 217   cursing and anti-enclosure protest 109

  custom and popular protest 106   famines, dearth and politics of subsistence 3, 5, 8, 35n1, 36, 38–9, 239   Irish and English affairs, interaction between 11–12   legitimating languages and mobilisation tactics 223   legitimation and delegitimation strategies 181   negotiated power, concept of 177n74, 184   official discourses and negotiation of power 8   political agency, history of 242   popular politics 3–4, 13, 165, 166, 203   Protestation Oath 243, 248n11, 250   religious factors and anti-popery 184–5   riots and voices of subordinate groups 73   seditious libels, ballads and rebellion 124   Stour Valley riots (1642) 184   ‘uniquely subtle body of work’ of (Andy Wood) 15n1   violence and comedic mistreatment of bodies 277   violence and competitive ‘othering’ 283   violence and victims cast as martyrs 275   violence in Irish 1641 depositions 12, 31–2, 267   violent events, contextualisation of 270, 278   Walter on his social origins 15   Walter on social history 18   women and public protest 73, 75   women protesters and motherhood 85–6   see also Walter and social history of early modern England (Keith Thomas) Walter and social history of early modern England (Keith Thomas)   biographical details    social origins and education 15–16    Cambridge affiliations 17    University of Essex lectureship 17–18   research themes    crowd behaviour 18    dearth, rioting and the ruling elite 17, 18–19    food shortages and poor laws 21–2    gesture and politics 16, 26    Levellers and Diggers 16, 32–3

307

INDEX    Lincolnshire Libel and charity out of fear 20    Maldon grain riots and crowds’ knowledge of the law 19    Oxfordshire Rising and riots against property vs persons 19–20    performative violence and 1641 Irish rising 31–2    politics and public protest 24–8    popular culture and cultural creativity 31    popular political culture 29–30    popular politicization and confessional conflict 31    popular politicization and the Stour Valley riots 30–1    popular protest and gender 24    popular protest key figures 24    Protestation Oath (1641–2) 32    ‘public transcript’ and James C. Scott’s writings 20–1, 23    ‘public transcript’ and John Higgens case 21    public welfare, charity and fear of rebellion 22–4   see also Walter, John (as discussed by contributors) Walwyn, William 224, 230, 237, 238 Warburton, William, A Faithful Portrait of Popery 191 Ware, John   account of his killing 278–80   examinations of witnesses 280–1   victims’ and attackers’ emotions 281–2 Warr, John 172 Warrington, Henry Booth, 1st Earl of Warrington 169, 176 Warwick, Robert Rich, 2nd Earl of Warwick 30 Warwick School, and Walter’s essays on gesture 16 Warwickshire   depopulation enquiry and Newdigate 134–40   grain shortages and Newdigate’s jury charge 140–1 Watts, John 28, 42–3 Wealden riots 74 Weaver, G. R. 183 Weber, Max 118, 182, 192–3, 201

Westrop, Ambrose 150 Wharton, George 91n2   see also Naworth, George (pseud. of George Wharton) Wharton, John 226 Whately, William 81 Whitaker, Thomas Dunham 109–10, 111, 122 Whitehall, William 126, 128, 136, 142 Whitehall Debates 238 Whittaker, Ranolde 114, 115 Whittle, J. 47n43 Whore of Babylon 191 Wickham, Chris 92n4, 93 Wilden, Frances 79 Wildman, John 224, 234, 239 Willett, Joan 80 Williams, John (alias ‘Skimmington’) 24 Willingham, George 225–6 wills, and dating practices 101 Wilson, John 270 Winstanley, Gerrard 168, 170 Winthrop, John 158, 225, 226 wit, and monarchy vs democracy 215 Withington, Phil 1, 10, 203   see also democracy in early modern England (Phil Whithington); introduction (Michael J. Braddick and Phil Withington) witnesses’ ‘worth’ statements 76, 77–8 wives and mothers in early modern England (Alexandra Shepard)   chapter overview 6   food riots and female political agency 73–6   provisioning and creditworthiness    courts and witnesses’ statements 76    coverture 76–7, 78    creditworthiness in civil law 77    dependency vs economic agency 77–8, 84–5, 88–9    extent of wives’ economic activity 78–82    wives as consumers and household managers 82–4    wives’ inability to buy grain on credit 83–4    women prisoners and ‘charge’ of dependents argument 84   women protesters

308

INDEX    and 1550–1650 wealth inequalities 87–8    and feminism 86, 89    and motherhood 85–6, 88–9    overlap between men’s/shared and gender-related concerns 88–9 women   and anti-popery 191  and ars moriendi 275   and dating referents 103–4, 103, 105   and popular political engagement 28   and popular protest 24   Protestant attitudes to 191   and Protestation Oath (1641–2) 32   see also gender, agency and religious change (Amanda Flather); wives and mothers in early modern England (Alexandra Shepard) Wood, Andy   chapter overview and start 7, 109   the commons and 1549 rebellion 42–3   custom and popular memory 106   English rural protest leadership issues 24   John Walter’s and colleagues’ ‘uniquely subtle body of work’ 15n1

  localism of popular political culture 29n63   popular time consciousness 94, 99n44   Stephen Proctor and constraints on popular protest 193   see also spectral lordship and Towneley Hall (Andy Wood) Woods, Michael E. 269 Woolf, Daniel 91 working-class politics, and enclosures 111 ‘The “Worth” of Witnesses in the English Church Courts, 1550–1728’ (UK Data Archive) 77n17 ‘worth’ statements 76, 77–8 Wren, Matthew, Bishop of Ely 30, 148–9 Wright, William 132–3 Wrightson, Keith 6–7, 9, 11, 17, 18, 25, 91   see also popular senses of past time 1615–31 (Keith Wrightson) Wrigley, E. A. 53 Wyncoll, Robert 225 Xenophon 71 Yorke, John, Sir 194

309

Tabula Gratulatoria

Ian W. Archer John Barber Helen Berry Jeremy Boulton Lloyd Bowen Michael J. Braddick Bernard Capp Bill Cliftlands Richard Cust Joan Davies J. C. Davis Heather Falvey Amanda Flather Malcolm Gaskill Mark Goldie Harumi Goto Mark Hailwood Tim Harris Graham Hart Deirdre Heavens Steve Hindle R. W. Hoyle Ann Hughes Martin Ingram Robert Jago

Frank and Jackie Kelly K. J. Kesselring Mark Knights Chris R. Kyle John Morrill Geoffrey Parker Alison Rowlands Roger Schofield Alexandra Shepard Quentin Skinner Paul Slack Richard Smith Steve Smith Mark Stoyle Tim Stretton Naomi Tadmor Clodagh Tait Stephen Taylor Keith Thomas Tim Wales Alexandra Walsham Phil Withington Andy Wood Keith Wrightson

STUDIES IN EARLY MODERN CULTURAL, POLITICAL AND SOCIAL HISTORY I Women of Quality Accepting and Contesting Ideals of Femininity in England, 1690–1760 Ingrid H. Tague II Restoration Scotland, 1660–1690 Royalist Politics, Religion and Ideas Clare Jackson III Britain, Hanover and the Protestant Interest, 1688–1756 Andrew C. Thompson IV Hanover and the British Empire, 1700–1837 Nick Harding V The Personal Rule of Charles II, 1681–85 Grant Tapsell VI Royalism, Print and Censorship in Revolutionary England Jason McElligott VII The English Catholic Community, 1688–1745 Politics, Culture and Ideology Gabriel Glickman VIII England and the 1641 Irish Rebellion Joseph Cope IX Culture and Politics at the Court of Charles II, 1660–1685 Matthew Jenkinson X Commune, Country and Commonwealth The People of Cirencester, 1117–1643 David Rollison XI An Enlightenment Statesman in Whig Britain Lord Shelburne in Context, 1737–1805 Edited by Nigel Aston and Clarissa Campbell Orr

XII London’s News Press and the Thirty Years War Jayne E. E. Boys XIII God, Duty and Community in English Economic Life, 1660–1720 Brodie Waddell XIV Remaking English Society Social Relations and Social Change in Early Modern England Edited by Steve Hindle, Alexandra Shepard and John Walter XV Common Law and Enlightenment in England, 1689–1750 Julia Rudolph XVI The Final Crisis of the Stuart Monarchy The Revolutions of 1688–91 in their British, Atlantic and European Contexts Edited by Stephen Taylor and Tim Harris XVII The Civil Wars after 1660 Public Remembering in Late Stuart England Matthew Neufeld XVIII The Nature of the English Revolution Revisited Edited by Stephen Taylor and Grant Tapsell XIX The King’s Irishmen The Irish in the Exiled Court of Charles II, 1649–1660 Mark R.F. Williams XX Scotland in the Age of Two Revolutions Edited by Sharon Adams and Julian Goodare XXI Alehouses and Good Fellowship in Early Modern England Mark Hailwood XXII Social Relations and Urban Space: Norwich, 1600–1700 Fiona Williamson XXIII British Travellers and the Encounter with Britain, 1450–1700 John Cramsie

XXIV Domestic Culture in Early Modern England Antony Buxton XXV Accidents and Violent Death in Early Modern London, 1650–1750 Craig Spence

O

MICHAEL J. BRADDICK is professor of history at the University of Sheffield. PHIL WITHINGTON is professor of history at the University of Sheffield.

Cover image: The cover shows the portrait of a scullion of Christ Church College, Oxford who, according to later (possibly apocryphal) report, had been employed to sing satirical and political ballads against James II’s party prior to 1689. The editors are grateful to Jacqueline Thalmann, curator of the Picture Gallery, Christ Church, for discussing the portrait with them. It is reproduced by permission of the Governing Body of Christ Church, Oxford.

Studies in Early Modern Cultural, Political and Social History

Edited by Michael J. Braddick and Phil Withington

CONTRIBUTORS: Michael J. Braddick, J. C. Davis, Amanda Flather, Steve Hindle, Mark Knights, John Morrill, Alexandra Shepard, Paul Slack, Richard M. Smith, Clodagh Tait, Keith Thomas, Phil Withington, Andy Wood, Keith Wrightson.

POPULAR CULTURE AND POLITICAL AGENCY IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND AND IRELAND ESSAYS IN HONOUR OF JOHN WALTER

ne of the most notable currents in social, cultural and political historiography is the interrogation of the categories of ‘elite’ and ‘popular’ politics and their relationship to each other, as well as the exploration of why and how different sorts of people engaged with politics and behaved politically. While such issues are timeless, they hold a special importance for a society experiencing rapid political and social change, like early modern England. No one has done more to define these agendas for early modern historians than John Walter. His work has been hugely influential, and at its heart has been the analysis of the political agency of ordinary people. The essays in this volume engage with the central issues of Walter’s work, ranging across the politics of poverty, dearth and household, popular political consciousness and practice more broadly, and religion and politics during the English revolution. This outstanding collection, bringing together some of the leading historians of this period with some of the field’s rising stars, will appeal to anyone interested in the social, cultural and political history of early modern England or issues of popular political consciousness and behaviour more generally.

POPULAR CULTURE AND POLITICAL AGENCY IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND AND IRELAND ESSAYS IN HONOUR OF JOHN WALTER

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Edited by Michael J. Braddick and Phil Withington