The Extraordinary and the Everyday in Early Modern England

The Extraordinary and the Everyday in Early Modern England

Also by Angela McShane POLITICAL BROADSIDE BALLADS IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND A Critical Bibliography

Also by Garthine Walker CRIME, GENDER AND SOCIAL ORDER IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND WRITING EARLY MODERN HISTORY (edited) GENDER AND CHANGE Agency, Chronology and Periodisation (edited with Alexandra Shepard) WOMEN, CRIME AND THE COURTS IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND (edited with Jenny Kermode)

The Extraordinary and the Everyday in Early Modern England Essays in Celebration of the Work of Bernard Capp Edited By Angela McShane Tutor in Postgraduate Studies (1600–1800), Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK

Garthine Walker Senior Lecturer in History, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK

Editorial matter and selection, introduction © Angela McShane and Garthine Walker 2010 All remaining chapters © their respective authors 2010 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-0-230-53724-8

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This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The extraordinary and the everyday in early modern England / edited by Angela McShane, Garthine Walker. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-230-53724-8 (hardback) 1. England–Social life and customs–17th century. 2. England–Social life and customs–16th century. 3. Popular culture–England–History–17th century. 4. Popular culture–England–History–16th century. 5. England– Social conditions–17th century. 6. England–Social conditions–16th century. 7. Curiosities and wonders–England–History–17th century. 8. Curiosities and wonders–England–History–16th century. 9. England– Civilization–17th century. 10. England–Civilization–16th century. I. McShane, Angela, 1959– II. Walker, Garthine. DA380.E97 2010 942.06–dc22 2010004784 10 19

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Contents List of Illustrations

vii

Abbreviations and Conventions

viii

Notes on the Contributors

ix

Introduction: The Extraordinary and the Everyday in Early Modern England Angela McShane and Garthine Walker

1

Part I

7

The Extraordinary in the Everyday

1. Bodily Control and Social Unease: The Fart in SeventeenthCentury England Keith Thomas

9

2. The Ambition of a Young Baronet: Sir Thomas Isham of Lamport, 1657–1681 Anthony Fletcher

31

3. Robert Robertes and Little Cis: An Extraordinary Relationship Ralph Houlbrooke

48

4. Punishing Words: Insults and Injuries, 1525–1700 Paul Griffiths

66

5. The World of Poor Robin’s Intelligence: Comedy and Communication in Late Stuart London David M. Turner

86

6. The Strangeness of the Familiar: Witchcraft and the Law in Early Modern England Garthine Walker

Part II

105

The Everyday in the Extraordinary

125

7. Ann Jeffries and the Fairies: Folk Belief and the War on Scepticism in Later Stuart England Peter Marshall

127

8. Wyclif’s Well: Lollardy, Landscape and Memory in PostReformation England Alexandra Walsham

142

v

vi Contents

9. ‘Boiled and Stewed with Roots and Herbs’: Everyday Tales of Cannibalism in Early Modern Virginia Catherine Armstrong

161

10. Glimpses of the Obscure: The Witch Trials of the Channel Islands Darryl Ogier

177

11. The Extraordinary Case of the Blood-Drinking and FleshEating Cavaliers Angela McShane

192

12. Mother Shipton and the Devil Darren Oldridge

211

13. ‘Bleedinge Afreshe’? The Affray and Murder at Nantwich, 19 December 1572 Steve Hindle

224

Publications by Professor Bernard Capp, FBA Compiled by Tim Reinke-Williams

246

Index

251

List of Illustrations Figure 8.1 Figure 12.1

‘The Burning of Wickliffes bones’, John Foxe, Actes and Monuments (London, 1563), p. 105. Frontispiece of Mother Shiptons Christmas Carols (London, 1668).

vii

152 217

Abbreviations and Conventions ODNB OED TRHS

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Oxford English Dictionary Transactions of the Royal Historical Society

The year has been taken to begin on 1 January, not 25 March as in the Old Style calendar. The place of publication for all printed works is London unless otherwise indicated.

viii

Notes on the Contributors Catherine Armstrong is Lecturer in American History at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her 2003 PhD was supervised by Bernard Capp at the University of Warwick. She is the author of Writing North America in the Seventeenth Century (2007), and co-editor of several volumes in the Print Networks series published by Oak Knoll Press and the British Library, of which she is also a series editor: Printing Places: Locations of Book Production and Distribution since 1500 (2005), Worlds of Print: Diversity in the Book Trade (2006), Book Trade Connections: From the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Centuries (2008), and Periodicals and Publishers: The Newspaper and Journal Trade 1740–1914 (2009). She also co-edited America in the British Imagination (2007). Anthony Fletcher is Professor Emeritus of Social History at the University of London and Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. His recent publications include Gender, Sex and Subordination in England, 1500–1800 (1995), Growing Up in England: The Experience of Childhood 1600–1914 (2008), and the co-edited volumes Religion, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain (1994) and Childhood in Question: Children, Parents and the State (1999). Paul Griffiths is Assistant Professor of Early Modern English Social and Cultural History at Iowa State University. He is author of Youth and Authority: Formative Experiences in England, 1560–1640 (1996) and Lost Londons: Change, Crime and Control in the Capital City (2008). He is also coeditor of The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England (1996), Londinopolis: Essays in the Cultural and Social History of Early Modern London (2001), and Penal Practice and Culture, 1500–1900: Punishing the English (2003). Steve Hindle is Professor of History at the University of Warwick. He has published two monographs, The State and Social Change in Early Modern England, c.1550–1640 (2000) and On the Parish: The Micro-Politics of Poor Relief in Rural England, c.1550–1750 (2004). He is also the co-editor of The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England (1996). Ralph Houlbrooke was Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Reading. His publications include The English Family, 1450–1700 (1984), Death, Religion and the Family in England, 1480–1750 (1998), English Family Life, 1576–1716: An Anthology from Diaries (1988), and James VI and I: Ideas, Authority, and Government (2006), and, as editor, Death, Ritual and Bereavement ix

x Notes on the Contributors

(1989) and co-editor, The Courtship Narrative of Leonard Wheatcroft, Derbyshire Yeoman (1986). Peter Marshall is Professor of History at the University of Warwick. He is the author of The Catholic Priesthood and the English Reformation (1994), Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England (2002), Reformation England, 1480–1642 (2003), Mother Leakey and the Bishop: Ghosts and Stories in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (2007) and The Reformation: A Very Short Introduction (2009). He is editor of The Impact of the English Reformation, 1500–1640 (1997) and co-editor of The Place of the Dead: Death and Remembrance in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (2000), The Beginnings of English Protestantism (2002), and Angels in the Early Modern World (2006). Angela McShane is Tutor in Graduate Studies (1600–1800) for the Victoria and Albert Museum/Royal College of Art joint postgraduate programmes in History of Design. Her 2005 PhD was supervised by Bernard Capp at the University of Warwick, followed by an Early Career Fellowship at Oxford Brookes University. She has published numerous journal articles and essays on aspects of popular, political culture and a scholarly resource: Political Broadside Ballads in Seventeenth-Century England: A Critical Bibliography (2010). She is the co-convener of the ESRC ‘Intoxicants and Intoxication’ network and is currently completing a monograph, ‘Rime and Reason’: The Political World of the English Broadside Ballad, 1640–1695. Darryl Ogier is the States of Guernsey Archivist and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He was awarded a Senior Research Associateship at Peterhouse, Cambridge in 2006. Since gaining his PhD, supervised by Bernard Capp, from the University of Warwick in 1993, he has published a number of articles on aspects of religious and supernatural beliefs and practices and a book, The Government and Law of Guernsey (2000). Darren Oldridge is Lecturer in History at the University of Worcester. Since receiving his doctorate from the University of Warwick, where he studied with Bernard Capp, he has published Religion and Society in Early Stuart England (1998), The Devil in Early Modern England (2000) – re-issued as The Devil in Tudor and Stuart England (2010), Strange Histories: The Trial of the Pig, the Walking Dead, and Other Matters of Fact from the Medieval and Renaissance Worlds (2005). He is editor of The Witchcraft Reader (2001; 2nd edn, 2008). Tim Reinke-Williams is currently a Lecturer in Economic and Social History at the University of Nottingham. His doctoral thesis, ‘The Negotiation and Fashioning of Female Honour in Early Modern London’ (2006), which he is preparing for publication, was supervised by Bernard Capp. He has published ‘Misogyny, jest-books and youth culture in seventeenth-century England’ in

Notes on the Contributors xi

Gender & History (2009), with others – on women and clothes, female drinking cultures, and the Jacobean pamphleteer Joseph Swetnam – forthcoming. Sir Keith Thomas is a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He was formerly President of Corpus Christi College, Oxford and President of the British Academy. He is author of Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century England (1971), Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500–1800 (1983), and The Ends of Life: Roads to Fulfilment in Early Modern England (2009). His extensive publications on the social and cultural history of early modern England cover a range of topics, including the position of women, age relations, cleanliness and godliness, education, literacy, and attitudes to laughter. David M. Turner is Senior Lecturer in History at Swansea University. His publications include a monograph, Fashioning Adultery: Gender, Sex and Civility in England, 1660–1740 (2002), a co-edited collection, Social Histories of Disability and Deformity (2006), and articles on aspects of gender, marriage, bigamy, and sexuality in early modern England, and he is a consultant editor of Section 1: Conduct and Politeness of the on-line research collection Defining Gender, 1450–1910: Five Centuries of Advice Literature for Men and Women. Alexandra Walsham is Professor of Reformation History at the University of Exeter; from 1 September 2010, she will be Professor of Modern History, University of Cambridge. Her main publications include Church Papists: Catholicism, Conformity and Confessional Polemic in Early Modern England (1993), Providence in Early Modern England (1999), Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance in England 1500–1700 (2006), and The Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Identity and Memory and Legend in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (forthcoming, 2011). She has co-edited The Uses of Script and Print 1300–1700 (2004) and Angels in the Early Modern World (2006). Garthine Walker is Senior Lecturer in History at Cardiff University. She has published Crime, Gender and Social Order in Early Modern England (2003), edited Writing Early Modern History (2005), and is co-editor of Gender and Change: Agency, Chronology and Periodisation (2009), and Women, Crime and the Courts in Early Modern England (1994).

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Introduction: The Extraordinary and the Everyday in Early Modern England Angela McShane and Garthine Walker*

What is extraordinary and what is everyday depends upon one’s point of view. From the vantage point of the early twenty-first century, almost anything in early modern life might seem extraordinary, so different does it appear from our own seemingly comprehensible and predictable experience. Indeed, until the mid-twentieth century, practices such as the bleeding of young women for ‘greensickness’ (amenorrhea), the ducking of scolds in the village pond, and the inscribing of wedding bands with dark omens of death were frequently presented as little more than colourful anecdotes that pointed to a quaint world now lost. Professional historians and lay readers alike deemed such behaviours irrelevant to the serious study of History. Some traditions appeared to be at worst better lost than found, or at best valuable primarily as gauges of the relative advancement and superiority of ‘modern’ society and culture. Since the late 1960s, such perspectives have changed dramatically. Historical writing about the extraordinary and the everyday in sixteenthand seventeenth-century England is most famously associated with the ‘new’ social history of the 1960s and 1970s. The latter did not, however, exist in an intellectual vacuum. It was part of a wider shift in the discipline, which was reflected in developments in the French Annales school and Alltagsgeschichte in Germany, and involved an engagement with scholarship produced in many other disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, linguistics, and – more recently – cultural criticism. The everyday lives of ordinary people, including their apparently extraordinary beliefs and practices, became legitimate subjects of historical enquiry. Instead of explaining seemingly bizarre elements of cultural belief in terms of the irrationality of ‘traditional’ society, historians sought to abandon the value-judgements of the present, and attempted instead to explain the logic of such beliefs in their own terms.1 Of course, ‘everyday’ and ‘ordinary’ are not necessarily synonymous. Everyone has everyday lives and experiences, regardless of their class, sex, age, ethnicity or any other social categorisation, whereas in the new social 1

2 Introduction: The Extraordinary and the Everyday in Early Modern England

history tradition the term ‘ordinary’ was often used to designate the lower orders of a society. In the 1980s and 1990s, social and cultural historians increasingly came to problematise the concept of the ‘ordinary’ as well as extraordinary experience of past actors and to investigate the culturally constructed nature of those categories. In doing so, they questioned the validity of traditional and fixed boundaries between objects of study and demonstrated the interconnectedness of, for example, religion, politics and popular beliefs and practice. At the same time, assumptions of a single shared popular culture, or a dichotomous one of elite and popular, were replaced by a more sophisticated model of cultures in which ideas, concepts, discourses, and practices might compete, clash or co-exist in a multitude of ways depending on the contexts at hand.2 A potential danger in the endeavour to explain everything in its own terms, however, is to forget that early modern people themselves regarded some things as extraordinary. Things were deemed extraordinary when they ceased to follow a prescribed or expected route, or were apparently ‘out of order’ and beyond the control of the natural, legal, cultural or religious constraints that were assumed to operate on life and experience. Some extraordinary things, though alarming, were also thrilling. Samuel Pepys’s idea of the extraordinary included the sight of a mummy: ‘all the middle of the man or woman’s body, black and hard’. Having never seen such a thing before, ‘it pleased me much, though an ill sight’, and he came away with ‘a little bit [of it], and a bone of an arm’. Many people today might still share his frisson in that case. But Pepys was also exhilarated by the potential danger of drinking orange juice: ‘which I never did before [and …] it being new, I was doubtful whether it might not do me hurt’.3 In 1682, many hundreds of people thought extraordinary the famous ‘groaning elm board’ that moaned and trembled if a hot iron was put upon it, and paid to see and hear it wherever it was exhibited. Not everyone was gripped positively by the experience, however. Anthony Wood, Oxford scholar, antiquarian and diarist, noted that the board was ‘showed at the Chequer Inn’ in Oxford ‘by two silly women, but [was] quickly prohibited by the Vice-Chancellor’; Wood nonetheless possessed several of the pamphlets that claimed to include the board’s ‘last words and sayings’.4 At the same time, something that might seem exceptional to one person could be entirely unexceptional to another. Wood described some people, who would certainly have disagreed with him, as ‘drinking more than ordinary’, while his own ‘zealous concernment in studies’ attracted disparaging comment from his peers. And how ordinary or extraordinary were the actions of ‘factious people’ who, because of a ban on the usual bonfires during the festivities of 15 and 17 November 1682, ‘being hindered from burning the Pope, they drowned him’?5 Context was crucial to the nature of distinctions between the mundane and remarkable.

Angela McShane and Garthine Walker 3

Social and cultural historians have become alive to the necessity for the historian to tack constantly between their own personal perspective and the multiple viewpoints of early modern contemporaries. Bernard Capp, to whom this volume is dedicated, is one of the best of those historians. As Lecturer and Professor of History at the University of Warwick, Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and Fellow of the British Academy, Capp has, since the early 1970s, made ground-breaking contributions to early modern history. His books deal with the radicalism of the millenarian plebeian Fifth Monarchists; astrology and the popular press; the mental world of common seamen and their role in the English Revolution; the cultural milieu of seventeenth-century ‘media celebrity’, the water-poet John Taylor, and the ways in which ordinary women in early modern England negotiated patriarchal codes in the street and at home. He has also written essays and articles on subjects as diverse as youth groups, male sexual reputation, arson, and theatregoing. From the outset of his career as a young lecturer in the History Department (at the time when E.P. Thompson presided over Warwick’s Centre for Social History), he has pursued the histories of the marginal, both in their own terms and as a means to understand the majority. Subsequently, he has been at the forefront of the shift from narrower social historical to broader cultural historical approaches to early modern studies. He has made a major contribution to our understanding of the fluid and culturally constructed nature of the ‘norms’ which early modern people negotiated in living their lives, sometimes transforming them in the process. In this way, he has helped us to reassess our ways of thinking about the ordinary and extraordinary experience of past actors. The essays in this book reflect not only Bernard Capp’s wide interests, but the authors have also been influenced by his distinctive capacity for empathy and originality and his ability to hear the voices of seventeenthcentury people in the historical record. While the contributors might all be described as social, cultural or socio-cultural historians, their essays represent a variety of approaches, methods and theoretical and conceptual frameworks. Each chapter sets out to make more explicit the insights concerning the ordinary and extraordinary which run through recent social and cultural history, but as a whole the volume does not attempt to present either any unified early modern ‘worldview’, nor any simple dichotomy between ‘elite’ and ‘popular’. On the contrary, by juxtaposing cases that struck early modern people as irregular or strange with things that they found perfectly normal, and by examining the importance of context and contingency in relation to social and ‘anti-social’ behaviours, this collection offers an exploration of the shifting centre and the porosity at the peripheries of the ‘norm’ in early modern England. Moreover, each essay shows how such insights impact upon broader contemporary debates and historiographies

4 Introduction: The Extraordinary and the Everyday in Early Modern England

– about historical perceptions of crime and deviance, about the links between Lollardy and Protestantism, about the existence of cannibalism to name but a few. By examining the importance of context and contingency in what struck early modern people as irregular and what they found mundane and unexceptional, this collection also illuminates some surprising similarities with as well as differences between early modern subjectivities and our own. The essays are organised into two parts. Part I, ‘The Extraordinary in the Everyday’, focuses on everyday matters and practices – from friendship to farting, from teenage angst to the property of the dying, the use of insulting words to the operation of the law – all aspects that serve to reveal the extraordinary nature of everyday early modern life. Essays in Part II, ‘The Everyday in the Extraordinary’, deal with seemingly exceptional events and beliefs – such as eating and drinking one’s own flesh blood or ingesting the corpse of another, being fed by a group of fairies, and beliefs in miraculous wells – that nonetheless illuminate something about the routine and quotidian experience of ordinary people in particular times, places and circumstances. The intention of this volume is not to focus upon the ‘bizarre’ beliefs, behaviours and events that might seem astonishing to modern readers. Nor does it seek to reveal that seemingly irrational beliefs made sense to early modern people – though these are undoubtedly valuable approaches. Our aim is rather to illustrate how the extraordinary and the everyday each informed the other and thus to demonstrate that any characterisation of the normative, indeed the concept of ‘everyday life’ is itself essentially unstable. By showing how many things, from insults, farts and witches to flesh eating and fairy feasts, were at once extraordinary and ordinary, we argue that these categories should be the subject of constant renegotiation. The volume takes account of what early modern people themselves deemed usual and unusual, and shows how these categories were contested then, just as they are now.

Notes *The editors would like to thank Jasmine Kilburn-Toppin and Ian Todd for their invaluable practical help in preparing the manuscript. 1 The historiographical impact and development of the ‘new’ social history has been so widely discussed that there is no need to rehearse it here. Suffice it to say that one of the most influential and groundbreaking studies of the time was Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England (1971). 2 Compare, for instance, Barry Reay (ed.), Popular Culture in Seventeenth-Century England (1985) and Barry Reay, Popular Cultures in England 1550–1750 (1998). For a re-appraisal of cultural history generally, see the contributions to all three issues

Angela McShane and Garthine Walker 5 of Cultural and Social History 1 (2004). For historical approaches to early modern history in particular, see G. Walker (ed.), Writing Early Modern History (2005). 3 The Diary of Samuel Pepys, eds R. Latham and W. Matthews (10 vols, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1995), vol. IX, 197, 477 (12 May 1668; 9 March 1669). 4 The Life and Times of Anthony Wood, Antiquary, of Oxford, 1632–1695, Described by Himself. Vol. III: 1682–1695, ed. Andrew Clark (Oxford, 1894), 29 (12 November 1682); Notes and Queries 205 (1853), 309–10. 5 Life and Times of Anthony Wood, vol. II, 429 (December 1678); vol. III, 30 (17 November 1682), vol. I, 465–6, 485 (1662, 27 July 1663).

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Part I The Extraordinary in the Everyday

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1 Bodily Control and Social Unease: The Fart in Seventeenth-Century England* Keith Thomas

I think I hear the curious reader exclaim, ‘Heavens! that the brain of man should be set to work upon such cursed nonsense – such damn’d low stuff as Farting; he ought to be ashamed of straining his dull faculties to such a nasty, absurd subject. But to print his thoughts upon farts, and to dedicate his dirty lucubrations to the Lord Chancellor, is the height of all human impudence and folly’. Anon. [Charles James Fox?], An Essay upon Wind; with Curious Anecdotes of Eminent Peteurs, Humbly Dedicated to the Lord Chancellor [1787], ‘The Author’s Anticipation’ The history of our manners from the accession of the Stuarts is I fear only to be collected from scattered sources […] For morals, fashion and domestic habits […] there are I believe no better documents to be found than what can be picked out of the dunghill of our comic writers. Robert Southey to Mary Hays; The Love Letters of Mary Hays (1779–1780) (1925), 246. Nothing could be more ordinary than the downward expulsion, sometimes noisy, sometimes silent, and more often than not malodorous, of gas from the stomach and intestines. Like the other functions of the body, breaking wind is a feature of the human condition, so universal an experience that it might be thought to have no history, unless it is considered as an aspect of the physical evolution of homo sapiens; and even there the case is weak, for flatulence is not a condition which distinguishes human beings from animals. Yet even physical processes have an historical dimension. The incidence of flatulence in a population is affected by differences in diet and regimen and can presumably be studied by medical historians in the same way as they study the history of other physical conditions. More interesting to the social and cultural historian are the changing attitudes of people to their 9

10 Bodily Control and Social Unease: The Fart in Seventeenth-Century England

own bodily processes. For even the most superficial inquiry reveals considerable variation, both over time and between cultures and social groups; and, thanks to the writings of Norbert Elias and others following in his wake, modern historians need no reminder of the connections between bodily control and social order.1 Fifty years ago it would have been hard to find a respectable publisher for this article;2 and in the Victorian age almost impossible. In 1883 the author of a work on Humour, Wit, & Satire of the Seventeenth Century (1883) regretted that ‘many, nay most’ of the jokes of the period could not ‘be reproduced at the present day’. ‘I know of no publisher’, he added, ‘who would be bold enough to reproduce them in their entirety for the use of the general public. By this I do not wish to cast any slur, either on the modesty, or morality, of our ancestors; but their ways were not quite as ours.’3 The pioneering historian of civilisation, Henry Thomas Buckle, who died in 1862 at the age of forty-one, had begun to collect references to my subject; they were posthumously published as ‘Contributions to a history of the pet’, a title which would certainly have deceived the casual reader.4 Even today the topic still teeters on the edge of academic respectability, for modern scholars are much more comfortable with the sex life of the past than with its scatology.5 The very terminology of the subject is a delicate matter. The word ‘fart’ does not trip easily off academic lips. In 1755 Samuel Johnson had, perhaps rather surprisingly, included it in his Dictionary, defining it as ‘wind from behind’. But during the later eighteenth century the word gradually disappeared from the respectable printed page (though lurid representations of the act itself enjoyed an extraordinary Indian summer in the satirical cartoons of Gillray, Cruickshank and Richard Newton).6 In the 1890s the compilers of the Oxford English Dictionary could state firmly that the word was ‘not in decent use’; and their ruling was repeated in the second edition (1989). Today the Concise Oxford (11th edition revised, 2006) is slightly more relaxed, downgrading the prohibition to ‘informal’ (meaning that the word is ‘normally used only in spoken contexts or informal written contexts’). But it gives no ‘formal’ alternative, which makes the topic almost uniquely difficult to discuss, by contrast with other scatological or sexual topics, for which a generally accepted polite vocabulary is in existence. ‘Crepitation’ and ‘to crepitate’ are rightly described by the OED as ‘rare’. In the early modern period, the learned explained that, when wind was broken silently, the phenomenon was termed peditus, or, when accompanied by a noise, ventris crepitus.7 But these expressions never entered common usage. Lacking any inoffensive synonym, generations of writers were reduced to euphemistic circumlocution, as in the Travels of Carsten Niebuhr (translated 1792), where it is reported that ‘the Arabians are greatly shocked when that accident happens to a man which is the natural consequence of the fulness of the intestines after too copious a meal and of the indigestion of too windy articles of diet’.8

Keith Thomas 11

In the seventeenth century, by contrast, the word ‘fart’, though indisputably vulgar, was used with much less inhibition and is ubiquitous in the literature of the time. So were a host of equivalents ranging from the relatively polite ‘escape’ to the distinctly unacceptable ‘crack’ and ‘fizzle’. We do not have to go as far as two recent commentators, who claim that ‘the early moderns arguably […] farted differently [from us]’,9 to recognise that this is an aspect of the past crying out for further investigation. A study of attitudes towards the breaking of wind may seem a curious tribute to Bernard Capp and his scholarly achievements, but it is hoped that he will recognise it as a well-intentioned attempt to illuminate some of the values, sensibilities and implicit tensions of the period of which he is an acknowledged master. The subject has already been explored by students of classical antiquity, medieval Europe and Hanoverian England,10 and there is no reason why historians of the seventeenth century should lag behind. Naturalia non sunt turpia [Natural things are not shameful] must be our motto. Flatulence or, in the medical language of the time, flatus or ‘ventosity’, was one of the most common ailments of the early modern period. The windy distension of the stomach was thought to send fumes through the body, entering the bloodstream, percolating the vital organs, inflaming the extremities and ascending to the brain. Failure to expel wind, it was said, resulted in headaches, bad breath, toothache, earache, colic, gout, constipation, pleurisy, hernia, hepatitis, stoppage of urine, nose bleeds, nightmares and a host of other illnesses.11 These were the ‘vapours’ from which generations of women were believed to suffer. The same effects were to be seen in the macrocosm, for wind in the bowels of the earth caused noxious vapours and earthquakes, while ‘flatuosity’ in the clouds produced thunderclaps. As Shakespeare’s Hotspur remarks: the teeming earth Is with a kind of colic pinched and vexed By the imprisoning of unruly wind Within her womb.12 The medical authorities of the time all regarded flatulence as a potentially dangerous symptom, following ‘Hippocrates’, who had said that almost every malady was caused by wind.13 Many well-known contemporaries were chronic sufferers. Robert Cecil was treated for flatulence by Theodore de Mayerne in 1611.14 Richard Baxter had ‘a flatulent stomach, that turn’d all things into wind’; it ‘pumped up the blood’ and caused haemorrhages in the nose. For over forty years he endured ‘incredible inflammations of stomach, bowels, back, sides, head, thighs, as if I had been daily fill’d with wind’. He took the advice of more than thirty physicians, all of whom identified it as ‘hypochondriacal flatulency’.15

12 Bodily Control and Social Unease: The Fart in Seventeenth-Century England

Samuel Pepys suffered from what he called ‘wind colic’. In October 1663, he endured great pain, obtaining no relief until he began ‘to break six or seven great and small farts’. A few days later he was unable to fart and in pain once more. In June 1664 he suffered ‘pain by wind; and a sure precursor of pain, I find, is sudden letting off of some farts; and when that stops, then my passages stop and my pain begins’.16 Similarly, the biographer and virtuoso, Roger North, became seriously ill in 1676 with an acute fever and intense pain in his stomach, accompanied by ‘a disposition perpetually to eruct’. ‘This I strove so much in when I was alone, thinking if I could raise the wind (as it seemed to be) I should be well. And by a perpetual straining to eruct, I have fixt on my self an eructation, which is but a convulsion of the esofagus, which I shall never quite wear off […] It is with many as I found it to be with me, that a disorder or convulsive motion of the fibres of the stomach or the mouth of it is believed to be wind […] whereas it is not so but plain convulsion.’17 The best way of avoiding flatulence was believed to be regular exercise and a healthy diet. The numerous works of medical advice published in the early modern period all laid heavy emphasis upon the digestive system.18 They advised their readers to avoid gluttony and drunkenness and to eat and drink moderately and slowly. They quoted Ecclesiasticus, 31:19: ‘a very little is sufficient for a man well nurtured, and he fetcheth not his wind short upon his bed’; or, as the Geneva Bible had it, ‘thereby he belcheth not in his chamber’ (a belch was ‘a ventosity coming out of the mouth with a disagreeable noise’).19 The glutton, by contrast, was only too liable to ‘break unsavoury and loathsome wind, both upwards and downwards, and make an abominable smell and noise therewith’.20 Food should be well chewed, ‘and not hastily gobbled, for that causeth crudity and wind’. (‘Crudities’ were imperfectly digested pieces of food which caused obstructions and disease.)21 Anything that made the belly swell was to be avoided.22 Unfortunately, this implied a very restricted diet indeed, and by modern standards an unhealthy one, since it meant excluding not just such obvious dangers as tobacco, bottled ale and newly-baked bread,23 but virtually all fruit, vegetables and high-fibre foods. These were foods which the heavily meat-eating upper classes tended to despise anyway. Their prejudices were reinforced by the knowledge, deriving from Galen, that fruit generated ‘ventosities’, colic and ‘flatuous windy humours’; and that radishes resulted in ‘rank belchings’.24 In his Diets Dry Dinner (1599) Henry Buttes listed figs, grapes, mulberries, peaches, pomegranates, hazel nuts, melons, chestnuts, gourds, rice, spinach, hops, carrots (‘red parsnips’), and eels, as likely to breed wind and flatulence. Other notorious fart-producers were buttered peas and frumenty (hulled wheat boiled in milk and seasoned with cinnamon and sugar).25 Worst of all were beans, against which Pythagoras had long ago issued a famous warning. Some commentators

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expounded his words ‘mystically’, but others assumed that his ban was a protection against flatulence: ’Tis this the Sage of Samos means Forbidding his disciples beans.26 Flatulence could be relieved by carminatives: coriander, dill, fennel, rue, caraway seeds, ginger, all of which possessed ‘the virtue expulsive’ and could bring immediate relief.27 As when the colic in the guts doth strain, With civil conflicts in the same embrac’t, But let a fart, and then the worst is past.28 However, the expulsion of wind in the company of others was regarded as an anti-social act. A Jacobean author observed that the human guts were ‘disposed in many labyrinthine gyres and winding revolutions, as to free the superior parts from offensive vapours’.29 This was not entirely true, of course, for eructations from the mouth could be the source of unpleasant odours. But it was from the lower parts that the worst smells were liable to emanate. Regardless of whether the expulsion of wind was noisy or silent, it gave off a pervasive odour which all but the person who emitted it found very disagreeable. (It was proverbial that everyone thought his own fart sweet.)30 Noxious smells and sour flatulencies redolent of rotten eggs were distinctly unpleasant; they were also thought to be dangerous to those who inhaled them.31 Flatulence was also ill-regarded because it was associated with lechery and coarse assertions of masculinity. The male erection was believed to be caused not by blood but by wind. ‘Our masters teach us that all leguminaes or pulse, as also bulbous roots, do by their flatulency blow up this spark of Venus’.32 In his advice on keeping down lust, the pious Richard Baxter advised his readers to ‘eat no hot spices or strong or heating or windy meats’.33 Jonathan Swift wrote of the lecherous Lord Berkeley that ‘love makes him stink’. My Lord, on fire amidst the dames, F–-s like a laurel in the flames.34 There were, therefore, good reasons for not breaking wind when in the company of others. Indeed a taboo on doing so has been a feature of many of the world’s civilisations. Seventeenth-century travellers reported that the natives of Guinea would rather die than fart publicly and were shocked by visiting Dutchmen, who did not possess the same sense of shame.35 The Irish were also said to be peculiarly sensitive on the subject. ‘Di horse farted in my

14 Bodily Control and Social Unease: The Fart in Seventeenth-Century England

face, and dow knowest an Irishman cannot abide a fart’, says the footman in one of Thomas Dekker’s Jacobean plays.36 This aversion is exploited by John Webster’s poisoner in The White Devil (c.1612), who ‘was once minded for his masterpiece, because Ireland breeds no poison, to have prepared a deadly vapour in a Spaniard’s fart, that should have poisoned all Dublin’.37 The courtesy literature of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century England, directed mostly at children or young people, was notoriously preoccupied with the control of bodily functions. Although Norbert Elias regarded this as indicative of a new level of inhibition, it seems clear that conceptions of bodily propriety in the medieval world had not been very different. In this respect, the prescriptions of Erasmus in his De Civilitate Morum Puerilium (1530) were very similar to those which had been issued centuries earlier, in ninth-century monasteries or in the noble households of Angevin England.38 In the twelfth and sixteenth centuries alike, farting in polite company was, like belching, urinating and indiscriminate spitting, explicitly prohibited: ‘Be not loud where you be, nor at/the table where you sit;’ ‘Beware also/no breath from you rebound/up nor down/lest you were shameful found;’ ‘Always beware of thy hinder part from guns blasting’. If the urge was irresistible, one should quietly withdraw: ‘Be privy of voidance, and let it go’.39 The point was heavily emphasised in that curious genre of satirical literature which taught manners to its readers by elaborating upon the habits of uncivil boors who only knew how not to behave. A passage in The Schoole of Slovenrie (1605), an English version of the German Friedrich Dedekind’s Grobianus, runs: When you at dinner mongst a sort of honest men do sit, Or wives and maids, the last whereof is for your purpose fit, If you have need, from forth your griping belly let you wind, The scent whereof the guests will quickly in their nostrils find, And lest the strangers should perceive that you have done amiss, Be sure to cry before the rest, ‘Why what a stink is this?’ Affirm that in the tender virgins all the fault doth lie And straight a red and blushing colour will their faces dye. […] Or if a little dog be nigh, be sure the same to kick, As if that his perfumed tail had caused this beastly trick. By this means your decreasing credit you may finely save, And others shall have that reward which you deserve to have. That noisome smell without offence the guests must undergo, Because none but you do certainly the father know.40 As with other forms of bodily control, the prohibition was not an absolute rule, but depended on the context. The emphasis initially was on

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the need not to offend social superiors. By implication, farting in the presence of servants or inferiors was more permissible.41 Only later would it come to be thought that the same respect should be shown to everyone. The upper classes liked to think that their bodily control was superior to that of their social inferiors. A dignified style indicated their place in the hierarchy. In ancient Greek comedy crepitation was a sign of rusticity and vulgarity,42 while in late fourteenth-century England it was an index of his superior refinement that Chaucer’s elegant parish clerk, Absolon, was ‘somedeel squaymous of farting’.43 As late as the 1840s an American author reported that ‘the labouring classes’ ignorantly regarded flatulence as a good sign and supposed ‘that the power to eject gas with violence [was] one of the most certain indications of high health’; ‘the discharge of wind’ was ‘as music to their ears’.44 In seventeenth-century England, it was the labourers, the rustics and the uneducated whose bodies were portrayed as dirty, leaky and undeodorized.45 Because of their poverty, it was they who were most likely to subsist on a flatulent-making diet of beans and coarse vegetables; and the medical writers thought that such food was more appropriate for labouring people, who would be better able to digest it.46 Yet even at the lowest social level, farting in public had long been regarded as a disagreeable, even insulting, act, indicating lack of respect for the company in which the farter found himself. Since classical times, the inadvertent breaking of wind could cause serious offence, while deliberately doing so was a recognised means of expressing contempt. ‘[Do] thy worst. I fart at thee’, says Ben Jonson’s alchemist.47 Since this was a gesture of which even King James I was capable,48 we should not be surprised that the records of the Elizabethan and early Stuart ecclesiastical courts abound in cases like that of Henry Cotton of Moze, Essex, of whom it was said in 1592 that, when presented by the churchwardens for not coming to church, ‘he coming by them very unreverently and contemptuously farted unto them and said, “Present that to the court.”’49 At other times delinquents were variously charged with offending the congregation with ‘a wicked fart’, with ‘a very loud and beastly fart’, and with ‘most loathsome farting’.50 The old woman, Alice Gooderidge of Stapenhill, Burton on Trent, was believed to have bewitched the boy Thomas Darling in 1596, because as he passed her, he inadvertently ‘let a ’scape’, whereupon in great anger she had exclaimed, ‘Gyp with a mischief and fart with a bell: I will go to heaven, and thou shalt go to hell.’51 To break wind could thus be a form of utterance, a speech act. Indeed ‘speak arse’ was a vulgar term of abuse.52 Hence the story of the Flemings having supper in a French inn, when the servant attending them let ‘a grievous and horrid fart’. When the landlady reproached her, she explained: ‘Sont Flamans, Madame, sont Flamans; ils n’entendent pas’.53 [‘They are Flemish, Madame, Flemish; they don’t understand’]

16 Bodily Control and Social Unease: The Fart in Seventeenth-Century England

Farting in company was seen as at best embarrassing and at worst positively uncivil. Yet releasing wind was not just a means of achieving greater comfort. It was a medical necessity, for everyone agreed that it was positively dangerous to attempt to withhold the gas, thereby driving it back into the body. The Hippocratic school ruled that although the silent passage of wind was a healthier prognostic, it was better that it should be expelled with a loud explosion than allowed to accumulate.54 The Regimen Sanitatis Salernitanum, a work of medical advice, which had been in wide circulation since the thirteenth century, was emphatic that it was dangerous to hold back wind when nature intended it to be expelled. The same view was taken by all the Tudor and Stuart guides to healthy living. It was essential to rid the body of unwanted superfluities. Those who ‘from modesty […] will rather die than fart’ were doing themselves serious harm.55 In the early eighteenth century a satirist asserted that the new female fashion for drinking tea and coffee meant that ‘in supping up these liquors hot, there is commonly as much wind as water sucked in, which, through modesty, being debarr’d a passage downwardly when nature offers, recoils up into the bowels, stomach and head, and then occasions all those dreadful symptoms usually ascribed to the vapours; all [of] which one seasonable fart might have prevented’. As the same author expressed it in the epigraph to his book: A fart, though wholesome does not fail, If barr’d of passage by the tail, To fly back to the head again, And by its fumes disturb the brain. Thus gunpowder confin’d, you know, sir, Grows stronger, as ’tis ramm’d the closer; But if in open air it fires, In harmless smoke its force expires.56 This medical commonplace inspired a good deal of facetious comment. In the early sixteenth century Sir Thomas More produced a Latin version of a Greek epigram which celebrated the power of the fart: kept in for too long, it could kill; released in time, it might save lives.57 Much-cited was the brutal mock-epitaph, ‘On Dumbelow who died of the wind colic’, sometimes attributed to Ben Jonson: Here lies John Dumbelow Who died because he was so; For if his breech could have spoke His heart had not broke.58 This verse was sometimes printed next to lines ‘On a Gentlewoman who happened to let an escape in the presence of a wag, supposing she did

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herself an injury to restrain’.59 A popular joke told of the rich man with colic who was unable to gain relief by breaking wind until his fool made him laugh. He gratefully told the jester that his fart was worth a thousand gold coins, whereupon the fool responded by emitting a horrific explosion, and then demanding to know how much that was worth, since it was so much louder than his master’s.60 There was thus a stark conflict between physical necessity and social propriety. The dilemma was stated in the 1630s by Sir John Suckling in a poem comparing love to flatulence: It pains a man when ’tis kept close, And others doth offend, when ’tis let loose.61 The early modern period betrays a continuous preoccupation with ‘the art of farting decently in public’, to quote the title of one of the works in Rabelais’s imaginary library of St Victor.62 Some wistfully recalled that the Roman Emperor Claudius had planned an edict, ‘wherein he would give folk leave to break wind downward and let it go even with a crack at the very board [i.e. dining-table]; having certain intelligence that there was one who for manners and modesty’s sake, by holding it in, endangered his own life.’63 In the eighteenth century, Benjamin Franklin observed that, by holding themselves in on social occasions in order to avoid giving offence, ‘well-bred people’ were heading for ‘future diseases […] often destructive of the constitution and sometimes of life itself’. In a satirical letter to the Royal Academy of Belgium, he proposed that chemists should be invited to devise a substance which could be mixed with food, so as to ‘render the natural discharges of wind from our bodies not only inoffensive but agreeable as perfumes’.64 In the absence of this utopian remedy, the books on manners advised those who could not restrain themselves to create some diversion which would enable the act to pass unnoticed. For all his concern with decent behaviour, Erasmus was emphatic that it was misguided to attempt to hold off the inevitable. ‘To suppress a sound which is brought on by nature is characteristic of silly people who set more store by “good manners” than good health […]There are some who lay down the rule that a boy should refrain from breaking wind by constricting his buttocks. But it is no part of good manners to bring illness upon yourself while striving to appear “polite”. If you may withdraw, do so in private. But if not, then in the words of the old adage, let him cover the sound with a cough.’65 Richard Weste in his The Schoole of Vertue […]Fit for all Children (1619) said the same: Retain not urine nor the wind Which doth thy body vex,

18 Bodily Control and Social Unease: The Fart in Seventeenth-Century England

So it be done with secrecy, Let that not thee perplex.66 Unfortunately, as Erasmus had pointed out, those who attempted to conceal their delinquency with a resounding cough were often detected and suffered ridicule as a result.67 The same was true of those who loudly moved their chair or blamed creaking doors and squeaking shoes. These varied tactics and subterfuges provide the satirical wits of the age with a rich mine of comic material. An eminent classical scholar has remarked that ‘the noisy expulsion of gas from the bowels has as good a claim as anything in our experience to be absolutely and unconditionally funny’. He sees it as a sort of delayed retaliation for the inhibitions forced upon small children by restraining adults.68 It is true that there is much scatological material in the early modern facetiae, drolleries and jest books which is hard to explain in any other way. The discomfiture arising from the loss of bodily control had been seen as funny since time immemorial, for it made public what should have been kept private and revealed an inability to curb the animal parts of one’s nature: it was no accident that farts were so frequently described as ‘beastly’. Involuntary or malevolent defecation was a common theme in early sixteenth-century humour, while jokes about flatulence and bad breath had been in circulation since classical times.69 By the early seventeenth century literary taste was changing and the excremental humour of the early Tudor interludes had largely vanished from the theatre.70 Yet the daily conversation of many people was heavily larded with scatological metaphors. Dawn was ‘sparrow-fart’ and a footman who walked close behind his master or mistress was vulgarly known as a ‘fart-catcher’.71 Innumerable men and women aroused the indignation of their betters by defiantly declaring that they ‘cared not a fart’ for the King or the Parliament or ‘all the lords in England (the Lord of Hosts excepted)’ or the Royal College of Physicians or the justices of the peace or the minister or the churchwardens or other figures of authority.72 ‘I care not a fart for him’, wrote the Earl of Pembroke’s steward in 1615 about a difficult tenant.73 In the same spirit a Somersetshire puritan said in 1632 that hearing an organ in a church ‘delighteth him as much [as] to hear his horse fart’.74 This was marginally less offensive than caring ‘not a turd’ or riposting with ‘a turd in your teeth’, or, more emphatically, ‘ten tough turds do I toss in your teeth’.75 Language like that was unacceptable to the educated elite when used against them by their social inferiors, but they were remarkably tolerant of jokes about flatulence among themselves. The historian William Camden recorded in 1610 the case of the Suffolk smallholder whose tenancy by serjeanty, allegedly devised in the reign of Henry II, required him to entertain the king annually on Christmas day with a saltus, a sufflatus, and a bumbu-

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lus: ‘that is, if I understand these terms aright, that he should dance, puff up his cheeks making therewith a sound, and besides let a crack downward’; he concluded benignly that ‘such was the plain and jolly mirth of those times’. When dealing with similar tenures in 1679, the legal antiquarian Thomas Blount described them as occasioning ‘inoffensive mirth’.76 The sea captain Edward Fenton told a fart joke on a voyage in 1582, while the Elizabethan wit Charles Chester remarked of Sir John Harington that he looked like ‘a sturdy ostler that could gird a mare till she fart again’.77 According to the Leveller William Walwyn, the godly ‘saints’ of William Kiffin’s Baptist congregation in the late 1640s, when the doors were shut and they were sure of their company, would ‘burst themselves with laughter’ at scatological jokes.78 The learned wits of seventeenth-century England had not yet renounced that Rabelaisian mixture of erudition and scurrility which had been so characteristic of earlier humanist writing. They did not emulate their German contemporaries in composing mock-academic Latin discourses on the taxonomy of flatulence.79 But they regarded the fart as an appropriate subject for puns, riddles and epigrams. From Ben Jonson to Jonathan Swift, highly educated poets turned out scatological verse; while the joke books and drolleries abounded in guns, trumpets, cracks, blasts, thunderbolts and ill winds blowing no good. Scatological humour was not the prerogative of the lower classes; on the contrary, most of it originated in sophisticated milieux. The jokes themselves were endlessly recycled; many originated before 1600, but were adapted and retold to fit new circumstances. This crepitational abundance reflected a number of different preoccupations, some frivolous, some rhetorical, some moral and political.80 Here it is possible to draw attention to only one particular theme, which is of especial interest to the historian because of the light it throws on the social anxieties of the time. This was the joke occasioned by the breaking of wind at unexpected moments or in inappropriate circumstances. It was not really a joke about farts as such; it was about social embarrassment. It ridiculed people whose bodies let them down at ludicrously unsuitable moments: at the royal court perhaps, or in church or when dancing or on a wedding night. Nowadays the best-known example of this topos is the apocryphal story, transmitted by John Aubrey, of the Earl of Oxford’s misadventure when bowing low to Elizabeth I, and of her witty retort seven years later.81 At the time a better-known instance was ‘The Great Parliament Fart’, an elaborate set of verses which, in many variant versions, circulated in manuscript and print throughout the seventeenth century and beyond. Written by a sophisticated group of lawyers, it was inspired by an incident in the House of Commons in 1607, when, according to a contemporary diarist, Henry Ludlow MP ‘sonitum ventre emisit’ at a moment of high political tension when an important message from the House of Lords was being delivered, ‘whereat the company laughing,

20 Bodily Control and Social Unease: The Fart in Seventeenth-Century England

the messenger was almost out of countenance’. The result, in the words of the poem, was that Never was bestowed such art Upon the turning of a fart.82 The unintentional fart could sometimes be the work of a practical joker. The medieval Mery Jest of the Frier and the Boy was often reprinted in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries; it told of a magic charm with which a boy was able to make his wicked stepmother fart loudly when she was angry.83 Samuel Pepys owned a book of conjuring tricks which included a formula ‘to make sport with a maid-servant’ by causing her to fart uncontrollably.84 (It was, of course, much more shameful for a woman to be heard farting than for a man, and therefore funnier.) Particularly popular were stories about the discomfiture of women who aspired to higher standards of behaviour than they could manage. The Jacobean actor Robert Armin retailed the story of ‘one proper gentlewoman […] because she would not seem too modest with laughing […], so she straining herself, though inwardly she laughed heartily, gave out such an earnest of her modesty, that all the table rang of it. “Who is that?” says one. “Not I,” says another, “but by her cheeks you might find her guilty Gilbert, where he had hid the brush.” This jest made them laugh more, and the rather that she stood upon her marriage, and disdained all the gallants there who so heartily laughed.’85 Similar in style was an epigram by Sir John Davies: Leuca in presence once a fart did let, Some laughed a little, she forsook the place; And mazed with shame, did eke her glove forget, Which she returned to fetch with bashful grace: And when she would have said, this is my glove, My fart (quoth she), which did more laughter move.86 Such jokes were concerned to show how paper-thin the veneer of refinement could be. There was the countrywoman who sent her clownish daughter to deliver some ripe medlars to a lady. The daughter warned the recipient that they were so soft that if she didn’t eat them quickly, they would ‘not be worth one fart’. When the lady complained to the countrywoman about her daughter’s uncivil language, the mother apologised abjectly, explaining that ‘Let me do what I will, I cannot mend her; and notwithstanding all the civility that ever I taught her, she hath no more manners than my arse’.87 Breaking wind at the wrong moment became funnier when the culprit found an ingenious way of extricating himself from a potentially embarrassing situation or succeeded in turning it to someone else’s disadvantage.

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For example, he might deny the offence by claiming that the sound was that of a rusty hinge; or he might blame the dog.88 In The Two Gentlemen of Verona Shakespeare wittily inverts this usual subterfuge by making the clown Launce take on himself the responsibility for the stink emitted by his dog Crab under the Duke of Milan’s dining-table: ‘All the chamber smelt him. “Out with the dog!” says one. “What cur is that?” says another. “Whip him out,” says the third. “Hang him up,” says the Duke. I, having been acquainted with the smell before, knew it was Crab, and goes me to the fellow that whips the dogs. “Friend,” quoth I, “you mean to whip the dog!” “Ay, marry, I do,” quoth he. “You do him the more wrong,” quoth I. “’Twas I did the thing you wot of.” He makes me no more ado, but whips me out of the chamber. How many masters would do this for his servant?’89 Alternatively, the guilty party might save the situation by a witty retort. When Henry VIII’s standard-bearer ‘gave out a rap’ immediately after the king had blown his hunting horn, he quickly explained to the outraged monarch that ‘Your Majesty blew one blast for the keeper and I another for his man’, at which the King ‘laughed heartily’.90 When the Duke of Ormonde first came to court as a young man, he stood next to Lady Dorchester, who let out a fart, at which he laughed aloud. ‘What’s the matter, my lord?’ said she. ‘Oh, I heard it, Madam’, replied the Duke. ‘You’ll never make a fine courtier’, said she, ‘if you mind everything you hear in this place’.91 In Elizabethan times, a stock response to the question, ‘How dare you fart before me?’ was (put in modern language) ‘If I’d known you wanted to go first, I’d have waited’.92 More mischievously, the offender might extricate himself by cunningly transferring the blame to someone else. In the often reprinted Merrie Conceited Jests of George Peele, the comic hero revenges himself when placed at dinner next to an elderly gentlewoman who had previously insulted him: ‘As she put out her arm to take the capon, George, sitting by her, yerks me out a huge fart, which made all the company in amaze, one looking upon the other; yet they knew it came that way. “Peace,” quoth George, and jogs her on the elbow, “I will say it was I.” At which all the company fell into a huge laughter, she into a fretting fury’.93 Less successful was the lady who attempted to blame her maid, who, much to the company’s amusement, indignantly repudiated the accusation. After being rebuked in private for her insubordination, the maid dutifully returned to the room, where ‘making a great reverence, she said aloud, “Gentlemen and Ladies, I declare freely that the fart which was let here just now, I take upon myself”; which caused the company to redouble their laughter’.94 By the later seventeenth century, there were signs of growing inhibition. Although some courtesy books continued to rule that it was wrong to break wind in company,95 others avoided saying so explicitly: in 1673 Obadiah Walker advised young men to ‘spit, sneeze, cough, &c’, away from the company ‘for decency’s sake’. That ‘&c’ reveals how the fart had begun its

22 Bodily Control and Social Unease: The Fart in Seventeenth-Century England

journey from the realm of the comic and embarrassing to the new category of the sordid and unmentionable.96 In the eighteenth century, guides to manners usually assume that the prohibition on farting in public is too self-evident to need articulating.97 Meanwhile, in polite literature the growing influence of neo-classical ideas of decorum had the effect of discouraging any form of ‘low’ subjectmatter. The shift from the scatological, underway since the later sixteenth century, gathered momentum. In 1658 a jest book purported to offer only ‘clean and innocent mirth’; and in 1676 a writer remarked of the fart jokes with which Will Summers had regaled King Henry VIII that ‘these homely jests might pass in those days, though the refinedness of these our times will neither admit such coarseness of language nor such boldness with princes’.98 As a dramatist wrote in 1697: Once only smutty jests would please the town, But now (heav’n help our trade) they’ll not go down.99 Confronted in the 1720s by the Derbyshire landmark long known as the Devil’s Arse, Daniel Defoe commented that ‘it seems they talked broader in those days than we do now’.100 As proof he could have cited the verses included by Ben Jonson in a masque performed before King James I in 1621. They explained what happened when the Devil came to dine at the Peak in Derbyshire: Then from the table he gave a start, Where banquet and wine were nothing scarce, All which he flirted away with a fart, From whence it was called the Devil’s Arse. And there he made such a breech with the wind, The hole too standing open the while, That the scent of the vapour before and behind Hath foully perfumed most of the isle.101 Today fart jokes are generally regarded as ‘infantile’ and ‘childish’. They are popular with children, to whom conventional standards of bodily propriety are restrictions which have to be painfully learned and are not yet habitual and unthinking. They have to be taught not to laugh at a fart (a prohibition which does not seem to appear in any of the early modern books on manners). It is tempting to regard the scatological humour of the seventeenth century in a similar light, and to see it as the natural release sought by people for whom intensifying standards of bodily restraint were relatively new and unaccustomed. Yet when the guides to conduct ceased to find it necessary to spell out the need for bodily control, the fart jokes did not immediately disappear.

Keith Thomas 23

There were none in Robert Baker’s Witticisms and Strokes of Humour (c.1766), which printed seven of its more risqué anecdotes on a separate leaf, ‘that those who dislike them, may cut them out without maiming the book’; and The Delicate Jester (c.1780) offered ‘wit and humour divested of ribaldry’. But flatulence and incontinence continued to feature in many other eighteenth-century jest books; and the satirical prints of the Hanoverian age provided an orgy of thundering farts, naked buttocks and defecating politicians.102 By showing that the great figures of the day were men like other men, their bodies performing the same natural functions and requiring the same loathsome purges and clysters, the cartoonists deflated the classical posturings of the eighteenth-century elite. Even a genteel female poet like Mary Jones (1707–1778) felt able to address the theme in some lines which describe Lieutenant-General Jasper Clayton (subsequently killed at the battle of Dettingen in 1743) battling with intestinal wind: He wisely thinks the more ’tis pent, The more ’twill struggle for a vent: So only begs you’ll hold your nose, And gently lifting up his clothes, Away th’imprisoned vapour flies, And mounts a zephyr to the skies.103 Only in the early nineteenth century were the jest books really cleaned up.104 The turning point was the reissue in 1836 of Joe Miller’s Jests, which incorporated ‘such omissions and alterations […] as were required by the greater delicacy observed in modern society and conversation’. The 247 jokes in the originals were reduced to 198 and not a single fart remained. Until that time, flatulence had been a staple of everyday humour. It symbolised the supposed bodily grossness of the lower classes and it exposed the hypocrisy of their superiors, who were equally at the mercy of their bodies, despite pretending not to be. The mixture of ribaldry and prudery with which contemporaries treated the subject offers a revealing glimpse into the everyday assumptions of a vanished age.

Notes *For generous assistance of various kinds I am grateful to Dr J.N. Adams, Dr Emily Gowers, Professor Ralph Houlbrooke, Professor Ian Maclean and Professor David Parkin. 1

2

N. Elias, The Civilising Process: The History of Manners (trans. E. Jephcott: Oxford, 1978) and idem, The Civilising Process: State Formation and Civilisation (trans. E. Jephcott: Oxford, 1982). A.L. Rowse describes the difficulties encountered in the late 1940s by B.H. Sumner, the Warden of All Souls, when writing on Peter the Great for

24 Bodily Control and Social Unease: The Fart in Seventeenth-Century England

3

4

5 6 7

8 9 10

11

12

13

14

Rowse’s ‘Teach Yourself History’ series: ‘An absurd query about a word showed him in a characteristic light. The Russian Bear’s habits were notoriously uncouth: could Humphrey dare to say that in public he farted? There was a to-do about this: Humphrey faltered and paltered. Of course he could use Strachey’s meiosis and say, as he had of some Elizabethan before the Queen, bending low “he gave vent to an unfortunate sound”. Humphrey summoned up all his courage, poor fellow, and settled it bravely that Peter the Great farted’. A.L. Rowse, All Souls in My Time (1993), 149–50. J. Ashton, Humour, Wit, and Satire of the Seventeenth Century (1883), vii; The Rev. A.G. L’Estrange encountered similar difficulties in his History of English Humour (1878). Miscellaneous and Posthumous Works of Henry Thomas Buckle, ed. H. Taylor (1872), vol. II, 472. Other early contributions include the bibliography in ‘Luc’ [P. Jannet et al.], Bibliotheca Scatologica (‘Scatopolis’ [Paris], ‘5080’ [1849]), 31–53, and Captain J.G. Bourke, Scatologic Rites of All Nations (Washington, DC, 1891), the title-page labelled, ‘not for general perusal’. As is remarked by K. Duncan-Jones, ‘City limits: Nashe’s “Choice of Valentines” and Jonson’s “Famous Voyage”’, Review of English Studies, new ser., 56 (2005). Admirably described and analysed by V. Gatrell, City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth-Century London (2006). Joannes Fienus [Jean Feyens, d. 1585], De Flatibus Humanum Corpus Molestantibus, Commentarius Novus (Amsterdam, 1643), 32. This passage was omitted from the English translation by William Rowland, A New and Needful Treatise of Spirits and Winds Offending Mans Body (1668; reissued 1678). The Journal of the Rev. William Bagshaw Stevens, ed. G. Galbraith (Oxford, 1965), 84. Fecal Matters in Early Modern Literature and Art: Studies in Scatology, eds J. Persels and R. Ganim (Aldershot, 2004), xvii. The most substantial study to date is V. Allen’s learned, if somewhat skittish, On Farting: Language and Laughter in the Middle Ages (New York and Basingstoke, 2007). Other informative works include J. Henderson, The Maculate Muse: Obscene Language in Attic Comedy (2nd edn, New York, 1991); B.C. Bowen, ‘The “honorable art of farting” in continental Renaissance literature’, in Fecal Matters, eds Persels and Ganim; Gatrell, City of Laughter, ch. 6. At a less academic level, ‘Dr Benjamin Bart’, The History of Farting (1995) interweaves fart jokes with a good deal of miscellaneous lore; J. Dawson, Who Cut the Cheese? A Cultural History of the Fart (Berkeley, CA, 1999) is an informative compilation, facetiously presented; his sequel, Blame it on the Dog: A Modern History of the Fart (Berkeley, CA, 2006), is ribald and anecdotal, mostly relating to the twentieth century. Feyens, Treatise of Spirits and Winds, esp. ch. 7; Theophilus Kentman, De Exhalationibus Fumosis et Vaporosis, Flatuosisque Spiritibus in Macrocosmo et Microcosmo Existentibus (Halle, 1591), 29–30. Pliny, The Historie of the World (trans. Philemon Holland, 1601), vol. I, 20–1; King Henry IV (1598), Act III. Sc.i; A. Corbin, Le miasme et la jonquille: l’odorat et l’imaginaire social XVIIIe–XIX siècles (Paris, 1986), 23. Hippocrates (trans. W.H.S. Jones: 1923), vol. II, 228–33. As late as the 1840s, the American Library of Health informed its readers that ‘every degree of flatulence is disease’; J.C. Whorton, Inner Hygiene: Constipation and the Pursuit of Health in Modern Society (New York, 2000), 12. H. Trevor-Roper, Europe’s Physician: The Various Life of Sir Theodore de Mayerne (2006), 168.

Keith Thomas 25 15 16 17 18

19 20 21

22 23

24

25

26

27

28 29 30 31

Reliquiae Baxterianae, ed. Matthew Sylvester (1696), pt. i, 9–10; pt. ii, 173–4. The Diary of Samuel Pepys, eds R. Latham and W. Matthews (1970–83), vol. II, 97; vol. IV, 327, 329–30; vol. V, 183; vol. X, 173–4. Notes of Me: The Autobiography of Roger North, ed. Peter Millard (Toronto, 2000), 202. For helpful accounts of these writings, see Paul Slack, ‘Mirrors of health and treasures of poor men: the uses of the vernacular medical literature of Tudor England’, in Health, Medicine and Mortality in the Sixteenth Century, ed. C. Webster (Cambridge, 1979); and A. Wear, Knowledge and Practice in English Medicine, 1550–1680 (Cambridge, 2000), ch. 4. [Noel Chomel], Dictionnaire Oeconomique: or, the Family Dictionary (trans. R. Bradley: 1725), s.v., ‘belching’. George Gascoigne, The Glasse of Government […] and Other Poems and Prose Works, ed. J.W. Cunliffe (Cambridge, 1910), 245–6. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, text ed. N.K. Kiessling et al., commentary by J.B. Bamborough and M. Dodsworth (Oxford, 1989–2000), vol. II, 24; James Hart, The Diet of the Diseased (1633), 36. For citations of Ecclesiasticus, see Wear, Knowledge and Practice in English Medicine, 182–3. Christofer Langton, An Introduction into Phisycke ([1550?]), fo. lxxi; [Thomas Tryon], The Way to Health, Long Life and Happiness (1683), ch. 13. William Vaughan, Directions for Health (7th edn, 1633), 80; Andrew Boorde’s Introduction and Dyetary, ed. F.J. Furnivall (Early English Text Society, 1870), 292; Thomas Muffett, Health’s Improvement, corrected and enlarged by Christopher Bennett (1655; 1746 edn), 341; Tryon, Way to Health, 163–4. Vaughan, Directions for Health, 55; Regimen Sanitatis Salerni (Eng. trans., 1617), 20; Muffett, Health’s Improvement, 324. See V. Nutton, Ancient Medicine (2004), 241. Wit’s Recreations (conflation of editions of 1640, 1641, 1645 and 1663), in Facetiae [eds T. Park and E. Du Bois] (1817; new edn, 1874), 402–3; also in John Phillips, Wit and Drollery (1682), 145–6, and ‘Philaret, a member of the Athenian Society’ [John Dunton ?], Athenian Sport; or Two Thousand Paradoxes Merrily Argued (1707), 114. Henry Buttes, Dyets Dry Dinner (1599), sigs E7v–8; ‘Strephon and Chloe’, in The Poems of Jonathan Swift, ed. H. Williams (2nd edn, Oxford, 1958), vol. II, 587. On the various speculations on the nature of and reasons for Pythagoras’s supposed prohibition, see M.D. Grmek, ‘La légende et la réalité de la nocivité des fèves’, in his Les maladies à l’aube de la civilisation occidentale (Paris, 1963), ch. 9. Langton, Introduction into Phisycke, fos lxi, v. For a capacious list of ‘correctors to expel wind’, see Burton, Anatomy, vol. II, 264–6. The OED explains that they were believed to dilute and relax the gross humours from which the wind arose, carding them like knots in wool. Edward Guilpin, Skialetheia: Or a Shadow of Truth, in Certaine Epigrams and Satyres (1598), sig. A4. Samuel Purchas, Purchas his Pilgrim: Microrcosmus, or the Historie of Man (1619), 29. M.P. Tilley, A Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Ann Arbor, MI, 1950), F, 65, 69, 666. For a man who was said to have killed his wife by farting into her mouth, see Alexander Smith, A Compleat History of the Lives and Robberies of the Most Notorious Highwaymen, Foot-pads, Shop-lifts and Cheats, of Both Sexes (5th edn, 1719), vol. III, 266–7.

26 Bodily Control and Social Unease: The Fart in Seventeenth-Century England 32

33 34

35 36 37

38

39

40

41 42 43 44 45 46 47

48 49 50

John Robinson, Endoxa, or Some Probable Inquiries into Truth both Divine and Humane (1658), 117. Similarly, Hart, Diet of the Diseased, 57; Charles Cotton, Scarronnides: or Le Virgile Travesty (1664), 11; K. Albala, Eating Right in the Renaissance (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, 2002), 148; Allen, On Farting, 65–6. Richard Baxter, A Christian Directory (2nd edn, 1678), vol. I, 336a. ‘The Problem’, in Poems of Jonathan Swift, vol. I, 64–7. Even in the nineteenth century, it was suggested that a sufferer from flatulence needed to ask himself not just whether he was abstemious in eating and drinking, but also whether he was ‘in possession of a pure mind’; ‘A London Physician’, A Letter on Flatulence addressed to the Public ([1865]), 13. Samuel Purchas, Purchas his Pilgrimage, or Relations of the World (4th edn, 1626), 718. The Honest Whore, Part II (1630; [written 1604–5]), Act I. Sc.i. Act II. Sc.i in The Works of John Webster, ed. D. Gunby et al. (Cambridge, 1995–2004), vol. I, 171. On the Irish, see J(ohn) Bulwer, Anthropometamorphosis: Man Transform’d: or the Artificiall Changling (1653), 382, and J.O. Bartley, Teague, Shenkin and Sawney, being a Historical Study of the Earliest Irish, Welsh, and Scottish Characters in English Plays (Cork, 1954), 31, 118, 127. Bartley shows that this theme disappeared after about 1710. Perhaps the English no longer regarded an aversion to farting as something peculiar. J.L. Nelson, The Frankish World 750–900 (1996), 215; Urbanus Magnus Danielis Becclesiensis, ed. J.G. Smyly (Dublin, 1939), 37–9, on which see R. Bartlett, England under the Norman and Angevin Kings 1075–1225 (Oxford, 2000), 582–8; and J. Gillingham, ‘From civilitas to civility: codes of manners in medieval and early modern England’, TRHS, 6th ser., 12 (2002), 272–8. Manners and Meals in Olden Time, ed. F.J. Furnivall (Early English Text Society, 1868), 13, 80, 136; Caxton’s Book of Curtesye, ed. F.J. Furnivall (Early English Text Society, 1868), 21; W(illiam) F(iston), The Schoole of Good Manners (1629), sig. B8. See A. Bryson, From Courtesy to Civility (Oxford, 1998), 82–4. [Friedrich Dedekind], The Schoole of Slovenrie: or, Cato Turnd Wrong Side Outward (trans. R.F., 1605), 96. See also Cacoethes Leaden Legacy: or His Schoole of Ill Manners ([1634]), sigs A3, A7r–v. Bryson, Courtesy to Civility, 86–7, 104. Henderson, Maculate Muse, 195. Geoffrey Chaucer, ‘The Miller’s Tale’, in The Canterbury Tales, Fragment I, ll. 3337–8. Whorton, Inner Hygiene, 12–13. J. Turner, The Politics of Landscape (Oxford, 1979), 173–7; Bryson, Courtesy to Civility, 85–6. Albala, Eating Right in the Renaissance, 188, 194. In Elizabethan Leicestershire, bread was made from beans; [Thomas Cogan], The Haven of Health (1589), 29–30. Henderson, Maculate Muse, 197; Bartlett, England under the Norman and Angevin Kings, 478; Ben Jonson, The Alchemist (1610), Act I. Sc.i. l.1. For one of the earliest recorded offensive farts, see Herodotus, The Histories, vol. II, 162 (trans. R. Waterfield: Oxford, 1998), 159. [Francis Osborne], Historical Memoirs on the Reigns of Queen Elizabeth and King James (1658), pt. ii, 68. F.G. Emmison, Elizabethan Life: Morals and the Church Courts (Chelmsford, 1973), 312. C. Haigh, The Plain Man’s Pathway to Heaven: Kinds of Christianity in PostReformation England 1570–1640 (Oxford, 2007), 9, 88; K. Thomas, Religion and

Keith Thomas 27

51 52

53 54 55

56

57

58

59 60

61 62 63

64 65 66 67 68 69

the Decline of Magic (Harmondsworth, 1973), 192; D. Oldridge, Religion and Society in Early Stuart England (Aldershot, 1988), 107; D. Cressy, Travesties and Transgressions (Oxford, 2000), 314n46. J[ohn] D[enison], The Most Wonderfull and True Storie, of a Certaine Witch named Alse Gooderige of Stapenhill (1597), 4. D. Underdown, Fire from Heaven: The Life of an English Town in the Seventeenth Century (1992), 78. In a criminal case in California in 1988, the defending lawyer appealed against the verdict on the grounds that the prosecuting lawyers had ‘farted about a hundred times’ during his closing speech to the jury; D. Pannick, Advocates (Oxford, 1992), 51. Journals of Sir John Lauder, Lord Fountainhall, ed. D. Crawford (Scottish History Society, Edinburgh, 1903), 38. Hippocrates, vol. II, 24–5. The Englishmans Docter or the School of Salerne (trans. Sir John Harington: 1607), sig. A6v; Boorde’s Introduction and Dyetary, 248, 292; ‘Buldrianus Sclopetarius’, De Peditu, Eiusque Speciebus Crepitu et Visio: Discursus Methodicus (‘Clareforti’, 1617), sig. B2v; Feyens, Treatise of Spirits and Wind, 53. ‘Don Fartinando Puff-Indorst’ [William Dobbs?], The Benefit of Farting Explaind, or, the Fundament-all Cause of the Distempers Incident to the Fair Sex Inquir’d Into (‘trans. Obadiah Fizzle’: [1722]), I. 3. The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol. III, pt. ii, ed. C.H. Miller et al. (New Haven, 1984), 132–3; on its subsequent wide circulation, ibid., 711–12, 716, 722–3, 729, and S.W. May and W.A. Ringler Jr., Elizabethan Poetry: A Bibliography and First-Line Index of English Verse, 1559–1603 (2004), vol. II, 918; vol. III, 1709. Wits Recreations, in Facetiae, ed. Park and Du Bois, vol. II, 247. Other versions in Archie Armstrong’s Banquet of Jests [1640], with preface by T.H. Jamieson (Edinburgh, 1872), 6; London Jests, or a Collection of the Choicest Joques and Repertees (1720), 87; and numerous other printed and unprinted collections. London Jests, 87. B.C. Bowen, Humor and Humanism in the Renaissance (Aldershot, 2004), vii, 10. Another version in The First and Best Part of Scoggins Jests (1626), in Shakespeare Jest-Books, ed. W.C. Hazlitt (1864), vol. II, 112. The Works of Sir John Suckling: The Non-Dramatic Works, ed. T. Clayton (Oxford, 1971), 53. Ars honeste fartandi in societate, in Sir Thomas Urquhart’s translation of Gargantua and Pantagruel, Bk 2., ch. 7. (World’s Classics, 1934), I, 194. Suetonius, History of Twelve Caesars, trans. Philemon Holland (1606; Tudor Translations, 1899), vol. II, 86. The Stoics were said to have taken an equally relaxed attitude; Cicero, Letters to Friends, ed. and trans. D.M. Shackleton Bailey (Cambridge, MA, 2001), letter 189. The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. XXXII, ed. Barbara Oberg et al. (New Haven, 1996), 398–400. De Civilitate Morum Puerilium, trans. B. McGregor, in Collected Works of Erasmus: History and Educational Writings, vol. III, ed. J.K. Sowards (Toronto, 1985), 275, 278. Manners and Meals, ed. Furnivall, 296. Adages 1 vi. 1 to 1 x 100 (trans. R.A.B. Mynors, Toronto, 1989), 45; Tilley, Dictionary of the Proverbs, F. 64. K.J. Dover, Aristophanic Comedy (1972), 41. See, e.g., The Philolegos or Laughter-Lover, trans. and ed. B. Baldwin (Amsterdam, 1983), 44–5.

28 Bodily Control and Social Unease: The Fart in Seventeenth-Century England 70 71 72

73 74 75 76

77

78

79 80

81

82

J. Briggs, This Stage-Play World: Texts and Contexts, 1580–1625 (2nd edn, Oxford, 1997), 281–2. OED; B.E., A New Dictionary of the Terms Ancient and Modern of the Canting Crew (1699), sig. C4v; Lexicon Balatronicum (1811), sig. F4v. Examples in William Salkeld, Reports of Cases adjudged in the King’s Bench (3rd edn, 1731–2), vol. I, 84; T. Harris, London Crowds in the Reign of Charles II (Cambridge, 1987), 162–3; T. Cogswell, Home Divisions: Aristocracy, the State and Provincial Conflicts (Manchester, 1998), 164; G. Walker, Crime, Gender and Social Order in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2003), 214, 217; F.V. White, ‘Anthony, Francis (1550–1623)’, ODNB; Merry Passages and Jeasts: A Manuscript Jestbook of Sir Nicholas Le Strange, ed. H.F. Lippincott (Salzburg, 1974), 126; Haigh, Plain Man’s Pathways to Heaven, 49, 156, 219. The Correspondence of Nathan Walworth and Peter Seddon, ed. John Samuel Fletcher (Chetham Society, 1880), 41. Haigh, Plain Man’s Pathways to Heaven, 116. Haigh, Plain Man’s Pathways to Heaven, 152, 153, 157, 160; May and Ringler, Elizabethan Poetry, vol. II, 1405. William Camden, Britain, or a Chorographicall Description of the Most Flourishing Kingdomes, England, Scotland, and Ireland, trans. Philemon Holland (1610), 464; T(homas) B(lount), Fragmenta Antiquitatis: Antient Tenures of Land and Jocular Customs of Some Mannors (1679), ‘To the reader’, 10–11. For extensive discussion of these tenures, see Allen, On Farting, 161–77. An Elizabethan in 1582: The Diary of Richard Madox, Fellow of All Souls, ed. E. Story Donno (Hakluyt Society, 1976), 152; (Sir John Harington), Ulysses upon Ajax (1596), sig. E5. The Writings of William Walwyn, ed. J.R. McMichael and B. Taft (Athens, GA, 1989), 430–1. The ejected minister Robert Wild wrote verses against the statute of 1665 which, in his words, made it an offence for a nonconformist clergyman or schoolmaster to vent a fart within five miles of a city or parliamentary borough; ‘The Fair Quarrel’, in Iter Boreale, with Large Additions of Several Other Poems (1670), 120. As in Rodolphus Goclenius, Physiologia Crepitus Ventris, et Risus (Frankfurt, 1607) and ‘Sclopetarius’, De Peditu. For reflections on the purposes of such writing, see M.A. Screech, Rabelais (1979), esp. 50–6, 439; J. Num Lee, Swift and Scatological Satire (Albuquerque, NM, 1971), ch. 2; T. Raylor, Cavaliers, Clubs, and Literary Culture (Newark, DE, 1994), 133; M.S.R. Jenner, ‘The roasting of the Rump: scatology and the body politic in Restoration England’, Past & Present 117 (2002); C. Brant, ‘Fume and perfume: some eighteenth-century uses of smell’, Journal of British Studies 43 (2004). ‘My lord, I had forgot the fart’; Bodleian Library, MS Wood F 39, fo. 389 (expurgated version in John Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. A. Clark [Oxford, 1898], vol. I, 319; vol. II, 270). The story is remarkably close to the even funnier tale of ‘How Abu Hasan broke wind’, in The Thousand and One Nights, but I know of no evidence connecting the two anecdotes. The Parliamentary Diary of Robert Bowyer 1606–1607, ed. D.H. Willson (1931; New York, 1971), 213n. See the version of the poem edited by M. O’Callaghan online: http://www.earlystuartlibels.net, and discussed by her in ‘Performing politics: the circulation of the “Parliament Fart”’, Huntington Library Quarterly 69 (2006).

Keith Thomas 29 83

84

85 86

87 88

89 90

91

92 93 94 95 96

97 98

99 100 101

102

C. Brown and R.H. Robbins, The Index of Middle English Verse (New York, 1943), no. 977; STC, 14522–14524.3; N. Orme, Medieval Children (New Haven, CT, 2001), 293. J.M., Sports and Pastimes (1676), 32; M. Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories (1981), 72. See also Fun upon Fun: or, the Comical Merry Tricks of Leper the Taylor. Part I (Glasgow, 1786), 8; and Allen, On Farting, 35. Robert Armin, A Nest of Ninnies (1608), sigs E4r–v. Gilbert was a North-Country name for a dog. The Poems of Sir John Davies, ed. R. Krueger (Oxford, 1978), 134–5 (spelling modernised). This became a prose jest in ‘Ferdinando Killigrew’, Killigrew’s Jests: or, a Pocket Companion for the Wits, (1759), 105. Leuca’s fart had appeared earlier, in Guilpin, Skialetheia, sig. A7. Cambridge Jests: or Witty Alarums for Melancholy Spirits (1721), 111. This is a toned-down version of the story in Merry Passages and Jeasts, 57. Hence John Selden’s famous question: ‘The bishops being put out of the House, whom will they lay the fault upon now: when the dog is beat out of the room, where will they lay the stink?’ Table Talk of John Selden, ed. Sir F. Pollock (Selden Society, 1937), 18. Act IV, Sc.iv. George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, ed. G.D. Willcock and A. Walker (Cambridge, 1936), 268 (and in Harington, Ulysses upon Ajax, sig. F3). This appears to have been Henry’s usual reaction to fart jokes; cf. Armin, Nest of Ninnies, sigs F3r–v. Joe Miller’s Jests (3rd edn, 1739), 4; Killigrew, Killigrew’s Jests, 49. Similar retorts in Archie Armstrong’s Banquet of Jests, 48; London Jests, 5–6, 154–5; Cambridge Jests, 48; and (by ordinary workmen) William Dickinson, A Glossary of Words and Phrases pertaining to the Dialect of Cumberland (English Dialect Society, series C, 1878), 133. An Elizabethan in 1582, 226. Merrie Conceited Jests of George Peel (1657), 20–1. Cambridge Jests, 72–3. An earlier version, involving a lady and her fool in church, is in The Sack-full of Newes (1673), sig. B3v. E.g., N[athaniel] W[aker], The Refin’d Courtier (1686), 12. Similarly [Antoine de Courtin], The Rules of Civility, Eng. trans. (1685), 136–7 (‘to belch, hawk and tear anything up from the bottom of your stomach are things so intolerably sordid, they are sufficient to make a man vomit to behold them’). A notable exception is Jeremy Bentham, Deontology, ed. A. Goldworth (Oxford, 1983), 276. ‘Democritus Secundus’ [Henry Edmundson], Comes Facundus in Via: The FellowTraveller (1658), title-page; A Pleasant History of the Life and Death of Will Summers (1676), sigs B2v–3. Charles Hopkins, Boadicea: Queen of Britain: A Tragedy (1697). Epilogue, sig. A4. Daniel Defoe, A Tour through England and Wales (1928), vol. II, 172. In deference to the King’s well-known views, the singer went on to explain that this was the origin of tobacco; ‘A Masque of the Metamorphosed Gypsies’, in Ben Jonson: The Complete Masques, ed. S. Orgel (New Haven, CT, 1969), 359–60. S. Dickie, ‘Hilarity and pitilessness in the mid eighteenth century: English jestbook humour’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 37 (2003); P. Thompson, ‘Magna

30 Bodily Control and Social Unease: The Fart in Seventeenth-Century England

103 104

farta: Walpole and the Golden Rump’, in Humour and History, ed. K. Cameron (Oxford, 1993); Gatrell, City of Laughter, esp. ch. 6. ‘Epistle from Fern Hill’, in Eighteenth-Century Women Poets: An Oxford Anthology, ed. R. Lonsdale (Oxford, 1989), 164. K. Thomas, ‘The place of laughter in Tudor and Stuart England’, TLS, 21 Jan 1977; Gatrell, City of Laughter, ch. 14.

2 The Ambition of a Young Baronet: Sir Thomas Isham of Lamport, 1657–1681 Anthony Fletcher

Tom Isham’s well known account of growing up in Northamptonshire is a quintessential record of everyday experience on a country estate.1 Yet the story has not been told of how, following a demanding upbringing by his royalist father, Sir Justinian Isham, young Tom went off the rails when he inherited the Lamport estate in 1675. He was then not quite eighteen. Tom lived extravagantly on a prolonged Grand Tour, becoming an acute and well informed artistic connoisseur at the expense (literally) of his estate. He returned home in 1679 and died of smallpox two years later. To his fond Oxford tutor, advising Tom’s younger brother Justinian to ‘steer a safer course’, the lesson was clear. ‘You have seen’, Dr John Fell wrote, ‘the ruinous effects of a life of pleasure: be now so just to virtue and honour as to make trial also of them’. What could be more extraordinary, as his friends and family saw the matter, than a young man risking such an inheritance? ‘Examine the different posture of your estate as it was left you by your father and as you will now find it’, Fell warned young Justinian, ‘and then determine what course of life is likeliest to preserve your family and fortune’. Every inch the dedicated landlord, the second Sir Justinian did indeed restore his family’s name, sitting in fourteen parliaments for the borough or county of Northampton between 1685 and 1730.2 Sir Justinian Isham, the boys’ father, born in 1610, was twice imprisoned during the 1650s as a royalist whom the Protectorate government believed to be dangerous.3 Meanwhile, adopting the latest architectural fashion, he employed John Webb to add a Palladian front to his Elizabethan manor house, and provocatively hung a version of Van Dyke’s Charles I on Horseback in his new entrance hall.4 Elected Knight of the Shire in 1661, he came into his own at the Restoration. Yet he had to wait until 1657, when he was forty-seven, before his second wife brought him an heir, thereby securing the dynasty. Employing a classicist tutor and a musician, who taught the harp, violin and organ, Sir Justinian devoted his middle age to the domestic upbringing of his children. Tom’s sister Mary became a fine Latinist.5 When Sir Justinian’s friend Sir William Hazelwood, an excellent 31

32 The Ambition of a Young Baronet: Sir Thomas Isham of Lamport, 1657–1681

Latinist himself, visited Lamport in September 1672, Tom recorded that he ‘began a conversation with my sister Mary and praised her highly, saying that their tutor Mr Richardson had spoken of her intimate understanding of Cicero, Virgil and Buchanan’. This was a highly unusual Stuart household.6 Yet in many respects Tom’s was an ordinary upbringing.

The ordinary upbringing of a son and heir All Sir Justinian’s hopes became centred on Tom, whom he personally trained for ease in the leadership of county society and the effective management of his estate. The idea that Tom should keep a diary to practice his Latin was in his father’s mind as early as the autumn of 1667, when he was still only ten. He suggested ‘a line or two most days, setting down ordinary matters as they happen about the house, garden, town, country or field’. ‘Nothing can come amiss for you to turn into Latin’, insisted this demanding father, ‘even the talk in the nursery which I am sure is not wanting upon several things with your brothers and sisters’.7 The ten-year-old Tom was not so easily coaxed, but, four years on, he was bribed with the promise of six pounds of pocket money into taking up the task. He kept it up, from the age of fourteen to sixteen, for almost two years. He had no time for the nursery now. We watch him, a teenager full of curiosity about his local and the wider world, stretching himself socially and intellectually, as he began to grasp his destiny and the potential that it held for him to be a great man. The Lamport estate was a delectable piece of Midland England, which the traveller westwards came upon soon after Kettering, the landscape now emptier and lonelier, with steeper rises and falls, receding, as Sir Gyles Isham put it, ‘into a blue distance, folds of meadow and wood’.8 Richard Richardson, holding the cure of Brixworth, was the boys’ exacting tutor. Their father was exceedingly proud of their progress in Latin and Greek. He expected a very great deal of them, especially of Tom. Boasting about the Lamport schoolroom to friends like Dr James Duport, master of Magdelene, Cambridge and a notable classical scholar, Sir Justinian was determined to show off the boys to his guests. He told Tom in January 1671 that Duport and others, ‘enquire much of their learning’, and would be there soon to test them on their Homer, Tully and Virgil. When Tom’s brother John dreamt about Duport after his visit, Richardson declared that the dream meant he would one day ‘equal or even surpass him in the Greek tongue’.9 Sir Justinian introduced his heir to the metropolitan world in June 1671. Tom was at once intoxicated by it, spending money lavishly on books and fashionable furnishings for the family home.10 His father, it seems, had begun to let him off the lead. In July, Sir Justinian’s valet, Edward Holland, regaled Tom with his progress in buying red Turkey leather chairs and an

Anthony Fletcher 33

expensive ‘cabinet’, that Tom had commanded should be sought out. Holland also proposed the purchase of new books he had spotted, including a History of the Heathen Gods and Demigods and The Present State of Italy.11 Besotted with his sons, Sir Justinian, meanwhile, fussed from London about their care ‘not to overheat yourselves’ in the hot weather.12 His master ‘praise God is very well and at present in a tavern’, Holland wrote from London in June 1672. When Tom rebuked Holland for not writing often enough about the purchases he had requested, Holland replied, ‘The bible of Amsterdam print, such a one as you desire, is exceeding dear, they asking eight shillings for it in quires, but I am resolved to buy it and get bound according to your desire’.13 Wholly trusted by a father who was over sixty years old and in declining health, Tom ruled the roost with his elder sisters, younger brothers and sister.14 Sir Justinian, meanwhile, watched the sands of time: ‘some of our acquaintance persons of great experience in the world are lately gone’ he told Sir Charles Harbord, lamenting deaths among their contemporaries in May 1673. He feared that Tom was insufficiently trained and mature for the responsibilities which would fall upon him, but Tom’s confidence was growing rapidly. He could slip into language in his diary which, in reporting the family’s health and well-being, almost purveyed him as already in charge at Lamport: ‘Mother and nearly all of us have bad coughs’, he noted on 4 December 1672.15 It made sense to Sir Justinian, when Tom was sixteen, to accept his friend Gilbert Clerke’s suggestion of appointing Richard Perrot as Tom’s personal servant. Perrot did not want to join the Isham household, Clerke insisted, for higher wages, ‘or to come on any other account than of being Mr Thomas his man’. He desired this specific role ‘from the beginning and to have the right (upon his good deportment) of going with him when he goes abroad, as far as a man may be useful to him’. Perrot was certainly a very tall young man, and therefore striking in appearance, but, Clerke opined, ‘for my part I think it fits him the better for Mr Thomas’s service’. Tom recorded the dramatic increase in visible status he was about to acquire, when Perrot called with a basket of apples from his current employer on 16 May 1673: ‘next month he is to come and be my servant’.16 Spared, by his father’s choice, the rigours and brutality of a leading boarding school, Tom enjoyed every moment of life at home. He took the daily Latin grind in his stride, never mentioning academic work in the diary, except his pride in the progress he and his brothers made in Euclid.17 The diary is the story of his life out of doors. He was thrilled by horse racing, patronised, as he noted, by the King, and now taken up eagerly by the Northamptonshire gentry. One of his longest entries described his riding over to the Rowell races, with his brother Justinian, in September 1672. His account of this day, of mixing with the great men of the shire in front of the country people, and of the races themselves on the fine new

34 The Ambition of a Young Baronet: Sir Thomas Isham of Lamport, 1657–1681

course, ‘a level stretch two miles long and four hundred yards wide’, was ecstatic. He described Lord Westmorland’s glorious victory in the silver cup, riding for Lord Sherard: They take their places, fired with love of glory, and suddenly dart over the plain at the given signal […]Westmorland takes first place and, fired by his own success, plies the cracking whip and passes the post first, flying ’mid the plaudits and cheering shouts of the mob – while the hills resound with clamour. The Rowell races brought home to Tom the excitement of his destiny. This would be his world.18 The boys’ sporting opportunities, with household servants and others at hand to assist them, were numerous. The Lamport fishponds had been established near the house in the sixteenth century. Catching the carp which stocked them was a well established spectator sport for the family and guests. Tom related, on 2 July 1672, how local boys were sent ‘naked into the pond to drive the fish out of the reeds’, tickling them into the net until ‘at length we hauled out the net with a great many carp’.19 Hare coursing, on foot with dogs, was a favourite occupation. When a hare was spotted in the kitchen garden on 2 September 1672, the boys pursued and killed it. Pursuing four hares a few days later, they managed to catch and kill two of them. There was a competitive edge to this coursing and Tom was disappointed when Randolph Wilkes ‘came with his hounds and challenged ours to a coursing match but the beaters could not find a hare’. In February 1673, when neighbours Sir William Hazelwood and Mr Saunders of Brixworth visited for hare coursing, Tom crowed, ‘our hound beat Mr Saunders’s’.20 Hare coursing did not involve shooting. Indeed, firearms were still inaccurate, and the only animal Tom records killing with his gun was a dog although Tom’s younger brother John killed a sparrow with a stone-bow, a feat which won Tom’s respect. Foxes, seen as vermin, were trapped and so were numerous birds. In August 1672, Sir Justinian and Gilbert Clerke initiated Tom into the business of netting partridges. This is where he learnt about the rivalry with Hazelwood: finding Hazelwood’s servants ‘on the same errand […] we told them not to come any further on our land’. He was pleased that day about bagging one partridge by his own efforts, which he added to the mew, the cage kept by the family to fatten birds during the summer for the table. In November 1672, Tom out with his hound, found partridges in the open fields of the neighbouring village of Houghton, ‘but they flew away before we could catch them in the net’. That December, however, he noted the successful trapping of four pine martens in a fortnight.21 Asserting his masculinity, Tom was demonstrating his mastery over his prospective lands and their animal kingdom. He enjoyed the dogs, the

Anthony Fletcher 35

bowling green and his bee keeping, a hobby shared with his brothers. For him Lamport was a glorious playground. The only limitation was that his father forbade keeping cocks, perhaps because he disliked the gambling then associated with cock fighting. In this secure pattern of landlordism, others did the hard work. Servants bought and sold horses, as Tom’s father instructed, at the local fairs. ‘The harvest was gathered in’, ran the final entry in his diary on 30 September 1673, ‘and the boys raised their customary shouts’.22 Yet there was so much for him to learn himself, which was why Sir Justinian took every possible opportunity to inculcate in Tom principles of effective estate management. In May 1673, on the day when his brothers enjoyed the Punch and Judy show at Brixworth Fair, ‘father and I went to Clipston, where we bought a horse from Hutchinson for thirteen pounds’.23 At the Rowell races, he wondered at his father’s declining the offer of eighteen pounds for the brown horse he rode that day, then he recorded a shrewd deal for a sale at eighteen guineas a few days later. Sir Justinian was much preoccupied by his new lands at Hanging Houghton, fully involving Tom in his plans for them. ‘Father and I went into the fields to determine where ditches should be dug and hedges planted’, Tom wrote on 18 November 1671. Establishing an entirely new orchard was the main business of the autumn. They inspected the workmen getting in a full row of cherry trees on 20 November while another twelve ‘fruit trees’ arrived for planting the next day. Applying his fine mind to the mathematics of planting, Sir Justinian explained to Tom the notion of plantings in groups of five trees, ‘in the form of a quinqunx’. The following April, father and son together visited their cousin Ferdinando Pulton at Desborough, who promised young trees from ‘his nursery garden’.24 Tom’s diary reveals how resourceful and enterprising his father was as a landlord. He sought to perfect a lawn: ‘we harnessed our ass to the roller to see how he could draw and we believe that when the ground is made more level he will do better’. He was determined to improve the fields near the house by eliminating rabbits. Tom noted his father’s decision to promise his groom ‘that if he stopped them from going into the pastures he would give him sixpence for every nest of rabbits’.25 When important people visited there was plenty to show off and be proud of. Tom shared the glory. ‘We took him to the Ash and other walks and showed him the garden, the house and the orchard, which pleased him immensely’, he recounted when Sir John Cotton, a Gentleman of the Privy Chamber to Charles II and grandson of the celebrated antiquary, came to stay in July 1672. Tom had imbibed his father’s early enthusiasm for natural landscape and they ‘pointed out the lovely view which travellers have between Lamport and Houghton’. So Cotton ‘promised to come again soon with hounds and hawks, to go hawking and stay longer with us’.26 Sir Justinian integrated strong landlord control of an estate village with his exercise of county magistracy. His tenant Fisher, who kept the inn on

36 The Ambition of a Young Baronet: Sir Thomas Isham of Lamport, 1657–1681

the Market Harborough road, was forbidden ‘to entertain strangers’. It was Sir Justinian who arbitrated in local quarrels, and local miscreants were routinely brought before him in his parlour. Tom sometimes seems to have been present, learning the magisterial ropes.27 At Christmas, as Tom explained, ‘the poor of Lamport and Houghton’, the labourers in these two villages and ‘the more substantial inhabitants’ were ‘asked to dinner’ on successive days. The cowherd Bayley, caught stealing wood from the hedges, came under Sir Justinian’s jurisdiction as both JP and landlord. Tom would rule after him, but the diary shows the settled habitation and the attention to detail that, to be effective, this rule required.28 In these teenage years, Tom imbibed the mores and values of gentry society, showing himself sensitive to the distinctions between polite society and the behaviour of the people. He noted village wrestling, the talk of a charivari, a man spilling beer at table and the rude gesture of a servant’s ‘turning his behind’ to one of his father’s distinguished visitors. It was on the visits he made with his father to the great houses of Northamptonshire that his upbringing demanded most of him. In April 1672, they called on Lord Montagu at Boughton and Lord Rockingham at Rockingham Castle. In July, they visited Lord Tracy, after inspecting the new medicinal springs at Astrop, where Tom noted ‘walks beautifully laid out’. That October, his mother came too on a visit to Lord Banbury and in November they all three went ‘to see Althorp House’. Tom’s diary records the gracious receipt of venison from Lord Exeter at Burghley and from Lord Rockingham.29 He must have felt chagrin that he was not old enough to be included in the invitation to the Boughton wedding feast, the event of the 1673 Northamptonshire season. All the ‘bells hereabouts’ were new roped, to ring the illustrious bride won by Lord Montagu’s son ‘into the country’, Sir Justinian told Lady Long on 30 August.30 The previous month, Sir Justinian had taken Tom and his brother Justinian, now well schooled in their Latin, to familiarise them with Oxford. He made preliminary arrangements with Dr Fell, the Dean of Christchurch, for their matriculation. Tom wrote a lengthy account of the trip: admiring ‘the beauties of the city’, hearing ‘speeches full of wisdom clothed in ornate language’ in the Sheldonian, watching ‘ropewalkers’ and ‘a man eating fire’.31 But it cost the old man a great deal: he was ‘seldom a fortnight free from pains’, he told Lady Long on 15 July 1673 and ‘very unfit for journeys, having ‘not yet recovered’ from showing his sons Oxford. When he decided to send Justinian there, ahead of Tom, at Michaelmas 1674, he confessed to Fell that he had spent much of the spring at Westminster with Tom: ‘having had my eldest son continually with me I know not now well how to let him go from me’. His daughter Vere worried about his health at this time.32 ‘I favour the ancient and severer way of education and that especially as to his manners’, Sir Justinian instructed Fell who was given charge of young Justinian. ‘Endeavour to speak Latin in your chamber and repeat

Anthony Fletcher 37

every morning something aloud to exercise and sweeten your voice, for which you find Atticus much commended’, Sir Justinian advised his second boy. He explained that he had been in some pain but was better, soon summoning him home for Christmas. But the decision to take Tom to Oxford during a cold February was the final straw. Sir Justinian died in Oxford, at sixty-five, of ‘a sharp fit of the stone’, on 2 March 1675. Accompanying his body home for burial the next day, Tom came into his inheritance. As the new Baronet, everyone’s relations with him, from siblings to distant family members, were now different; his whole life was transformed overnight.33

The sins of ‘youth and quality, wealth and honour’: the extraordinary ambition of Sir Thomas There was a nervous tone in the family pleas of the next weeks for Sir Thomas to find early maturity of conduct. Clinging to her Christian faith, his half-sister Elizabeth L’Estrange wrote in grief on 4 March: ‘as I doubt not of his [Tom’s father’s] happiness, so I am verily persuaded you will always imitate his virtue and follow his pious example, which will render you most worthy to be beloved and honoured of all your relations as he was’. Tom’s cousin Elizabeth Lodge wrote deferentially, sending all the London news, on 6 April. She hoped Sir Thomas would ‘remember old Westminster where you have been very merry and I hope will be again’. ‘The best wish I can imagine for you’, she declared, ‘is that you will be heir of his goodness and generosity as well as his honour and fortune’.34 But Sir Thomas felt overwhelmed by the death of his father, displaying a manifest emotional instability, hardly accountable simply as mourning, in the first months of his rule at Lamport. The teenage master’s pride, egoism and self conceit quickly put friends and relatives on their guard. Those whom Sir Justinian had trusted with the family’s financial affairs, Sir John Garrard and Sir William Pargiter, found the heir an impatient taskmaster, as they sought to resolve the complexities of the will. Taking stock at Lamport, Sir Thomas was convinced that some jewels rightfully his were missing. Accepting that ‘no servant could be free of suspicion of it’ on 27 April, Pargiter suggested he have the house searched: ‘this you may do without any warrant it being your own house’.35 Meanwhile, Zaccheus Isham, the cousin intended by Sir Justinian to be Tom’s Oxford tutor, was alert to the young Squire’s ‘business in hand’. Isham realised that nothing but the best would be good enough for his tutee, and fussed, in a letter to Richardson on 15 April, about difficulties in finding Sir Thomas a suitable servant: whether it was ‘best to have an Englishman or a good approved Frenchman … or whether a livery boy would be most useful’. He was working hard to ‘provide for your reception here’, he told Sir Thomas the next week. He would approach Dr Fell for Lord Falkland’s fine lodgings, since that young man ‘very shortly goes for

38 The Ambition of a Young Baronet: Sir Thomas Isham of Lamport, 1657–1681

France’. ‘I perceive, Sir’, Zaccheus concluded, ‘now that you are somewhat disturbed. I hope this trouble and discontent will soon pass over’. Why not escape ‘new torrents of business’ at Lamport, he pleaded in May, ‘sheltering yourself under these blessed shades’? Bemused by Sir Thomas’s ‘indisposition’, Zaccheus spoke of his ‘restlessness and disquiet’.36 By the middle of May, Sir Thomas had quarrelled with his brother Justinian and seriously fallen out with his half-sister Judith. Finding it difficult to adapt to his elder brother’s new attitude towards him, Justinian had replied he presumed ‘it was not required’, when he was asked to account for his expenditure of his ten pounds allowance at Oxford before it was renewed. Sir Thomas’s draft reply berated him for ‘a very odd and foolish letter and very much unbeseeming yourself’. Startled, Justinian saw the need to climb down, apologising for any ‘impertinence’ and asking pardon of his mother, who his brother had put up front as the one wronged. Both Zaccheus Isham and the family friend Dr Outram, who sought to mediate, were alarmed that, when Judith pleaded that her legacy was inadequate, Sir Thomas stood fast on the will. Dirt would be thrown on him for the scuffle, Zaccheus warned.37 On 15 May, a London vintner confirmed the despatch of six gallons of canary wine and eight of claret to Christchurch, against Sir Thomas’s coming. Zaccheus’ careful preparations were to no avail, however. Sir Thomas arrived, matriculated on 4 June and went home again almost at once, following news of smallpox in the college. He was back in Oxford in late August, but did not take to university life. ‘My going from Oxford signified very little for I found a disappointment in everything’, Sir Thomas told Justinian: having ridden hard for Northampton and home on 6 September. So much for Oxford. His brother John, meanwhile, had matriculated at Cambridge, settling in to Christ’s College. His letter of 6 October touches upon the close friendship that Sir Thomas had recently established with David Loggan, the engraver of the Oxford colleges, whom he had probably met when Loggan visited Lamport to paint a portrait of Lady Vere Isham, Sir Thomas’ mother.38 One of his friends thought that Loggan’s subsequent portrait of Sir Thomas was a poor likeness. But Sir Thomas’s vanity was fed by this friendship. He was delighted when John told him that Loggan ‘hoped you would winter at his house’ in Leicester Fields. He left Lamport for London at the beginning of November 1675, nonchalantly inviting Zaccheus to abandon Oxford likewise and join him there. He was more into partying than study. Art was becoming his burgeoning passion. His tutor reported on 21 October that the ‘china rarity you left me I have not yet given in your name to the public library’.39 Unwilling to tackle his financial and estate affairs, Sir Thomas charmed his way through a winter in David Loggan’s circle at London.40 It was at this time that Sir Peter Lely executed the fine portrait now at Lamport, later copied by Lely and given, in a typical gesture of generosity tinged with

Anthony Fletcher 39

Sir Thomas’s self-fascination, to his friend Robert Spencer of Althorp.41 But a fierce streak was emerging in the Baronet’s character. ‘Bid Robin the brewer to provide for himself against Easter’, he wrote to Richardson, while on a short visit to Oxford in February 1676; ‘I take notice of his insolency and without he mends his manners he must be sent packing too’. His widowed mother asked him to repair the family’s chariot, so that she could use it at her dower house at Shangton: ‘I told my mother’, he related to his old tutor, ‘I thought it was not worth the wheels and if she pleased she might have it if she would bestow new wheels’.42 Richardson and his father’s close friend Gilbert Clerke, both faithful to his interests, together with the dedicated bailiff John Chapman, worked hard to keep things in order, as Sir Thomas increasingly neglected his estate. It took from June 1676 to June 1678 to obtain confirmation of appointment of the ‘civil and trusty’ servant Lewis Harries as butler, following the death of Edward Freeman. ‘I hope that in choice of your servants you will think it reasonable a little to gratify them that have so much occasion to use them and live with them’, Clerke told Sir Thomas.43 Remarkably, this was as strongly as senior figures, entrusted by his father with supporting the Baronet, felt able to speak to the young popinjay. Justinian, once Tom’s close pal, was now immersed in his Oxford studies, and confessed himself ‘melancholy’ at Sir Thomas’s unwillingness to stay still. He believed him to be at Cambridge visiting brother John in September, ‘where I make no question but you live very merrily’.44 In fact Sir Thomas, who as his diary shows was always alert to European affairs, was about to embark on his Grand Tour. His cousin and Oxford tutor, Zaccheus, and a servant, Mr Ogilvy, accompanied him. They sailed from Rye to Dieppe on 6 October 1676: his trustee Richardson going too, as far as Paris.45 This was some Grand Tour, lasting nearly three years, and documented by 222 letters in the Isham correspondence. They travelled via Turin and Venice, settling in Rome for a whole year from April 1677. Their return was leisurely, visiting Padua, Venice and Geneva, before pausing for a lengthy stay in Paris, through the winter of 1678 and into 1679.46 Sir Thomas hugely enjoyed himself. Gabriella Buoncampagni became his mistress during his stay in Rome, it being alleged that he shared her with his tutor Zaccheus. ‘The lemonade wench with whole floods of tears deplores the loss of her Adonis’, wrote a friend following his departure. In October 1677, after tasting it himself in Tuscany, he laid in twenty-four casks of Montepulciano for his winter in Rome.47 Art had become an obsession. Sir Thomas sat for portraits, which flattered his fine dark looks, by Carlo Maratti, then the leading artist of the city, and the Fleming, Ferdinand Vouet. In Maratti’s portrait, Sir Thomas gazes at a miniature of Gabriella.48 One of the most important items in the Isham correspondence is a list of fifty-five paintings that Sir Thomas considered buying in 1677.49 Writing to Sir Thomas’s servant Mr Ogilvy on 1 December 1677, Robert Harpur

40 The Ambition of a Young Baronet: Sir Thomas Isham of Lamport, 1657–1681

discussed arrangements for viewing these paintings. He trusted Sir Thomas to offer fair prices, stressing his integrity as a dealer: ‘what is copy put for copy, what original for original’.50 The dazzling array of work from this period now on display at Lamport indicates the Baronet’s shrewdness as a purchaser. It also illustrates how sex and drink ran through his mind. He commissioned Ludovico Gimignani to paint Venus and the Death of Adonis; he acquired Philippo Lauri’s A Sleeping Venus with Satyrs and Giacinto Brandi’s Bacchus. Visiting the Mont Allos villa, Sir Thomas admired Guido Reni’s Bacchus and Ariadne, so he had Constantin Grasso, one of the leading copyists then in Rome, do an exact version of the painting for him. He also employed Grasso to copy the celebrated Bolognese painter, Guercino da Cento’s, Anthony and Cleopatra, which he admired in Rome.51 Supply of cash, normally in the form of hundred pound bills, was a constant theme of the correspondence between Sir Thomas, Zaccheus and Ogilvy on the one hand and Richardson, Clerke and Chapman on the other. Sir Thomas was simply concerned to maintain the standard of living abroad which he believed was rightfully his. There were some predictable problems over getting money through; Sir Thomas was neither patient nor easy to satisfy.52 He also expected constant reports about the estate. By February 1677, irritated by his complaints, Richardson took up numbering his letters ‘because you seem to tax me for neglect in writing’.53 Still deferential, the man who had once taught the young Tom his Latin was becoming alarmed about how the Lamport lands would bear the young Baronet’s extravagant travel. One of them writing every week, Clerke and Richardson’s performance was a magnificent demonstration of loyalty. Clerke’s tone on 7 February 1677, hearing the Alps were crossed, was still jaunty, but the pleas to limit his stay abroad had begun. ‘You have a most incomparable pond stored with good carp’, he wrote, ‘cheer up and be merry, serve God and make as much haste home as you can. I long to see you’. The next month the warning notes, thence constantly reiterated, increased. Tenants and creditors had quickly understood that Lamport had an absent landlord and reacted accordingly. The March Lady-Day rents would ‘hardly be got in until midsummer’; with money owing for wool not coming in since Sir Thomas left, Clerke was urging the bailiff to ‘spur up those woolmen’. New taxes, he warned at Easter, would ‘fall very heavy on your estate’.54 A long letter from Sir Thomas to Gilbert Clerke on 17 April 1677 provides insight into his state of mind and the conduct of his youthful life. He had the grace to be grateful for Clerke’s ‘looking so strictly after things’. ‘Pray get in all rents as soon as you can’, he insisted, ‘for if you use to forbear them they will continually expect it’. He was not naïve about the impact of his non-residence. Nor did he underestimate his costs: ‘I am as saving as may be, but nevertheless I find money to run away, everything being excessively chargeable for diet, lodgings and horse hire’. Yet Sir Thomas

Anthony Fletcher 41

was grievously unrealistic and arrogant about what he might get away with. He felt he had ‘small encouragement to come home, for I consider I live cheaper here than I should do in England, so I think I shall not much care for removing before I hear that the score is altered or any other invitation that I imagine is worth coming for’. After months ‘upon the ramble and never settled’, he had decided to ‘make some stay’. ‘To live quietly and well consisteth the only true happiness’, Sir Thomas, just twenty, reflected.55 In October, Zaccheus spoke of a return to France the next spring, for ‘some stay there unless the urgency of his occasions calls him home’.56 Clerke took up residence at Lamport in April 1677, overseeing Chapman’s day-to-day management of the estate. The bailiff worked very hard, driving his beasts to Smithfield, reporting spiritedly at intervals. The mutton sales were the best ever, he wrote in August; there was ‘such plenty of hay as ever I knew it’; the nut trees throve; the coach horses were well; he was planting a new walk. Sir Justinian might well have been looking over his shoulder. Chapman’s sale of 160 sheep and lambs at Smithfield that month, Clerke noted, would pay for carriage of the inlaid Naples cabinets that Sir Thomas was shipping home, as well as his last instalment of cash by bill of exchange.57 The Lamport elders marshalled their arguments persistently for a rapid homecoming, seeking to induce him with news of a prospective bride ‘excellently qualified with £2000 portion’. Richardson urged the balancing of ‘what you can see or learn abroad’ with ‘the charge that lies upon your estate’. The gentry community of Northamptonshire needed him: ‘you cannot but long defer a free and public communion with your countrymen’. ‘I am glad to hear’, wrote Clerke in September, seeing art running away with him, ‘that you will not go very deep in curiosities, not so deep I hope as we will be able to discharge’. Clerke then spoke outright on 18 November 1677, presenting, with figures, a dismal prospect for the months ahead. He concluded that Chapman would shortly need to borrow. Sir Thomas could not with security live abroad at above fifty pounds a month until the next summer. ‘I suppose you cannot fall much in your expenses at Rome’, he opined, understanding his master’s obsession with status and ostentation. So he should go somewhere to be incognito and live cheaper: ‘you have much disappointed us and I fear brought yourself into hazard by wintering in Italy’.58 His ‘long sigh fetched for your absence’ on 2 December was followed by sharp reproof, a week later, in Richardson’s letter. They were in the clear at last with Judith, Richardson confessed, but Mary’s marriage portion was a serious concern. Moreover four brothers expected the increasing annual sums due as they came of age under their father’s will. The issue was clear: ‘you spend £1300 per annum; the rest will not discharge the ordinary and necessary expenses, for that the longer you are abroad at that rate the worse you will find your estate at your return’. Half this expenditure ‘would keep as good a house at Lamport as the best gentleman in the county’. It was ‘absolutely necessary’ to repeat himself

42 The Ambition of a Young Baronet: Sir Thomas Isham of Lamport, 1657–1681

‘again and again’, Richardson declared, apologising for this unwelcome reminder of the facts. Clerke stressed the ‘necessity to contract expenses’ on 15 December, noting that one of the prime questions at a recent Oxford Enceania was ‘whether travelling be good for English gentlemen’.59 Sir Thomas enjoyed the spring of 1678 in Venice and Padua. All his Italian goods were ‘safe in the High Room and shall not be opened’, Clerke assured him.60 Though Chapman was now borrowing to pay his bills of exchange, his affairs were ‘in good condition’: ‘we are going to gravel the walks and make your garden monstrous fine and have planted walnut trees’. Living in hope, they even prepared ‘the bowls green for summer’. Clerke stressed his own parsimony at Lamport. This was not so much admonition to him, as ‘caution lest you should have brought yourself into straights, borrowing being an uncertain thing’. Satisfied that he had at last crossed the Alps, Richardson read the absent Baronet another stern lecture on 14 June: his estate could not ‘bear what was charged upon it by will and what your worship charges besides’. He was ‘not so good as my old master’ by around £1500 per annum; only his speedy return home could ‘make amends for all’. Sir Justinian had seen French as a ‘good ornament’ but ‘far inferior to Latin’, Clerke reminded him on 16 June. His affairs at home did not permit a stay in France to perfect the language.61 The new issue was Mary’s determination, long bored at home and now twenty-five, to marry. She had been a tirelessly deferential correspondent. Moreover, Sir Thomas felt close to her, his only remaining full sister. She was delighted when he declared that she was ‘the only friend you had to open your mind to’. On 12 June, she wrote candidly about the good character of the man she had chosen, Marmaduke Darrell, son of one of Sir Justinian’s old friends and of Sir Thomas’s godfather. His estate, £700, was small but her mother was resolved ‘not to cross me’; others certainly were richer but then, as he had said, ‘I must dispense with their debaucheries’. The problem was that Sir Justinian had laid strict instructions, preserving the entail, about how the dowry of £1000 promised Mary should be raised. It could not be ‘borrowed without you’, Richardson advised, ‘it being to be done upon your credit and upon your outlying lands’. Clerke thought the match ‘much below her deserts’. Nevertheless, frustrated by Sir Thomas’s delay in coming home, Mary told him that all had a free choice in this matter, ‘which must last for the whole life’. The couple married on 12 November 1678, on the promise of the dowry to follow.62 Still in Geneva in July 1678, Sir Thomas made a deal. Warned by Clerke that he could ‘make no more shifts’ and that his wealthy cousin in London, Samuel Garrard, was refusing to lend again, he purchased approval of a final year abroad by agreeing to ‘stint himself’. He would expect no more than £50 a month, seeking to live on that. ‘Only when you come home’, Clerke added, ‘you must get a lady with £6[000] or £7000, you must have

Anthony Fletcher 43

no less’. Lady Isham might then be persuaded, ‘to both your contents’, into ‘keeping up some form of house and servants at Shangton’. Meanwhile, he hoped for Sir Thomas’s salvation from ‘those sins which youth and quality, wealth and honour, may most incline you to when you are full of money’.63 Reminding him that, by his father’s shrewd will, ‘neither your land nor personal goods could be made responsible for your personal debts till all legacies be discharged’, Clerke stressed how crucial it was for the wayward Baronet to maintain this promised frugality.64 There was tension about Sir Thomas’s insistence that Chapman should risk the investment of restocking the Lamport lands with cattle that autumn. ‘He will shuffle with anybody sooner than you shall want’, declared Clerke in January 1679. Richardson’s budget until the next August showed a small deficit. Yet both of them confessed ‘how much good’ he had ‘done yourself by your late retrenchment’. In the midst of the crisis of the Popish Plot, Clerke was now thankful that Sir Thomas was not yet home, having heard what others had spent in the parliamentary elections. Noting that his place at Northampton had cost Lord Montagu £1000, Clerke derided the ‘horrid inconveniences for a little popular applause’ imposed upon the local gentry. He was sure ‘you would have been solicited to put in’. How would this vain young man possibly have resisted that temptation?65 Without a lively art market to absorb him in Paris, Sir Thomas started gambling heavily. Under normal circumstances, to gamble away £300 should be ‘no great matter for a gentleman of your estate’, Clerke advised, but he now simply did not have the money. Chapman was borrowing again. Sir Thomas should come home immediately. In the end, it was this financial catastrophe and family sorrow which brought him back to England. For, on 14 June 1679, he heard of his sister Mary Darrell’s death from smallpox. An old friend, John Eyre, added a warning, stressing ‘those jealousies concerning you daily whispered […] raised and increased by your long stay abroad’. ‘If ever now make haste’, he pleaded. By the end of August 1679, Sir Thomas had returned to Lamport.66 The hopes his seniors had of handing over responsibility at Lamport were dashed by his decision to spend most of his time in London, summoning Chapman to bring his coach there for periodic visits in state to his patrimony. He lodged next door to Loggan, at the Golden Head in Leicester Fields. Zaccheus, back in Oxford, worried about his erstwhile pupil. ‘I beg you to be very careful in whatever you do’, he wrote, ‘for all men’s eyes are upon you’. The time required ‘the greatest prudence and circumspection imaginable’. By late October, rumours about Sir Thomas’s course of life were rife: the story ‘in the country’, Clerke informed him, was that, after losing £1000 in Paris, he had gambled away another £1500 in London. ‘They tell the story with circumstances’, he warned, suggesting it must have reached his mother, who was reported ‘very pensive’. But Sir Thomas was heedless. The perfect excuse was that he was finding himself a wife.67

44 The Ambition of a Young Baronet: Sir Thomas Isham of Lamport, 1657–1681

The coda to this story is the succession of marriage plans in the years from 1679 to 1681. Sir Thomas rejected Mary, the thirteen-year-old daughter of Thomas Catesby, from across the fields at Ecton, with £5000 in money down and consummation at fifteen, out of hand.68 London offered bigger fish. The next abortive match was with Elizabeth Dashwood, daughter of a wealthy London alderman, who offered £12000 down. She was reported to be ‘very virtuously educated’ and ‘naturally brisk and cheerful’, who would prove to be ‘a very endearing consort if well managed’. Sir Thomas threw this opportunity away by pushing for too much money. He then alarmed his friends with an intrigue, through shady intermediaries, to obtain the hand of Barbara Chiffinch, whose father was the notorious Keeper of Charles II’s private closet. ‘The lady is a professed Papist’, objected Zaccheus strongly, warning of the dishonour to the family of marrying ‘a person of the Romish religion, the idolatry and superstition of which’ he should have learnt through his travels. Dr Fell, now Bishop of Oxford, told Sir Thomas severely on 29 July 1680, that he was pleased to hear that this ‘court amour’ had been abandoned. Praying for a ‘lady of virtue and parts’ who might reform the wayward heir to Lamport, Fell declared that ‘it is not the portion but the wife that makes the fortune’. Sir Thomas’s ambition, fully apparent throughout this whole tale, was now in full flood. He set his sights on Henrietta-Maria, Baroness Wentworth, who had an impeccable royalist background and a large fortune. His pursuit, without avail, of this splendid match, with the help of some new London friends Lord Deincourt and Sir Edwards Picts, became obsessive over some nine months. The downright refusal of another local girl, Ann Wyatt of Bugbrooke, whom he courted at home in late 1680, may shed light on the public reputation that the Baronet had now acquired. At the age of twenty-four, in April 1681, Sir Thomas’s affairs were in disarray. His ambition was now so notorious that his former servant, Mr Ogilvy, now serving the Sunderlands, could write that ‘my Lady Sunderland is very much persuaded that you design to be a Lord’. She could help him realise this, he alleged, without it costing him as much as he might have to pay elsewhere. However, Abraham Van den Bende, of St Martin-in-the-Fields, provided an alternative way forward. Offering his eighteen-year-old daughter Mary in marriage, he would pay a debt of £6800 for Sir Thomas, securing a mortgage on Shangton, and with his Hanging Houghton lands settled on her in return. A wealthy merchant, of Dutch origin, Van den Bende was effectively buying his way into English landed society. The wedding was arranged for 29 July. Sir Thomas had a beautiful wedding dress made for himself of white brocade, woven in silk and gold, now in the Victoria & Albert Museum.69 But Sir Thomas caught the smallpox, dying on the eve of the marriage.70 His legacy is at Lamport, where thousands of visitors admire the magnificent works of art, including beautiful inlaid marble tables and cabinets as well as paintings, on which Sir Thomas had lavished the family’s wealth.

Anthony Fletcher 45

In the main, Thomas Isham’s life until he inherited Lamport in 1675 was ordinary. His training in estate management was typical of that an heir might receive from a father if, in Sir Justinian’s case, more thorough than usual. His six years as the baronet surely amply matched any qualms his father may have suffered about whether his eldest boy was up to the role destined for him. Sir Thomas proved too arrogant, too opinionated, too pleasure seeking and too mercurial to be a successful and respected Northamptonshire landlord. His course of life, best explained as driven by ambition was, by the standards of his time and society, quite extraordinary. His seniors saw all the problems with him, they cajoled and protested, but they lacked the final authority to insist that Sir Thomas toed their lines. It was left to the clever, sober and responsible younger brother, Sir Justinian, the fourth Baronet, to restore the Isham estate and renown. Fortunately, he survived Sir Thomas by almost fifty years, which gave him ample time to complete the task.71

Notes 1 Sir Thomas Isham, The Diary of Thomas Isham of Lamport (1658–81), kept by him in Latin from 1671 to 1673 at his Father’s Command, ed. Sir G. Isham, Bt. (trans. N. Marlow: Farnborough, 1971) [hereafter Diary], 50–2. Studies that draw upon the evidence of Tom’s diary include B.S. Capp, ‘English youth groups and the Pinder of Wakefield’, Past & Present 76 (1977), 127–33; A.J. Fletcher, ‘Courses in politeness: the upbringing and experiences of five teenage diarists, 1671–1860’, TRHS 12 (2002), 417–30. 2 Diary, 50–2. 3 The correspondence of Bishop Brian Duppa and Sir Justinian Isham, 1650–1660, ed. Sir G. Isham, Bt. (Northamptonshire RS, 17, 1951), passim. 4 N. Pevsner, Northamptonshire (1973), 186–8: ‘Lamport Hall Guidebook’, 14. 5 Diary, 108, 112, 128–9. 6 Diary, 10–11; Fletcher, ‘Courses in politeness’, 418. For women’s classical education, see R. O’Day, Education and Society 1500–1800 (1982), 183–95; J. Kamm, Hope Deferred: Girls’ Education in English History (1965), 34–51. 7 Diary, 10–11. 8 Diary, 53. 9 Diary, 90–1. 10 Northamptonshire Record Office [NRO], Isham (Lamport) Collection [IC] 732: Justinian Isham to Thomas Isham, 1 June 1671. 11 NRO, IC 736: Edward Holland to Thomas Isham, 15, 20 July 1671. 12 NRO, IC 734: Sir Justinian Isham to his son Thomas, 11 July 1671. 13 NRO, IC 753: Edward Holland to Thomas Isham, 6 June 1672. 14 Sir Justinian had three daughters by his first wife, and five sons including Tom and a daughter by his second. 15 Diary, 173, 208. 16 Diary, 209–10. 17 Diary, 15–17, 173. 18 Diary, 29–30, 147–51. 19 Diary, 127, 145.

46 The Ambition of a Young Baronet: Sir Thomas Isham of Lamport, 1657–1681 20 Diary, 30–1, 61, 153, 159, 195, 201. For blood sports in the later seventeenth century, see E. Griffin, Blood Sport: Hunting in Britain since 1066 (New Haven, 2007), esp. chaps 9 and 10. 21 Diary, 31, 143, 165. 22 Diary, 99, 131, 235. 23 Diary, 151, 207–9. 24 Diary, 63–7, 99. 25 Diary, 99, 103. 26 Diary, 131. 27 Diary, 67, 78, 85,93, 109, 209. For this procedure see A.J. Fletcher, Reform in the Provinces (New Haven, CT, 1986), 87–158, 229–51. 28 Diary, 67, 71, 177. 29 Diary, 105, 133, 138–9, 163, 167. For gifts of venison in midland society see S.E. Whyman, Sociability and Power in Late-Stuart England (Oxford, 1999), 23–33. 30 Diary, 230–2. 31 Fletcher, ‘Courses in politeness’, 419. 32 NRO, IC 807, 809. 33 Diary, 35–6, 217–22. 34 NRO, IC 890, 896; Diary, 37. 35 NRO, IC 898, 900, 902. 36 NRO, IC 894, 897, 899, 908. 37 NRO, IC 903, 905–6, 908, 912–13. 38 NRO, IC 910, 918–19, 930–2; Diary, 37; Sir G. Isham, ‘A Catalogue of the Pictures at Lamport Hall’, 18; G. Tyack, ‘Loggan, David (bap. 1634, d. 1692)’, ODNB. 39 NRO, IC 937, 944, 975a. 40 NRO, IC 964. 41 Isham, ‘Catalogue of Pictures’, 12, 15. 42 NRO, IC, 964, 968. 43 NRO, IC 971, 1075, 1098; Diary, 66. 44 NRO, IC 973. 45 NRO, IC 974; Diary, 32–4. 46 NRO, IC 975–1197. On the elite Grand Tour, see e.g., J. Black, Italy and the Grand Tour (New Haven, 2003); idem, France and the Grand Tour (New Haven, 2003). 47 NRO, IC 1011, 1020, 1046. 48 Diary, 38; ‘Lamport Hall Guidebook’, 7. 49 NRO, IC 1014d: Notes on 55 ‘Paintings’. 50 Diary, 38–40. 51 Isham, ‘Catalogue of Pictures’, 1, 3, 7, 13, 15, 17. 52 NRO, IC 1057, 1062. 53 NRO, IC 980, 984. 54 NRO, IC 981, 983, 987, 989. 55 NRO, IC 992; Diary, 40. 56 NRO, IC 1048. 57 NRO, IC, 994, 1015–16. 58 NRO, IC 1009, 1021, 1058. 59 NRO, IC 1072, 1073. 60 For the High Room see ‘Lamport Hall Guidebook’, 12–14. 61 NRO, IC 1076(a), 1089, 1097, 1098. 62 NRO, IC 1027, 1096, 1101, 1130, 1133, 1145, 1147; Diary, 40–1. 63 NRO, IC 1109, 1113. 64 NRO, IC 1119.

Anthony Fletcher 47 65 66 67 68 69 70 71

NRO, IC 1147, 1156, 1160, 1161. NRO, IC 1175, 1181, 1185–93, 1197; Diary, 41–2. NRO, IC 1201–4; Diary, 42. NRO, IC 1161. VAM:175–1900: To view online see http://collections.vam.ac.uk/objectid/O127178. Diary, 42–50. Work is in hand by Miriam Grice on the career and family life of Sir Justinian Isham (1658–1730).

3 Robert Robertes and Little Cis: An Extraordinary Relationship Ralph Houlbrooke

The narrative of events reconstructed and analysed in this chapter is, in some respects, an ‘everyday story of country folk’, in this case residents of late Elizabethan Berkshire. It includes particularly vivid and detailed descriptions of quotidian occurrences, especially a death, and the dispute that followed it. The relationship on which the story hinges is nonetheless of a sort unfamiliar to historians of early modern England: a friendship between an elderly single man and a young orphan girl. The story derives much of its peculiar interest from this relationship. The detailed testimony of numerous witnesses throws light on various aspects of it, as well as upon the protagonists’ extensive network of kindred and acquaintance. Depositions taken in the course of proceedings in various judicial tribunals, especially the royal prerogative courts and the church courts, contain some of the most vivid and revealing evidence for the social history of early modern England, and have been exploited by several scholars, not least Bernard Capp.1 Many depositions concerning such commonly occurring causes of dispute such as courtship, tithes, and wills are rich in distinctive details of landscape, communities and individuals. Every so often, depositions brilliantly illuminate an exceptional relationship or situation. This is particularly true of the testimony given by witnesses in the court of the archdeacon of Berkshire in 1596 concerning the friendship between the elderly bachelor Robert Robertes and the young orphan Cicely White. In May 1596, proceedings were begun on behalf of Cicely White, then aged about eleven, against Henry, John, and Thomas, the three brothers of Robert Robertes, deceased, in the court of the archdeacon of Berkshire. Robert had died around midnight on 16 April. The question at issue was whether or not he had made a nuncupative will, that is, a will expressed by word of mouth but not approved by the testator in written form before his death. On Cicely’s behalf, it was claimed that Robert had made such a will, making her his executrix. Witnesses to this nuncupative will had been produced in the archdeacon’s court. The surviving filed testament takes the following form: Memorandum that Robert Robertes of Maidenhed within the parishe of Cookham in the Countie of Berckes yeoman the xvjth day of Aprill 1596 48

Ralph Houlbrooke 49

beinge sicke in body but of perfect minde and memory and then moved by some of his frendes there present to make his laste will and to dispose of his goodes declared and signified how he woulde have his goodes to be disposed and made his last will and testament nuncupative or by wordes of mouth onely in the presence of diuers honest witnesses in this manner and to this effect as followeth Inprimis he gave and bequeathed vnto John Westcot iijs iiijd and nominated him to be ouerseer of his will and the rest of his goodes and chattells whatsoeuer he gave and bequeathed vnto Cicely White and nominated and appointed hir full executrix of this his said will nuncupative. On 17 April, the day after Robert’s death, Henry White, possibly Cicely’s half-brother, had been granted administration of Robert’s estate during her minority. Robert’s three surviving brothers seem, however, to have claimed that no such will had been made and that they ought, as next of kin, to have the administration of the dead man’s estate.2 Although an orphan, Cicely White had been born into a prosperous Maidenhead family. The town of Maidenhead had grown up west of the bridge that carried the road from London to Reading over the Thames. This road, which in Maidenhead became the town’s high street, was the boundary between the two already long-established parishes of Cookham and Bray. In 1582, Maidenhead had been incorporated by royal charter with a warden, two bridge-keepers, and eight other burgesses. The main functions of the town were to serve travellers and act as a market for the surrounding area.3 Cicely’s father Jeffery, a mercer, had been one of the burgesses named in the borough’s 1582 charter. He died intestate in 1587, but the inventory of his estate (dated 26 December 1587) and the administration bond entered by his widow give valuable information about his business and his family. His inventory totalled £209 12s. Jeffery’s stock included an immense variety of wares, including many English and foreign cloths of diverse qualities, ribbon, thread, thimbles, stockings, salt, sugar and spices, dried fish, tallow, wax, candles, soap, paving tiles, pots, boxes, spades, bowstrings, two accidences (Latin grammar books), and sixteen catechisms. The total value of these goods was £65 3s 6d. Jeffery was owed £70 18s 8d by a total of no fewer than 161 customers, most of them in Maidenhead, Bray and Cookham, but some living further afield in places such as Wycombe or Windsor. Henry Cranshawe, the vicar of Bray, was prominent among these debtors, owing £2 7s 9d. The list included other leading inhabitants of Maidenhead and members of local gentry families. Of these debts, a substantial proportion, amounting to £32 18s 8d, were judged desperate or doubtful. Much bigger were Jeffery’s own debts, totalling £132 9s, to sixteen men, some of them Londoners, the majority of them suppliers of his wares, including a draper, a haberdasher, a mercer, two fishmongers,

50 Robert Robertes and Little Cis: An Extraordinary Relationship

a salter, and a seller of soap. Jeffery’s business assets, in the shape of stock and credits, amounted to £136 2s 2d, just £3 13s 2d more than the debts he owed. If however £32 18s 8d of the debts owing to him were truly irrecoverable, a small surplus would have become a negative balance of £29 5s 6d.4 Against this stood the rest of his estate. This may well have helped to underpin his credit, but was not a readily convertible source of business funds. The contents of Jeffery’s well-furnished house and some other goods totalled £70 18s 8d altogether. The house contained a hall, a parlour, a chamber over the hall, a guest chamber and other upstairs chambers, a kitchen and a workhouse. Besides beds, tables and chairs, together with abundant linen and tableware, the contents of the house included a suit of armour in the hall and painted cloths, a Bible, and a large service book in the main chamber. Jeffery’s small-scale farming operations were represented by two acres of corn and more in the barn, some hay, five hogs and a cow. These, together with a gelding and a mare, came to less than £7.5 A recent wide-ranging analysis of samples of early modern probate material has suggested that Jeffery’s situation was far from rare. ‘The fact that the majority of households had more debts than credits, and that a large percentage of these households actually had more debts than credits and moveable goods combined’, Craig Muldrew concludes, ‘is indicative of the way in which economic growth was “pushed” forward by credit, since it seems reasonable to assume that this gap between expenditure and income in credit was a result of continually higher levels of consumption than earnings.’ In order to expand his business Jeffery White both contracted substantial debts of his own, and forbore to demand immediate payment from many of his customers. His operation is a striking illustration of the importance of credit in the early modern local economy. (It is however possible that appraisers sympathetic to his widow under assessed the value of his assets, and that his underlying financial position was stronger than his inventory suggests.)6 Jeffery had been married at least twice. The most important condition of the administration bond entered into by Sybil, Jeffery’s widow, was that she should well and honestly nourish, instruct and bring up Anne, Robert, Joyce, Susan, Simon and Cicely, her six children by Jeffery, and Margaret, who was, as Sybil’s own will makes clear, Jeffery’s daughter by a previous marriage. The appraisers of her husband’s goods included a Jeffery White of Henley, who later helped to appraise Sybil’s own goods. He too was probably a child of her husband’s earlier marriage, as was the previously mentioned Henry White, administrator of Robert Robertes’s estate.7 Sybil’s guarantors were her brother, Robert Lutman of Hambledon in Buckinghamshire, and Robert Winch of Bray, possibly her brother-in-law, both yeomen. A Robert Winch was one of the two Maidenhead bridgemen in 1590 and among the more substantial contributors to the 1586 and 1594 lay subsidy instalments in both Cookham and Bray.8

Ralph Houlbrooke 51

Sybil did not long outlive her husband. Already sick and weak, she made her will on 12 May 1589. Remarkably, although the vicar of Bray, Henry Cranshawe, was present, it was not then written down, and strictly speaking she named no executor, even though she clearly directed that her brother Robert Lutman was to have the disposition of her goods, to see her honestly buried, her debts paid, and her children brought up. Within four days Sybil was dead and her goods had already been appraised by six men, including Cranshawe, Jeffery White of Henley and John White of London (perhaps the London fishmonger to whom Jeffery owed £25 5s, his biggest single debt.) The archdeacon’s official committed the administration of the goods to Lutman, stipulating that the six children be properly brought up with food, clothing and lodging ‘meete and decente for their degrees & callinges’. Sybil hoped that her goods would suffice to provide each of her six children with a portion of £6 13s 4d. She also left each of her daughters a gold ring. Anne, probably the eldest, who had already left home, was to have Sybil’s own wedding ring. Her inventory includes ‘a lyttle ringe with a stone for Cicely’. Her stepdaughter Margaret was to have her own mother’s ring.9 How had the mercer’s business fared during the eighteen months of Sybil’s management? The stock of wares was now worth £37 13s, just 58% of what Jeffery had left. We learn that it was distributed between a main shop and a shop or shops ‘at Market’, where there was a small amount of hardware and other goods amounting to £4 4s 4d. Sybil had cut to £9 18s 8d the debts owing to her (only 14% of those listed in Jeffery’s inventory), and the list of debtors to thirty-seven. This result may have been due in part to the writing off of desperate debts, but some individual debts had been substantially reduced. None of the outstanding ones was described as desperate. Debts owed stood at £76 4s, again only 58% of Jeffery’s. The net result of cautious management and retrenchment was however, sadly, that the business was running on a clear negative balance of £28 12s 4d, barely a pound less than the one Jeffery had left, when his ‘desperate’ debts are taken into account.10 Sybil had continued to live in the old house, where the stock of inventoried goods stood at £57 7s 2d, 78% of the value of her husband’s household inventory. The whole estate was valued at £104 19s 6d. Its net value after debts had been cleared would have been £28 15s 6d. This would not have been enough to pay Sybil’s bequests if it was a true total. But her orphaned children’s prospects did not depend solely on Sybil’s bequests. Her will, the two inventories, and the other probate documents give the impression that the young orphans had a number of potentially useful relatives. Besides their maternal uncle, Robert Lutman of Hambledon, these included members of what looks like a wider White network and some of the Winches. Both Robert, about fifteen at the time of his mother’s death, and Cicely, aged about four, remained in Maidenhead. As events were to

52 Robert Robertes and Little Cis: An Extraordinary Relationship

show, Robert White was more than willing to help his sister Cicely. The testimony of one witness, John Westcott, that Robert lived ‘honestly by his stocke’ at the age of twenty-two, suggests that he was by then trading independently.11 Cicely was taken in by a widow called Elizabeth Jervis, one of the witnesses to Sybil’s will, and probably a friend of hers. Elizabeth received Cicely as an orphan and freely gave her food and lodging for six years. According to one witness, the widow was ‘in stede of a mother to her’. Elizabeth Jervis lived in Maidenhead and had been born into the Robertes family. She had at least five brothers: John, Robert, Thomas, Henry, and William (who had died by 23 April 1585), and possibly a sister Alice. One witness deposed that he was well acquainted with ‘all the brothers & sisters … dwellinge within a mile of the house where all the said Robertes were born in Cookham’.12 John, of Cookham, yeoman, was probably the wealthiest of them. He appears in the surviving lists of Cookham contributors to the subsidy or subsidy instalment payments of 1586, 1594, 1598 and 1599, always paying on £3 in goods. He also held land. His will, made on 7 March 1603, was proved on 21 April 1604 and his inventory amounted to £211 9s 1d. (All taxpayers were by the 1590s grossly, if unequally, underassessed.)13 Elizabeth, who appears to have had no surviving children of her own, was a widow of substance. When she died in the summer of 1597, her movable estate was valued at £203 9s 6d. She followed a pattern common among widows in making bequests to numerous friends and kinsfolk, including many children of her surviving Robertes brothers, and the children of a Walter Jervis (probably the Walter Jarvis who was subsequently to be warden of Maidenhead (1604) and bridge-keeper in 1606 and 1611). In addition, she left ten pounds to be distributed to the poor at her burial, and forty shillings for four sermons, one to be preached at her funeral and the other three within a year. Elizabeth made John Robertes and Walter Jervis her executors.14 It was while he was living under his sister Elizabeth’s roof that Robert Robertes became acquainted with Cicely White. What sort of man was Robert Robertes? The court’s memorandum of his nuncupative will describes him as a yeoman, though a draft preamble penned for his will by Robert White at his deathbed calls him husbandman.15 John Westcot, a yeoman of the neighbouring parish of White Waltham, forty-nine years old at the time of the case, gave the fullest picture of the dead man.16 According to Westcot, Robert had been between fifty-six and sixty years of age at the time of his death. All his three brothers ‘had a familie of there owne to nourishe & kepe’. Yet Westcot described Robert as a bachelor. He was not a householder, even though he had been, according to Westcot, ‘well able to live of him self’. Robert had stayed a month altogether ‘otherwhiles’, i.e. from time to time, at Westcot’s house. Westcot admitted that he himself had owed Robert ten pounds at the time of his death, and that he had kept

Ralph Houlbrooke 53

thirty sheep of Robert’s to ‘halves’, which presumably meant splitting any profits made equally between the two men. He added that Robert had been ‘vnwilling in his life tyme to have anie thing sett downe in wrytinge, & yf he had lent a man money he wold have taken his word for it’. As well as owning some movable property, Robert had also been physically fit, able if necessary to travel twenty miles a day until he sickened. Westcot’s testimony presents a picture of a man who, for whatever reason, had preferred the life of a bachelor to the assumption of fully adult status and responsibilities as a married householder, despite his possession of adequate material means to fulfil the latter role.17 An inventory of Robert’s goods, dated 12 July 1596, valued his estate at £63 7s 8d. Rather more than half of his estate in terms of value consisted of some 178 sheep and lambs, together with wool and sheep skins. Most of the sheep and lambs were described as being in the keeping of eight different individuals. Thirteen wethers went ‘in the wood’. Ten pounds owed by John Westcot, and £9 16s 8d received on the sale of a steer and a bull made up the greater part of the remainder of the estate. Thirteen bushels of white peas (£1 6s 8d) and money received for twelve bushels of barley (£1 10s) provide the only indications of any engagement in arable farming. Taken together with John Westcot’s testimony, the inventory suggests that Robert may have relied for the greater part of his livelihood on a series of arrangements with local landholders for the pasturing of his stock.18 Witnesses produced on Cicely’s behalf deposed that relations between Robert and his brothers had long been cool. According to Robert Winch, the fifty-three year old yeoman of Bray whom we have already encountered as one of Sybil White’s guarantors, there had been no familiarity between them for ten or twelve years. Robert had never come to his brother John’s house when John made good cheer, even when requested to do so, despite the fact that the two had lived within three-quarters of a mile of each other. Thomas Godfrey, a thirty-four year old mercer of Maidenhead, went so far as to say that there had been enmity between the two of them for six years. Another witness, Richard Russell, testified that Robert had refused to pledge his brother John when Russell had drunk to him. Yet John Westcot, produced as witness by the surviving Robertes brothers, testified that though they dwelt apart, John had often drunk and played cards with Robert till about a month before Robert’s death. Westcot himself had been drinking in their company ten times in the previous six months. There is no suggestion that the testator had stood out in the local community as a misfit or a recluse. About nine months before his death, he had apparently gone to a feast given in the house of one Mylles of Burnham, on the other side of the Thames in Buckinghamshire. Perhaps Robert resented the relative lack of status that resulted from his position as a single man, and was consequently the more determined to maintain a sturdy independence in relation to his brothers.19

54 Robert Robertes and Little Cis: An Extraordinary Relationship

Robert had, however, lived for a long time in his sister Elizabeth Jervis’s house, but, probably some nine months before his death, he had fallen out with her. This meant he had subsequently lodged elsewhere, most recently with William Osburn, a victualler, in whose Maidenhead house he had died. On the way to the feast given by Mylles of Burnham about nine months before Robert’s death, Marian Chipney, the thirty-six year old wife of a Maidenhead brewer, asked Robert why he had left Elizabeth’s house. He answered ‘that he had taken great paynes for & under his said sister as her servant & yet not with standinge she grudged that he should brede vp anie cattle with hers’. Marian remarked that his sister would miss him. ‘Her cattle would miss him’, Robert had retorted.20 Cicely White was about eleven years old when Robert died. The friendship between them had blossomed while they had both been living under Elizabeth Jervis’s roof. Robert had delighted in young children, Westcot recalled, and Cicely had been very often in Robert’s company. He ‘did nowe and then playe with Cicilie White calling her his litle dowdle & would geve her a pece of an apple or give her drincke yf she came in place where he was’. Richard Russell, yeoman, concurred. For three years before his death, Robert ‘did love the said Cicely dearely & tenderly & did favour her aboue all others … calling her his dowdy & his Sis & vsing such courteous speaches of love towards her, as … did argue his great affection towards her’. Robert had carried Cicely up and down the town with him to dinner and supper and at various times he had entrusted money to her. Whenever at dinner or supper he had desired her company, he would be merry at her coming and say that those who had sent for her loved him. Thomas Godfrey added that Robert had called Cicely his lady, and Robert Winch deposed that Robertes had called Cicely White’s brothers and sisters his brothers and sisters, and that, at the sheep shearing before last, Robertes had begged a ewe lamb from him for Cicely.21 Marian Chipney, the brewer’s wife, who had talked with Robert on the way to the feast at Burnham, gave some of the most vivid testimony concerning Robert’s feelings towards Cicely. After explaining his departure from his sister’s house, Robert had added, sighing, ‘that he was sory for his poor wench meaninge Cicilie White for she would misse him, & further said that he manie tymes & oft had saved her breech from beatinge & had risen in his shirt out of his bed to save her when his said Sister would have beaten her’. Marian had remarked that it was well done to show such kindness to the fatherless and motherless. Robertes had responded ‘oh … she … hath bene so kind a child vnto me that I cannot chuse & further said that he could goe no whither, but the wench was willing to goe with him; and also … that she … while as she walked afield with him was greevouslie hurt, which was a great greefe vnto him and did sweare by his troth and wishe that he had had twice so much hurte himself as the said Cicilie had so she had scaped’.22

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Because Robert seemed to love Cicely so well, Marian Chipney had thought he must be her uncle. He had told Marian that he meant to ‘brede … vp a stocke’ for Cicely; ‘I have gotten her a lambe all redy & … yf it please God I see her bestowed I will be as kind as a father vnto her …’ There was a common report in Maidenhead, Marian added, that Robert had made Cicely executrix of his will. On Marian’s arrival there two years before she had asked the neighbours ‘what fellowe the said Robert Robertes was, goinge so plainlie as he did’, by which she presumably meant simply or unassumingly dressed. They had answered that ‘he did gather for somebody one daye’, and when Marian further enquired for whom, they had told her ‘Cicilie White yf he doth not marry’.23 The nature of the injury Cicely sustained while walking with her elderly companion remains obscure. We learn from John Westcot’s testimony, however, that a surgeon had cured her. Curiously (in view of Robert’s affection for the young girl, readily confirmed by Westcot), Robert had confessed that he neither had paid, nor would pay anything for the surgeon’s pains. Nor had he allowed his sister anything for Cicely’s maintenance.24 The recorded evidence that Robert Robertes made a nuncupative will was contained in testimony given by Richard Russell and Robert White.25 The depositions do not identify Robert Robertes’s mortal illness, but they do suggest that his sickness was a short one. On the Friday after Easter, 16 April 1596, he lay in bed in his lodging, an upper chamber in William Osburn’s house in Maidenhead, where he was to die around midnight. As so often happened during terminal illnesses in early modern times, a stream of visitors entered Robert’s chamber during the day. Early in the afternoon, the thirty-six year old yeoman, Richard Russell, and one John Butterfield were with the sick man and sent for his sister, the widow Elizabeth Jervis. She seems to have brought Cicely with her, and to have sent for Cicely’s brother Robert, who arrived shortly afterwards. It was Elizabeth Jervis who, according to a time-honoured formula, urged Robert Robertes to make his will: ‘Brother, dispose your goods according to your soules health & make your last will. Yf it please god to send you your health againe it is not the further from you.’ Robert responded by naming his old friend and landlord, John Westcot, as his overseer, bequeathing him 3s 4d for his pains. Elizabeth Jervis then asked whom he would make his executor. Robert answered ‘Sis’, meaning Cicely White, who stood by his bedside. In order to have his will written, Robert asked for John Hartwell, an honest man used in such cases. All his speeches, as Richard Russell put it, were such as might well become a man in sane memory. John Butterfield went to fetch Hartwell and Westcot. These two were later to be the principal witnesses against the will, produced by the surviving Robertes brothers. Their testimony does, however, continue the story told by Russell and White without directly contradicting what those two witnesses had deposed. Hartwell and Westcot were both men of substance.

56 Robert Robertes and Little Cis: An Extraordinary Relationship

Hartwell was probably the man of the same name who had been nominated as one of the two original bridge-keepers in the Maidenhead charter of 1582. He described himself as a white baker of Maidenhead and about fifty-two years old. Hartwell was a friend of both the families involved in the dispute. He deposed that he had known Cicely’s parents and that he was her godfather. A John Westcott became warden of Maidenhead in 1603, but there is some doubt that this was the same man as our John Westcot of White Waltham. Both Hartwell and Westcot had been contributors to the subsidy levied in 1594, paying on £3 goods. John Hartwell was chosen as overseer of their wills by Elizabeth Jervis and her brothers William and John Robertes, John Westcot by Elizabeth Jervis.26 Westcot, who had already been with Robert for two hours that morning, arrived first, shortly followed by Hartwell, who asked Robert ‘how he did’. Robert answered that he was sick. Hartwell asked the dying man why he had sent for him. According to Westcot, Robertes spoke a word or two in reply, not plainly, however, but inwardly and faintly. Westcot himself explained to Hartwell that he had been sent for to write the will. Hartwell thereupon exhorted Robertes to make his will and asked him whether he was willing to do so. He answered ‘yea’, whereupon Hartwell ‘complayned or signified that he saw nothing there readie to make his will withall’ whereupon Robert White ‘stepped home to his howse’ and fetched pen, ink and paper. Hartwell recalled that he had then asked White to write the will because his hand had been taken with such a shaking that he could not set or hold pen to paper. Because White confessed himself unable to ‘pen or conceive’ a will, Hartwell gave him directions, and he began a will as follows: In the name of God Amen I Robert Robertes of Maydenheade in the Countie of Berkes in the parish of Cookham husbandman, being sicke and diseased in my bodie, but being of perfite mind and memorie, thancks be to god, do make this my last will and testament in manner and forme following. First I give and bequeath my Sowle to almightie God and to Jhesus Christ his sonne trusting by the merits of his passion of his precious bludshedding to be saved at the last day and my bodie to be buried in the churchyard of Cookham. I give and bequeath … After White had written this preamble or ‘proheme’ he and Hartwell took the paper to Robert Robertes, read it to him, and asked him to declare what goods he would bequeath and to whom. ‘I can not tell’ he answered. Elizabeth Jervis urged him to speak and set something down.27 John Hartwell, approaching Robert’s bedside, asked how he would dispose of his goods. Robert answered that John Westcot should be his executor, saying that he should have ten groats for his pains. Elizabeth Jervis corrected him: ‘Executour brother? you meane overseer’, a role for which

Ralph Houlbrooke 57

the small sum of ten groats was indeed a more appropriate reward. Robert assented. Hartwell asked who the other overseer should be, and Robert answered ‘my brother’. Asked which, he responded ‘John, who ells?’ What would he give Cicely White, Elizabeth Jervis asked him. Forty shillings, he answered. Where was it? In ‘a budget’ (that is a bag), was the reply. He either could not tell where the budget was, however, or said that it was lost. After this he lay still for several minutes and answered no questions.28 Elizabeth Jervis did her best at various times to draw Robert’s attention to Cicely’s presence. She told Cicely to ask the dying man how he did. When he made no answer, the widow asked her brother ‘why doe you not speake to the wench’. He responded ‘what should I saye to her’. Reminded of her presence again, he said ‘oh my Sis I thinke thou wilt lose one of thy best frends’. During the long pause after he had been questioned about the whereabouts of the bag, Elizabeth Jervis opened his tightly clasped hand and put Cicely’s into it. Asked again what he would give her, Robert answered five pounds. Where was it? She had it already, he said. But Cicely, asked whether she had any money of Robert’s, said no. At some point, according to his own testimony, Westcot asked Robert whether he would give Cicely his steer and his bull. No (he replied), he had something else to give her.29 After this interrogation, Robert turned away, and ‘ratled or made a noise’, troubled by phlegm in his throat. ‘O Lord, Robert White’, John Hartwell said, ‘yow see this man … is past memorie, and senselesse’. Everybody save Westcot and Hartwell then left the room, in the hope that Robert might say more to them alone than he would say before the rest of the company. John Hartwell claimed that he and Westcot ‘iointly and seuerallie’ tried to make Robert declare how he would dispose of his goods, but he only answered ‘O lord what shall I doe?’ At five o’clock, Westcot left him, judging that he was ‘in extremitie of sicknes and … past parfit remembraunce’.30 Among Robert’s visitors that afternoon was the forty-four year old gentleman, Henry Emylie, or Emley. A member of the staff of the Exchequer in London, he had moved to Nettlebed from London some twelve years beforehand. Breaking his journey to London at Osburn’s house, where he had stayed before, he was asked by his host to step upstairs and to try to persuade Robert to make his will. He did so, but found Robertes unable to speak properly. Seeing the state Robert was in, Emley urged those present to pray for him, saying that he was past sense and memory.31 Much later, some time after nine o’clock at night, Joan, the thirty-year-old wife of Henry Hill, a saddler of Maidenhead, sitting in the chamber by Robert, together with another woman, the widow or goodwife Woods (who had died by the time the case came to court), heard him ask if his sheep had come. She requested Thomas Chambers, like Hartwell a white baker of Maidenhead, also sitting in the room, to go to Robert: the dying man had ‘somewhat in his minde that he would geve awaye’, for he was talking of sheep, and Chambers would do well to ask him who should have them,

58 Robert Robertes and Little Cis: An Extraordinary Relationship

which he did. Robert answered ‘White’. Questioned by Joan Hill, who thought Robert had said ‘Helen White’, Chambers answered ‘no it is the little wench Cis at widowe Jervis’, to which Joan responded, ‘by the masse yf there were one to sett it downe in wryting the wench might have all his shepe’. After these words, Robert held up his hands and said ‘mercy lord mercy … Lord have mercy vpon me’. According to Chambers, however, Robert had been a man ‘past all remembrance’ from around nine o’clock until eleven o’clock or midnight, when he died. Robert’s enquiry as to whether his sheep had come had been among his ‘light speeches’.32 Judicial proceedings to determine whether or not Robert Robertes had indeed made a will began formally on Wednesday 5 May, less than three weeks after his death. They took place in the court of the archdeacon of Berkshire, at its normal venue on the Berkshire side of the Thames, near Oxford’s southern bridge. The presiding official at this time was Henry Marten, appointed in 1593 after gaining his doctorate in laws the previous year. A fellow of New College in Oxford, he had an outstandingly successful career as a civil lawyer ahead of him, although after giving the first two Stuart kings good service, he was to find himself increasingly at odds with Caroline innovations in church and state.33 His son, notoriously, was to take opposition to the point of regicide. In 1596, however, it was the still young Dr Marten who appointed the somewhat obscure Chad or Ched Smith curator of Cicely White.34 Smith, in turn, appointed Lister and Marten as proctors to act on her behalf in the forthcoming cause. This was officially described as a ‘business testamentary or of probate of the nuncupative testament of Robert Robertes of Maidenhead … promoted by Ched Smith, legitimately constituted guardian during the suit of Cicely White of Maidenhead aforesaid executrix of the aforesaid nuncupative testament’ against the deceased’s brothers Henry Robertes, John Robertes and Thomas Robertes in particular, and all others claiming to be interested in general. Chad Smith offered an allegation in writing in the presence of Henry White and Roger Jones, bachelors of laws, proctors for the Robertes brothers. Marten admitted the allegation, and the case proceeded through its formal stages. Between Wednesday 5 May and Wednesday 14 July there was a weekly entry relating to the case in the court book except on 2 June, when the court does not appear to have sat. The proceedings were for the most part unremarkable: they included the presentation of a materia exceptiva on behalf of the Robertes brothers, challenging Chad Smith’s case; of additional positions, that is material points supplementing their original claims, by both sides, and the production of witnesses for both parties. 35 When on 19 May Mr Lister produced Robert White as a witness for the will, the proctor for the Robertes brothers not surprisingly objected, above all because he was Cicely’s brother. (John Westcot testified that Robert White had not only borne Cicely brotherly affection but that he had ridden to

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Reading and Oxford before and after the beginning of the suit to seek counsel and advice for Cicely for the proof and confirmation of the will. Indeed, he had heard one of John Robertes’s proctors say that Robert White would have retained him for his sister had he not been spoken to already by the Robertes brothers.) On 7 July, Lister alleged that some of the deceased’s goods had already perished or been dissipated since his death, above all because nobody had proper authority for their administration. To prevent the further dissipation of the estate, he asked for the sequestration of the goods during the suit. Marten warned both Chad Smith and John Robertes to produce inventories, which they did the following week.36 After that session, there is no further record of the case in the court act book for over three months. Meanwhile, however, no doubt encouraged by Henry Marten, the parties reached a settlement during the vacation that was, very exceptionally, entered in the archdeaconry will register. The lengthy indenture of agreement is dated 27 August 1596. It explains that, although much money had been spent, the suit remained undecided. For the avoidance of further charges the parties had submitted to the judgement of four arbitrators: Richard Powle, Henry Newberie, Thomas Goad, gentleman, and Richard Winch, yeoman, who had achieved an accord. The Robertes brothers undertook to signify before the next court day their consent to the probate of the nuncupative will in Cicely’s favour and (at the request and expense of Chad Smith and Henry White) to do everything reasonable that should be necessary to expedite it. They were however also assigned a share of the estate valued at £33 7s 10d, or over half of the whole. This included money John Robertes had already received from the sale of the steer and the bull, 42 sheep and lambs, a quantity of wool, four pounds of the sum owed to Robert Robertes by John Westcott, the peas and barley, some sheets and some clothes. The parties set their hands to the indenture. On 13 October, Marten delivered definitive sentence upholding the nuncupative will.37 Like many testamentary cases, this one had clearly been difficult to decide. Two witnesses were normally sufficient for the probate of a nuncupative will, but the Robertes brothers’ proctor’s objection to Robert White’s production as a witness in his sister’s cause was quite understandable. Although the witnesses insisted that the deceased had been in his right mind when he made his very brief nuncupative dispositions, his subsequent loss of mental capacity, manifested in incoherent and confused utterances, had subsequently been swift. Robert Robertes had made much of his little friend when alive, yet his failure to give her material assistance had been quite striking. There were some grounds for doubting whether he had really had a firm intention of making her the sole or main beneficiary of his estate. Under the circumstances, a compromise settlement by arbitration was probably the best possible outcome. Cicely was almost certainly still alive on 26 July 1623: the sister Cicely whom Robert White the elder of Maidenhead, yeoman, mentioned in the

60 Robert Robertes and Little Cis: An Extraordinary Relationship

will he made that day. As Brian Boulter has shown, more of the Maidenhead burgesses were recruited from the town’s innholders than from any other social group. A Robert White, almost certainly our man, had been three times bridgeman of Maidenhead. His brother-in-law John Rockhall was probably the man who became bridgeman in 1625 and 1631, and warden in 1638.38 Twenty-seven years after the dispute over Robert Robertes’s will, Robert White would have been approaching fifty. He appears to have done well, since he was able to make generous provision for five children out of the overplus of the lease of the Saracen’s Head in Maidenhead. There is no mention of his brother Simon, who had perhaps died by this time, but Robert left four sisters a pound each per annum from the same source, as well as a gold ring. Only Cicely was mentioned by her forename alone.39 In her late thirties, Robert Robertes’s ‘little Dowdle’ lived among an extensive kindred close to her birthplace. She had not suffered the uprooting experienced by many of those who lost parents in early childhood. But, like her old friend Robert Robertes, she had apparently not married or set up a household of her own. This story, pieced together from different classes of record in the archive of the archdeaconry of Berkshire, holds interest for legal, social, and economic historians. The English church courts probably heard thousands of cases about testaments and legacies each year in Elizabeth I’s reign.40 Such cases formed one of the most important elements of their business. But the outcome of very few other cases is as fully and clearly documented as is that of the dispute over Robert Robertes’s will. It was the duty of the courts to ascertain and uphold the last wills of the dead, but where the wishes of the deceased were as unclear as they were in this case, a settlement by arbitration was a sensible and realistic solution. We know that large numbers of testamentary cases were settled peacefully, but the terms of such settlements have very rarely survived.41 The suit concerning the estate of Robert Robertes is a classic example of a common type of testamentary case, in which the next of kin contested the claims of an outsider on the ground of the invalidity of an alleged will. Such cases could cause extreme resentment and bitterness. The relative ease and speed with which this case was settled, and the fact that Marten’s handling of it did not (it seems) provoke an appeal, probably owed a good deal to the fact that the parties shared friends in Maidenhead society. Elizabeth Jervis’s loyalties were divided. She clearly tried to promote Cicely’s interests at her brother Robert’s deathbed. Her other brothers may have thought that she was acting at their expense. But if so there seems to have been no lasting rift: she made her brother John executor of her own will the very next year. Witnesses gave a vivid, almost classic, account of Robert’s final hours: of his numerous visitors, the efforts made to get him to declare his will, and of the onset of his delirium. Joan Hill, the saddler’s wife’s exclamation ‘by

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the masse’, with which she expressed her frustration that nobody remained to record what may have been Robert’s last coherent utterances concerning his property, speaks eloquently if enigmatically of one woman’s ambivalent attitude in face of religious change. At the same time, John Hartwell’s testimony contains an account of a procedure that many historians suspect was common – the framing of a will’s preamble by a scribe, without reference to the testator – though one rarely comes across a description as clear as the one in this case.42 Nuclear families, their formation and dissolution, have attracted more attention from historians of early modern demography and social structures than have those individuals who, through choice or lack of opportunity, remained single all their lives. Orphans, bachelors, and spinsters have on the whole remained less visible than the married, the widowed, and children in families. Historical demographers’ technique of aggregative back projection has revealed a peak in lifetime celibacy during the seventeenth century. This has plausibly been attributed, first and foremost, to adverse economic circumstances. The possibility that the single state was for many individuals a positive choice has been considered, but principally in relation to women.43 Robert Robertes presents us with an example of a man who probably had sufficient means to set up his own household but did not do so. We can only guess at the reasons for his not following the common pattern. They may have included a lack of social aspirations and sexual drive, though even when he was in his mid-fifties some observers considered it possible that he might still marry.44 He seems to have shunned full economic independence. His seeming aversion to risk and lack of energy or initiative stand in conspicuous contrast with Jeffery White’s readiness to incur huge debts and extend credit to a host of customers in order to expand his business. Robert appears to have preferred to share the management of his stock with a variety of other individuals, or even to entrust animals to their care, rather than maintain a viable land holding of his own. How common was this pattern of economic behaviour among small property owners? His readiness to work as his stronger-minded sister’s servant, hoping that she would pasture his stock with hers, is particularly striking. Orphans are another large social group or category about whom we know relatively little. Investigation of their lot has focused above all on institutional arrangements for their care, education and employment, whether in hospitals and workhouses or by means of poor law apprenticeship.45 ‘Parental deprivation in the past’ was studied by Peter Laslett in a pioneering ‘note’ based on local population listings, but such sources almost certainly tend to mask the presence of the ‘fatherless and motherless’ as distinct from those children who had lost only one parent.46 Cicely White is an interesting example of a ‘fatherless and motherless’ child, orphaned but by no means friendless or destitute. She had prospects, which, although

62 Robert Robertes and Little Cis: An Extraordinary Relationship

limited, were probably better than those facing the majority of children of her age in England at that time. These prospects were enhanced by her friendship with the elderly bachelor Robert Robertes. In him she found a benefactor who seems to have been in key respects childlike as well as a lover of children. A friendship between an elderly man and a young girl would today be regarded as something out of the ordinary, and would probably not be encouraged. The testimony given in this case does not record any of the fears, suspicion or disapproval that such an attachment would generate in the very different climate of early twenty-first century Britain. The relationship nevertheless seems to have been an exceptional one. In thousands of court cases and personal records of the early modern period I have never come across another one quite like it. Marian Chipney thought at first that Robert Robertes must be Cicely’s uncle. Kinship would have made their close acquaintance understandable: but Robertes was not Cicely’s uncle, godfather, or grandfather. We can recover their story only because Robert’s brothers went to law to overturn a nuncupative will that favoured his young friend at the expense of his closest kindred. We know their friendship only through the words of witnesses. What those witnesses did not see, we cannot know. The relationship remains in some respects an enigmatic one. Witnesses gave an exceptionally detailed and revealing account of Robert Robertes’s deathbed and of the making of his nuncupative will. The settlement of the subsequent court case is unusually well documented. Abundant probate material gives us an outstandingly full picture of Cicely White’s family circumstances and her father’s business as a mercer in a small market town. The two protagonists in this story, an elderly bachelor and a young orphan, belong to relatively poorly documented social categories. All these elements make their story interesting. But it is their relationship, an exceptional one in the eyes of those who witnessed it, and without a close parallel yet found in early modern records, that makes it extraordinary.

Notes 1 Especially Bernard Capp, When Gossips Meet: Women, Family and Neighbourhood in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2003). 2 Reading, Berkshire Record Office [hereafter BRO], D/A1/13, 60; D/A1/111/114; D/A2/c155, fo. 118v. 3 B. Boulter, Maidenhead in the Early Modern Period (presented for Certificate in Local History, Oxford University Department for External Studies, 1985), 1, 5, 23–6; Calendar of the Patent Rolls, Elizabeth I, vol. IX, 1580–1582, ed. A. Morton (1986), 195. 4 Ibid., 195; BRO, D/A1/220/126. 5 Ibid., loc. cit. 6 C. Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, 1998), 117–18.

Ralph Houlbrooke 63 7 BRO, D/A1/220/126A, D/A1/133/124. Evidence from two sources suggests that Jeffery White of Henley was probably a son of Jeffery of Maidenhead’s earlier marriage. First, the will that Jeffery White of Henley, mercer and apothecary, made on 2 November 1614, which contains the following legacies: ‘to John White my Brother five shillings And to Robert White my Brother one shilling and to Margaret my Sister five shillings And to Jeffery White the Sonne of Henry White deceased five shillinges and to every Sister of the halfe blood sixe pence apeece (my italics)’. Margaret was almost certainly the Margaret identified in Sybil’s will as a daughter of her husband’s earlier marriage. The deceased Henry was probably the Henry White who appears as administrator of Robert Robertes’s goods. The second source is an entry in Sybil’s inventory: ‘Item a gowne that was my fathers xvjs and a blacke friseadowe coate xs a dublet of taffaty vjs and a dublet besides at xvjd’. Since Jeffery was one of the appraisers, it seems likely that the words are his. Another entry referring to ‘all my mothers apparell of wollen vnbequeathed’ is ambiguous, but is more likely to have referred to his stepmother’s apparel than to that of his own long dead mother. See National Archives (hereafter TNA), PROB/11/145, fo. 473; BRO, D/A1/133/124A. 8 BRO, D/A1/220/126, D/A1/133/124A; Boulter, Maidenhead, 45; TNA, E 179/74/244, m. 2r–v, E 179/74/271, m. 1r–v. 9 BRO, D/A1/133/124, D/A1/220/126. 10 BRO, D/A1/133/124a, b. 11 BRO, D/A1/133/124a, b; D/A2/c155, fo. 111 (where Robert deposed that he had lived in Maidenhead since his birth), 114r, 116r. Robert gave his own age as 22 in 1596; the estimate of Cicely’s age was given by John Westcot. 12 Ibid., fos 114v–115r, 118v; D/A1/12, fos 17v–18r, D/A1/13, 168–9. 13 TNA, E 179/74/244, m. 2r, E 179/74/271, m. 1r, E 179/74/280, m. 2r, E 179/74/ 282; BRO, D/A1/13, 1254, D/A2/c155, fo. 130 (for the statement by Thomas Godfrey, a mercer of Maidenhead and probably warden of the town in 1596, that ‘he is three pounds goods in the subsidie book & worth above xxli all his debts paid’); R. Hoyle, Tudor Taxation Records: A Guide for Users (1994), 29–31; Boulter, Maidenhead, 45. 14 D/A1/13, 168–9; Boulter, Maidenhead, 45. 15 BRO, D/A2/c155, fo. 117r. 16 Ages cited are those given by the witnesses under examination. 17 BRO, D/A2/c155, fos 113r, 114v, 116r; D/A1/12, fos 383–4. My description of Robert as ‘elderly’ takes account of L.A. Botelho’s recent opinion that ‘the elderly poor were considered old at approximately age 50’, i.e. six years younger than Westcot’s minimum estimate of the age of the more prosperous Robert: see her Old Age and the English Poor Law, 1500–1700 (Woodbridge, 2004), 12. 18 BRO, D/A1/111/114b. 19 BRO, D/A2/c155, fos 110r–111r, 115v–116r, 129r, 130v–133r. 20 Ibid., fos 110r–113r, 133r–v. 21 Ibid., fos 110r–113r, 114v–115r, 129r–132r. 22 Ibid., fo. 133r–v. 23 Ibid., fos 132r–133v. 24 Ibid., fo. 114v. 25 Ibid., fos 110r–113r. 26 Ibid., fos 113r–v, 116v–117r; CPR Elizabeth I, IX, 195; Boulter, Maidenhead, 45; BRO, D/A1/12, fos 17v–18, D/A1/13, 168–70, 1254; TNA, E179/74/271, mm. 1v, 4v. 27 BRO, D/A2/c155, fos 113r–v, 116v–117r.

64 Robert Robertes and Little Cis: An Extraordinary Relationship 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

35

36

37

38 39

40

41 42

Ibid., fos 113v, 117r–v. Ibid., fos 113v–114r, 115v, 117v. Ibid., fos 114r, 117v–118r. Ibid., fos 118r, 125v–127r. Ibid., fos 121v, 133v–134r. The widow Woods had also been present in the afternoon: Ibid., fo. 115v. See J.S. Hart Jr, ‘Marten, Sir Henry (c.1561–1641)’, ODNB. Chad Smith, yeoman of Maidenhead in the parish of Bray, made his will on 10 Mar. 1602/3. Joan Hill testified in answer to interrogatories put in by the Robertes brothers’ proctors that Richard Russell ‘was at the tyme of his production & nowe is tenaunt to Ched Smith’. See BRO, D/A1/13, 1150 and D/A2/c155, fo. 134r. BRO, D/A2/c36, fos 215, 222, 226, 230v, 234v, 235r, 241r, 247v, 248r, 253r, 257v, 262v, 267r; D/A2/c38, fos 3v–4r. Lister may have been one of two men named Robert Lister, both BCL, of Magdalen College; Marten may have been William Martin (born c.1554), BCL, of New College. White was probably Henry White, BCL (born c.1559), of New College; Jones was probably Roger Jones, BCL (c.1566–c.1644), of New College, who became registrar of the Oxford Chancellor’s court: See J. Foster, Alumni Oxonienses, 1500–1714 (Oxford, 1891–2), vol. II, 828, vol. III, 918, 981, iv. 1614. BRO, D/A2/c36, fos 234v–235r, 267r; D/A2/c38, fos 3v–4r; D/A2/c155, fo. 115r. Eleven men were involved in the appraisal of the goods listed in the inventory, D/A1/111/114b. BRO, D/A1/12, 381–4. The first three arbitrators were probably all members of minor gentry families. For the Newberys of Waltham St Lawrence, including a Henry, and Richard Powle of Shottesbrooke, who became registrar of the court of Chancery, see VCH Berks, vol. III, ed. W. Page and P.H. Ditchfield (1923), 161, 181, 183. For wills of men of the same names, all gentlemen, see TNA, PROB 11/117 (30 Wood), PROB 11/123 (31 Lawe), and PROB 11/154 (97 Barrington). Richard Winch was one of the assessors of the 1594 subsidy in Bray: TNA, E 179/74/271, mm. 1r, 2r–v. Boulter, Maidenhead, 14, 45. BRO, D/A1/16, 59–60 (copy of a will proved in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury because the deceased had possessed goods in different dioceses). Two of the ‘sisters’ mentioned in Robert’s will cannot be identified with confidence as daughters of Jeffery and Sybil. One of them may have been Robert’s half-sister Margaret. Administration of the goods of an Anne White of Maidenhead had been entrusted to her brother Robert as early as 14 July 1593, though at that point our Robert would have been only about eighteen, rather young to be entrusted with the administration of an intestate’s estate: BRO, D/A1/12, fo. 109. For statistics summarising the business of a few courts, see R.A. Marchant, The Church under the Law. Justice, Administration and Discipline in the Diocese of York, 1560–1640 (Cambridge, 1969), 62, 68, 110; R. Houlbrooke, Church Courts and the People during the English Reformation 1520–1570 (Oxford, 1979), 274–7, and M. Ingram, Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England, 1570–1640 (Cambridge, 1987), 68. Houlbrooke, Church Courts, 276–7. The extent to which preambles reflect the influence of the scribe rather than the convictions of the testator has now been discussed in a very large number of books and articles. But see in particular M. Spufford, Contrasting Communities. English Villagers in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Cambridge, 1974),

Ralph Houlbrooke 65

43

44 45

46

321–5, and J.D. Alsop, ‘Religious preambles in early modern English wills as formulae’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 40 (1989), 19–27. R. Schofield, ‘English marriage patterns revisited’, Journal of Family History 10:1, 2–20, esp. 14–16; J. Spicksley, ‘A dynamic model of social relations: celibacy, credit and the identity of the “spinster” in seventeenth-century England’, in H. French and J. Barry (eds), Identity and Agency in England, 1500–1800 (Basingstoke, 2004), 106–46; A.M. Froide, Never Married: Singlewomen in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2005). Marian Chipney’s deposition, BRO, D/A2/c155, fo. 133v. See section on ‘The apprenticeship of pauper children’, in S. Hindle, On the Parish? The Micro-Politics of Poor Relief in Rural England c. 1550–1750 (Oxford, 2004), 191–223. P. Laslett, Family Life and Illicit Love in Earlier Generations. Essays in Historical Sociology (Cambridge, 1977), 160–73.

4 Punishing Words: Insults and Injuries, 1525–1700 Paul Griffiths

For almost all people sitting low down on social ladders there is something quite satisfying in turning the tables on people above them with a cutting wisecrack or slur. Bernard Capp, along with others, has shown us how words helped to settle scores four centuries or so ago. Bickering neighbours traded wounding words that could burn holes in self-esteem like acid. Wordsmiths sat around alehouse tables (and elsewhere) cracking jokes and making up razor-sharp rhymes and ditties about their betters, lapping up the transgressive thrills that can make forbidden pleasures seem doubly exciting.1 This much we know, but this essay focuses on insults that were drawn from penal cultures, when people with chips on their shoulders insulted others using images that called to mind unfortunates dangling on gallows, or sitting in shame in stocks. Thomas Frisby, from a Leicestershire village, landed in trouble in 1626 for ‘wishinge’ that his parson was ‘hanged for catechisinge’. ‘Thowe art a haglet’, Richard Black scoffed at his minister in Rothley (also in Leicestershire), ‘a good mr woodcocke and one worthie to be whipped owt of churche with a dogg whippe’.2 Like these Midland wags, in what follows we see how people with little but right, wit, or cheek on their side borrowed something ‘official’ to lampoon and lambast an authority, or a neighbour who was not in their good books. ‘You old jade’, a Dorchester widow jeered at a near neighbour in 1632, ‘thou will be in Bridewell before me’.3 Such outbursts show how penal symbols came to mind when people reached for insults, and this should be no surprise since they were often put on display in full public view, and could be both dramatic and gory. All over the land bodies dangled from gibbets for days on end as visual words of warning. Few other things made more awful impressions on the minds of people, already used to seeing power put on view at executions, in processions and in clothing. One Norwich witness recalled overhearing a 66

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conversation between two or three men who stood chatting in the busy city market in Autumn 1549. Like so many other shoppers, the men looked up the hill at Robert Kett’s body still hanging from the castle walls after his execution, where it would remain for some time to come, one musing ‘Oh Kette God have mercye uppon thy sowle’. 4 Political messages were more likely to be seen than read. Anything associated with punishment was fair game for verbal sharpshooters, including the much maligned hangman. ‘Whyte lyvered rascall’, a Nantwich labourer roared at a churchwarden who was trying to get him to calm down after he stormed into the church and grabbed ropes from bellringers in 1641, and you ‘hathe hanged three men’ he added, almost appropriately bearing in mind the long ropes hanging down from the bells.5 Other habits of mind also show that punishment loomed large in mental landscapes, even helping people to get from one place to the next, or point something out. Streets, lanes, stairs, ditches, gates and pools (and other landmarks) were all named after a punishment with which they were linked by place or use: ‘whipstreete’ in Ipswich, for instance; ‘old gaole lane’ in Dorchester; ‘hanging ditch’ in a Cheshire village; ‘hangmans pitt’, ‘gallowes lane’, and ‘bridewell staires’ in Gloucester. There was also a ‘bridewell staires’ in London, down by the riverside; ‘castle hill’ in Bridgnorth (and anywhere else where a castle loomed high over a town); Gallowtree gate in Leicester, with a pair of stocks and a civic cross close by; ‘gallows poole’ in Chester; ‘ducking pond’ in Clerkenwell; while ‘blynd lane’ in Marlborough might show how a local lock-up (the ‘blyndhowse’) helped people to get around the town. The gallows were one point on the map in a rogation tide procession along Colchester’s fringes.6 Towns and villages all over the land depicted order and obedience in a sequence of linked visual symbols. These included not only guildhalls, that became grander as time passed, and stylish town-houses that were meant to impress, but also streets, crosses, conduits, gates, walls, proclamations pinned to posts, and the tools of punishment. These might vary from place to place, but more often than not they included stocks, cages, pillories, whipping posts, and ducking stools. The possession of an efficient and clean-seeming pair of stocks or pillory was intended to give the message that this was a place with clout, where authority counted. It made sound sense, then, to put a pair of stocks next to the ‘quest house in Holborne’, or behind Hicks Hall in built-up Middlesex, where punishments were dished out all year round, by justices sitting in sessions.7 Public punishment functioned as a warning sign to toe the line, even when the tools of the trade were not being used. The constable ‘and other inhabitants’ of Southwell in Nottinghamshire claimed that the ‘want’ of a cucking stool in 1654 ‘hath emboldened and encoureged many lewd and turbulent women to continue in their unquiett and unpeaceable behavior’.8

68 Punishing Words: Insults and Injuries, 1525–1700

Augmenting their visibility, punishments were often strategically placed next, or near, to key landmarks. We find stocks, pillories, whipping posts or ‘public whipping stocks’ close by each other and nearby crosses, conduits, pumps, docksides, and town halls; by the ‘mynster gate’, ‘little wicket’, and ‘aylegate’ in Gloucester; or in the middle of crowded ‘publick markett place[s]’.9 Walking up and down streets and lanes, people could hardly fail to notice, or bump into, a place of punishment. Cages and stocks stood menacingly along busy St John Street, Cow Cross, and Charterhouse Lane on London’s northern fringes. A cage was ‘sett upp’ in ‘the midst of the streete’ in one London ward in 1615 and in ‘open streets’ elsewhere. Another stood out amongst the crowd that milled around Charing Cross in 1602 (‘with the bedels chamber over’ it). A pillory perched on top of a hill in Ipswich was impossible to miss, while there was a whipping post ‘in the cliff’ on the edges of Lewes.10 There were few more prominent visual cues for viewers to cling to the straight and narrow and tools of punishment were often large and heavy objects, designed to make images stick in the mind. One of Winchester’s ducking stools weighed four stone thirteen pounds; an Ipswich sawyer picked up a few shillings for ‘sawinge of 45 foote [of wood] for the coocking stoole’. And local authorities all over the land spent money on ‘cullering’ stocks, whipping posts, and pillories to make them even more eye-catching.11 These material semiotics were integral to the maintenance of law and order and courts came down hard on anyone who ‘cut’ or ‘pulled down’ pillories or chopped up the stocks: as happened in 1591, when one of Wolverhampton’s ‘comon drunkards’ knocked on the constable’s door not long after his wrecking spree was over and cheekily asked him for ‘a freshe payre of stockes’.12 Uneasiness with this optic order helps to explain why local authorities all over the land were concerned about the security and outward appearances of penal ‘engines’, for example, by spending money on locks for stocks or to keep them spick and span with a fresh lick of paint.13 Punishment loomed large in both material and mental landscapes. Located in buzzing marketplaces, punishments were normally timed to draw large crowds in the peak hours of buying and selling in the middle of the day in ‘full markett’; ‘open market’; or at ‘the height of the market’; or sometimes on a ‘fayre day’, where half-stripped offenders were ‘publiquely’ or ‘openly whipped’, quite often until rivers of blood streamed down their backs.14 And punishments could drag on and on, stretching the sense of shame to agonising limits for people who cared about their reputations, as they sat in the stocks for six hours after heavy drinking bouts; plunged under water for the third time strapped to a ducking stool; or, like one Winchester thief, winced and writhed in pain as the whipper stung him with fifteen heavy lashes.15 Mention of pain reminds us that the acoustics of punishment were every bit as compelling as the visual impact: cries and shouts of misery and agony; sometimes a drumroll; a town cryer’s shrill but

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solemn proclamation; whoops and jeers from crowds at times, boos and hisses at others; the loud clap of locks and bolts; wheels trundling along cobbled streets, and constant chattering. The sights and sounds of punishment mingled to create what men in power hoped would be a single salutary lesson, and never more so than when sinners, or engines, were carted all through a town. Ducking stools did not always stand still in the places especially picked out for them. Augutile Loggins took home 3/4 d from Gloucester’s leaders in 1656 ‘for haulinge ye ducking stool to every streete in the town to affrite the scolds’. Further south in Southampton, wheels were made so that the stool could ‘bee carried from doore to doore as ther the scold shall inhabitt’ to make then quiver with ‘terrour’.16 After voices and hooves, the clatter and creak of wheels was perhaps the most common sound on streets: everyday rattlings that were made more special when there was a ‘whore’ or ‘scold’ on board. Gloucester’s chamberlain gave the go-ahead to buy ‘a newe payer of wheeles for the skoldyng carte’ in 1550.17 Thieves, vagrants, and others who broke the law were whipped ‘aboute the towne’ throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – like the ‘eegyptyans [who] were tyed and broughte aboute the citie’ in Gloucester in 1559 ‘and scourged’ – although there were fewer such warning spectacles by 1700.18 Moreover, people would have known exactly where to line the streets to get a good view of what must have been a visual feast. Grapevines must have stretched from courtrooms to the eager ears of neighbours or, just as likely, there was always a good chance that there would be something grisly or rib-tickling to see on market days. It was not a random progress when vagrants walked, or staggered, behind a ‘cart tayle’, not knowing when the next lash might happen. There was a map of display. Miscreants were whipped ‘along the chiefe streete[s]’, tracing a well-trodden route that was sometimes the same as, or very similar to, the one followed by mayors when on parade with the town’s cream of the crop. Two Ludlow thieves began their hour of shame at Gaolford Tower, from where they were whipped ‘round the gallows’ and then ‘round the markett place’, before heading back to the Tower. William Griffin was first whipped at Northampton’s ‘gaole doore’ in 1673, then dragged ‘round aboute ye market cross and all along the drapery’. Alehouses were the beginning and endpoint for John Coles of Wellingborough when he was whipped ‘betweene one and two from ye Hend Inne to ye White Hart & back againe’. Shrewsbury thief John Morris had more points on his heavy and weary procession: when the clock struck one he was whipped ‘att a dragg’ from ‘castle gate prison to the salt markett, thence up the high street to the Wild Hopp’, finally ending his most unhappy hour at the Welsh bridge. A Southampton blacksmith was ‘well whipped’ from the Watergate to the Bargate in 1621, no doubt rueing the ill-fated moment when he swiped a chamber-pot. People were also whipped from one gate to the next in Winchester; from the sessions house

70 Punishing Words: Insults and Injuries, 1525–1700

to the market house in Lewes, and from the bridge to the Running Horse in Midhurst in Sussex.19 Highly visible, it is no wonder that penal symbols helped people to plan routes or pinpoint locations: on the spot ‘betwixt the gallows and dringhouses’ is exactly where George Allen damaged the road, a York court heard in 1653; the brick wall ‘betweene Bridewell staires and the cage’ needs patching up, a London bench directed in 1647.20 People also told the time of day or picked out particular days, weeks, or months through memories of punishments or sittings of courts. Weaver Jacob Hatt told Colchester magistrates that he had had sex with Grace Garryson not long after her son was locked up in ‘pryson’ in 1599. While Elizabeth Cammon, from the same town, said that ‘a duchman’ raped her ‘about pardon tyme last past’. Three years after Robert Kett was put to death in 1549, Edward Hardy, a Ludham yeoman, could remember that ‘he was with Mr Barnered in his owne house in Connesford that day that Kette was hanged’.21 Memories of punishment, twice as sour no doubt for those who found themselves on the end of a lashing or ducking, were also powerful for others, who could use them as evidence of character stains when commenting negatively on someone who got on their wrong side. ‘My mother is an honester women than thine’, Sebastian Coney snapped at Constable Hull from Hertfordshire in 1614, ‘for my mother never was drawen to the cuking stooll and so was thine, which [he reminded the constable] old Baker will say as well as I’. A watchman said later in court, that in the middle of a brawl between ‘pedlars and their wives’ in Reading in 1631, he heard one woman goad her husband for having been ‘whipt at the whipping post’. Concerned that his mistress stayed out of her husband’s house in Old Fish Street London all day long drinking in 1576, George Fletcher told Bridewell’s bench that ‘he hath hard divers straunge men’ whisper word that ‘she hath rode on a carte’ in the past.22 Remembering punishments or penal landmarks is another sign of how deeply rooted the law was in the minds of early modern people, whatever their social standing. People frequently knew exactly what lay in store for them if they broke the law. ‘I am for Bridewell’, Christopher Ash from Dorset told a passing weaver, after he had helped himself to some wheat in 1631. Joane Crouch of Dorchester told Robert Carder that she would be whipped if she let him ‘goe up [with her] into her chamber’ in 1634, as had happened to Gasse’s wife, she remembered, when she had been caught in bed with another man some time ago. More impressively, a Staffordshire thief urged twelveyear-old Nicholas Leister to break into a nearby house in 1596 and steal whatever he could lay his hands on, reassuring him that ‘thou canst not be hanged for it, for that noe bodie is in the house’. Some sort of comfort in that year, perhaps, but not in the one after when benefit of clergy was removed in cases where people were not at home when their house was burgled.23 But this awareness of the law and its penalties should not be taken to mean that early modern people blandly and blindly took this law on board

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without adding their own touches, according to their own needs. The law was not ‘cement’ that helped society to stick together through thick and thin.24 Far from it: the law could never be relied on to keep people rooted safely in place, pliant and agreeing. That more and more people turned to the law to settle disputes over the seventeenth century is not inevitably evidence of widespread acceptance of the morality of the law, or of the existing social order, or the deeper disparities and divisions that split society.25 Lowerclass people who waged law had their own agendas and nearly always followed due process in order to put their own points of view and protect their own interests: not least when entitlements to age-old common rights were at stake.26 Litigation was no laughing matter, and often took up time, trouble, and expense. Usually more pithy, and tending to look like evidence of a short fuse, insults nonetheless contribute to the same general point about popular legal know-how, even when people finished up on the receiving end of justice for their gibes. There was some emotional depth in bringing to mind images of bodies dangling on gallows, or someone looking out sorrowfully from a pillory, with limbs locked tight. Penal images were ready at hand, ubiquitous, easy to see in the mind’s eye, and offered great potential to hurt someone when in the hands of livid loudmouths. As Al Gore has recently reminded us, ‘It is well documented that humans are especially fearful of threats that can be easily pictured or imagined’.27 Penal images were knowingly singled out to bring to mind the disgrace of punishments that were still largely public in nature. These taunts were public dressing downs in more ways than one, designed to sting, with the added edge that they often took swipes at authority. The borrowing of penal forms by people for ritual ridings and rough music is said to be ‘closely linked with establishment structures and values’, having had ‘close’ links with the ‘shame punishments’ dished out by courts. This appropriation was also double-edged at times: ‘unauthorized’ with splashes of ‘anti-authoritarian mischief’.28 Insulting words were less ambiguous than this. Often rude and raw, they hijacked penal intentions and iconographies for vengeful and occasionally subversive motives. Penalties were planned to make offenders think about their fall from grace and to coax audiences (where present) to think better thoughts from now on. Penal ‘examples’ were too symbolically vital to be usurped for unseemly alternative expressions, criticising magistrates and their work.29 Yet punishment was more chancy when staged out in the open. There was more to risk when crowds hovered around stocks or pillories, sometimes goading offenders who were, after all, on public stages and perhaps unable to bite their lips, even now. Just as delicate as visual representation, was verbal posturing about the rights and wrongs of punishments inflicted, or times when insults incorporated penal images, expressions over which magistrates had no control when they were first coined. It was far better to keep a

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tight rein on these displays of authority, but that was not always possible. Chatting with a neighbour in Colchester in 1650, Mary Pirkis said that John Alexander, who had just been whipped for stealing wood, ‘had as much honour by that whipping as Christ had by his sufferinge upon the crosse’.30 Such boldness gave no-nonsense reminders that punishment did not always follow the guidelines set down by people in power. Imagine how magistrates winced upon hearing that John Bagley from Manchester ‘dared’ the constables to shove him in the cage in 1631, shouting that ‘it was his glorye to be put in the cage’. A Colchester merchant ‘dare[d]’ Alderman Justice Badham to lock him in the stocks in 1654, telling him that he was ‘a just asse, turd, old foole, old rogue’, and no better than him. Thomas Allday stood in the middle of Lavington market in Wiltshire in 1560, crowing that he knew he would ‘lose his eares’ on the pillory if he did something wrong, but he could not care less and ‘would cover [the scars] with a nyght cappe’. When two Norwich constables knocked on a locksmith’s door to serve him a warrant in 1632, he stood his ground, shouting that ‘he would not sett in the stocks unles Mr Craske [the justice whose signature was on the warrant] sett with him’, and added that he ‘cared neither for the constables’, Justice Craske, or Justice Cory. While peeved after a justice gave him a stiff dressing down, a Glastonbury blacksmith made up ‘jesting verses’, pleading in mocking taunts, ‘Oh good justice do not whip me’, and putting a smile on his friends’ faces we might imagine.31 The words were bad enough on their own, but what if they were picked up by the eager ears of bystanders who went home and spread them from one loose tongue to another? No one could ever guarantee how they might be received, except to say that, in all likelihood, responses would range from the shaking of heads in disbelief to chuckling and even approval. Once set in motion, gossip about penal mishaps might take on new leases of life, and stray still further from the controlling hands of magistrates. Nor was it harmless tittle-tattle that they could afford to ignore. Spurred on by their tenuous hold on the meanings of punishment, magistrates often took steps to tighten their control on penal practices, beginning with a clarification of who had the right to punish in the first place, and taking care to ensure that no one took unauthorised punishment into their own hands. Even officers ended up on the wrong side of the law if they punished someone on the spot without authority. Men and women found themselves in court if they punished someone who was not one of their charges or for ‘small or no cause’. This was the gist in Star Chamber cases when, trying to paint scheming adversaries in the blackest colours possible, complainants claimed that they were ‘unlawfully’ dumped in the stocks, ‘dipped’ in rivers, or whacked with whips to their never-ending shame.32 More numerous in the courts were times when masters, mistresses, parents, or husbands were hauled over the coals for ‘barbarously’, ‘cruelly’, ‘unduely’, ‘unreasonably’, ‘unnaturally’, ‘unseemly’, ‘extremely’, ‘excessively’, ‘immoderately’, ‘inhumanely’, or ‘vyolently’ punishing one of their dependants: like

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Alice Thaxter’s husband who beat her ‘blacke and blewe’ in their Norwich home; or the aptly named John Heavy, whose wife was left aching and shaking after a beating from him ‘in som feare of her lyfe’. One Norwich master was taken to task for ‘overbeatinge’ his apprentice.33 In each one of these cases the ‘legitimate’ politics and symbolism of punishment was dented in some way. Magistrates knew what to do: drag guilty parties before them; hand out stern lectures, and, in seeming poetic justice, punish someone who had done harm to penal codes. It would have been much better, needless to say, if ‘examples’ had always had the desired effect and the authorities’ messages were never in any doubt at all. But this was a pipe-dream. There were too many times when people nursed grudges against neighbours, or felt hard done by after a brush with authority. And penal symbols were too eye-catching to pass unnoticed, even by casual onlookers. Predictably then, people turned to the insulting images they found close at hand when slinging mud at others. These ‘punishing words’ ran the whole gamut of penalties, from a light rap on the knuckles and small fine, to gripping, grisly beheadings before baying crowds. We could also chalk up an impressive tally of the number of times when people commented dryly on national politics, wishing that one side in a struggle would end their days on the gallows. The number of such politically electric outbursts was predictably climbing in the topsy-turvy times after 1641. ‘Yf all roundheads, anabaptists, and brownists were hanged we would have a true church in England’, Robert Drake from Norwich blurted out in 1644. There was a mole sitting in the room when a goldsmith from Warminster (Wiltshire), said that he ‘hope[d] to see theise independent rogues hanged’ in 1651. Across the country in Colchester, John Woolmore was similarly cavalier in his views, when, in 1649, he was overheard in Todd’s house ‘wish[ing] all the roundheads were hanged’, adding that anyone who ‘would not serve the king’ should be strung up without delay. Also in Colchester, but two years later, a widow said that she had bumped into a drummer near Magdalene Green, who told her about a dream he had had the night before in which he saw ‘a greate starre in the skye’. Inside this shining star Prince Charles sat ‘in a golden chaire with a golden crowne on his heade’ holding ‘the Lord Generall Cromwell’s head’ in his hands, after an imaginary beheading.34 Hot-headed words perhaps, spoken on the spur of the moment, but they were no less powerful for that in highly-charged times, and remind us once more of how the language of punishment resonated in daily lore and language. Penal symbols were also used as ammunition in nearly all situations when people were left smarting after coming into contact with authority. Ministers and magistrates of all stripes suffered on the end of insults derived from attention-grabbing punishments. Officers were also in the firing line, either when making arrests or trying to stop some sticky situation from getting out of hand. ‘Punishing’ words landed on them when they turned up on doorsteps to distrain property if taxes or fines were long overdue.35 When asked to take

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his turn on night-watch in 1615, Abraham Musgrave, who ran an inn in a red-light district on London’s northern edges, rounded on the constable, calling him ‘slave’, and the beadle at his side ‘villaine’, and ‘wished they were both hanged’ quickly. ‘Lieing knaves’ James Gould of Dorchester yelled at two constables, after a heavy drinking bout one night in 1637, he ‘kept better men then they’ he mocked, trying to bring them down in size. When one of the constables talked with him afterwards and ‘wished him to bee sorrowful for his falt’ and ‘acknowledge’ the wrong he had done, Gould lashed out again telling him ‘he would see them [both constables] hanged first for he was an honester man then either of them’, and also ‘swore 3 oathes’ for good measure. The bailiff ‘should goe shite’ himself and busybody constables ‘should be hanged’, William Raynolds, also from Dorchester, said brusquely when he was taken to task for ‘swearing’ oaths in 1634.36 These were not mere words lacking any force. To picture someone hanging helplessly struggling for one more gulp of air was a chilling threat: making a sign of the gallows at a rival conjured up threatening images of death, pain, and suffering. Some people went so far as to build a pair of gallows to intimidate someone they had come to blows with, an imagery that was just as shameful as the moment when a henpecked husband woke up to find cuckold’s horns pinned to his front door. There were storms of protests in Osmington (Dorset) when gentleman farmer, John Warham, put up fences around common land. Fuming villagers pulled down the offending enclosures and when he looked out of his window the next morning the first thing Warham saw was wood stacked up in ‘the forme and fashion of a gallowes’. Another enclosure, pushed through in the same county by Thomas Balston, triggered a similar response from hard up ‘commoners’, who ‘sett up a payre of gallowes’ on the disputed land and hung a paper libel on ropes, the gist of which was the wish that Balston would meet the same ‘untymely ende’ as his father, who had been found hanging in a barn.37 Less dramatic and imposing than the gallows, pillories and stocks still held a spell over people, who were only too uncomfortably aware of their humiliating associations. A constable from Glaisale, in Yorkshire’s North Riding, was greatly ‘discredit[ed]’, he said, when a rowdy neighbour called him a ‘rogue’ and told others living nearby that he ‘deserves’ to ‘have his ears nailed to the pillory’. Images of ripped ears added visual insult to injury, like brands on hands and shoulders, or scratches and slit noses that smudged the faces of women called ‘whores’ by others. In Dorchester’s dark streets one night in 1630, two watchmen overheard tipsy Henry Gollop ‘sweare twenty oathes’ in quickfire succession as they stood at Mr Whittle’s window, drawn there by the noise of hubbub inside. They rushed to fetch help, but a constable’s quick arrival did nothing to dampen Gollop’s unruly high spirits. He rattled off another ‘20 oathes’ and told the constable that ‘he would cutt off one of his eares’ given half a chance.38 Other officers were threatened with a shaming stint in the stocks: as in 1584 when Nicholas

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Gyrdler warned Norwich’s sheriffs that ‘he wold sett them in the stocks’ if they set foot in his house to search it. Or when, in 1602, nervous James Shaw got word from a constable in his Lancashire village that a schoolmaster, from whom he had just ‘taken’ cattle in the king’s name to settle debts long past their due date, warned ‘that if he were constable he would set [Shaw] in the stocks’ for meddling with a law-abiding subject.39 But punishments did not need to be out in the open to add spite and spice to insults. Lock-ups also added force to slurs, appearing in records more frequently in direct proportion to the actual rise in their numbers, after legislation in 1610 compelled county and civic authorities to open houses of correction. At the same time, the use of ducking stools, stocks, or outdoor whippings slowed down, at least in some places, over the seventeenth century as a whole.40 Another sign of how insults varied in tandem with penal change can be seen in the earliest mentions of transportation after 1600. ‘I am a better man than thou’, a drunk surgeon told a Dorchester constable in 1633. Standing at the mayor’s door, stamping his foot on the ground as the mayor came to see what all the fuss was about, the surgeon continued to harangue the constable: ‘I know you to be as good a whorem[aste]r and a dronkered as myself’, he scoffed, and said that he would put him on board a ship for ‘Virginia shortly with the rest’.41 Entire civic governments, or leading officials, also had to put up with the indignity of someone wishing that there were nooses around their necks or whips cutting into their backs. ‘Yf the quene did know what a godly cocscomb she had to rule her subjects she would not be well pleased’, John Ewell scoffed at the Mayor of Devizes in 1576, telling him that he ‘was worthy to have his hedde sett uppon a post’. Two constables and a bailiff turned up on Ewell’s doorstep soon after to quiz him about sureties: he ‘could have found [them] yesterday but now I will not’, he sneered, nor would he go anywhere near Mr Mayor ‘for he hade almost kylled two but he shall not kyll me, I wyll see him hanged first’, he added as a parting shot. Ewell was frogmarched to prison straight away, but gave his gaolers the slip soon after. Perhaps he is the same John Ewell who turns up in records nine years later, although this time he wished that his adversary in government would spend time in the pillory rather than swing from the gallows. William Barrett ‘was an arrant knave and worthy to sytt in the pyllary more worthy than upon the bench’, this Ewell pronounced in a friend’s house in 1585, warning that he [Ewell] ‘would be an enymy to the towne as longe as he lyved’. He had proved true to his word, if these Ewells were one and the same person, or perhaps he was a loyal son following in his father’s footsteps.42 ‘Pyllorye knave’ was also an insult bandied about in a sour spat between two civic worthies of Norwich in 1553. Alexander Ross, who had lately landed in Colchester from Holland, was under the impression that the king ‘allowed half a crowne apeece’ to ‘poore travellers’ in 1670, and so he felt hard done by when the mayor gave him less. He hit

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back with ‘uncivill [and] threatening speeches’, letting the mayor know that he would thrash him if ever he found the nerve to meet him outside the city limits. Half a century earlier, Joseph Hall stood in front of the mayor and aldermen in their court in Norwich shocking them with his charge that ‘Mr Maior had taken awaye his cloake’ and his smug threat ‘that he would whipp him unles he payed vis viiid’: a standard fine in the courts, talk of which is yet more evidence of widespread awareness of penal practices.43 Other daring, or possibly foolhardy, prisoners took a large gamble in speaking out of turn before benches of magistrates, threatening them for having the gall to put them on trial. Anthony Withes dug deeper holes for himself in court in York in 1652 after letting the magistrates on the bench know that ‘some’ of them ‘would hang for it by the necke [if they] heard this matter’. Uncertainties in the wake of the Popish Plot were still simmering when Daniel Gates was brought to Hertfordshire Quarter Sessions in 1682, after officers had swooped on a barn in which he was holding a conventicle. Hearing that justices had put their names on the search warrant, Gates said, almost matter-of-factly, ‘that he had known justices of the peace hanged and that he hoped to see a gallows in Buntingford Street’ before we ‘should have good days’ back again. The ultimate logic of this train of thought, in which magistrates were tarnished by ‘punishing words’, was to bring penal ‘engines’ to the court, as a scrivener imagined would happen when saying that ‘he wold build a cage and a paire of stockes of Hickes Hall [the site of the sessions hall in built-up Middlesex] in disgrace of ye house’.44 Juries were also in the line of fire, sitting only a few feet away from the dock, reaching decisions that, at their most serious, made the difference between life and death. Richard Rawlinson called a Doncaster jury ‘perjured knaves’ in 1589, and added that each juror was ‘worthie to weare papers’, just like the lowest of the low who sat shamefully in the stocks with their offences written down in large letters on papers for all to see. Rawlinson was one of many up and down the land who was left nursing hard feelings after a jury brought in a guilty verdict. Another was Samuel Postlethwaite from Liverpool who found himself out of pocket to the tune of £5 after ‘giving very abusive language’ to a jury in 1667, ‘saying [that] the stocks were more fitting for them than the court’ in which they were now sitting.45 ‘Punishing words’ also rained down without concession on ministers of the church. Thomas Jackson from Eccleshall (Staffordshire), who made his living selling ale, had a list of offences as long as his arm in 1604. These included once ‘making horns’ over the heads of some neighbours and another time poking fun at the minister: ‘he were more mete to preach at the gallows than the pulpit’, he had scoffed, and was also overheard ‘wishing the divill to poyson’ the ‘false forsworne rascole and vorlet and knave’. George Matchett landed in trouble for giving shelter to recusants in his Holborn house in 1630, and made things worse for himself by ‘sayeing that

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hee would willingly goe to church if he might see the ministers hanged’. And if he did go to church for the sake of ‘conformity to the lawe’, he added mockingly, he could always ‘stopp his eares whilest hee was there’.46 Visible public figures, like officers and ministers, who were linked instantaneously to authority, frequently got on the sharp end of a parishioner’s tongue. But in terms of recorded complaints, the largest share of insults and injuries resulted from neighbourly tiffs. ‘Love thy neighbour’ was a commandment that was sometimes more honoured in the breach than the observance. Neighbours did not live side-by-side in dog-eat-dog worlds, but there were more than enough local spats to leave us with a deep impression of the darker potential of neighbourhood affairs, and more than a few of these disagreements involved the use of insulting penal symbols. Some people shouted out in self-defence, as in 1654 when a Portsmouth yeoman told Thomas Coleman that ‘he would see him hanged before he would take anything from him’ after Coleman threatened to ‘pistol him’ on the road if he would not give him any money. Other skirmishes put the gloomier side of domestic service on show, from both sides of the fence: heavy-handed masters or surly servants. ‘Excessive beatinge and broosinge of the bodye of Thomas Whitacre’ (his apprentice) was one charge that was laid at the door of Norwich bully, William Matthews, in 1653; another was that he tongue-lashed him all day long, one time ‘threttninge [that] he would hang him’. Trouble flowed in the other direction in the house of Dorchester clothier, John Cooth, in 1630, when his maid – Elinor Gill – stubbornly refused to do her work. Cooth told Gill that ‘yf shee tooke such courses they would bring her to the gallowes’, words of warning revealing that he had taken another trope of penal politics on board, that unless stopped through short sharp shocks, small wrongs would lead inevitably to capital crimes later on, like tumbling cards. The pointed moral was lost on Gill that day, however, and she flashed back shouting ‘that he that said soe might be hanged first’.47 In typical cases, insults did not surface suddenly from out of the blue, they were expressions of people involved in long-running neighbourly squabbles, that might drag on for years. People lived cheek-by-jowl in towns and cities: sharing wells, dumping waste, letting animals run loose, hanging clothes out to dry, bumping into each other all the time, all of which naturally created tensions that could lead to temper-tantrums from people at the end of their tethers. There was little space to hide, in urban and rural communities alike. Word could soon spread about some scandal or faux pas, and black sheep were well known by repute. More often than not there was a steady build-up of offences by troublemakers until one day patience drained away, leaving neighbours with little choice but to bring prosecutions. Insults could sour the atmosphere at any point in the drawn-out dealings that followed. London’s loyal chronicler, John Stow, provides a particular case in point. Stow apparently had to cope with a steady stream of name-calling after his

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Survey first appeared in 1598. ‘Scurrilous and calumniating tongues’ claimed that his work was a pack of lies and stitched together by a mere tailor to boot. An outraged neighbour, William Ditcher – alias Tetford – with his wife in tow, hounded him day-in-and-day-out. On one day, Stow said, Ditcher turned up at his shop to rubbish the author and his work. On other days, Ditcher had picked a fight with Stow’s apprentice and had jumped on Stow himself, as he walked along the street, scratching his face before neighbours pulled him off. On one notable occasion, Ditcher threw stones at Stow’s apprentice, who had been left in charge of the stall, and shouted at the top of his voice that the boy ought to be ‘carted’. He added that Stow’s wife ‘had two children by one man’ before she married him, and he also egged on another neighbour, the heavy-drinking John Snelyng, to keep up the torrent of abuse. Snelyng had previously waylaid Stow at his stall, yelling that he was ‘the falsest man in England’ and threatening to ‘cart him’ through streets like a common criminal. Whether or not Ditcher had taken exception to what Stow had to say in his Survey is hard to know from this account. It is possible that the pair had locked horns in some previous neighbourly spat, the details of which are now lost. After showing ‘much patience’ for a while, Stow finally got his own back through legal channels.48 In some cases, insults and injuries originated in national rivalries, that were often mixed up with fears about job losses. As in 1610, when ‘A duchman’ was brought to court in Norwich ‘for makeing the signe of a paire of gallowse at an Englishman’. Three English apprentices also came to the court that day to ‘complaine’ about another ‘dutcheman’ who had ‘rejoyced’ when three of their friends were whipped for ‘misusing certaine Dutchemen’ in the marketplace one evening. Another English apprentice was determined to give as good as he got and ‘said openlie in the court that he had rather live to see 100 of the Duchman hanged then all the prentices of the weavers in Norwich whipped’.49 It is worth noting how often the penalty that caused offence in ‘punishing words’ matched those punishments that would have been handed down by the courts for the behaviour that was the nub of the insult. The link between sexual wrongdoing and carting and/or whipping offenders along main streets is recognisable, for example, although one Norwich loudmouth bragged that he would ‘sette’ one King’s ‘harlot’ wife ‘in the cokestole’ in 1535. Ellen Prior, whose husband was landlord at The Sign of the Hand in Norwich, told people around her that Edmund Norkold made a mint from running a brothel and would have been wheeled around the city in a cart if he had not ‘greased’ a justice’s palm at the last sessions. A witness at London Bridewell claimed that Thomas Kirbie stormed into his master’s house in Winter 1575 – a bawdy house under the protection of the Earl of Worcester – and ‘threatened’ Katherine Price, saying ‘that he wolde cause hir to be whipped aboute the towne’, adding the snide parting shot ‘that he had to doe with a [100] better than she is’. ‘Arrant whore’ Jane

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Langham shouted at Mistriss Williams, as she stood at her door on St John Street, along London’s seamy northern border in 1592: ‘a cart wear more fit for thee’. Grabbing Evelyn Grace by the sleeve, as she stood selling butter in London’s Cheapside Market in 1591, Katherine Fayremanner told her that a ‘whore’ like her should stande ‘att the carts arse’, making such a racket that shoppers flocked to see what was going on.50 It is unsurprising that such symbols seeped into street slang, given that carts with ‘whores’ and ‘whoremasters’ on board rolled along streets in the full glare of publicity. Also noteworthy is how insults based on carting fall in number more or less at the same time as the reduction in their use by magistrates after 1600.51 But there were still plenty of other penal symbols for people to pick from. The gallows, as ever, loomed large in minds. ‘Where hadst thou this fine gowne uppon thy backe’, a feltmaker’s wife asked a widow living in Reading in 1633, and, not waiting for an answer, told her ‘it would make a fine shewe uppon the gallowes’. When William Wilton of Stepney pleaded with his wife ‘to refraine [John Moule’s] company’ after she had been ‘sundry’ times ‘privately and publiquely’ warned to steer clear of him, he hoped against hope to clinch her fidelity with a last-ditch vow that he would ‘fly out of the kingdome’ if she did not. Unrepentant, she snapped back that he could ‘goe to the gallowes’. ‘[D]oste thou thinke that I will forsake my friend’ for you, she said, cuttingly. John Earbrey, afraid for his horse, grabbed hold of a weaver’s wife on a road outside Colchester in 1664, calling her ‘old witch’ as she struggled to shake him off, and pledging by three ‘oathes by God [that] he would hange her if shee did bewitch his mare’.52 These myriad examples show that people had a good sense of which punishments fitted which crimes in penal codes, enabling them to add sharpness to their insults with tailored taunts and threats. Neighbours taunted each other with images of pillories. John Hall gave evidence that, when he was hanging around Colchester Castle with ‘manye other youthes’ one day in 1623, Edmund Mourkant barged in on the gang telling one of them ‘that he was a potchet puritan [whose] brother had lost his eares for counterfiettinge of the broad scales’. Michel Wright’s father saw red when a weaver tried to dupe his son out of money in 1672, and rushed round to his house, where he ‘swore that if he refused to restore the money he would have his eares cutt off’. In 1599, things got heated in Butterall in Staffordshire during ‘passion weeke’, when two yeomen stomped through the village shouting ‘that they would cutt of the eares’ of Edward Howell’s sons and nail them to his door in broad daylight. Last, but not least, some neighbours wished whippings on one another, like the Barnsley shoemaker who became the talk of the town for a time in 1641 for ‘insulting’ Richard Hanble, calling him ‘rogue [and] base fellowe’, and giving his word ‘that he would whipp him out of the towne’, just like any other ragged vagrant caught tramping through the town with nowhere to go.53 Early modern people were hard-hitting but also creative and colourful when inflicting insults on each other, and when the time came to

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slur someone they often reached for penal symbols. These words were intended to insult and injure, and spared no lingering neighbourly feelings, nor any drop of deference they might have felt towards the authorities above them – if only for a while at any rate. *** Punishment was clearly very much in the mind throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, although this has not always been thought to be the case. Foucault, and others after him, have argued that magistrates showed little or no interest in reforming criminals until deep into the eighteenth century. But they have tended to focus on felony cases, rather than petty offences, and, as a result, have given insufficient consideration to the mental impact of punishing petty crime: inside houses of correction, for example, or even in something as harsh sounding as whipping. Amendment, repentance, and reformation were all good outcomes for the men sitting on the bench, who congratulated themselves in successful cases, but held their hands up in despair whenever someone fell back into their ‘bad’ old ways again.54 Similarly, the bulk of the population understood punishment in terms of how it impacted on states of mind of both offenders and audiences, for better or for worse. They, too, wanted their wayward neighbours to get back on the straight and narrow. Punishment was kept constantly in the mind’s eye: by regular display in prominent settings, by pamphlets that gave details of criminals’ lives from the cradle to the gallows, and by everyday chat. Although punishment did not need to take place out in the open to capture the imagination: as wounding epithets like ‘Bridewell bird’ or ‘Newgate bird’ attest.55 Not many days passed by for most people without walking past somewhere that they instinctively associated with punishment: through a marketplace; next to a gallows, standing ominously even when not being used; or along ‘whipstreete’ or ‘old gaole lane’. People used these penal signs as markers to plan routes, give directions, or to pinpoint somewhere on a map. They even remembered days and dates by punishments. The mention of punishment was highly appropriate in more than a few areas of life, sometimes on practical grounds, but also for the smug satisfaction of bringing someone down a peg or two. In the hands of malcontents bearing grudges, penal images could become, what one Colchester witness termed, ‘public wrongs’, forcing people in dire straits to take counter-measures in courts, or in communities, to make sure that their standing and status stayed in one piece.56 Some quips were high jinks that got out of hand, but they hurt all the same. Whether spoken while horsing around, or in a drunken babble, harm had been done if a name was dragged through the mud. Penal insults had sharp force with their shameful insinuations. When people were feeling bitter, they picked them out by

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design, taking pleasure in thinking that, like ‘public’ punishments, their full effect depended on there being bystanders as witnesses, who might still talk about their words long after they were first spoken. Magistrates, ministers, and maligned neighbours all appeared on the receiving end. In many cases, subordination and/or socialisation strings snapped with great irony as verbal abuse drew upon icons of authority. ‘Punishing words’ could make insults doubly damaging for both victims and the powers that be. They were also tellingly double-edged, showing on one hand how law was deeply embedded in ways of thinking in all layers of society, but also how legal awareness, in any shape or form, should never be routinely conflated with awe, reverence, or deference.

Notes *My thanks to Andy Wood and to the editors for their very helpful suggestions. 1 B.S. Capp, When Gossips Meet: Women, Family, and Neighbourhood in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2003), ch. 5; A. Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500–1700 (Oxford, 2001), ch. 6; M. Ingram, ‘Ridings, rough music and mocking rhymes in early modern England’, in B. Reay (ed.), Popular Culture in SeventeenthCentury England (1985), 166–97. 2 L[eicestershire] R[ecord] O[ffice] ID41/12/59, fo. 101v; 1D41/91/1, fo. 38v. 3 D[orset] R[ecord] C[entre] DC/DOB/8/1, fo. 122. 4 N[orwich and] N[orfolk] R[ecord] O[ffice] Norwich Mayor’s Court Interrogatories and Depositions 1549–54, fo. 12. 5 Quarter Sessions Records, With Other Records of the Justices of the Peace for the County Palatine of Chester, 1559–1760, eds J.H.E. Bennett and J.C. Dewhurst (Lancashire and Cheshire Record Society, 94, 1940), 110. Cf. G.D. Robin, ‘The executioner: his place in English society’, British Journal of Sociology 15 (1964), 234–53; K. Stuart, Defiled Trades and Social Outcasts: Honour and Ritual Pollution in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge, 2000), ch. 3. 6 S[uffolk] R[ecord] Office, I[pswich] Branch C/3/4/1/22, fo. 4v; C/3/4/1/39, fo. 3; DRC DC/DOB/8/1, fo. 259v; The Diary of the Rev. Henry Newcome From September 30, 1661, to September 29, 1663, ed. T. Heywood (Chetham Society, 1st ser., 18, 1849), 161; W[iltshire] R[ecord] O[ffice] G22/1/205/2, fo. 33; G[loucestershire] A[rchives] GBR/B/3/2, fo. 419; GBR/B/3/3, fos 505, 745; GBR/F/4/5, fos 48, 376v, 395v; GBR/F/4/6, fo. 266; Q/SaIB/1, fos 40v, 55; B[ridewell] H[ospital] C[ourtbooks] 9, fos 296, 297; S[hropshire] A[rchives] BB/C/5/2/1; passim; E[ssex] R[ecord] O[ffice] C[olchester] Branch D/B5/SB2/4, fo. 7v; LRO BRIII 2/42; C[heshire] R[ecord] O[ffice] Z/AB/1 fos 55, 360/60v; L[ondon] M[etropolitan] A[rchives] MJ/SBR 1, fos 306, 420, 506; MJ/SBR/4, fo. 502; MJ/SRB/6, fo. 300. 7 LMA MJ/SBR/1 fo. 147; MJ/SBR/3, fo. 410. Cf. Stuart, Defiled Trades and Social Outcasts, 123–4, 128; U. Rublack, The Crimes of Women in Early Modern Germany (Oxford, 1999), 80. 8 Nott[inghamshire] R[ecord] O[ffice] QSM 13, fo. 12. 9 SA 3365/2430, fo. 27v; 3365/489/522; QS 1/1, fo. 168; GA GBR/F/4/3, fos 79v, 184, 207v; GBRF/4/6, fo. 77; GBR/G/GB/SiB/1, fo. 70; GBR/G/G3/SO/1, fo. 108; E[ast] S[ussex] R[ecord] O[ffice] RYE 1/5, fos 236, 302; QO/EW2, fo. 71; QO EW/8,

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20 21

22

fo. 83v; Win/55, fo. 109; H[ampshire] A[rchives] W/K5/8, fo. 15; W/D3/3, n.p.; Q3/3, fos 97, 181; CRO TAR 1/8; 1/13; N[orthamptonshire] R[ecord] O[ffice] Northampton Assembly Book 3/1, fo. 347; NQS/1, fo. 8; LRO BRIII 2/32, 2/33, 2/34, 2/36, 2/39, 2/44, 2/46, 2/48, 2/51; NNRO N[orwich] M[ayor’s] C[ourtbooks] 11, fo. 135; 12, fos 300, 312; Norwich Chamberlain’s Accounts 1589–1602, fo. 102v. See also P. Griffiths, ‘Bodies and souls in early modern Norwich: punishing petty crime, 1540–1700’, in S. Devereaux and P. Griffiths (eds), Penal Practice and Culture, 1500–1900: Punishing the English (Basingstoke, 2004), 85–120, esp. 93; D. Postles, ‘The market place as space in early modern England’, Social History 29 (2004), 41–58; idem, ‘Penance and the market place: a reformation dialogue with the Medieval Church (c.1250–c.1600)’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 54 (2003), 441–68; P. King, Crime and Law in England, 1750–1840: Remaking Justice from the Margins (Cambridge, 2007), ch. 8, esp. 271–2. LMA MJ/SBR/1 fos 434, 462; Rep[ertories of the Court of Aldermen] 32, fo. 157; 23, fo. 505; MJ/SBR/1, fo. 404; W[estminster] A[rchives] C[entre] E2413, fo. 72v; EROC DB5/Sb3/1, fo. 160; SROI C/3/41/17, n.p. HA W/K5/8, fo. 40; SROI C/3/4/1/40, fo. 4v; WRO G22/1/205/2, fo. 153; GA G22/1/205/2, fo. 165. Staffordshire Quarter Sessions Rolls, ed. S.A.H. Burne (5 vols, Stafford, 1931–40), vol. II, 110–12. See also T[he] N[ational] A[rchives] SP12/252/94i–ii; NRO NSP1, fo. 5v; The Assembly Books of Southampton, ed. J.W. Horrocks (4 vols, Southampton Record Society, 19, 21, 24–5, 1917–25), vol. II, 41. For a few examples from some London parishes see G[uildhall] L[ibrary, London] MSS 2968/1, fo. 444; 4457/2, fo. 266; 1002/1, fo. 359v; 4570/2, fo. 216; 1046/1, fo. 168v; 4241/1, fo. 343. On optic order see P. Griffiths, Lost Londons: Change, Crime, and Control in the Capital City, 1550–1660 (Cambridge, 2008), ch. 1. On seeing see S. Clark, Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern Culture (Oxford, 2007). GA GBR/G3/SO/1, fo. 159; SA 3365/2430 fos 40v, 47, 103v, 131; 3365/511; QS1/1, fos 168, 184v; QS1/2, fos 5, 82, 136v; NRO NQS1, fos 39–39v; EROC D/B/SB1/4, 21-3-1636; D/B5/SB2/6, fo. 239; DRC DC/DOB/8/1, fo. 307. EROC D/B5/SB1/4, 19-5-1634; DRC DC/DOB/8/1, fos 21, 25, 220; LMA ML/ SBR/6, fo. 204; HA W/d3/3, n.p. GA GBR/F/4/6, fo. 131; S[outhampton] C[ity] A[rchives] 6/1/28; 6/1/14. See also WRO G22/1/205/2, fo. 74v. GA GBR/F/4/3, fo. 29. ESRO Rye 1/6, fo. 284; GA GBR/F/4/3, fo. 78. SRO LB/11/1, 31-5-1716; LB2-31/5/1715; NRO NQS/1 fo. 43; NQS/4, fo. 6v; SRO 3365/2430, fo. 143; SCA SC9.2/1, fo. 64v; HA Q3/3, fo. 181; ESRO QO/EW2, fo. 95v; QO/EW, 10 October 1690. Y[ork] C[ity] A[rchives] F7, fo. 351; BHC 9, fos 296, 297. EROC D/B5/SB2/5, fo. 90v; D/B5/SB2/3, fo. 121; NNRO Norwich Mayor’s Court Interrogatories and Depositions 1549–54, fo. 60v. See also EROC D5/SB2/7, fos 146v, 174; DRC DC/DOB/8/1, fos 55, 56, 87–7v, 169v–70, 332v; W[arwickshire] R[ecord] O[ffice] CR103, fo. 10. Hertfordshire County Records, eds W. Le Hardy and G.L. Reckitt (10 vols, Hertford, 1905–57), vol. I, 42; Reading Records: Diary of a Corporation, ed. J.M. Guilding (4 vols, Reading, 1892–6), vol. III, 83; BHC 3, fos 49v–50. See also BHC 8, fo. 25v; Calendar to the Records of the Borough of Doncaster, ed. W.J. Hardy (4 vols, Doncaster, 1899–1903), vol. II, 151; EROC D/B5/SB2/9, fo. 160v.

Paul Griffiths 83 23 DRC DC/DOB/8/1, fos 96v, 247; Staffordshire Quarter Sessions Rolls, vol. III, 237. See also EROC D/B5/SB2/3, fo. 111v; DRC DC/DOB/8/1, fo. 198v; DC/LR/D1/3a, fo. 108. 24 J.A. Sharpe, ‘The people and the law’, in Reay (ed.), Popular Culture in SeventeenthCentury England, 244–70; C. Herrup, The Common Peace: Participation and the Criminal Law in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1987); J. Langbein, ‘Albion’s fatal flaws’, Past & Present, 98 (1983). 25 S. Hindle, The State and Social Change in Early Modern England, c.1550–1640 (Basingstoke, 2000), ch. 4; C.W. Brooks, Lawyers, Litigation and English Society Since 1450 (1998), chaps 3–4; C. Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, 1996), chaps 8–9; W. Prest, ‘The experience of litigation in eighteenth-century England’, in D. Lemmings (ed.), The British and their Laws in the Eighteenth Century (Woodbridge, 2005), 133–54. 26 A. Wood, ‘Custom, identity, and resistance: English free miners and their law, c.1550–1800’, in P. Griffiths, A. Fox and S. Hindle (eds), The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, 1996), 249–85; P. King, Crime, Justice, and Discretion in England, 1740–1820 (Oxford, 2000), ch. 11; idem, Crime and Law in England, 1750–1840, chaps 9–10. 27 A. Gore, The Assault on Reason (New York, 2007), 37. 28 M. Ingram, ‘Juridical folklore in England illustrated by rough music’, in C.W. Brooks and M. Lobban (eds), Communities and Courts in Britain, 1150–1900 (1997), 61–82, quoting 81, 66, 72, 80. Cf. E.P. Thompson, ‘Rough music’, in his Customs in Common (1991), 467–538; J.R. Kent, ‘“Folk justice” and royal justice in early seventeenth-century England: a “charivari” in the Midlands’, Midland History 8 (1983), 70–85. For a few examples of popular rituals see Worcestershire County Records …. Calendar of the Quarter Sessions Papers, Volume 1, 1591–1643, ed. J.W. Willis Bund (Worcestershire Historical Society, 1900), 106–7, 195–6; Records of the County of Wiltshire: Being Extracts From the Great Quarter Sessions Rolls of the Seventeenth Century, ed. B.H. Cunnington (Devizes, 1932), 65–6; GL 12806/3, fo. 418. 29 See esp. J.A. Sharpe, ‘“Last dying speeches”: religion, ideology, and public executions in seventeenth-century England’, Past & Present 107 (1985), 144–67. 30 EROC D/B5/SB2/9, fo. 37. 31 The Court Leet Records of the Manor of Manchester From the Year 1552 to the Year 1686, and From the Year 1731 to the Year 1846, ed. J.P. Earwaker (12 vols, Manchester, 1884–90), vol. III, 82; EROC D/B5/SB2/9, fo. 92; Some Annals of the Borough of Devizes, ed. B.H. Cunnington (2 vols, Devizes, 1925), vol. I, pt. I, 33–4; NNRO N[orwich] C[ity] Q[uarter] S[essions] minute book 1630–8, fos 22v, 70; Quarter Sessions Records for Somerset, eds E.H. Bates Harbin and M.C.B. Dawes (4 vols, Somerset Record Society, 23–4, 28, 34, 1907–19), vol. III, 305. See also NNRO NMC 6, fo. 82; 7, fo. 212; 8, fo. 542; 11, fo. 318; NNRO NCQS minute book 1630–8, fo. 70; The Casebook of Sir Francis Ashley JP Recorder of Dorchester, 1614–35, ed. J.H. Bettey (Dorset Record Society, 7, 1981),10, 60; DRC DC/DOB/8/1, fos 8, 9v, 190v, 339; EROC D/B5/SB2/9, fo. 26; LMA MJ/SBR/4, fo. 598. 32 NNRO NCQS minute book 1629–36, fo. 23. See also, for example, WARO CR103, fo. 26; NNRO NMC 8, fo. 379; 14, fos 57v, 263v; 14, fo. 271; TNA STAC8 130/18, 190/37, 206/18, 208/22, 210/11, 123/16, 266/29, 34/16. 33 NNRO NMC 7, fo. 562; 13, fos 92, 356. See also EROC D/B5/SB4/3, fo. 25v; D/B5/ SB2/9, fo. 190; LMA MJ/SBR/1, fo. 287; MJ/SBR/4, fo. 593; Rep. 33, fo. 331; YCA F7, fo. 390; WARO QS40/1/1, fos 43, 80v; NNRO NMC 7, fo. 241; 25, fo. 97v; 26,

84 Punishing Words: Insults and Injuries, 1525–1700

34 35 36 37 38

39

40

41 42 43 44 45

46 47

48

49 50 51

52

fo. 268; 14, fo. 261v; 11, fo. 567; NCQS minute book 1639–54, fo. 167; P. Griffiths, Youth and Authority: Formative Experiences in England, 1560–1640 (Oxford, 1996), 313–24. NNRO NCQS minute book 1639–54, fo. 60v; WRO A1/150/10, Trinity 1651; EROC D/B5/SB2/9, fos 26v, 57. See also EROC D/Y/2/8, fo. 158. See also my Lost Londons, ch. 8. LMA MJ/SBR/2, fo. 215; DRC DC/DOB/8/1, fos 325, 257. TNA STAC8/293/12, 77/4. See also TNA STAC8/195/21. North Riding Quarter Sessions Records [1605–1786], ed. J.C. Atkinson (9 vols, North Riding Record Society, 1–9, 1884–92), vol. VI, 34; DRC DC/DOB/8/1, fo. 50v. See also L. Gowing, Domestic Dangers: Women, Words, and Sex in Early Modern London (Oxford, 1996), 103, 109. NNRO NCQS minute book 1581–91, fo. 93v; Lancashire Quarter Sessions Records. Volume 1, 1590–1606, ed. J. Tait (Chetham Society Publications, new ser., 77, Manchester, 1917), 157. Griffiths, ‘Bodies and souls in early modern Norwich’; J. Innes, ‘Prisons for the poor: English bridewells 1555–1800’, in F. Snyder and D. Hay (eds), Labour, Law, and Crime: A Historical Perspective (Oxford, 1987), 42–122. DRC DC/DOB/8/1, fo. 161v. Some Annals of the Borough of Devizes, vol. I, pt. i, 63–4, 65–6; pt. 2, 5. NNRO NMC Interrogatories and Depositions 1549–54, fo. 54; EROC D/B5/SB2/9, fo. 182v; NNRO NMC 15, fo. 72v. See also NNRO NMC 3, fo. 7. YCA F7, fo. 238; Hertfordshire County Records, vol. I, 320; LMA MJ/SBR/1, fo. 621. Calendar to the Records of the Borough of Doncaster, vol. II, 113; Liverpool Town Books, 1649–1671, ed. M. Power (The Record Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 136, Dorchester, 1999), 204. Staffordshire Quarter Sessions Rolls, vol. IV, 331–2; vol. V, 101–2; LMA MJ/SBR/5, fo. 145. See also EROC D/B5/SB3/1, fo. 17; D/B5/SB2/2, fos 83v, 84v. [Portsmouth] Borough Sessions Papers, 1653–88: A Calendar, eds A.J. Willis and M.J. Hoad (Portsmouth Record Series, 1, Chichester, 1971), 4; NNRO NCQS Book 1639–54, fo. 167; DRC DC/DOB/8/1, fo. 31. See also K. Wrightson, ‘Mutualities and obligations: changing social relationships in early modern England’, Proceedings of the British Academy 139 (2006), 157–94. J. Strype, A Survey of the Cities of London and Westminster […] Written at First in the Year MDXCVIII by John Stow […] Corrected, Improved, and Very Much Enlarged: and the Survey and History Brought Down from the Year 1633 (5 books in 2 vols., 1720), xxiii. NNRO NMC 14, fos 290v–1. NNRO NMC 3, fo. 5; NCQS minute book 1630–38, fo. 50; BHC 2, fo. 184v; LMA D/L/C 214, fos 320, 102, 103. See also BHC 6, fos 9v–10. Ingram, ‘Juridical folklore’; idem, ‘Shame and pain: themes and variations in Tudor punishments’, in Devereaux and Griffiths (eds), Penal Practice and Culture, 36–62. Reading Records: Diary of a Corporation, III, 185; TNA STAC8 296/20; EROC D/B5/SB2/9, fo. 135. See also Worcestershire County Records, 222–3; Calendar to the Records of the Borough of Doncaster, vol. I, 222; Lancashire Quarter Sessions Records, 2; The Notebook of Robert Doughty, 1662–1665, ed. J.M. Rosenheim (Norfolk Record Society, 54, 1989), 42; The Diary of Thomas Isham of Lamport (1658–81), ed. N. Marlow (Farnborough, 1971), 173; NNRO NMC 23, fo. 120; NMC Interrogatories and Depositions 1549–54, fos 5, 37, 477; DRC DC/DOB/8/1, fo. 8v; EROC DC/DOB/8/1, fo. 125v.

Paul Griffiths 85 53 EROC D/B5/SB2/7, fo. 74; Diary of Thomas Isham, 110; Staffordshire Quarter Sessions Rolls, vol. IV, 76–7; West Riding Sessions Records, ed. J. Lister (2 vols, Yorkshire Archaeological Society, 54, Leeds. 1888–1915), vol. II, 226. See also Calendar to the Records of the Borough of Doncaster, II, 113; West Riding Sessions Records, vol. II, 226; NNRO NMC 3, fo. 174; EROC D/B5/SB2/9, fo. 160v. 54 M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (trans. A. Sheridan, New York, 1976). Cf. my ‘Bodies and souls in early modern Norwich’, and ‘Introduction: punishing the English’, in Devereaux and Griffiths (eds), Penal Practice and Culture, 1–35. On Foucault see also R. McGowen, ‘Power and humanity, or Foucault amongst the historians’, in C. Jones and R. Porter (eds), Reassessing Foucault: Power, Medicine, and the Body (1994), 91–112. On the impact of whipping and pain on offenders see E. Cohen, ‘The animated pain of the body’, American Historical Review 105 (2000), 36–68. 55 For example, WAC WCB1, fo. 174. 56 EROC DC/DOB/8/1, fo. 190v.

5 The World of Poor Robin’s Intelligence: Comedy and Communication in Late Stuart London1 David M. Turner

In late March 1676 a new serial publication hit the streets of London. Its format resembled closely the official organ of information, the London Gazette, but its content was rather different. Readers of its first issue were informed of skirmishes in ‘Upper and Lower Alsatia’ – London’s criminal underworld – an account of the ‘bloody work made among the Lifters [and] pickpockets’ of Southwark, the activities of a ‘Red-letter’d Polonian Doctor’ and his amazing cures, and the arrival in town of a ‘man-Salamander, that eats nothing between meals but fire and brimstone’. There was a report on the Sunday afternoon perambulations of citizens and their wives in the fields near Islington and terrifying news of the appearance of an ‘ignus fatuus’ in the streets of Holborn, taking the form of a ‘strange, wonderfull, miraculous, prodigious, portentous and stupendous Surloyn of burning beef’.2 This was Poor Robin’s Intelligence, a paper intended ‘not merely to Entertain the Idle with Stories’ but also ‘to Expose Vice and Ill Nature to deserv’d contempt, and … laugh Foppery out of Countenance and Practice’.3 Published weekly between March 1676 and November 1677, the newspaper dedicated itself to exposing the extraordinary in everyday life, with its tales of prodigies, cheats, sham doctors, astrologers and the mishaps and sexual misadventures of the city’s inhabitants. In spite of its self-proclaimed reforming objectives, Poor Robin’s Intelligence was viewed disdainfully by contemporary commentators. To his enemies ‘Poor Robin’ was a ‘Pad[d]ler in the Excrements of Men’s Imperfections, a Wounder of Men’s Credits, a Robber of persons’ Reputations’, whose publications were a ‘Destroyer of White Paper, [and] an Increaser of Bum-Fodder’.4 Though more moderate in their criticism, modern historians have taken a similarly dismissive view of Poor Robin’s Intelligence, assuming it to be a one-dimensional work obsessed with sex. Lois Schwoerer describes its content as ‘silly or bawdy or both’, whereas C. John Sommerville remarks that ‘one almost feels sorry for the licenser, Roger L’Estrange, who had to read each one carefully to make sure it could not be taken as political comment’.5 Historians of the later seventeenth-century press have often passed over Poor Robin’s Intelligence and 86

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focused instead on the more politicised publications that flourished after the lapsing of the Licensing Act in 1679.6 More recently, however, Lawrence Klein has recognised the importance of the paper as one of the principal sources for the representation of London in the periodical press of the Restoration era. With its vivid descriptions of the rich texture of urban life Poor Robin’s Intelligence was the progenitor of better known satirical publications that flourished around the turn of the eighteenth century, such as Ned Ward’s London Spy and Tom Brown’s Amusements Serious and Comical. 7 It stands as a vivid example of the popular comic literature of early modern England that Bernard Capp has shown to be so important in understanding the mental world of its inhabitants.8 Its comically skewed vision of life bears comparison with the world of John Taylor the Water Poet that Capp has so expertly reconstructed, and like Taylor’s writing, Poor Robin’s Intelligence begs important questions about the meanings of seventeenth-century popular humour. As this chapter argues, Poor Robin’s Intelligence offers an intriguing insight into how London’s inhabitants located themselves mentally and geographically within the expanding metropolis. Moreover, its stories of sexual immorality, domestic discord, deception and scatological humiliation may tell us much about gender relations, social identity and the meanings of authority in the later seventeenth century, and how comic discourses fed into wider social and political debate.

Cultural contexts Poor Robin’s Intelligence married aspects of jestbook humour with contemporary social satire and presented them in the conventional garb of news. ‘Poor Robin’ evoked a familiar comedic figure, whose name was associated with a wide range of cheap print in the late-seventeenth century. These included a hugely successful almanac begun by William Winstanley in the early 1660s, a popular jest book, a variety of satirical ‘visions’ and prognostications, and ‘characters’ of scolds, the Dutch and the French.9 ‘This Poor Robin is more troublesome, than a silenc’d Presbyter’, remarked one pamphlet in 1678, referring to the proliferation of Poor Robin titles, ‘the Town can never be at Quiet for him, but he will still be Holding forth his Pamphlets … since he has got as many lives as a Cat, and like her too, is perpetually Mewing and Scratching’.10 Poor Robin’s Intelligence kept its authorship a closely guarded secret. There were rumours at the time of a ‘fraternity of Robin Writers’, but modern historical opinion suggests that the main author was ‘almost certainly’ the prolific publicist Henry Care.11 Schwoerer regards Poor Robin’s Intelligence as a ‘slight’ publication, but one which demonstrated Care’s literary versatility which would later be put to more purposeful use, in his pro-Whig propaganda during the Exclusion Crisis.12 Poor Robin’s Intelligence exhibited some of the wit with which Care would later lampoon Catholicism in the Weekly Pacquet of

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Advice from Rome, such as in a story of December 1676 which related how some youths had built ‘popes of snow whose frail and melting images … are said to fore-show the like declension and abolition of papacy’.13 However, the paper showed little of Care’s later sympathy for dissenters, attacking conventiclers as ‘maggot-brain’d soul-drivers’ and Quakers as joyless, hypocritical peddlers of gibberish.14 The paper was highly critical of dissenter Thomas Danson’s attack on Anglican William Sherlock’s views on justification, mocking his inveterate rhetoric as ‘A Dialogue between a Monkey and his looking glass: Or, Satan managing the Nonconformists Arguments’.15 The Whigs’ ‘Modern Green-ribbon’d Caball’ was also ridiculed as a shadowy Masonic brethren, who joined the ‘Ancient Brother-hood of the Rosi-Crosi’ to feast on ‘Black Swan Pies, Poach’d Phoenix Eggs, Haunches of Unicorn etc’.16 Indeed, Care’s association with Poor Robin’s Intelligence would be used by his critics to undermine his credibility, casting him as ‘one having neither Faith or Truth, ungrateful to his Benefactors, and a Traytor to his Confederates’.17 Poor Robin’s Intelligence was published in half-sheet, double-columned and printed on both sides. It was printed by Anne Purslowe, later in conjunction with Thomas Haley, and distributed by the ‘General Assembly of Hawkers’.18 With its satirical content, Poor Robin’s Intelligence bore some resemblance to the comical newsbooks of the Civil War and Interregnum, especially John Crouch’s Mercurius Fumigosus, Or the Smoking Nocturnall (1654–5).19 Like this publication, Poor Robin’s Intelligence based its stories around familiar comic themes such as false prophets, cuckolded citizens, drunken apprentices and the like, but gave them a more immediate appeal by locating them in a recognisable contemporary environment and designating each story a specific time and place. Though the paper reported events from Europe and parts of provincial England, the majority of its stories centred on the capital and its hinterland and many tales were set in identifiable parishes, streets and alleys. Poor Robin’s Intelligence also parodied the advertisements that were becoming an increasingly popular feature of the Restoration press. Dryly referred to as ‘Divertissements’, the paper printed mock appeals for lost maidenheads, missing curs, and a variety of products ranging from ‘Italian padlocks’, to protect the chastity of young women, to a cornucopia of choice rarities: ‘A mermaid’s comb made of a cuckold’s horn; a large Chronicle containing a catalogue of good women, carried on the shoulders of a big-lim’d spider [and] a dainty brood of feather’d tortoises hatched under an Ostrich’.20 The paper set up an intelligence office at the Queen’s Head Tavern in Snow Hill, located in Farringdon Ward without, for the receipt of news.21 It thus envisaged its readers as having a close involvement in the text, not just as consumers of its stories, but also as contributors. It is impossible to gauge the ‘truth status’ of its material, but part of its appeal to readers lay in the possibility that its comic tales related to actual people and occur-

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rences. The paper inferred that its news items were based on secret knowledge and offered readers tantalising hints of where they could find out more. A note appeared in July 1676 advising readers to enquire at Chancery Lane where they might learn about ‘some comical passages translated between a parcel of Neighbours and their Wives at Hampstead’, or at the office at the Queen’s Head where they might also hear about ‘divers other accidents too many to be enlarged upon’.22 A report from ‘Cat[te] Street’ dated 2 August 1676 related news of a duel between two merchants, ‘whose Monosyllabick names, tho’ they would add no great grace to the story are yet sufficiently known in these parts’.23 A rival publication remarked that the paper’s success was due to its supply of ‘tattle and gossip’. Readers, it complained, ‘study Poor Robin, more than the Practice of Piety’ looking for material with which to ‘wound some of [their] Acquaintance’.24 Accusations of tale-bearing were intended to damage the paper’s credibility and we should be wary about reading too much into these derogatory comments. It seems likely that many tales were invented or adapted familiar storylines. However, there is some evidence to suggest that the paper drew inspiration from extraordinary news items from the time. For instance, it appears that a story concerning a bigamous shoemaker apprehended for having ‘winlac’d a parcel of love-sick Wenches (to the number of Seventeen)’ dated from Newgate 11 May 1676, derived from an actual trial that was reported in the Old Bailey Proceedings.25 We have little evidence from diaries, letters or other sources to suggest who actually read Poor Robin’s Intelligence. However, in terms of locating this publication within its cultural context, it is perhaps more pertinent to ask who was thought to be reading it and what kind of audience is implied by references within the text. Exploring the paper’s style, and analysing the kind of knowledge needed on the part of its audience, provides a means of reconstructing the imagined community of its readers.26 Historians have tended to assume that the paper catered to the tastes of a ‘vulgar’ or ‘popular’ audience. The ‘coarse humour’ of Poor Robin’s Intelligence, argues Sommerville, made it ‘so obviously directed at a vulgar, semi-literate audience’.27 Care himself argued that the cheap single sheet format was ideally suited at reaching the ‘vulgar’, and comic themes such as cuckoldry, scatological mishaps, drunkenness and disorder are those which historians have traditionally seen as reflecting the tastes of the lower orders.28 Yet, as Capp and others have argued, the question of what constitutes ‘popular’ humour is problematic – the category of ‘popular culture’ itself may include many layers and distinctions.29 As we shall see, instead being a straightforward reflection of popular tastes and attitudes, Poor Robin’s Intelligence is indicative of the problems of distinguishing between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture at a time when historians have often viewed the two as moving further apart.30 Much of the comedy of Poor Robin’s Intelligence was based on verbal humour and witty wordplay. The paper employed a variety of comic forms, ranging from smutty innuendo and extended metaphor to learned rhetorical flourishes. The

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narration of its news stories delighted in verbal invention in which supposedly ‘high’ and ‘low’ discourses intermingled promiscuously, blurring the distinctions between them. On the one hand, the paper deployed an earthy vocabulary rooted in street slang – its description of prostitutes as ‘fawns, Prickets-Sisters, Sorels, Does’ or as ‘cracks, Bugs, Bawds’ employed the ‘cant’ of the London underworld.31 The paper also drew on popular slang for specific trades, describing tailors as ‘cabbages’ or ‘limb-trimmers’ and shoemakers as practitioners of the ‘Gentle-craft’, or as ‘Votaries of Saint Hugh, lineally descended from Prince Crispin’ (a reference to the trade’s supposedly noble origins).32 But on the other hand, as the latter example suggests, the paper also delighted in burlesque linguistic invention. One of the recurring conceits of Poor Robin’s Intelligence was to describe the mundane in high-flown terms. A barber was variously described as a ‘sprucifier of complexions’ and a ‘metamorphoser of Beards’.33 A tavern landlady received the grand epithet of the ‘chief Pedagogue of a fuddling Academy’, whereas a quack doctor specialising in women’s complaints went by the title ‘Signior Ragamuffin Corrector of Brazen Utensils, and re-establisher of decayed Lungs throughout all the Kitchens of Middlesex’.34 Places too were sardonically dignified with eloquent descriptions. A young man labouring under ‘the kissing evil’, which caused him to ‘hugg and busse all he met in so close and violent a manner that several of them have lost their senses and fallen into Fitts’, was apprehended by a constable and ‘carried in Triumph to an ancient Mansion-house vulgarly called New Prison’.35 This style was popular with other seventeenth-century humorists such as John Taylor and drew inspiration from classical rhetoric, especially the paradoxical encomium in which worthless or ‘low’ subjects were praised in a grandiloquent fashion.36 The verbal comedy of Poor Robin’s Intelligence relied much on complex punning and extended metaphor. At times this involved quite crude sexual innuendo. In one story a tailor’s journeyman is caught ‘taking measure’ of his master’s wife ‘with more than ordinary familiarity’.37 Elsewhere, a shoemaker is cuckolded by one who ‘knew the length of her foot as well as her husband’.38 In another story the wife of a philandering metalworker fears that her spouse ‘might spoil his weapons by endeavouring to sharpen them at a stranger’s vice’.39 In these examples the sexual act was described in pithy terms that drew on the language of manual work. But other stories drew upon a wide range of discourses in order to achieve their comic effect. These included literature, geography, botany, theology, science, mathematics, law, history and quackery. For instance, the specialised language of natural philosophy was parodied in a story from Temple Bar, dated 30 May 1676, of two young ‘academicks’ who place ‘several pieces of Silver and gold into a Glass of wine’ to prove that ‘nature abhors a vacuum’, inferred from the ‘natural recession of the volatile and aerial particles from the solid body obtruding thereupon’, only to have their money swindled from them by a ‘shifting Bully of the Town’.40 Geographical and scientific metaphors were

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combined in an item from July 1677, which described the symptoms of a young man’s venereal disease as ‘more than ordinary heats in the mutinous Low Countrys of his Microcosm’.41 Furthermore, a story of a young gentlewoman’s out-of-wedlock pregnancy drew upon mathematics, describing her as ‘having practised the rule of three, before she rightly understood multiplication, division, or substraction’, making her ‘extreamly perplexed to find, that having taken one out of one, there should two remain’.42 The paper also included numerous literary references and allusions. A story of two drunken fellows who mistake bushes swaying in the wind for something ‘terrible and prodigious’ referred to ‘Old Ovid’ who ‘tells us a great many handsome lyes of men that were Metamorphos’d into trees and bushes by the power of Jupiter, Juno, and others’.43 Elsewhere the paper drew on the Iliad to describe in mock-heroic terms the predicament of an upstart tailor who loses control of his horse (purchased as a status symbol) as fancying himself ‘like Bellerophon going to Heaven … upon the back of his Pegasus’.44 That the story ended with the terrified tailor fouling his breeches is typical of the paper’s delight in combining the high and the low. Medieval romances such as Orlando Furioso and English classics such as Sydney’s Arcadia were also referenced, as were contemporary plays.45 In one report a ‘yoke of ty’rd citizens’ attempt to swap their wives after seeing Dryden’s Marriage A la Mode, while a description of swimming lessons as the ‘table experiment’ in an item printed late June 1676 made reference to a famous scene in Thomas Shadwell’s The Virtuoso, first performed a month earlier, in which swimming was learnt on the laboratory bench by carefully mimicking the movements of a frog.46 One of the paper’s running jokes was to describe people inadvertently exposing their bodies as ‘publishing’ their ‘Naked Truth’ – a wry reference to Bishop Herbert Croft’s controversial theological treatise of the same name.47 Works as diverse as William Seymar’s anti-marriage tract Conjugium Conjurgium (1673) and ‘Blagrave’s White Witchcraft’ – probably Joseph Blagrave’s Astrological Practice of Physick (1671) – were alluded to alongside almanacs and ballads.48 Therefore, rather than catering largely to a ‘semi-literate’ audience, Poor Robin’s Intelligence is better seen as the product of an increasingly literate culture in which people were expected to derive information from a variety of sources. It may not have been necessary to have access to a large library or a repository of specialist knowledge to enjoy the paper’s content – the mixture of literate allusions and crude bawdy contributed to the richness of this publication and the comedy was clearly intended to perform on a variety of levels. However, some familiarity with elite learning was assumed by its author.49 At its upper levels, the readership of Poor Robin’s Intelligence may have included educated professionals or students at the Inns of Court. But the paper made efforts not to exclude those lower down the social scale, such as tradesmen and their apprentices, among whom levels of literacy were high in later seventeenth-century London.50 Such people were the subjects of

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the majority of the stories printed in the paper. Comic tales assumed familiarity with the spatial layout of artisans’ households and celebrated the ingenuity of apprentices who outwitted their masters.51 At a time when ‘wit’ was increasingly seen as an elite cultural trait, the paper also celebrated the verbal repartee of rustics, servants and craftsmen.52 The paper defined its intended readership in gendered terms. Above all, it imagined its content being enjoyed in a community of masculine good fellowship centred on the tavern. Readers were invited to come to the paper’s office at the Queen’s Head ‘where there is a Glass of good Wine, and you are Welcome Gentlemen’.53 In the seventeenth century, London taverns were renowned for attracting men of wit, and by the 1670s were regarded as a less serious venue for male sociability than coffee houses.54 The conviviality of the tavern was set against the sour zealotry of the Quaker meeting or conventicle. The paper described approvingly the activities of a group of young apprentices who disguised themselves as churchwardens who broke up a dissenter meeting and collected fines from the ‘testy zealots’, which they subsequently ‘expended in […] charitable (good fellowship) uses’.55 The tavern milieu broke down some of the barriers of class that might divide readers in the outside world, uniting them in a common culture of mirth and fraternal bonding.56 Participation in its textual community and understanding of its allusions, formulae, metaphors and codes enabled its readers to distinguish themselves from those who were the butts of its jokes.57 The format of the paper suggests that readers were encouraged to keep their copies to provide a storehouse of wit and good stories. Each issue carried a lettered signature (from A to Qqqq) rather than a number, suggesting that wealthier readers were meant to collect them and have them bound like a book.58 Bawdy innuendo and complex puns were considered inappropriate for respectable women.59 The paper sometimes made fun of the supposed naïve simplicity of women unable to spot the sexual overtones of (for example) a traveller’s request of an innkeeper’s daughter for somewhere to ‘stable his horse’.60 Many of the paper’s descriptions of women were derogatory, emphasising their pride, ignorance and sexual availability. Yet the world of Poor Robin’s Intelligence was not entirely off limits to women. Aside from the fact that it was published by a woman and that women would have been prominent in the ‘General Assembly of Hawkers’ responsible for its distribution, the paper sometimes gave women credit for the kind of ingenuity and verbal dexterity it celebrated in men.61 For instance, a story from Grose Alley in July 1677 celebrated the quick-witted display of ‘a Welsh Damosel of admirable Conduct and Courage’, who disguised herself as a constable and threatened to send to Bridewell two female neighbours who disturbed the peace of the neighbourhood with their slandering.62 The tavern culture that was central to the paper’s outlook presented risks to women’s reputation. However, in the paper, as in real life, women were to be found in drinking establishments, and on occasion there was even grudging respect for women’s hard drinking

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exploits, such as in a tale of ‘Five Strapping Bona-Robas’ of Shadwell who accepted a wager to ‘drink a Tearse of Clarett, within the space of Five Hours’.63 We will return to the sexual politics of Poor Robin’s Intelligence in the final part of this chapter, after examining its representation of metropolitan life and social relationships more fully.

Representing the City One of the key questions posed in recent historical writing on early modern London has been how inhabitants located themselves mentally and geographically within the city.64 In Poor Robin’s Intelligence there is little of the linguistic division of London between the fashionable ‘Town’ and the mercantile ‘City’ that was becoming increasingly popular in dramatic and other texts during the 1670s.65 Instead, the metropolis is mapped as an amalgam of ‘countries’, ‘colonies’ and ‘territories’, a set of overlapping, yet distinctive worlds with their own manners and customs. News was reported from the ‘colony’ of Islington, the ‘Garrison’ of Spindle Lane and the ‘Diocese of PissPot Alley’.66 In December 1676, a divertissement announced the imminent publication of ‘an exact Mapp of New Alsatia’, showing ‘all the Neighbouring Territories of the Free Cantons; describing the strongest Ports, most dangerous Passes, safe Intrenchments, convenient out-works, opportune Sally-ports, redoubts, Bastions, Mines, Sconces, In-lets, Out-lets, and Accommodations of that well-fortify’d Colony’.67 These elaborate geographical metaphors were of course further evidence of the paper’s delight in word play and satirised the conventional press, which printed predominantly foreign news. However, the spatial language of Poor Robin’s Intelligence presented an image of the metropolis that foreshadowed Thomas Brown’s later description of London as a ‘world by itself’, comprising of ‘so many nations differing in manners, customs, and religions, that the inhabitants themselves don’t know a quarter of ’em’.68 The city’s colour, bustle and confusion were recurring themes. There were few glimpses of the polite world: fashionable resorts such as Epsom were distinguished solely by their potential for debauchery, being a place ‘where Gallants are generally more free, and expect less ceremony in order to a familiarity than in London’.69 Just as the language of the paper combined common slang with the learned discourses of lawyers and virtuosi, so the street life depicted in Poor Robin’s Intelligence was an arena where high and low jostled alongside each other, not easily separable. For example, two seemingly respectable city women, a ‘jolly wife, and a buxome widow’ of Aldersgate Street, succumb to the ‘Modish entertainments of Musick, Dancing and Revelling’, only for their evening to end by being taken as prostitutes by the night watch, and dispatched to ‘the Academy in Clerkenwell’.70 The defining characteristics of a gentleman in London were the ‘clap’ and a discourse ‘smelling rank either of obscenity or Profaneness’.71 The city was confusing and disorienting, where the true characters of

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strangers could not be read easily. A divertissement hailed the invention of a new pair of spectacles, ‘not to be worn upon the Nose, but on the Neck and Wrists’, through which ‘a man may clearly see his faults, and his enemies’, and make ‘the most difficult distinction between good and evil’.72 The comic themes of Poor Robin’s Intelligence thus emphasised the disorderly aspects of urban life.73 Narratives of roguery and trickery featured heavily in the paper. So too did deception and credulity. Descriptions of the miracle cures and incompetence of quack doctors were a popular means of ridiculing charlatans and their gullible clients in equal measure. In April 1676 there was news of the recent arrival in Fleet Street, at the behest of ‘several persons of Quality’, of ‘Sir Cut beard Noddle Thatcher’ whose healing skills were ‘renowned in Hungaria, Polonia and the Low Countries’, and who ‘understands Diseases by taking 3 Hairs from the Pole of the Patient, and perfectly cures ‘em by cutting off the rest’.74 Astrologers and their clients also received short shrift. From Whitefriars on 12 May 1676 it was reported that an ‘old Astrological Sophister’ had spent ‘a full quarter of a year’ preparing a ‘most Strange and Wonderful Praediction, which he hath partly borrowed from the sixty sixth Page of Mother Shipton, and only wants to see it fulfilled before it be published … viz. Whether his Papers will turn to good account, or be converted into Bandboxes and Hat-Cases’.75 The paper also added to the contemporary mood of increasing scepticism about the reliability of prodigies. Upon reports, in April 1676, from the New Forest in Hampshire of the discovery of a serpent’s skin ‘about six foot in length with legs and wings’, the editor commented wearily that ‘I suppose we shall soon have a true and perfect Narrative thereof, in a strange and Wonderful Relation of a Terrible Serpent …cry’d about the streets, wherein ’tis odds but that it will be made appear, that this very Serpent was the natural off-spring of the Woman at Rumsey who was at the same time Delivered of a Living Toad and a Dead Child’.76 Given the importance of the tavern in the cultural milieu of Poor Robin’s Intelligence it is unsurprising that stories of the body disordered by drink featured heavily in this publication. In spite of its valorisation of the conviviality found in drinking establishments, the paper displayed an ambivalent attitude towards alcoholic consumption. On the one hand, drink loosened inhibitions, acting as a facilitator of wit and ‘frolicks’. In October 1676 it reported the adventures of some ‘pickled youths of the neighbourhood’ who play a trick on a midwife’s daughter by disguising themselves as women, one of them pregnant, and under the pretence of helping her to give birth, get her to put her hands ‘under the supposed woman’s coats’ to feel ‘something stirring’.77 The wit and good fellowship encouraged by participation in drinking culture might offset its more negative aspects. A ‘profuse young gallant’, in dire straits after squandering all his money on drink, so pleases two gentlemen with his ‘pretty Repartee’ that they present him with a ‘dozen Bottles of Claret, and left him as great as a king to pursue his Fortune’.78

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However, many of the stories in Poor Robin’s Intelligence highlighted the problems of intoxication and the ridicule it might bring. In the first place, drunkenness led to violence. A Quaker’s wife of Fish-Hook Street was reported to have taken ‘too liberal a Dose’ of Brandy, causing her to ‘make a violent Assault and Battery on her Maid’, but ‘in the fury of the Attack, her unstable and Back-sliding Feet refusing to support the reeling Fabrick of her outwardmass, she fell down flat on her face’, and was carried home to bed.79 In another story a man who returns home ‘Three Quarters and a half Drunk’, and has his sexual advances on his wife rebuffed, responds by hurling an ink pot in her face that ‘besides putting her Oatmeal visage into mourning, somewhat fractur’d the promontory of her nose’. His furious wife proceeds to beat him so severely that he has ‘ever since behav’d himself with all dutiful submission towards the Triumphant Conqueress’.80 While these stories trivialise domestic violence by reducing it to slapstick, they nonetheless highlighted how authority might be both abused and undermined by the loss of control occasioned by drunkenness. Above all, intoxication led to people embarrassing themselves in front of others. Drunkenness made people lose control of their senses and reason, leading them to mistake their environment. In March 1677, the paper reported the story of a drunken man who falls asleep in the road believing, when he wakes up, that he is at home, whereupon ‘fairly uncasing his Raggs, betakes himself naked to his repose in the open street’, where he is eventually apprehended by the watch.81 Drink also threatened bodily control, collapsing distinctions between human and animal. In one story a ‘Poor debauch’d Journeyman’ falls asleep drunk at the side of a road where he is mistaken for a pig by a short-sighted drover.82 In another, a seemingly respectable woman, who often railed against the evils of alcoholic consumption, drank at a friend’s funeral, causing ‘a violent Irruption at the Postern Gate of her Body’. Thinking she has suffered a fit, her husband calls on his neighbours for help making ‘all the people near to by spectators of his dear spouse’s uncleanness’.83 Humiliation was one of the major comic themes of Poor Robin’s Intelligence. In the last example it is not the embarrassment of the woman’s losing control of her bowels that is intended to cause the biggest laugh, but the humiliating exposure of her predicament before her neighbours. Humiliation, as William Ian Miller has argued, is a theme that particularly lends itself to mirth, involving a sense of ‘comic justice’.84 The humiliation of the befouled wife is ‘deserved’ due to her hypocritical Puritanism. Humiliation also highlights the difference between how people see themselves and how they are seen by others. The comedy of humiliation in Poor Robin’s Intelligence often involves the deflation of social pretension. The paper routinely pricked the pomposity of pretenders to honour and status, or those whose over-mannerly behaviour rendered them pretentious. In one example, a legal clerk of Chancery Lane ‘resolved to Equip himself in a Sword and Peruke, and turn Spark’. Having

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‘attained a gentile management of his Person and Parts’, the would-be man of mode ‘thought there was nothing more required to render him compleat than that unseparable companion of a Gallant called a Mistress’. Yet inexperience belied his swagger and, losing courage, he was humiliated in front of ‘those common prostitutes behind Holbourn Row’, and so ‘home he went to his Chamber with so much apprehension of Shame, that ’tis thought he will never appear again in publick as long as he stays in Town’.85 A handicraftsman who purchases a horse after considering ‘how more creditable it would be for him to ride down like a Gentleman to his Friends in the country than to vamp it like a Porter or a Foot-Pad’, is thrown into a ditch where he is humiliatingly rescued by his ‘fraternity’.86 Tales of shopkeepers taking singing lessons and servants affecting the fine clothes and dainty manners of their masters also end in disaster.87 Although such stories had a conservative character, generally mocking those who made false claims to gentility, the jokes nonetheless recognised the possibilities for social mobility in the expanding metropolis, and its temptations.88

Sex and the comic bawdy The theme of humiliating exposure was also a key aspect of the sex comedy of Poor Robin’s Intelligence. Although in some respects the comic tales printed in the paper reflected the anonymity of urban life that historians have so often highlighted, in others the world described in Poor Robin’s Intelligence was tightly knit and claustrophobic, and its stories reveal anxieties about lack of privacy. The density of housing and thin walls meant that little went on within the houses of craftsmen and artisans that could be entirely hidden.89 The charivariesque mockery of sexual deviants was a popular theme.90 Many stories of lechery culminate in the intervention of the neighbourhood, with humiliating consequences for those involved. For example, it was reported in Shoreditch in July 1676 that a ‘decayed lover of this parish’, upon hearing that flagellation might revive his waning libido, had sought the services of a local prostitute. However, upon the first blow he ‘cry’d out Murder so loud that the Neighbours came in to his assistance, but finding him at the old sport, they … turn’d him loose to the wide world, and the next morning presented him in effigie … and scourg’d him by proxy all about the streets’.91 Marital problems were also frequently depicted as being acted out in full view of the neighbourhood. There were numerous references to ritualistic battles for the breeches being publicly contested between husbands and wives, such as that announced in September 1676 ‘between Sir Simon Sneak and Dame Bettrice his wife’, to be enacted at Bankside, to which ‘all new married people are desired to attend … that they may learn how to deport themselves to the best advantage on such important and unavoidable occasions’.92 From Goswell Street it was reported in April 1676 that a wife had celebrated gaining the ‘masterdome’ over her philandering husband by wearing his ‘Sunday-

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Breeches’ as a ‘Trophy of her Man-hood, and engaged the youth of that Riding to signalize her victory in a publick solemnity on May Day’.93 Such themes were not new, of course, but the announcement of battles for the breeches as public performances drew attention to the difficulties of keeping matrimonial difficulties secret and how ‘private’ matters might become ‘public’ affairs, affecting the participants’ wider social standing. The implication was that in respectable families marital difficulties should be dealt with behind closed doors, but the ‘public’ and ‘private’ realms were difficult to keep apart. Similar issues were raised in tales of infidelity where cuckolds suffered humiliation by inadvertently alerting the neighbourhood to their wives’ adultery. One story mocked a husband whose loud exclamations upon discovering his wife in bed with a lover led to the ‘great disturbance of the neighbourhood’, bringing the affair to public knowledge.94 Elsewhere, a tailor of Covent Garden found his wife in bed with his journeyman and, ‘considering [that his wife] had such a reputation in the Neighbourhood that he doubted no body wou’d believe’ she was unfaithful, fetched in several neighbours to prove himself a ‘cuckold by witness’, in the process revealing his lack of patriarchal control to others.95 If such news items conventionally mocked men who lacked domestic authority, Poor Robin’s Intelligence also recognised the comic potential of stories in which wronged spouses turned the tables on adulterers. There was a rough and ready sexual morality to many of its stories of marital infidelity. There were several references to nose slitting as a punishment that wives might inflict on their husbands’ whores as a bodily inscription of their shame.96 A city wife pays a visit to a neighbour she suspected of sleeping with her husband and threatens to cure her of ‘the Falling-Evil’ by opening a ‘Vein in the Ridge of her Nose, which ’tis not doubted will prove a Soveraign Antidote for the future against that prevalent distemper’.97 Quick-witted action on the part of cuckolded husbands was viewed positively as a means of transferring the shame of infidelity onto the gallant.98 In several stories cuckold-makers are subjected to a beating.99 More ingeniously, in February 1677, a doctor who discovered his wife was having an affair with a barber sought revenge under the guise of reconciliation by inviting his rival to drink with him, giving him a glass of something that resembled ‘common distill’d waters’ but was in fact a ‘violent Cathartick or purge’. This causes the barber to be interrupted in his work of shaving a customer by ‘importunate grumblings in his lower rooms’, which the customer takes as an affront leading him to ‘rise up in wrath and break his head with his Basin’.100 The comically brutal assertion of manhood was also evident in some of the paper’s representations of marital relations. One story, dated 25 October 1676, described how a husband forced his wife to sign over her estate to him by feeding her on a ‘Diet-Drink of Water and Salt’ and by the ‘warm

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Application of a Rope’s end to her shoulders every other evening’.101 The paper conventionally portrayed wifely insubordination as leading to political disorder: ‘Usurp’d power you know is commonly very Tyrannical, and when Might overcomes Right, it seldom fails to insult’.102 However, Poor Robin’s Intelligence participated in a later seventeenth-century debate about the arbitrary deployment of power within the family (and by implication in the state at large), and many of its stories implied that patriarchal authority had limits.103 We have already seen how husbands who got drunk and beat their wives were humiliated – assertion of power exercised without responsibility might be equally ‘tyrannical’. Laughter was to be had at the expense of philandering men whose wronged wives took their own revenge. One furious wife, upon discovering her husband in flagrante delicto, forces him to ‘bestow in her presence above Forty serious Salutes with his Feet, on his Doxies Blind Cheeks for a parting farewell; a Pennance which she desires us to recommend to all good wives upon such Occasions’.104 Rather than unambiguously accepting the sexual double standard, the paper represented men’s sexual behaviour in more ambivalent terms. On the one hand it recognised that young men might be driven by their sexual urges and expected that they might sow their wild oats prior to settling into wedlock, going as far as to mock the ‘cowardise’ of those whose nerve failed them in the face of sexual opportunity.105 However, there was also criticism of men who acted irresponsibly or without appropriate discretion. In July 1676 it printed the story of a gentleman marriage-hater who seduced a young woman but ‘afterward behaved himself so unlike a Gentleman, as to proclaim her infamy (and his together)’. Seduction had its own rules of civility in which a degree of candour was important. With an appropriate sense of poetic justice, the victim harnessed the power of print to reveal her extraordinary act of revenge, exposing the whole affair in a novel, ‘The Revengeful Lady, or the Tell-Tale Eunuch’d’.106

Conclusion The final issue of Poor Robin’s Intelligence appeared on 6 November 1677. There was a suggestion that the paper had been ‘suppressed by Authority’ for its ‘intollerable Abuses, especially to one of eminent Quality’.107 However, after eighty-four weekly editions it may simply have run out of steam. That sales may have been dropping off is suggested by an advertisement that appeared in October 1677 telling readers where they might purchase unsold back issues.108 A spin-off, Poor Robin’s Memoirs, containing the picaresque adventures of ‘S. Mendacio’ was launched on 10 December 1677, running to seventeen parts or ‘tomes’, and there was an attempt to revive Poor Robin’s Intelligence again in 1679–80.109 By this time, however, the paper faced greater competition in the newly de-regulated marketplace for news. The paper’s earlier success had been due in part to its avoidance of controversy but in the politicised atmosphere surrounding the Popish

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Plot and Exclusion its facetious view of life’s absurdities may have been considered irrelevant. Nevertheless, the influence of Poor Robin’s Intelligence on the development of newspapers at this time should be acknowledged. In focusing on London news and social topics, rather than the foreign political news of the official Gazette, Poor Robin’s Intelligence paved the way for the greater emphasis on domestic affairs and public disorder in newspapers of the early 1680s such as Thomas Benskin’s Domestic Intelligence.110 The satirical advertisement, developed in Poor Robin’s Intelligence, was also employed in the political propaganda of these years, as was another of its comic staples, narratives of roguery and trickery.111 It is difficult to say whether the experience of reading Poor Robin’s Intelligence may have increased public interest in plots at this time. If anything, the paper’s sceptical tone and mocking of credulity acted as a warning not to believe everything one heard or read about. Nevertheless, in exposing the extraordinary in everyday life, the paper may have opened the minds of its readers to the possibilities of intrigue in the world around them. At one level, the content of Poor Robin’s Intelligence bears out Schwoerer’s accusation of being ‘silly or bawdy or both’. The material was too ambivalent for the paper’s claim to be a force for the reformation of manners to sound fully convincing. However, amidst all its revelling in life’s disorderly possibilities, there was a sense of social justice running through the paper’s stories. Its tales of humiliating exposure satirised social pretension and revealed people’s common human vulnerability. It commonly criticised those who threatened the peace of their neighbourhoods through slandering or scolding, or who stirred up needless controversy. Furthermore, it stood against those who abused their positions of authority, criticising masters who abused their servants and husbands who tyrannically abused their patriarchal authority. In one of its last issues, the paper abandoned its satirical tone altogether to condemn a group of ‘rascals’ who had robbed the victims of a recent fire in Whitefriars ‘whose Deplorable Condition cannot but affect any Christian with serious compassion’.112 For all its facetious wit and linguistic showboating, the paper was an important site for thinking about the problems facing inhabitants of later seventeenth-century London: how to make sense of their increasingly complex environment; how to read the city and its inhabitants; and how to maintain decorum and dignity in the face of temptations of the flesh or the bottle and maintain privacy in claustrophobic communities where the much vaunted ‘anonymity’ of urban life was in short supply. For modern historians, Poor Robin’s Intelligence is significant also in the kind of questions it raises about how we think about the nature of early modern humour and popular culture more generally. This chapter has shown the dangers of defining the ‘popularity’ of comic literature purely from its subject matter. Attention to the language of Poor Robin’s Intelligence, the ways it

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addressed its implied readers and the kind of knowledge it assumed on their part, presents a more complex picture of its potential constituency than the simplistic assumption of a ‘vulgar’ or ‘semi-literate’ audience would allow. The material may be characterised as expressing a kind of learned vulgarity that was based on varied cultural resources. The virtuosity and comic richness that Bernard Capp documented in the early seventeenthcentury output of John Taylor the Water Poet was alive and well in Restoration England in this much maligned publication.

Notes 1

2

3 4 5

6

7

8

9 10 11 12 13 14

15 16 17

I am grateful to the Research Committee of the School of Humanities, Law and Social Sciences, University of Glamorgan, for funding much of the research in this chapter. Poor Robin’s Intelligence [hereafter PRI], A ‘From the Beginning of the World to the Day of the Date hereof’ [i.e. 26 March 1676]. The paper often employed this kind of idiosyncratic dating. For clarity, date references in this chapter are given in conventional form. Poor Robin’s Answer to Mr Thomas Danson, Author of the Late Friendly Debate Between Satan and Sherlocke (1677), 1. Lex Talionis: Poor Robin turn’d Robin the Devil. Being his Exact Character (1680), unpaginated. L.G. Schwoerer, The Ingenious Mr Henry Care, Restoration Publicist (Baltimore, MD, 2001), 40; C.J. Sommerville, The News Revolution in England: Cultural Dynamics of Daily Information (New York and Oxford, 1996), 85. For example, J. Sutherland, The Restoration Newspaper and its Development (Cambridge, 1986); M. Knights, Politics and Opinion in Crisis, 1678–81 (Cambridge, 1994). L. Klein, ‘The polite town: shifting possibilities of urbanness, 1660–1715’, in T. Hitchcock and H. Shore (eds), The Streets of London: From the Great Fire to the Great Stink (2003), 31–2. B.S. Capp, ‘Popular literature’, in B. Reay (ed.), Popular Culture in SeventeenthCentury England (1985), 198–243; idem, Astrology and the Popular Press: English Almanacs, 1500–1800 (Boston MA, 1979); idem, The World of John Taylor the Water Poet 1578–1653 (Oxford, 1994). H.E. Smith, ‘Poor Robin’, Notes and Queries, 6th ser. 7 (23 April 1883), 321–2; Capp, Astrology and the Popular Press, 40, 231, 245, 339. A Scourge for Poor Robin; Or, the Exact Picture of a Bad Husband (1678), 3. Poor Robin’s Answer to Mr Thomas Danson, p. 3; Schwoerer, Ingenious Mr Henry Care, 40. Ibid., 41 and 40–3 passim. PRI, Oo (12–19 December 1676). Ibid., Cc (26 September–3 October 1676). For the humourlessness of Quakers see ibid., Hh (31 October–7 November 1676); Mm (28 November–5 December 1676). Poor Robin’s Answer to Mr Thomas Danson. PRI, Ee (10–17 October 1676). Cf. Schwoerer, Ingenious Mr Henry Care, 41. ‘Another Character of Poor Robin’, in Lex Talionis; cf. Schwoerer, Ingenious Mr Henry Care, 40.

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19 20

21 22 23 24 25 26

27 28

29 30

31

32 33 34 35 36

37 38 39 40 41

H.R. Plomer, A Dictionary of the Printers and Booksellers who were at work in England, Scotland and Ireland from 1668 to 1725 (Oxford, [1922], 1968), 245, 139. Anne was possibly the widow of the printer G. Purslowe. On this publication see J. McElligott, ‘John Crouch: A royalist journalist in Cromwellian England’, Media History 10:3 (2004), 139–55. PRI, Ggg (3–10 April 1677) (lost maidenhead); ibid., Yy (6–13 February 1677) (missing dog); ibid., Ddd (13–20 March 1677) (Italian Padlock); ibid., H (16–23 May 1676) (choice rarities). John Stow, A Survey of London [1603], ed. C.L. Kingsford (2 vols, Oxford, 1908), vol. II, 21. PRI, R (18–25 July 1676). Ibid., T (1–8 August 1676). Poor Gillian: Or, Mother Redcap’s Advice to Citie and Country (7 December 1677). PRI, G (9–15 May 1676); cf Proceedings of the Old Bailey Online, t16760510-1, 10 May 1676 (trial of a ‘Person’ for bigamy). K. Sharpe, Reading Revolutions: The Politics of Reading in Early Modern England (New Haven CT, 2000), 59–60. For recent examples of this approach see K. Harvey, Reading Sex in the Eighteenth Century: Bodies and Gender in English Erotic Culture (Cambridge, 2005), ch. 1; J. McElligott, ‘The politics of sexual libel: royalist propaganda in the 1640s’, Huntington Library Quarterly 67:1 (2004), 75–99. Sommerville, News Revolution 147. Henry Care, The Weekly Pacquet of Advice from Rome (5 vols., 1678–83), vol. I, 3, cited in T. Harris, London Crowds in the Reign of Charles II: Propaganda and Politics from the Restoration to the Exclusion Crisis (Cambridge, 1987), 100. On ‘popular’ humour see R. Thompson, ‘Popular reading and humour in Restoration England’, Journal of Popular Culture 9 (1975–6), 653–71; M. Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and its Readership in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1981), ch. 7; K. Thomas, ‘The place of laughter in Tudor and Stuart England’, Times Literary Supplement (21 January 1977), 77–81. Capp, World of John Taylor; T. Harris (ed.), Popular Culture in England c.1500–1850 (Basingstoke, 1995). Cf. P. Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (London, 1978); A. Fletcher and J. Stevenson, ‘Introduction’, in eadem eds, Order and Disorder in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1985), 1–15. PRI, H (16–23 May 1676). L. Beier, ‘Anti-language or jargon? Canting in the English underworld in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’, in P. Burke and R. Porter (eds), Languages and Jargons: Contributions to a Social History of Language (Cambridge, 1995), 64–101. For examples see PRI, R (18–25 July 1676); ibid., G (9–15 May 1676); ibid., N (20–27 June 1676). Ibid., Z (5–12 September 1676); ibid., Ddd (14–20 March 1677). Ibid., K (30 May–6 June 1676); ibid., F (25 April–1 May 1676). Ibid., O (27 June–4 July 1676). Capp, World of John Taylor, 85–6; H.K. Miller, ‘The paradoxical encomium with special reference to its vogue in England, 1600–1800’, Modern Philology 53:3 (1956), 145–78. PRI, H (16–23 May 1676). Ibid., N (20–27 June 1676). Ibid., Bbb (28 February–6 March 1677). Ibid., K (30 May–6 June 1676). Ibid., Ttt (26 June–3 July 1677).

102 The World of Poor Robin’s Intelligence 42 43 44 45 46

Ibid., K (30 May–6 June 1676). Ibid., J (23–30 May 1676). Ibid., T (1–8 August 1676). Ibid., Jj (7–14 November 1676); ibid., P (4–11 July 1676). Ibid., S (25 July–1 August 1676); ibid., O (27 June–4 July 1676); M.H. Nicholson and D.S. Rodes, ‘Introduction’, in Thomas Shadwell, The Virtuoso [1676], ed. idem (1966), xii. 47 [Herbert Croft], The Naked Truth: or, the True State of the Primitive Church (1675). For examples see PRI, Dd (3–9 October 1676); ibid., Ffff (4–11 September 1677). 48 Ibid., O (27 June–4 July 1676) (Seymar); ibid., Yy (6–13 February 1677) (Blagrave); For ballads see e.g. ibid., O (27 June–4 July 1676) (The Rich and Flourishing Cuckold) and almanacs see e.g. ibid., H (16–23 May 1676) (Merry Andrew’s Monthly Predictions). 49 A similarly broad range of discourses are present in sexual libels of the 1640s and in eighteenth-century erotica: McElligott, ‘Politics of sexual libel’, 89; Harvey, Reading Sex, 54–60. 50 D. Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge, 1980), chaps 6 and 7. 51 For examples see PRI, G (9–15 May 1676); ibid., Qq (26 December 1676–2 January 1677). 52 Cf. J. Spurr, England in the 1670s (Oxford, 2000), 102–9. 53 PRI, H (16–23 May 1676). 54 M. O’Callaghan, ‘Tavern societies, the inns of court, and the culture of conviviality in early seventeenth-century London’, in A. Smyth (ed.), A Pleasing Sinne: Drink and Conviviality in Seventeenth-Century England (Woodbridge, 2004), 37–51; B. Cowan, The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse (New Haven, CT, 2005), 228. 55 PRI, Cc (26 September–3 October 1676). 56 A. Shepard, ‘“Swil-bols and Tos-pots:” Drink culture and male bonding in England, c.1560–1640’, in L. Gowing et al. (eds), Love, Friendship and Faith in Europe, 1300–1800 (Basingstoke, 2005), 118. 57 O’Callaghan, ‘Tavern Societies’, 50. 58 C. Nelson and M. Seccombe, Periodical Publications 1641–1700: A Survey with Illustrations (1986), 27. 59 D. Roberts, The Ladies: Female Patronage of Restoration Drama (Oxford, 1989), 38; Harvey, Reading Sex, 59. 60 PRI, L (6–13 June 1676). 61 P. McDowell, The Women of Grub Street: Press, Politics and Gender in the London Literary Marketplace 1678–1730 (Oxford, 1998), 55. 62 PRI, Uuu (3–10 July 1677). 63 Ibid., H (16–23 May 1676); A. Flather, Gender and Space in Early Modern England (Woodbridge, 2007), 114. 64 For example see the essays in J.F. Merritt (ed.), Imagining Early Modern London: Perceptions and Portrayals of the City from Stow to Strype, 1598–1720 (Cambridge, 2001); M. Ogborn, Spaces of Modernity: London’s Geographies 1680–1730 (New York, 1998); C. Wall, The Literary and Cultural Spaces of Restoration London (Cambridge, 1998). 65 Spurr, England in the 1670s, 161. 66 PRI, Dd (3–10 October 1676) for Islington and Piss-Pot Alley; ibid., Cc (26 September–3 October 1676) for Spindle Lane. 67 Ibid., Nn (5–12 December 1676).

David M. Turner 103 68

69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76

77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89

90

91 92 93 94 95 96

97 98 99 100

Tom Brown, Amusements Serious and Comical [1700], ed., A.L. Hayward (1927), 10; see also R.B. Shoemaker, ‘Gendered spaces: patterns of mobility and perceptions of London’s geography, 1660–1750’, in Merritt (ed.), Imagining Early Modern London, 144–65. PRI, O (27 June–4 July 1676). Ibid., F (25 April–2 May 1676). Ibid., Y (29 August–5 September 1676). Ibid., F (25 April–2 May 1676). Klein, ‘Polite Town’, 32. PRI, F (25 April–2 May 1676). Ibid., G (9–15 May 1676). Ibid., E (18–25 April 1676). W.E. Burns, Age of Wonders: Prodigies, Politics and Providence in England 1657–1727 (Manchester and New York, 2002), 105 notes the anti-providentialist tone of Henry Care’s Weekly Paquet of Advice from Rome. PRI, Ff (17–24 October 1676). Ibid., Kk (14–21 November 1676). Ibid., Bb (19–26 September 1676). Ibid., Ff (17–24 October 1676). Ibid., Ccc (6–13 March 1677). Ibid., U (8–15 August 1676). Ibid., Cc (26 September–3 October 1676). W.I. Miller, Humiliation and Other Essays on Honour, Social Discomfort and Violence (Ithaca, NY, 1993), 137–8. PRI, L (6–13 June 1676). Ibid., W (15–22 August 1676). Ibid. (for the singing shopkeeper); ibid., P (4–11 July 1676). See also M.S. Dawson, Gentility and the Comic Theatre of Late Stuart London (Cambridge, 2005). L. Gowing, Domestic Dangers: Women, Words and Sex in Early Modern London (Oxford, 1996); J. Boulton, Neighbourhood and Society: A London Suburb in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 1987), esp. ch. 9; J.F. Merritt, ‘Introduction: Perceptions and portrayals of London 1596–1720’, in idem (ed.), Imagining Early Modern London, 11. See also P. Burke, ‘Popular culture in early modern London’, in Reay (ed.), Popular Culture: 35; Harris, London Crowds, 32; M. Ingram, ‘Ridings, rough music and the “Reform of Popular Culture” in early modern England’, Past & Present 105 (1984), 79–113. PRI, R (18–25 July 1676). Ibid., Bb (19–26 September 1676). Ibid., F (25 April–2 May 1676). Ibid., Z (5–12 September 1676). Ibid., Q (11–18 July 1676); see also D.M. Turner, Fashioning Adultery: Gender, Sex and Civility in England 1660–1740 (Cambridge, 2002), 93–4. Gowing, Domestic Dangers, 103–4; V. Groebner, ‘Losing face, saving face: noses, honour and spite in the late medieval town’, History Workshop Journal, 40 (1995), 1–15. PRI Dd (3–10 October 1676); see also ibid., P (4–11 July 1676). Turner, Fashioning Adultery, 93–4. For example, PRI, N (20–27 June 1676); ibid., R (18–25 July 1676). Ibid., Yy (6–13 February 1677); For a similar story see ibid., Eee (20–27 March 1677).

104 The World of Poor Robin’s Intelligence 101 102 103

104 105 106

107 108 109 110 111

112

Ibid., Gg (24–31 October 1676). Ibid., R (18–25 July 1676). R. Weil, ‘Sometimes a scepter is only a scepter: pornography and politics in Restoration England’, in L. Hunt (ed.), The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity 1500–1800 (New York, 1993), 125–53; idem, Political Passions: Gender, the Family and Political Argument in England 1680–1714 (Manchester, 1999); F.E. Dolan, Dangerous Familiars: Representations of Domestic Crime in England, 1550–1700 (Ithaca, NY, 1994), ch. 3. PRI, Bbb (28 February–6 March 1677). Ibid., Q (11–18 July 1676). Ibid., O (27 June–4 July 1676). The said novel was published by ‘Poor Robin Kt’ in 1679 as News from Epsom: Or, the Revengeful Lady; Shewing how a Young Lady there was Beguil’d by a London Gallant; who when he had done, boasted of the Conquest, for which unworthy Fact, she Wittily reveng’d herself of the Tell-Tale, and made a Capon of a Cockney (n.p., 1679). Lex Talionis. PRI, Mmmm (16–23 October 1677). R.M. Wiles, Serial Publication in England before 1750 (Cambridge, 1957), 75. Sutherland, Restoration Newspaper, 76. Sommerville, News Revolution, 94; K. Loveman, ‘“Eminent Cheats”: Rogue narratives in the literature of the Exclusion Crisis’, in J. McElligott (ed.), Fear, Exclusion and Revolution: Roger Morrice and Britain in the 1680s (Aldershot, 2006), 108–22. PRI, Iiii (25 September–2 October 1677).

6 The Strangeness of the Familiar: Witchcraft and the Law in Early Modern England Garthine Walker

Studies of early modern witchcraft contain many references to witchcraft as a crimen exceptum – an exceptional crime that was not subject to regular judicial procedures or standards of proof. This is particularly true in studies of European witchcraft in jurisdictions governed by inquisitorial methods and in which witchcraft was defined as heresy. In England, which had an accusatorial system of criminal justice, witchcraft was prosecuted as a secular offence for which the most serious punishment was hanging, as it was for other felonies. Scholars of English witchcraft have frequently remarked upon its singularity and its distinctiveness from the European model. Yet in spite of the tendency to see witchcraft as a relatively less exceptional crime in a European context, it is usually portrayed as an essentially special crime regardless of how it was categorised or of the legal framework in which it was prosecuted. Academic authors’ incredulity regarding witchcraft may often be detected in their work. Following on from nineteenth-century antiquarians, who were horrified that the ‘superstitious and absurd’ beliefs of our ancestors sent so many to the gallows for an ‘imaginary crime’, early and mid-twentiethcentury scholars referred unreflectively to ‘the witchcraft delusion’, and lamented ‘the credulity and folly’ of early modern people.1 Even in the late 1970s, historical sociologists referred to the period of the witch trials as a ‘bizarre chapter in European history’.2 Others expressed a residual bafflement that rational, highly educated men ‘could have been so bigoted as to put people to death for […] patently impossible acts’.3 Witchcraft was thus ‘a noncrime’, a ‘crime without criminals’.4 Yet from 1970 onwards, as a consequence of methods and approaches associated with what came to be known as the new social history, and particularly the works of Keith Thomas and Alan Macfarlane on witchcraft, historians sought to understand early modern witchcraft in its own terms. A vast and growing body of research now explores the contemporary meanings of early modern witchcraft from multiple perspectives and in numerous contexts. 105

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Nonetheless, the twin aims of avoiding both presentism and overinterpretation continue to collide silently in the light of a certainty that witchcraft was a crime that simply could not have occurred. As Robin Briggs put it, ‘as a crime, [witchcraft] was “transparent”, with a hole at the centre, since witches did not actually do most of the things alleged against them’.5 Lyndal Roper noted that ‘in a profession used to assessing documents for their reliability, it is hard to know how to interpret documents which we do not believe to be factual’.6 The interpretative and methodological difficulties identified by historians in studying witchcraft echo the problems of producing evidence that were encountered or assumed to be present in the early modern courtroom. Witchcraft, it seems, requires special treatment both by early modern courts and by twenty-first-century academics. In this chapter, I shall consider the extent to which witchcraft in England and Wales was regarded by early modern people as an exceptional crime, and the extent to which this impacted on prosecutions and punishments. I shall show that in many respects witchcraft was a mundane, everyday crime. Historians have long been aware that concerns about witchcraft were those of everyday life. A child sickens, livestock goes missing or dies, the process of making butter goes awry. Even instances of sudden infant or adult death were less extraordinary than modern scholars might suppose. To a large extent the unexceptional nature of witchcraft was precisely wherein lay its power to bring about exceptional outcomes. As a crime, too, there were respects in which witchcraft was no more remarkable than certain other offences, especially other ‘secret’ crimes. For the most part, witchcraft cases proceeded through the various stages of the criminal justice system in a routine manner.

English witchcraft: a crimen exceptum? Conventionally, Anglophone historical writing compared English trials favourably to those conducted in continental Europe. Witch trials elsewhere were far more shocking and barbaric than those at home, which were ‘mild, humane and few’.7 With a confidence typical of national histories, early twentieth-century work considered early modern concerns about witchcraft and its prosecution to be foreign imports: ideas that had accompanied Protestants returning from exile upon the accession of Elizabeth I and again with the arrival from Scotland of James I.8 In the 1960s and 1970s, some scholars continued to commend the moderate and progressive English response to the problem of proving the impossible crime of witchcraft: England’s superior legal framework and ‘relatively advanced conception of due process of law’ put ‘effective limitations on the suppressive power’ of the judiciary. In contrast, ‘a nearly complete absence of institutional restraints’ within continental legal systems meant that ‘due process and legal restraint tended

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to go by the board’. The ‘repressive control’ activated by European authorities was matched in England by ‘restrained control’.9 The relative ‘leniency’ with which English courts dealt with witchcraft was explained also in terms of the higher status and independence of women and the development of modern property rights, both of which set England apart from implicitly ‘backward’ continental nations.10 Going beyond witch trials to compare systems of justice per se, some scholars have explicitly distinguished between ‘an […] “extraordinary” (or inquisitorial) form, which normally had harsh consequences’ and an ‘accusatorial (or “ordinary”) form’ – like England’s – which did not, using the latter terms to describe inquisitorial systems that do not meet the continental stereotype.11 By 1980, the idea of a ‘European model’ of witchcraft against which the English case could be measured had already been challenged. The relationship between the form of judicial system and the view of witchcraft as a crimen exceptum was far from straightforward. The grounds upon and extent to which witchcraft was categorised in continental jurisdictions as a crimen exceptum varied from place to place, as did the extent to which legal rules were relaxed.12 Through the 1980s and 1990s, historians increasingly drew attention to the diversity and complexity of patterns of prosecution in Europe, a pattern that was made more obvious by the inclusion of central and Eastern Europe in its scope. Older distinctions between inquisitorial and accusatorial legal systems remained but were less sharply drawn. Relaxing of the categories, however, seems to have moved primarily in one direction: to an acknowledgement that the potential excesses of inquisitorial methods were not realised everywhere. Initial accusations often focused on everyday maleficia rather than on satanic pacts or sabbat attendance;13 torture was not routinely applied without constraint, and when it was, it was usually a breach of official policy;14 not all states – even those that saw some large scale witch panics, such as France – defined witchcraft as a crimen exceptum;15 suspects were not automatically assumed to be guilty, and in some continental jurisdictions legal officials were uninterested in prosecuting witches.16 Such characteristics cannot easily be mapped according to religion, legal system, or geographical area. In this broader context, English witch trials may be seen as one variant among many.17 Nonetheless, the idea of English exceptionalism persists in several ways. First, witchcraft was defined and prosecuted as a secular crime. In 1542, certain types of witchcraft became a felony, that is, a capital crime – particularly witchcraft that resulted in harm that itself constituted a criminal offence such as murder, non-lethal bodily harm, and damage to property and livestock.18 Subsequent Acts of 1563 and 1604 established a sliding scale of punishments according to the nature and purpose of the alleged acts.19 At one end of the spectrum lay bewitching to death and at the other divining the whereabouts of lost property or stolen goods. Under English criminal law, witchcraft had no special status as a crimen exceptum. It was a

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felony like any other for which convicts hanged, and was subject to ordinary judicial procedures and standards of proof. It was, however, an aggravated offence: convicts were ineligible for ‘benefit of clergy’, a mechanism by which a capital sentence was commuted to branding (for men), and accessories to the crime were to be punished as principals.20 Witchcraft was in bad company: murder, rape, sodomy, bestiality, robbery, and burglary all became non-clergiable in the sixteenth century. Secondly, it has long been established that in comparison to ‘mass’ trials experienced in some parts of Europe, England’s witch trials were few and convictions fewer. English cases contributed perhaps 1% of the total European executions for witchcraft, a significant under-representation in terms of population.21 This has frequently been attributed to the nature of the English criminal justice system.22 In cases of felony, the burden of proof lay with individual prosecutors, usually the victim or a relative of theirs; guilt or innocence was decided by a panel of jurors, and judicial torture was employed neither to obtain confessions nor to identity other witches. The focus of trials therefore remained on maleficia, the particular harm allegedly caused by witchcraft. Large-scale continental trials, on the other hand, occurred within inquisitorial systems of justice in which legal officials were responsible not only for gathering evidence in order to build a case for heresy against the suspect but also for extracting confessions from the accused, and for initiating cases against further persons whom the suspect named. Judicial torture was sanctioned as an effective means by which to achieve these ends. Brian Levack has observed the process whereby with each round of interrogation the diabolic pact and sabbat attendance became closer to the centre of the case, and the alleged malefic act(s) which initiated the trial became increasingly tangential. Thus, ‘torture in a certain sense “created” […] diabolical witchcraft’.23 Although not all European witch trials conformed to this model, ‘extraordinary’ mass continental trials still provide a gauge by which the ‘ordinary’ interpersonal conflicts that characterised English trials may be measured positively. By the same token, the Hopkins trials of the 1640s are often described as aberrations due to their similarities with the stereotypical continental ones. English witch beliefs continue to be presented as, if not unique, at least idiosyncratic in comparison to European ones. Their distinctive features were the presence of the witch’s ‘familiar spirit’ or ‘imp’ by which witches enacted maleficia and the low profile of the stereotypical European witch. One reason given for the latter is the absence of English intellectual engagement with fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century continental discourses about diabolic witchcraft and how best to deal with it. Of course, English gentlemen and scholars might have read the texts in question in Latin or vernacular European languages. But if they did, they seemingly did so passively. No contribution to demonological debate was either of English authorship or printed in England until the late sixteenth century. The first

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demonological text in English, a translation from the Latin written by a French Calvinist minister, appeared only in 1575.24 The first of English authorship was Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witches in 1583, published two decades after the first witch was hanged under the 1563 Act. Although Scot provides information about his first and second-hand experience of witch beliefs in England, his primary purpose was to refute the beliefs of foreign ‘papists’ in general and Jean Bodin in particular. It was not until the 1590s that an English author produced a work dealing expressly with English witch beliefs.25 While the heretical witch of continental demonologies never became typical of English cases, academic writers have identified her incorporation into seventeenth-century accounts. The Lancashire trials of 1634, for example, featured witches who confessed to making a compact with the Devil, and a young boy claimed to have witnessed ‘a witch feast in Pendle Forest’, before admitting that he had made up the story after hearing adults talking about such a feast that had taken place two decades earlier, which had resulted in the trials of 1612.26 In the Hopkins trials in the 1640s, a proportion of those arraigned confessed to having met the Devil, and some claimed that they had had a sexual relationship with him.27 Each of the above perspectives has some degree of validity. Yet the idea that England was an excepted nation and witchcraft an excepted crime are sometimes conflated in confusing or even contradictory respects. What I wish to explore here is the extent to which the classification of witchcraft as a felony rather than a form of heresy means that drawing comparisons with prosecutions for witchcraft elsewhere may take us only so far in understanding the ways in which witchcraft and its prosecution in England and Wales was exceptional. We need also to consider the concept and the prosecution of witchcraft in the more immediate context in which it existed, namely in that of felony within the English criminal justice system.

Standards of proof Both on the continent and in England, offences carrying a penalty of death normally required higher standards of proof than lesser offences. Commonly, this meant the testimony of two eye-witnesses, the production of ‘unambiguous written proofs’, and/or the suspect’s free confession. Yet lawyers and laymen across Europe acknowledged that these criteria were hard to meet in witchcraft cases. The status of witchcraft as excepted crime rested on the opinion that in ‘an extraordinary matter there must herein be extraordinary dealing: and all manner of ways are to be used, direct and indirect’, including the acceptance of ‘less absolute proof’ than was normally required.28 Although under English law witchcraft was not officially a crimen exceptum, many believed it ought to have been. The devil’s part in maleficia, after all,

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was ‘usually hidden’.29 Many feared that unless exceptions were made, no witches would be convicted in England at all. These views can be found in all strata of society. In George Gifford’s Dialogue Concerning Witches and Witchcrafts, it is the schoolmaster, a man with at least a grammar school education, who concedes that ordinarily there ought ‘to be due proof by [at least] two witnesses’ in capital crimes: This may be for murtherers, this may be for thieves: but for witches I see not how. They deal so secretly with their spirits, that very seldom they can be convinced by flat testimonies of men, as to say directly they have heard or seen them send their spirits. And again, it is a rare thing to have a witch confess. For it is generally thought the devil hath such power over them, that he will not suffer them to confess. These were serious concerns, in response to which contemporaries expressed a variety of positions just as they did on the continent. Gifford, for instance, rejected the argument that witchcraft constituted a special case. Why, he asked, was it any harder to prove that someone had committed witchcraft than murder or burglary? ‘If there be vehement suspicion, and the party upon examination confess the fact, that is sufficient proof. If the party do deny, and two or three of credit do testify upon their knowledge with a solemn oath that he is guilty of the fact, that is also a sufficient proof’.30 Histories of English witchcraft have tended, often implicitly, towards the first rather than the second position: since the courts convicted people of a crime for which direct evidence could not exist, ordinary rules and procedures could not have been followed. Witchcraft, we are told, was therefore ‘punishable […] in the absence of any evidence of damage against persons and things’.31 In order to circumvent ‘the difficulties in proving witchcraft […] a whole judicial system was manipulated and reshaped – incorporating diabolic elements such as the witch’s mark and the swimming test’.32 Catching offenders in the act was – obviously – difficult in all secret crimes. Yet we might presume witchcraft to be set apart from other violent felonies in that material evidence that implicated the suspect – such as, say, a murder weapon or poison found in the suspect’s house, and credible witnesses who testified that they had seen the accused carrying the weapon or buying poison – was rarely detected. There are occasional references to materials and methods such as wax or clay images of the victim, which were pierced with pins, roasted in the fire, or buried in the ground, which corresponded to the deterioration of the bewitched party.33 John Walsh, for instance, explained that wax figures caused the victim to languish for two years, the time it took for the wax to decompose, while a prick through the heart of a figure caused death within nine days.34 ‘Witching stuff’ like this was rarely presented to JPs or produced in court, despite the fact that the 1543, 1563 and 1604 statutes all referred to it, conceivably because it was a remnant

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of the late medieval discourses of sorcery and ritual magic, which were better known among the literate elite than ordinary people. However, the presumption that no material evidence existed in most witchcraft cases reflects our own disbelief that any could exist. As the witch’s familiar spirit was widely thought to be the conduit of her maleficia, the importance assigned to evidence that suggested that the suspect had a familiar spirit is hardly a departure from legal form. Moreover, familiars appeared in everyday shapes that people could recognise. No wonder that so much emphasis was placed on familiar spirits in the detection and prosecution of witchcraft.

Familiar spirits and the witch’s mark The witch’s familiar spirit or ‘imp’ is a famously distinct feature of English witch beliefs, which was already present in the earliest witch trial pamphlet. In 1566, Elizabeth Frauncis and others confessed that they had practised maleficia against people around them by the agency of a familiar called Sathan, who appeared variously in the shape of a ‘white spotted cat’, a toad, and a large dog.35 In 1579, Frauncis was prosecuted again, her published confession this time describing her ‘spirit of a white colour’ in the form of ‘a little rugged dog’.36 The same year, the printed account of Elizabeth Stile’s confession, allegedly made in gaol before her trial, identified other witches in the first instance by their possession of familiars rather than by their malefic deeds. One kept ‘a spirit or fiend in the likeness of a toad’ in her garden; another ‘hath a spirit in the shape of a black cat, and calleth it Gille’; a third fed ‘a kitten [kitlyng] or fiend’ named Ginnie. Stile’s own familiar was a rat called Philip, it ‘being in very deed a wicked spirit’. Each witch fed her familiar with her own blood – either unadulterated or mixed with milk or breadcrumbs.37 Three years later, Ursula Kempe confessed to having four imps, cats called Titty and Jack, a toad called Piggin, and Tiffin the lamb. These latter two she admitted had murdered two of her neighbours. Kempe too fed her imps with her own blood, in her case mixed with breads and beer. Familiars were and continued till the mid-seventeenth century to be widely acknowledged as a means of identifying witches, and sometimes in distinguishing them from cunning folk.38 Imps usually appeared in everyday shapes – dogs, cats, toads, rodents – which enabled others to see and identify them. Because familiars took the form of ordinary creatures, people were attuned to anything out of the ordinary that might indicate otherwise. The strangeness attributed to familiars took many forms. Familiar spirits appeared out of the blue, vanished into thin air, or left no traces behind them. A large black cat that had suddenly appeared next to the cradle of an ailing baby immediately vanished into thin air first when a woman struck at it with a fire-fork and again when another woman kicked it.39 A large toad thrown into the fire in accordance with a magical remedy

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for bewitchment spluttered for a while but then left no sign of ever having been there.40 Proximity to and the touch of familiars (and witches) had unusual consequences: the leg that kicked the mysterious black cat swelled up very painfully.41 Familiar spirits, unlike the dumb beasts in whose shapes they appeared, were able to speak. A maidservant deposed that her former mistress and a squirrel had talked together all through the night. Asked by the bench what they were discussing, she replied that although she heard their conversation ‘very perfectly’, she was ‘so bewitched by it, that she could not remember one word’.42 Other signs that the natural order of things was disturbed included a chicken that ‘cried out like a rat’ when touched with a pair of tongs.43 One of the ways in which familiar spirits were identified was by the physical mark or protrusion on the witch’s body from which it sucked her blood. Witches’ ‘privy marks’ or teats were situated ‘unnaturally’ on the witch’s body: under her arms or hair, on her lip or buttock, but it was only after the legislation of 1604 that such marks became typically discovered on suspects genitals.44 Extraordinary as they were, such marks were widely understood to be if not routine signs of guilt at least strong pieces of corroborating evidence. In 1579, for example, Southampton jurors urged the mayor and aldermen ‘to permit five or six honest matrons’ to strip and search a reputed witch in order to discover ‘whether she have any bloody mark on her body which is a common token to know all witches by, and so either to stop the mouths of the people or else to proceed farther’.45 Yet the practice of searching suspects was not a formal part of the legal process. Until 1604, it was not unlawful to have dealings with a familiar spirit. Witches were convicted for the harm they inflicted, not for the specific means by which they achieved that harm. Although the 1563 Act made the ‘invocation or conjuration of evil and wicked spirits’ for any purpose a hanging offence alongside bewitching to death, the terminology was that of ritual magic – the sort practised by sorcerers, which relied upon complex instructions, ‘magic circles’, and Latin invocations set out in manuscript and printed books. This was not the art of illiterate witches prosecuted for maleficia. In 1566, the year in which Mother Waterhouse was executed after confessing to have killed people with Sathan the white-spotted cat’s assistance, another pamphlet focused on the spirits to which the 1563 Act referred. Following an overtly anti-Catholic frontispiece and preface, came the transcription of John Walsh’s examination by Episcopal authorities. Asked ‘whether he had a familiar or not’, Walsh initially denied but then confessed that his deceased master, a Catholic priest, had given him such a spirit, which he ritually summoned using his master’s ‘book of magic circles’, two candles of virgin wax, frankincense, St John’s wort and fire. In sorcery of this kind, the human’s power over the spirit relied upon the ritual rather than the individual; after his book of circles had been confiscated, Walsh was unable to raise the spirit, let alone command it.46

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Walsh’s spirit shared some features with those of the 1566 witches: it assumed the unexceptional shapes of a pigeon and a dog, but also that of a man with cloven hooves; Walsh fed his familiar with live prey (unremarkable in the case of sixteenth-century pigeons or dogs), and he initially gave the spirit a drop of his blood that it (evidently in canine form) took away on its paw.47 In both pamphlets, the familiars were gifted to their owners – to Walsh by his master, to Elizabeth Frauncis by her grandmother and which Elizabeth herself later passed on to Agnes Waterhouse.48 Yet the subsequent relationships between humans and spirit were different. The instructions on how to look after the sixteenth-century witch’s familiar were informal and mundane. It was not conjured by rituals, charms, or invocations. Its relationship with its human owner was typically domestic and unexceptional. It lived in her garden, or in pots lined with wool in her house. It was with this type of familiar that legislators were concerned when they drafted the 1604 legislation. The 1604 Act created a new capital crime: to ‘consult, covenant with, entertain, employ, feed, or reward any evil and wicked spirits’ for any purpose. Historians often imply that the Act’s significance lies in its introduction of continental diabolism into English law.49 It is more accurate, however, to say that the statute introduced a form of English quasidiabolism by criminalising the witch’s relationship with her familiar spirits. Unlike the formal relationship between conjurer and demon, that of the witch and her familiar was intimate and quotidian. It was, as part of everyday life, easier to spot. The relationship was frequently portrayed thus both before and after 1604. So was the emphasis on diabolism. In the 1566 trial pamphlet, Joan Waterhouse confessed that her familiar (at that time, a toad) offered to haunt a neighbour’s child if she would surrender her soul. The first English translation of a European demonological text referred to the ‘domestical or familiar devil [demon]’ through which witches were able to ‘talk and confer with the Devil’.50 The binding magistrate at the St Osyth’s trials and the author of the pamphlet account in 1582 believed that the greatest crime of maleficia was the diabolic compact, as did the Calvinist preacher William Perkins, writing in 1608.51 George Gifford’s 1587 text assumed that both witches and cunning folk made ‘compacts’ and enjoyed ‘fellowship with devils’.52 In 1618, Michael Dalton opined in his manual for magistrates that witches have ‘a friendly and voluntary conference of agreement’ with their imps while simultaneously demonising them: ‘the Devil or Familiar’ would carry out the witch’s desires, and in exchange, ‘the witch giveth (or offereth) his or her soul, blood or other gift unto the Devil’.53 Although it was possible for the 1604 Act to be interpreted as introducing the stereotypical European diabolic pact, the legislation itself did not explicitly frame it so. The terms of the 1604 Act permitted the conviction of witches on the basis of an alliance with a familiar spirit. It was no longer necessary to

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provide positive proofs of maleficia. Arguably, this meant that there was little need for witchcraft to be designated a crimen exceptum.54 The new status of familiars in witch trials was accompanied by greater emphasis on witch-marks as evidence. For some scholars this is confirmation enough that witchcraft was not subject to the normal standards of proofs and procedures.55 Others contend that ‘a witch’s mark alone would identify [a woman] unconditionally as a witch’.56 By the 1660s, the reliability of such marks as proof of guilt was sufficiently both accepted and contested for the frontispiece of the 1665 reprint of Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft to condemn explicitly not merely ‘witch-mongers’ as in earlier editions, but rather the ‘unchristian […] and inhumane’ searchers who identified witches’ marks on the bodies of accused women and the ‘witch-tryers’.57 However, seeking corporeal indications of guilt or innocence in the courts was itself unexceptional. The courts and legal officials routinely drew on midwives and matrons’ expert knowledge of female bodies whenever cases required the detection not only of the ordinary signs of pregnancy, child-bearing, and sexual intercourse but also the extraordinary ones of abortion, infanticide, and rape. Early modern judges and coroners regularly sought advice from physicians, surgeons and midwives about natural and medical issues in cases where either the corpses or living bodies of victims and/or defendants contained crucial evidence:58 in felonies such as homicide, infanticide, and rape; in determining whether female felons were pregnant in order to stay execution until after the delivery of their babies; in other types of suit involving corporeal evidence, as when legitimacy and inheritance rested on whether a widow’s child could have been her late husband’s. The women who examined suspected witches for witch’s marks or unusual teats, did so on the basis of their knowledge of normal physical characteristics, not of witches’ bodies per se. Deborah Willis has noted that in witch trials the ‘revelation of the witch’s teat was usually among the last pieces of evidence to be entered against the accused woman’. Consequently, she argues, ‘[it] is as if the full fantasy – of witch as malevolent mother feeding a brood of rival children – could only be confronted in the relative safety of the courtroom’.59 She seems here to conflate pamphlet accounts of witch trials and trials themselves, while overlooking the pre-trial processes that led to prosecution and which were subsumed into printed versions of events. Searches were commonly conducted before official prosecutions were initiated; they were not reliant on ‘the safety of the courtroom’. Moreover, the status and timing of searches for the witch’s mark before and during trials and in trial pamphlets were pragmatic. Suspected witches were subject to physical searches toward the end of the process of detection because the witch’s mark provided corroboration of evidence already gathered against the accused. As with other crimes, suspicions that a crime had been committed had first to be aroused. This perhaps sounds obvious, but scholars’ certainty that

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the crime of witchcraft could not have occurred sometimes leads to an (unacknowledged) assumption that suspicion began with animosity towards a particular person rather than with a perceived crime.60 When a crime – in our case maleficia – was committed, the victim or their family members sought to identify the malefactor. This applied to all felonies. Persons of ill repute were more likely to be observed than those with good reputations, but, as Cynthia Herrup noted, ‘[e]ven those with bad reputations were relatively safe if no one linked them specifically to the crime’. The questions that magistrates asked suspects were intended to reveal any such connection. Was he or she ‘arrested near the crime, or in a suspicious area’? Were they ‘well placed to have done the deed easily’? Did they have ‘the wit and the capacity to do it? Did others have a similar opportunity? Did the alleged defendant have much to gain from a crime’? Did they ‘have a specific motive’?61 In the case of witchcraft, JPs also inquired as to whether potential defendants had a familiar spirit. If evidence suggested that they did, a physical examination of the defendant’s body for a witch mark was a logical step in the process of finding corroborative evidence.62 Prosecutions for felony, including those for witchcraft, followed a common pattern. For modern readers, positive proof that a suspected witch had a familiar might seem as impossible to produce as that of enacting maleficia. But many early modern people would not have agreed. Even those who doubted the existence or efficacy of familiar spirits noted that ‘in fear, in the dark’ it was easy for ‘men [to] take some little cat or dog to be an ugly devil’.63 People deposed that they had observed the suspected witch with their familiar(s), ‘secretly’ feeding some unidentified ‘thing’ presumed to be a familiar, or that they had heard the suspect calling to, or having a conversation with one. Sometimes they had spotted or overheard the witch offering to give their imp(s) to others.64 Yet, crucially, physical examinations of suspected witches did not inexorably find witch-marks. In Leicester in 1650, for instance, four townswomen ‘diligently searched’ Ann Chettle ‘from the crown of her head to the soles of her feet [… and] found her to be clear of any such suspicion’.65 When witch-marks were discovered, further circumstantial evidence added to the weight of probability that a suspect was indeed a witch. Straightforward causal connections were made between the witch and/or her familiars and the affliction or recovery of a supposed victim. A woman who cursed her neighbour by wishing ‘her eyes out’ was an obvious suspect when the woman so cursed immediately fell down as if dead and ever since had ‘a marvellous pain in her eyes’.66 At the very moment that the jury announced their guilty verdict against those on trial for witchcraft, afflicted children recovered their ability to speak and returned to full health; elsewhere, the pain of a pin pricking a girl’s heart remained until the witches held responsible were hanged.67

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By the mid-seventeenth century, witch-marks had become so much a part of the ‘identikit’ witch that searches were carried out even when there were no allegations concerning familiar spirits. In Bowling near Bradford in West Yorkshire in March 1649, neighbours procured a warrant to have Mary Sikes searched for a witch-mark and for examinations to be taken by the local Justice after several people had been afflicted with extraordinary fits and livestock had died. Sara Rodes, the young girl who suffered the strangest and most violent fits six times each day for over a week, claimed that Mary Sikes was responsible for the fits. Sikes had suddenly appeared out of a hole at the bottom of Sara’s bed, and held her down by the throat and apron. The girl’s mother experienced similar although fewer fits, and, although she did not see Sikes as her daughter did, Mary Sikes came ‘into her mind and memory’ at the time. These fits ceased when Sikes was searched for witch-marks. Meanwhile, Richard Booth had accompanied Sara Rodes’s brother at their mother’s behest to Henry Tempest, the local JP, to get a warrant for Sikes to be searched and to be brought before Tempest; he returned home to find that his daughter was ‘very strangely taken, her body quaking and dithering’, and hyperventilating so much that she was unable to speak. When Sikes was searched, the girl got ‘better […] but not fully recovered’.68 Others had lost valuable livestock. Henry Cordingley told the JP that over the past fifteen months, Mary Sikes had several times cursed him, and threatened his beasts and horses. He might have nine or ten now, she said, ‘but she would make them fewer’. Sure enough, two of his horses had sickened, trembled and quaked in a similar fashion to Sara Rodes’s fits. One of them, his black horse worth £4 16s, died. A post-mortem revealed that it mysteriously had less than ‘an eggshell of blood’ in its body. His other horse recovered and regained a healthy appetite when Mary Sikes was searched. Cordingley further deposed that the Christmas before last, he had gone to his feeding shed at midnight with a lantern to feed his horses, where he encountered Mary Sikes riding on the back of one of his cows. Sikes escaped by flying out of the window, notwithstanding its strong wooden bars, leaving his cow so lathered in sweat that it looked completely white.69 Mary Sikes was subjected to a body search because she was suspected of witchcraft, not vice versa. We may surmise, however, that suspicions became more vehement due to the findings of the searchers. The six women who examined Sikes’s body found on her buttock ‘a red lump about the bigness of a nut, being wet, and that when they wrung it with their fingers, moisture came out of it’, and on her torso ‘a little lump like a wart and being pulled out it stretched about half an inch’, the like of which they had never seen on a woman. The searchers also informed the JP (and his clerk recorded) that Sara Rodes had made a remarkable recovery that coincided with the search.70 Taken together, this set of depositions reveals the extent

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to which witch-marks could constitute corroborative evidence even where familiars were absent. The significance of this was not lost on Mary Sikes herself: she begged one of the searchers, Elizabeth Nicholls, to ‘scratch her back’, which Nicholls flatly refused to do, whereupon Mary ‘scratched her own back and drew blood at every scratch and made her back very bloody’.71 Scratching a witch to draw blood was, of course, a well-known remedy for bewitchment.72 Here we have a woman who was so desperate to bring to an end the symptoms of bewitchment that had been attributed to her that she tore violently at her own flesh in order to destroy any link between her and the victim’s afflictions. In doing so, however, she potentially incriminated herself – why attempt to un-witch if there was no witchery to undo? When Sikes was questioned by Tempest, she asserted that the lumps discovered by the searchers were not extraordinary in the least. Explaining ‘the lump near her seat’, she said ‘she got a strain with carrying a bushel of shilling and a peck of wheat under her left arm’ from Oakenshaw mill to Bowling some sixteen years before. The ‘little lump near her arm’ was ‘a wart which she had ever since she was born’. The back-scratching similarly had a mundane explanation: she ‘desired Elizabeth Nicholls to scratch her back because she hath the itch’. She utterly denied practising witchcraft of any kind.73 She was, it seems, acquitted.74

‘Out of the mouths of babes’: child testimony and hearsay The Sikes case contains two further features associated with the abandonment of normal legal procedures: children’s testimony and hearsay evidence. Both Sara Rodes and Richard Booth’s daughter were children who still lived at home with their parents, which suggests that they were aged twelve or younger.75 In the criminal courts, the testimony of children under the age of fourteen (the formal age of discretion) was not normally admissible, primarily because their testimony under oath was unreliable as they were not expected to understand the nature of an oath.76 We see in the depositions of witnesses against Sikes that Henry Tempest did not record direct statements by the Rodes or Booth girls. Rather, their accounts of what they had seen, heard and experienced were provided second-hand, by their parents or other adults. In technical terms, this amounted to hearsay – information provided second-hand rather than that of an eye-witness or expert witness. Hearsay, too, was considered to be insufficient evidence upon which to convict. Undoubtedly, information provided by children younger than fourteen years did contribute, sometimes greatly, to prosecutions, convictions and executions. This was the case, for instance, in the Lancashire trials of both 1612 (in which a nine-year-old boy testified under oath), and 1634. In the latter, the testimony of Edmund Robinson, aged ten or eleven, was crucial

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to the prosecution – testimony that he later admitted amounted to no more than ‘framed […] tales’ about five neighbours participating at a sabbat or witch-feast. After hearing adults talking about the witches’ meeting at Mocking Tower (the context for the 1612 trials), ‘it came into his head to make the like tale of a meeting at Horestones, at which place he had been with his father at such time as he built it for Thomas Robinson to dwell in’. His motive was initially practical: ‘to avoid his mother’s correction for not bringing home her kine’, but ‘perceiving that many folks gave ear to him he grew confident in it more and more’. Even then, the boy claimed that he named only those whom he had heard adults suspect to be witches.77 We should remember, though, that while we can find numerous instances in which such cases are well-known to us, this is at least partly because of contemporary doubts about convictions being safe. Hearsay was ‘clearly viewed as inferior’, but like children’s testimony it appears often to have been accepted as a means of confirming or corroborating other more reliable evidence. This continued to be the case until the mid-eighteenth century, more than fifty years after the last execution for witchcraft in England, and after the repeal of the Witchcraft Act in 1736.78 Here too we cannot make a strong case for witchcraft being a peculiar case. Accepting the testimony of children or that of their parents who repeated what their children had said to them – effectively hearsay – was not entirely a breach of routine rules and procedures. In fact, the earliest English jurist who argued absolutely that children’s voices were not to be entertained as evidence was Sir Matthew Hale in the 1660s, and there was no consensus among judges that he was correct. In the eighteenth century, the jurist William Blackstone held that at the judge’s discretion any witnesses – including children – who ‘have the use of their reason’ should be permitted to testify. The testimony of children still had to be corroborated by other evidence, however, and conviction should certainly not be ‘grounded singly on the unsupported accusation of an infant’ under the age of fourteen.79 In practice, children’s testimony was seldom privileged over that of adults. But in neither theory nor practice were all witnesses supposed to be equally valid. Jurors were expected to assess and to take account of the relative reliability of witnesses; in Blackstone’s terms, to observe ‘the quality, age, education, understanding, behaviour, and inclinations’ of witnesses and to determine their relative credibility accordingly.80 The primary way in which ‘the truth of testimony’ was established ‘was via the authority of the witness’.81 We all know that the testimony of gentlemen was generally given greater credence than a man of lower status, as was the word of a man over that of a woman. But class and gender were not the only indices of authority. Expert witnesses ‘were to be trusted’ in their own field and ‘public testimony’ should be privileged over ‘private’.82 In practice, experts did not always agree nor were their views always accepted. In the Bury St Edmonds trials, for instance, the doctor Thomas Browne testified that the

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allegedly bewitched children’s fits were genuinely the result of witchcraft, but the judge, none other than Sir Matthew Hale, was persuaded to test the children, who, being blindfolded, performed terrible fits whenever they were told (falsely) that one of the witches approached or touched them.83 The discomfort that historians appear to experience with the idea of children’s testimony being accepted in witch trials may have more to do with the crime being prosecuted than with the status of the witness; in a somewhat crude nutshell, as witchcraft did not exist, people were losing their lives on the basis of children’s made-up stories. Be that as it may, it is difficult to find the same sentiments in, say, rape cases, even though instances in which the alleged victim was a child had a hugely greater chance of resulting in conviction and execution.84 One might suppose that this was because adults provided corroborative evidence, including that supplied by experts on the state of the child’s body. But in witchcraft cases too, as we have seen, convictions did not rest on the testimony of a single witness, a child or otherwise. English witch trials that ended with the accused dying on the gallows were never simply the outcome of children’s fantasies. They were the culmination of numerous stages of sifting evidence and weighing probabilities on the part of many people: those who detected, prosecuted and gave evidence against witches; magistrates who examined accusers, witnesses, and the accused; grand jurors who determined whether there was sufficient evidence against the accused to warrant a trial; petty jurors who evaluated evidence and returned verdicts of guilt or innocence; and judges who examined and crossexamined the defendant and witnesses in court before the jury considered their verdict, and sentenced or reprieved convicts accordingly.

Conclusion: an ordinary crime Witchcraft was in many respects dealt with in the same way as other felonies. As with other offences, the accused person’s intention was crucial. Burglary, for instance, remained an aggravated offence even if the burglar did not steal anything. Women were convicted and executed for petty treason even if the lethal act was carried out by someone else. Attempting to poison one’s husband was petty treason even if he lived but others died as a consequence. Witching to death was murder, a pre-meditated killing that was all the more terrible because its secret nature denied the victim the chance of self-defence. Even Reginald Scot conceded that people who confessed to having practiced maleficia might deserve punishment for their evil intention despite the impossibility of the things to which they confessed.85 The punishment for witchcraft was also indistinct from that for other felonies. Some clergymen and theologians were fixated on the idea of a diabolic compact, and thus believed that witches ‘deserveth a death so much the more horrible’ than being throttled on the gallows like an ‘ordinary

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felon, and a murtherer’.86 This was certainly not because legislators lacked the imagination or inclination to set some crimes apart from the majority. Heretics were burnt at the stake, as were petty traitors, notably women convicted of killing their husbands; male traitors were normally hanged, disembowelled, and quartered, and their butchered bodies publicly displayed; highwaymen were hanged in chains on the highways they had patrolled; pirates were hanged in chains or in a cage in ports, where their bodies rotted and were eaten at high tide by fish nibble by nibble; murder by means of poison was in 1531 temporarily classified as high treason with the penalty of being boiled to death. Witchcraft, like other ‘secret’ crimes, had notably low rates of conviction and execution. To put it another way, witchcraft had relatively low rates of conviction and execution largely because it was a secret crime. Secret crimes were considered to be particularly heinous. Those found guilty of perpetrating them had little possibility of escaping execution. However, such offences were also particularly difficult to prove. They therefore had low conviction rates in absolute and relative terms. Early modern people, most of the time, were doing the best they could with the information available to them in the culture in which they lived. They believed that witchcraft – especially that which caused the death of other human beings – was a heinous crime. But that did not mean that they sent people to the gallows lightly. Early modern historians often reserve their most judgemental comments for those implicated in witch trials. In the 1970s, Lawrence Stone explained witchcraft accusations in terms of the endemic ‘malice and hatred’ in early modern communities.87 In the twenty-first century, Malcolm Gaskill has argued that above all else, ‘witchcraft demonstrates the hostility early modern people could feel for others, how they interpreted ill-will, and how many pursued grudges with a degree of ruthlessness shocking to modern sensibilities’.88 Rather than judge early modern behaviours against an idealised notion of our own period, I have explored just some of the issues arising from the notion that witchcraft is a crime apart and, thus, so was its place in the courts. In doing so, I hope to have shown that in early modern England the extraordinary and ordinary, the shocking and banal, are entangled in ways that we might recognise as, at once, strange and familiar.

Notes 1 Spellings have been modernised throughout this chapter. W. Kelly, ‘Ancient records of Leicester’, in Report of the council presented to the Annual General Meeting …1855 (Leicester, 1855), 85–9; G.F.B., ‘Review of Wallace Notestein’s History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 (1911)’, American Historical Review 18:1 (1912), 129–30; Depositions from the Castle of York, ed. J. Raine (Durham, 1861), 28. 2 A. Anderson and R. Gordon, ‘Witchcraft and the status of women – the case of England’, British Journal of Sociology 29:2 (1978), 171.

Garthine Walker 121 3 Quoting L. Mair, ‘Review article: witchcraft’, British Journal of Sociology 23:1 (1972), 109. 4 G. Geis, ‘Lord Hale, witches and rape’, British Journal of Law & Society 5 (1978), 26–44; E.P. Currie, ‘Crimes without criminals: witchcraft and its control in Renaissance Europe’, Law & Society Review 3:1 (1968), 7–32. 5 R. Briggs, Witches and Neighbours: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft (New York, 1998), 10. 6 Roper’s solution is to ‘attend to the imaginative themes of the interrogations’: Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in Early Modern Europe (New York, 1994), 203; D. Purkiss, The Witch in History: Early Modern and Twentieth-century Representations (New York 1996), 59–88. 7 E. Peel and P. Southern, The Trials of the Lancashire Witches: A Study of SeventeenthCentury Witchcraft (Newton Abbot, 1969), 105–6. 8 S. McGinnis, ‘“Subtiltie” exposed: pastoral perspectives on witch belief in the thought of George Gifford’, Sixteenth Century Journal 33:3 (2002), 667. 9 Currie, ‘Crimes without criminals’, 11, 17. 10 Anderson and Gordon, ‘Witchcraft’, passim. 11 P.B. Uninsky, ‘Violence, honor, and litigation: Injures et voies de fait in prerevolutionary Rouen’, New York University Journal of International Law and Politics 23 (1991), 869, 872. 12 C. Larner, ‘Crimen exceptum? The crime of witchcraft in Europe’, in V.A.C. Gatrell, B. Lenman and G. Parker (eds), Crime and the Law: The Social History of Crime in Western Europe since 1500 (1980), 49–75. 13 B.P. Levack, The Witch-hunt in Early Modern Europe (2006), 15, 100; J. Klaits, Servants of Satan (Bloomington, 1985), 25, 135. 14 Levack, Witch-hunt, 84; Idem, ‘State-building and witch hunting in early modern Europe’, in M. Hester, G. Roberts and J. Barry (eds), Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe: Studies in Culture and Belief (Cambridge, 1996), 105. 15 A. Soman, ‘The Parlement of Paris and the great witch hunt (1565–1640)’, Sixteenth Century Journal 9:2 (1978), 31–44, quotation at 32. 16 Soman, ‘Parlement’, 32–3. 17 M. Gaskill, ‘Witchcraft and evidence in early modern England’, Past & Present 198:1 (2008), 34. 18 For prosecutions for sorcery in ecclesiastical courts, see A. Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England: A Regional and Comparative Study (1970; 2nd edn, 1999), 66–75. 19 Statute Elizabeth I, c.16 (1563) made murder by witchcraft, and invoking or conjuring evil spirits or demons, capital crimes without clergy; the same applied to a second conviction for harming a person’s body or property. Discovering treasure or lost property and practising love magic were punishable by one year’s imprisonment with quarterly stints in the pillory for a first offence and life imprisonment for a second. Statute 1 James I & VI, c.12 (1604) expanded the category of non-clergiable witchcraft to include causing any non-lethal bodily harm and to a second conviction of using witchcraft to damage someone’s livestock or goods, to discover treasure, to find stolen goods, and to bring about unlawful love. 20 Statute 33 Henry VIII, c.8 (1542); repealed 1547. 21 About 400 people were hanged for witchcraft in England, at least 100 of whom were convicted during Matthew Hopkins’s 1645 campaign: W. Monter, ‘Review: Re-contextualizing British witchcraft’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 35:1 (2004), 106.

122 The Strangeness of the Familiar: Witchcraft and the Law in Early Modern England 22 W. Monter, ‘Witch trials in Northern Europe 1450–1700’, in S. Clack and B. Ankarloo (eds), The Athlone History of Magic and Witchcraft in Europe: The Period of the Witch Trials (New York, 2002), vol. IV, 67. 23 Levack, Witch-hunt, 15, 100, quotation at 15. 24 Monter, ‘Re-contextualizing British witchcraft’, 106–7. Early demonological treatises came primarily from Germany, France, Italy and Spain. The text was Lambert Daneau’s Discours des sorciers (Geneva, 1574), translated as A Dialogue of Witches (London, 1575). 25 George Gifford, A Dialogue Concerning Witches and Witchcrafts (1593). Subsequent references are to the 1847 reprint of the 1603 edn. 26 CSDP, Charles I. 1634–1635 (1864), 77–8, 152–3. 27 Monter, ‘Re-contextualizing British witchcraft’, 109. 28 Reginald Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), ed., B. Nicholson (1886), 19; Henri Boguet, Examen of Witches [Discours de sorciers] (1606), ed., M. Summers (trans. E.A. Ashwin: 1929), 7, 130, 209. 29 C. L’Estrange Ewen, Witchcraft and Demonism: A Concise Account Derived from Sworn Depositions and Confessions obtained in the Courts of England and Wales (2005: 1st edn, 1933), 76–7. 30 Gifford, Dialogue, 72–3. 31 Quoting S. Federici, ‘The great witch hunt’, The Maine Scholar 1 (1988), 37. 32 N. Johnstone, The Devil and Demonism in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2006), 13–14; my italics. 33 Scot, Discoverie (1584), 257–9; The Lawes against Witches and Conjuration: And Some Brief Notes and Observations for the Discovery of Witches (1645), 4. 34 The Examination of John Walsh … upon Certayne Interrogatories Touchyng Wytchcraft and Sorcerye (1566), sig. A6. 35 The Examination and Confession of Certaine Wytches at Chelmsford in the Countie of Essex (1566), sigs A6, A8, B2v. 36 A Detection of Damnable Driftes (1579), sig. A4. 37 A Rehearsall both Straung and Tru, of Hainous actes Committed by … Four Notorious Witches (1579), sigs A5r–A6r. 38 Gifford, Dialogue, 59. 39 The Witch of Wapping, Or An Exact and Perfect Relation, of the Life and Devilish Practises of Joan Peterson […] (1652), 4–5; Detection of Damnable Driftes, 4–5. 40 H.L. Carson, ‘Contrasts in English criminal law’, Green Bag 6:12 (1894), 569. 41 Witch of Wapping, 4–5. 42 Ibid., 6. 43 Carson, ‘Contrasts in criminal law’, 569. 44 Scot, Discoverie, 21; C. Holmes, ‘Women, witnesses and witches’, Past & Present 140:1 (1993). 45 Rev. J.S. Davies, A history of Southampton; partly from the MS of Dr Speed, in the Southampton Archives (Southampton, 1883), 236. 46 Examination of John Walsh, Sigs A–A3r, A4v–A5r, A6r. 47 Ibid., sigs A5v–A6r. 48 Richard Bernard, A Guide to Grand-Jury Men (1627), 157–9. 49 G. Durston, Witchcraft and Witch Trials: A History of English Witchcraft and its Legal Perspectives, 1542–1736 (Chichester, 2000), 180–1. 50 Daneau, Dialogue of Witches, 13, 14. 51 W.W., A True and Just recorde (1653), sigs A3r–A4v. 52 G. Gifford, A Discourse of the Subtill Practises of Devilles by Witches and Sorcerers by which Men are and have bin Greatly Deluded (1587), sig. Jr.

Garthine Walker 123 53 Michael Dalton, The Country Justice (1618; 1705), ch. 160. 54 W. Notestein, A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 (Washington, 1911), 104. 55 K. Newman, Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama (Chicago, 1991), 54. 56 A.L. Barstow, Witchcraze: New History of the European Witch Hunts (2nd ed., New York, 1995), 15. 57 The corresponding passage in 1651 referred only to the ‘lewd unchristian practises of witchmongers’; the original title page of 1584 was differently organised but again focused on ‘witchmongers’. The latter term could include searchers. 58 It was not until the later eighteenth century, with the development of the adversarial system, in which prosecution and defence lawyers replaced judges in examining and cross-examining witnesses that law manuals began to discuss the nature of medical testimony. S. De Renzi, ‘Medical Expertise, Bodies, and the Law in Early Modern Courts’, Isis 98:2 (2007), 315–22. 59 D. Willis, Malevolent Nurture: Witch-hunting and Maternal Power in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY, 1995), 64–5. 60 F. Timbers, ‘Witches’ sect or prayer meeting? Matthew Hopkins revisited’, Women’s History Review 17:1 (2008), 23–4. 61 C.B. Herrup, The Common Peace: Participation and the Criminal Law in SeventeenthCentury England (Cambridge, 1987), 87. This remains the best account of the various stages of the criminal justice process. 62 C. Holmes, ‘Popular culture? Witches, magistrates and divines in early modern England’, in S.L. Kaplan (ed.), Understanding Popular Culture: Europe from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1984), 87. 63 Gifford, Dialogue, 97–8. 64 Lawes against Witches and Conjuration, 4. 65 Kelly, Report, 87–8. 66 John Strype, The Life of the Learned Sir Thomas Smith (Oxford, 1698), 100. 67 Carson, ‘Contrasts in criminal law’, 570. 68 TNA:ASSI 45 3/2, 130–3 (1649). 69 Idem. 70 TNA:ASSI 45 3/2, 133–4 (1649). 71 TNA:ASSI 45 3/2, 134 (1649). 72 See also TNA:ASSI 45 3/2, 81 (1650); ASSI 45 7/1, 186v (1664). 73 TNA:ASSI 45 3/2, 134–5 (1649). 74 Raine, ed., Depositions, 28. 75 The age at which they could expect to enter into service in another household. 76 B.J. Shapiro, A Culture of Fact: England, 1550–1720 (Cornell, 2003), 16. 77 CSPD, 1634–1635, 152–3. For both the 1612 and 1634 trials, see R. Poole (ed.), The Lancashire Witches: Histories and Stories (Manchester, 2002). 78 Shapiro, Culture of Fact, 15. Alice Molland was hanged for witchcraft in Exeter in 1685. 79 H. Brewer, By Birth or Consent: Children, Law, and the Anglo-American Revolution in Authority (North Carolina, 2005), 154, 165. 80 Ibid., 154. 81 R.W. Serjeantson, ‘Testimony and proof in early-modern England’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A, 30:2 (1999), 205. 82 Shapiro, Culture of Fact, 206. 83 Carson, ‘Contrasts in criminal law’, 570. The witches were convicted and hanged on other evidence.

124 The Strangeness of the Familiar: Witchcraft and the Law in Early Modern England 84 G. Walker, ‘Re-reading rape and sexual violence in early modern England’, Gender & History 10:1 (1998), 1–25. 85 Scot, Discoverie of Witchcraft, 39. 86 Holmes, ‘Popular culture?’, 90. 87 L. Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage (1977), 98. 88 M. Gaskill, Crime and Mentalities in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2000), 66.

Part II The Everyday in the Extraordinary

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7 Ann Jeffries and the Fairies: Folk Belief and the War on Scepticism in Later Stuart England Peter Marshall

In 1696 a short but remarkable pamphlet was published in London. Cheap print had long been a matter of the everyday in seventeenth-century England, but the subject matter of this particular publication was extraordinary even by the permissive and eclectic standards of the later Stuart press. Its author was the printer and bookseller Moses Pitt, and the tract billed itself as An Account of one Ann Jefferies, Now Living in the County of Cornwall, who was fed for six Months by a small sort of Airy People call’d fairies. And of the strange and wonderful cures she performed with Salves and Medicines she received from them, for which she never took one Penny of her Patients.1 Ann Jeffries was a girl from a poor family, apprenticed as a domestic servant to a substantial yeoman family in the parish of St Teath, on the western edge of Bodmin Moor. Pitt recounted that when she was nineteen years old, and sitting one day knitting in a garden, there had hopped over the garden hedge to her ‘six persons of a small stature, all clothed in green, which she call’d Fairies’. As a consequence of this visitation, she fell into a lingering sickness, and a succession of fits and convulsions, which made the rest of the household fear for her life. At other times she was so enervated ‘that she became even as a Changling’. But as her strength recovered, she began to display great devotion, going constantly to church to hear the Word of God read and preached, and memorising large parts of the sermons, though she herself was illiterate. Then she began to discover powers of healing. Her first patient was the mistress of the house, who had hurt her leg in a fall. Jeffries had prior knowledge of the accident from the fairies, who after the incident in the garden had continued to appear to her, ‘never less than 2 at a time, nor never more than 8’ (and always in even numbers). She insisted that her mistress placed the leg on her lap, and eased the pain by gentle stroking. According to Pitt, this cure, combined with the stories Ann Jeffries was telling about the fairies, ‘made such a noise over all the county of Cornwall, as that it had the same effect St Paul’s healing of Publius’s father of a fever and a blood Flux at Malta, after his shipwreck there, as related [in] Acts 28.8, 9.’ She began to be resorted to by 127

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sick people with all manner of distempers and agues, from as far afield as Land’s End in the one direction, and London in the other. Several days before they reached St Teath, she would know their identity, and the manner and time of their arrival. In the meantime, she gave up the consumption of ordinary victuals, and from harvest time to Christmas was nourished solely on special bread given to her by the fairies. She was also seen dancing in the orchard among the trees. Invisible to onlookers, the fairies danced with her.2 Beyond its colourful detail and extravagant claims, the pamphlet was remarkable in a number of ways. It was, so far as we can tell, the only English publication of the second half of the seventeenth century devoted primarily to the subject of fairies. It was also noteworthy for the distinctive perspective of its author. Pitt’s account was partly autobiographical, for the family with whom Ann Jeffries was in service was his own, and her duties included attending to the young Moses, who at the time of the alleged fairy visitations in 1645–6 was no more than seven years old. Pitt’s account was thus part personal reminiscence, part historical curiosity, a picturesque incident from the first half of the seventeenth century, retold at the very end of the second. But Pitt’s motivation in publishing this story – which had ‘made so great an impression on me from my childhood hitherto’ – was in fact neither public antiquarianism nor private nostalgia. He believed the material to be both topical and valent in 1696, and to make the point Pitt affixed to his title page a quotation from a sermon which Samuel Barton, chaplain to the House of Commons, had preached before the members at St Margaret’s Westminster earlier that year: ‘all the works of Providence are not alike. Sometimes for wise and good Reasons God has been pleased quite to alter the course of Nature, as it were, to shew himself to have a Power above it’.3 Divine providence was frequently invoked in the last decade of the seventeenth century; it had after all removed one king from the English throne and provided the nation with a soundly Protestant replacement.4 But in some circles, the most pressing need was for providences which demonstrably surmounted the accustomed course of nature, and which could be held up in order to stem a perceived tide of atheism, scepticism and unbelief sweeping the nation. Pitt offered his account of Ann Jeffries’ fairygiven powers to the public as evidence that ‘the Great God has done as great and marvellous Works in our Age, as he did in the days of old.’ It was, he considered, the duty of all who knew of such extraordinary works or providences of the Almighty to publish them to the world, so that ‘the greatest Atheist may be convinc’d, not only of the Being of a God, but also that his Power and his Goodness are as manifest now as of old’. Another voice was being ventriloquised here: that of the pamphlet’s dedicatee, Edward Fowler, bishop of Gloucester. Pitt had first told the tale to Fowler fifteen or twenty years before, over Sunday dinner, but during an encounter at

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Christmas 1695 the bishop had seized Pitt’s hand and refused to let it go until he had promised to write and publish the account of Ann Jeffries.5 Fowler had a long-standing reputation as an aficionado of the miraculous and the supernatural. As a young curate in the 1650s, he had made the acquaintance of the Cambridge Platonist, Henry More, who shared his interest in apparitions and remarkable providences. Many of the stories which More included in his edition of Joseph Glanvill’s compilation of supernatural phenomena, the Sadducismus triumphatus of 1681, were supplied by Fowler. A solid churchman, the Latitudinarian Fowler nonetheless enjoyed good relations with the famous dissenting minister, Richard Baxter, whose Certainty of the World of Spirits (1691) was, like the publications of Glanvill and More, intended to assert the existence of an interventionist deity through attested incidents of witchcraft and hauntings. The dissenting minister and medical doctor, Henry Sampson, wrote approvingly of Fowler as ‘a great collector of such storys & others of like importance to prove the Being of Spirits’.6 ‘No Spirit, No God’ was the prevailing view in these circles.7 Far from being a backwards-looking obscurantism, entirely inimical to the outlook of the ‘Scientific Revolution’, modern scholarship has taught us to recognise that attempts to verify the existence of spirits in the Restoration period were often predicated upon the experimental method. Natural philosophers and Royal Society members like Robert Boyle hoped to place knowledge of the supernatural on a firmer empirical foundation, and collaborated with clerical collectors of spirit stories in the hope of confounding ‘Hobbism’ and ‘Saduceeism’.8 But slight attention has been paid to one, decidedly anomalous, strand in this discourse in the second half of the seventeenth century: discussion of the existence and nature of fairies.9 Fairies were anomalous because, unlike other denizens of the spirit world (ghosts, demons, angels), they had never found a secure place in any orthodox Christian cosmology, Catholic or Protestant. In the eyes of learned writers, belief in fairies had long exemplified vulgar ignorance and superstition, and as a result was always particularly prone to ridicule and disparagement.10 Its apparent endorsement by one section of the educated elite thus brings into focus a particularly interesting cultural moment. It points to the possibilities for creative exchange between elite and popular cultures, as well as to their dangers and limitations. Positioned as it is, either side of the Restoration divide, Pitt’s memoir of the adventures of Ann Jeffries invites us to track, and to consider the significance of, the changing valency of the world of fairy in seventeenth-century England. Central to the claimed veracity of Pitt’s pamphlet account was the announcement that its protagonist was still ‘living in the County of Cornwall’, now seventy years of age, and married to a man called William Warden. Frustratingly for Pitt, however, Ann Jeffries flatly refused to co-operate in the writing of the account. In 1691, Pitt had asked his nephew, an attorney, to visit her and question her about ‘those several strange passages of her life’, but she

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could or would tell him nothing ‘it being so long since’. Two years later, Pitt prevailed on his brother-in-law, Humphrey Martin, to repeat the approach, and though he spent the greater part of a day with Jeffries, reading out to her for her comments a full account which Pitt had supplied, ‘she would not own any thing of it as concerning the Fairies, neither of any of the cures she then did.’ Jeffries’ reticence, and her evident suspicion of the renewed interest of her betters in these matters, was understandable, for half a century before, the fairies had got her into serious hot water with the authorities. That trouble had begun with an examination by local magistrates and ministers, and culminated in a three-month spell in Bodmin gaol, on the orders of a justice of the peace, John Tregeagle, who also summoned the young Moses and his mother to give evidence at a sessions. Jeffries was denied victuals in the gaol, and also afterwards, when she was kept as a prisoner in Tregeagle’s house, but the fairies continued to feed her during this time. Upon her eventual release, she was ordered not to return to the Pitt family, and went instead to a sister of Moses’s father, near Padstow. For a time, she continued to perform striking cures, but when it was that the fairies eventually forsook Ann Jeffries, Pitt could not say.11 Pitt’s account of Jeffries’ sufferings at the hands of her ‘great persecutor’, Tregeagle, was heartfelt, but it was also remarkably incomplete, as can be seen from a pair of contemporary letters of intelligence making reference to the affair. These show that Ann Jeffries’s curative and prophetic powers had a decidedly political cast. One letter, sent from Bodmin in February 1647, told how after her encounter with ‘small people clad in greene’, she had been summoned in front of the parliamentary county committee, and had brazenly bade its members to ‘be good in theyr office, for it will not last long.’ Since being housed under guard at the mayor’s house in Bodmin, ‘she prayes very much, & bids people to keepe the old forme of prayer. She says the King shall shortly enjoye his owne, & be revenged of his enemyes.’ A second newsletter in April of that year reported much discourse here of the Prophesies of a Maide in Cornwall, who heales the Kings Evill, broken Joynts, Agues &c by touch only. She foretells the Kings restoracion suddenly in a straing way. She is under custody & hath been long concealed, least her discourses (which are all on behalfe of the King & strangely saucy against the parliament) should trouble the Peoples mindes, who are apt to revolt from the Parliament’s obedience. In the meantime, the royalist Sir Edward Hyde was requesting his friend John Earle to find out more from him ‘of your prophetess of Bodmyn.’12 It was undoubtedly the overt politicisation of this particular manifestation of Cornish folk belief about fairies that provoked the heavy-handed intervention of the authorities.13 Ann Jeffries’ royalism and Anglicanism are

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striking: scholarly studies of female prophets and visionaries in this period give the impression that they were almost always to be found in radical and sectarian circles.14 Her experiences lend support to the suggestion of Bernard Capp (commenting on another case of miraculous fasting within a non-sectarian household) that ‘female visionaries of the period represent an extreme manifestation of religious emotions and sensibilities more widely spread’.15 Pitt, however, ignores the political dimension – his sole, and very oblique, reference to Jeffries’ royalism concerns her breaking her fast and eating roast beef on Christmas Day 1645.16 Over and beyond its political dynamics, the Jeffries case neatly encapsulates some key themes in official and popular attitudes towards fairies, as they had developed in the decades following the English Reformation. Although a few of the more familiar folkloric tropes are missing (such as the association of fairies with gifts of money and hidden treasure, or with household cleanliness), several of the motifs in Jeffries’ accounts of her dealings with the little people can be paralleled in other instances of direct or reported plebeian testimony from the Elizabethan and early Stuart periods: the association with the colour green, the diminutive stature, the appearance in groups or ‘troops’, the penchant for dancing. In particular, several village cunning folk in these decades attributed healing or divinatory powers to the gift of the fairies.17 At the same time, Ann Jeffries’ claims seemed to confirm a number of official expectations and stereotypes which had accumulated around the figure of the fairy by the early decades of the seventeenth century. In the first place, fairy belief was often heavily gendered in elite discourse: not only were fairies frequently associated with domestic settings and the female sphere, but the giving of credence to them was quintessentially a weakness of women, and the ridiculing of fairies a validation of respectable masculinity. When fairies were mentioned in controversial or didactic sources, the expression ‘old wives’ tales’ was seldom far away.18 Secondly, fairies were strongly associated with Catholicism. Somewhat implausibly, belief in them was frequently said to have been a form of superstitious delusion the Romish clergy had foisted upon the laity of preReformation England. Protestant authors differed over the extent to which fairy beliefs had withered in the pure light of the Gospel. Some Elizabethans (like Thomas Nashe) consigned them wholesale to ‘idolatrous former daies’, while others, more convincingly, conceded that they ‘sticketh very religiously in the mindes of some’.19 Ann Jeffries was not, of course, a Catholic.20 Yet the godly ministers who examined her would have been primed to link credulity about fairies to religious conservatism and recidivism. A further early Stuart elite presumption about fairies is firmly imprinted on the Jeffries case. Along with ghosts of the dead (another incongruous presence in the post-Reformation metaphysical world) fairies could only retain a place as a sometimes objectively real phenomenon by submitting to theological reprocessing and reclassification. The ministers who examined

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Ann (said by the February 1647 newsletter to be ‘three able divines’) tried hard to persuade her that ‘they were evil spirits that resorted to her, and that it was the Delusion of the Devil’.21 The identification of fairies as demons allowed the Protestant clergy to reconcile the beliefs and experiences of parishioners with their own macrocosmic understanding of the universe, and at the same time it accounted for the apparently greater prevalence of fairylore in Catholic times (when the devil’s delusions held more sway). Several historians of witchcraft have noted a tendency on the part of legal authorities to hear narratives that probably reflected popular belief in household fairies, or brownies like ‘Robin Goodfellow’, and interpret them as tales of demonic familiars.22 Jeffries herself was perhaps lucky not to be charged with witchcraft. The demonic pedigree of the fairies was reinforced by the sole (and oblique) reference to them that Protestant exegetes could find in Scripture: Isaiah 13:21, a prophesy of the ruin of Babylon, and of the strange creatures that would dwell where its glory had once stood. The Authorised Version stated that ‘wild beasts of the desert shall lie there; and their houses shall be full of doleful creatures; and owls shall dwell there, and satyrs shall dance there.’ For ‘wild beasts’ and ‘doleful creatures’ the Geneva Bible of 1560 preferred to leave untranslated the Hebrew words, Ziim and Ohim, adding in a marginal note that this implied those wicked spirits ‘whereby Satan deluded man, as by fairies, goblins and such like fantasies’.23 The text also mentioned ‘satyrs’, and the tendency among learned commentators to link the fairies and elves of folklore with classical and pagan spirits and deities underlined the diabolical association. A ‘digression of devils’ in Robert Burton’s 1621 Anatomy of Melancholy explained that what people called fairies and Robin Goodfellow were simply those ‘Lares, Genij, Faunes, Satyrs […] that kept the Heathen people in awe’.24 James VI wrote in his Demonologie of 1597 about a ‘kinde of spirites, which by the Gentiles was called Diana, and her wandring court, and amongst us was called the Phairie […] or our good neighboures’.25 In a treatise on witchcraft published the same year that Ann Jeffries came to the attention of the authorities in Cornwall, the Huntingdonshire clergyman John Gaule identified the creatures of Isaiah 13:21 as devils, assuming a shape for witches to worship them. The same grim reality was to be found in ‘the Fawnes, Satyrs, Sylvanes or Syrens, that the poets sing of […] or in the plebeiantraditions of Fairies, Elfes and changelings.’26 But even as fairies were being slotted into the conventional categories of the demonologists an alternative interpretative tradition was taking shape. For writers sceptical of the reality of witchcraft, or the powers claimed for witches, fairies were a useful tool of deconstruction. Plebeian fairy traditions are, for example, frequently invoked by Reginald Scot in his 1584 Discovery of Witchcraft, with the aim of establishing a kind of absurdity by association. To Scot it seemed highly significant that ‘heretofore Robin Goodfellow, and Hob gobblin were as terrible, and also as credible to the people, as hags and witches be now’. The implication was that just as the former were losing their

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hold among persons of good sense, so, inevitably, must the latter.27 The theme was echoed by seventeenth-century disciples of Scot such as Samuel Harsnett, and the medical doctor Thomas Ady, who included in his list of ‘Causes of upholding the damnable Doctrin of Witches power’, ‘Old Wives Fables, who sit talking, and chatting of many false old Stories of Witches, and Fairies, and Robin Good-fellow’.28 Another physician, John Webster, was similarly frustrated by the propensity of ignorant people to adhere to ‘those fictions of Spirits, Fairies, Hobgoblins’. Conceding that people did believe they saw such things, Webster hypothesised that strange yet entirely natural animals were sometimes mistaken for spirits, and rendered into ‘old wives fables of Apparitions and Goblins’. The creatures which for centuries had been called satyrs, for example, were in reality most likely a rare kind of ape.29 To another, and more notable, sceptic, Thomas Hobbes, fairies were of considerable polemical value. The Leviathan contains not only an extended and celebrated comparison of the Romish religion with ‘the kingdom of fairy’, but pronounces at the outset that ‘the Religion of the Gentiles in time past, that worshipped Satyres, Fawnes, Nymphs, and the like; and now adayes the opinion that rude people have of Fayries, Ghosts, and Goblins’ was simply the result of an inability to separate ‘dreams and other strong Fancies, from Vision and Sense’.30 It was this increasingly clear link between the casual disparagement of fairies and other spirits, and the philosophical outlook of ‘Hobbism’, which encouraged some soi disant defenders of Christian orthodoxy in the second half of the seventeenth century to begin to reappraise what had once been almost universally denigrated as ‘old wives’ tales.’ That fairies might be the thin end of an atheistical edge was implicitly recognised in 1678 by the influential Cambridge Platonist, Ralph Cudworth. Having dismissed all belief in spirits as mere imaginations, atheists had reached the conclusion that ‘the Chief of all which affrightful Ghosts and Spectres […] is the Deity, the Oberon, or Prince of Fairies and Phancies’.31 Rehabilitation took several forms. The conflation of fairies with the mythological fauna of the classical world had served to collapse these creatures into the ranks of Satan’s army. But it could work equally well to argue for their independent existence, by providing a venerable heritage of educated observation and classification. The mystical poet Samuel Pordage warned his readers to ‘Laugh not at Fairies, Pigmies, Gnomies, […] At Nymphs, Penates, Durdales, Undenae, / For name them what you will […] there such Spirits are as these.’32 In a piece of remarkable textual subversion, a second Discourse concerning Devils and Spirits appended to the 1665 edition of Scot’s Discovery of Witchcraft, argued that the terrestrial spirits known to the ancient heathens as nymphs, satyrs, Lares and Penates, were none other than the fairies and goblins of familiar folk belief.33 The tireless scourge of atheism, Henry More, also associated the ‘Aereall Genii’ of ancient historians with the ‘frequent fame of the dancing of Fairies in Woods and desolate places’.34

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It must be admitted that, compared to the number of relations of witches, ghosts and poltergeists, there were few stories identified unambiguously as fairy apparitions in the compilations of men such as Glanvill and Richard Bovet.35 But at times it was the very oddness of fairies, their position outside the conventional Christian taxonomies, which appealed to the empiricist mindset of English natural philosophy, drawing the attention of practitioners of the new science and their clerical allies. It was widely known, for example, that Paracelsus had postulated the existence of a race of elusive terrestrial spirits, ‘non-Adamic’ creatures of a middle nature between men and angels.36 One compiler of a celebrated anti-atheistical work, the puritan clergyman Richard Baxter, speculated whether the aerial regions ‘have not a third sort of Wights, that are neither Angels […] nor Souls of Men, but such as have been there placed as Fishes in the Sea […] And whether those called Fairies and Goblins are not such.’37 In the 1690s, aficionados of the Royal Society like John Aubrey and Robert Boyle solicited accounts from clerical correspondents in Scotland about the experiences of local people with fairies.38 It may perhaps have been at Boyle’s instigation that a Highland minister, Robert Kirk of Aberfoyle in Perthshire, completed in 1692 the only seventeenth-century British treatise devoted to the nature of fairies, a manuscript known as The Secret Common-Wealth and intended ‘to suppress the impudent and growing Atheisme of this age.’39 Kirk’s extraordinary essay was a kind of ethnographic survey of the physiology, customs and social organisation of these elusive creatures, who manifested themselves to humans possessed of the ‘second sight’. Its modern editor describes it as ‘a slightly strange book, which combines what is effectively reportage of folklore with erudite speculation and biblical exegesis’.40 Kirk had been contemplating the work during a visit to London in 1689–90, in the course of which he debated the utility and reality of apparitions over dinner with Edward Stillingfleet, the newly appointed bishop of Worcester. Kirk wrote afterwards in his diary that he considered it ‘not repugnant to Reason or Religion to affect ane invisible polity, or a people to us invisible, having a Commonwealth, Laws and Oeconomy, made known to us but by some obscure hints of a few admitted to their converse’. It was, he thought, worth remembering that the very first reports of the lands and inhabitants of America had been ‘lookt on as a fayrie tale, and the Reporters hooted at as inventors of ridiculous Utopias’.41 It was Kirk’s conviction that the fairy inhabitants of the invisible world were themselves courteously endeavouring ‘to convince us (in opposition to Sadducees, Socinians and Athesists) of a Dietie, of Spirits’.42 In this context, therefore, Moses Pitt’s attempt to put forward the appearance of fairies to a Cornish serving girl as evidence of the existence and providence of Almighty God does not seem quite so unique or eccentric as at first. Within months of its publication, Pitt sent a copy of his tract to the Sussex clergyman, William Turner, who was just then compiling a Compleat

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history of the most remarkable providences as ‘one of the best methods that can be pursued against the abounding Atheism of this Age.’ Turner printed the account in its entirety, with prefixed letters from Pitt’s kinsman in the south-west, William Tom, affirming that ‘all in it is very true’, and from Pitt himself, adding some details he had forgetfully omitted from the original: ‘(viz.) that those Fairies are distinguished into Males and Females; and that they are about the bigness of Children of Three or Four Years of Age.’43 The appropriation of traditional fairylore, and its supposed amenability to the new spirit of scientific enquiry, represents a striking exception to the historical rule that elite and popular cultures were drawing inextricably away from each other in the latter part of the early modern era.44 Folk knowledge about fairies – whether or not it was becoming, as Keith Thomas has claimed, ‘primarily a store of mythology rather than a corpus of living beliefs’ – continued to be a domain that the educated, particularly clergymen, had access to, and one they could adopt and adapt for their own purposes.45 The contest over the reality of fairies was only a minor campaign in the larger war against scepticism, yet it proved in the end to be a battle fought by the anti-sceptics on ground of their opponents’ choosing. In the late seventeenth century, belief in fairies was a step too far for most educated and respectable opinion. Robert Kirk expected and experienced incredulity and ridicule on this matter in London society, and Moses Pitt prefaced his pamphlet with a ready confession that ‘the great Part of the World will not believe the Passages here related’.46 It is possible in fact to suggest that fairies were somewhere the tipping-point in that ‘tilting of a balance’, which Alan McFarlane has recently suggested as a better explanation for the transition from a ‘magical’ to ‘modern’ worldview than any radically paradigmatic shift.47 Fairies were mentioned, passingly but tellingly, in two key texts published the same year as Pitt’s pamphlet. One of these was a lightning rod of orthodox ire: the deist John Toland’s Christianity not mysterious. In his discussion of miracles, Toland applied the rule that none could be considered credible ‘unless for some weighty design […] some special and important end’. By this token, ‘the celebrated Feats of Goblins and Fairies, of Witches, of Conjurers, and all the Heathen Prodigies, must be accounted fictitious, idle, and superstitious’.48 The other, an abridgement of John Locke’s Essay concerning humane understanding, invoked fairies to lodge a fundamental epistemological objection to discussions about the spirit world. Since human senses could not certainly discover them, it was impossible to know with certainty that there were such things as spirits, ‘for we can no more know that there are Finite Spirits really Existing, by the Idea we have of such Beings, than by the Ideas any one has of Fairies or Centaurs, he can come to know that Things answering those Ideas, do really Exist.’49 We also have one delayed but significant reaction to Pitt’s pamphlet itself. In 1708, the aristocratic philosopher, Anthony Ashley Cooper, earl of Shaftesbury published A Letter

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Concerning Enthusiasm, in response to the activities in London of the so-called ‘French prophets’, a trio of Huguenot refugees from the Massif Central, who had become notorious for their histrionic displays of prophecy and religious ecstasy. In his dedicatory epistle, Shaftesbury took the opportunity for a sideswipe against the dedicatee of Pitt’s pamphlet of 1696, Bishop Fowler of Gloucester, complaining of those who thought it necessary to improve on scripture with ‘a solid system of old wives’ stories’. Why, he knew of one ‘eminent, learned and truly Christian prelate […] who could have given you a full account of his belief in fairies’, being ‘so great a volunteer in faith […] beyond the ordinary Prescription of the Catholick Church.’ It was in this work that Shaftesbury enunciated his famous, or infamous, principle: that ridicule should operate as a test of verity, the truth being able to withstand the scrutiny of raillery.50 By the end of the seventeenth century, it was to ridicule, rather than to reasoned philosophical argument, questions of observational method, or close scriptural exegesis, that fairies, and by extension the entire spirit world, were becoming particularly vulnerable.51 ‘Polite’ and coffee house society was learning to scoff at ‘enthusiasms’ of all kinds, with essays in the burgeoning periodical press lumping together ‘Fairies, Witches, Magicians, Demons and departed Spirits’ as the detritus of discarded belief, and yawning that ‘the World is already wearied with Stories of Witches, Fairies, &c’.52 In August 1712, the godly Yorkshire antiquary Ralph Thoresby found himself on a visit to London having to argue late into the night against ‘some who would be thought the only wits, and glory in the style of Free-thinkers, who deny the existence of spirits’.53 In this climate, the long-standing associations of fairies with the ‘vulgar’ people, with childhood, and with tales told by old wives, placed severe limits on their utility for the vindication of orthodox Christianity. As Adam Fox has ably demonstrated, it was in the nurseries of gentry and middling-sort households that the cultural formation of elite males was, for a time at least, directly influenced by the outlook of illiterate females.54 This probably helps to explain both the enduring literary fascination with matters such as omens, ghosts and fairies in early modern England, and also the periodically intense disparagement to which they were subject. A careful reading of Moses Pitt’s pamphlet of 1696 reveals the extent to which, unconsciously, it presents a view of reality filtered through the eyes and understanding of a child, punctuated by halcyon memories of Christmas dinners, and riding on horseback for the first time. There is a revealing remembered incident, when, during the time of her supposed fast, the young Moses came seeking his nursemaid at her chamber door. She told him to ‘have a little patience and I will let you in presently.’ But, looking through the keyhole, ‘I saw her eating; and when she had done eating, she stood still by her Bed-side as long as Thanks to God might be given, and then she made a coursey (or Bow) and opened the Chamber-door.’ Ann Jeffries gave the child a piece of her bread, ‘the most delicious Bread that ever I did eat either before or since.’ The incident is offered as evidence of Jeffries’ sustenance by the

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fairies, rather than of her surreptitiously feeding herself. When Pitt remarks of the fairies that, unlike his sister Mary, ‘I confess to your lordship, I never did see them’, it is in a spirit of poignant regret.55 A more conscious sense of the inability of fairylore to transcend the worlds of childhood memory and nostalgic recollection can be detected even among some who were generally sympathetic to the project of confounding scepticism by the collecting of remarkable providences. The antiquarian polymath and proto-folklorist John Aubrey avidly collected accounts of the appearances of fairies, and seemed periodically to adopt a stance of belief towards them. Yet at the same time, he refrained from explicitly presenting these narratives as either didactic or providential, and he tended to put distance, both cultural and chronological, between himself and the supernatural events which he recorded. In a typical authorial aside, he noted that ‘when I was a Boy, our Country people would talke much of [fairies]’.56 Like Moses Pitt, Aubrey had had a childhood brush with the fairies at close second-hand. In notes for his natural history of Wiltshire, Aubrey recounted how in 1633–4, while a school boy at Yatton Keynell, his curate, Mr Harte, had stumbled across a fairy ring while crossing the Downs by night, and had been buffeted and held prisoner by the fairies till sunrise the following day. Impressed by the story, Aubrey and a school friend set out after dark to dance on the Downs, but the fairies never appeared to them, as ‘it is saide they seldom appeare to any persons who go to seeke for them’. As an adult, Aubrey inclined towards a thoroughly naturalistic explanation for the phenomenon of fairy rings in grassland: ‘I presume they are generated from the breathing out of a fertile subterraneous vapour’.57 Aubrey’s reflections on these matters point to the potential for meaningful exchanges involving elite piety and emergent ‘science’ on the one hand, and customary folk belief on the other, as well as to the inherent fragility of the alliance between them. The last words should go to Ann Jeffries herself. In the course of her interview with Humphrey Martin in early 1693, the old lady showed an astute understanding of the cultural and economic connectedness, as well as of the gulf, between her world and that of a successful London author and printer. If she disclosed anything of what had transpired all those years ago, she knew that Moses Pitt ‘would make either Books or Ballads of it: And she said, That she would not have her Name spread about the Country in Books or Ballads of such things, if she might have five hundred pounds for the doing of it’.58 Her wishes in this matter were to be ignored, but the result of her reticence, as so often, is that we hear her voice only in the accent and cadences of her betters.

Notes 1 On Pitt’s career, see M. Harris, ‘Pitt, Moses (bap. 1639, d. 1697)’, ODNB. Aspects of the case are discussed by D. Purkiss, The Witch in History: Early Modern and Twentieth-Century Representations (1996), 161–2; F. Valletta, Witchcraft, Magic and

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2 3

4

5 6

7 8

9

Superstition in England, 1640–1670 (Aldershot, 2001), 78–9; L. McClain, Lest We Be Damned: Practical Innovation and Lived Experience among Catholics in Protestant England, 1559–1642 (2004), 190–3; R. Buccola, Fairies, Fractious Women and the Old Faith: Fairy Lore in Early Modern British Drama and Culture (Cranbury, NJ, 2006), 166–73; J. Shaw, Miracles in Enlightenment England (New Haven, 2006), 146–50. Pitt, Ann Jefferies, quotations at 10, 11, 15, 16. Pitt, Ann Jefferies, 4–5, 1. Cf. Samuel Barton, A sermon preach’d before the Honourable House of Commons at St. Margaret’s Westminster, upon the 16th of April, 1696 being a day of thanksgiving unto Almighty God for discovering and disappointing an horrid and barbarous conspiracy of papists (1696), quotation at 7. See C. Rose, England in the 1690s: Revolution, Religion and War (Oxford, 1999), 19–27, 196–201; W.E. Burns, An Age of Wonders: Prodigies, Politics and Providence in England 1657–1727 (Manchester, 2002). Pitt, Ann Jefferies, 5–6, 3. J. Spurr, ‘Fowler, Edward (1631/2–1714)’, ODNB; S. Handley, Visions of an Unseen World: Ghost Beliefs and Ghost Stories in Eighteenth-Century England (2007), 29, 30. See also M. Goldie and J. Spurr, ‘Politics and the Restoration parish: Edward Fowler and the struggle for St Giles Cripplegate’, English Historical Review 109 (1994), 572–96. Henry More, An Antidote Against Atheisme (1653), 164. See T.H. Jobe, ‘The Devil in Restoration science: the Glanvill-Webster witchcraft debate’, Isis 72 (1981), 343–56; S. Schaffer, ‘Godly men and mechanical philosophers: souls and spirits in Restoration natural philosophy’, Science in Context 1 (1987), 55–85; S. Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford, 1997), ch. 19; M. Hunter (ed.), The Occult Laboratory: Magic, Science and Second Sight in Late Seventeenth-Century Scotland (Woodbridge, 2001), 1–31. On Moses Pitt’s connections to Boyle, see A. Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago, 1998), 145. A small but growing body of scholarly work has addressed itself to early seventeenthcentury fairy belief, in order to provide context for the fairy motifs in literary works by Shakespeare, Spenser and others. See J.O. Halliwell (ed.), Illustrations of the Fairy Mythology of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1845); M.W. Latham, The Elizabethan Fairies: The Fairies of Folklore and the Fairies of Shakespeare (1930); K.M. Briggs, The Anatomy of Puck: An examination of fairy beliefs among Shakespeare’s contemporaries and successors (1959); M.E. Lamb, ‘Taken by the fairies: fairy practices and the production of popular culture in A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, Shakespeare Quarterly 51 (2000), 277–312; M. Swann, ‘The politics of fairylore in early modern English literature’, Renaissance Quarterly 53 (2000), 449–73; D. Purkiss, ‘Old wives’ tales retold: the Fairy Queen in drama and popular culture’, in D. Clarke and E. Clarke (eds), ‘This Double Voice’: Gendered Writing in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, 2003); M. Woodcock, Fairy in The Faerie Queene: Renaissance Elf-Fashioning and Elizabethan Myth-Making (Aldershot, 2004); Buccola, Fairies, Fractious Women, and the Old Faith. A separate tradition of folklorist study is exemplified by K.M. Briggs, The Fairies in Tradition and Literature (reprint, 2002). Among limited treatments by cultural historians, the short section in K. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971), ch. 19, pt. iv, maps out the essential ground. See also D. Purkiss, Troublesome Things: A History of Fairies and Fairy Stories (2000) and, with caveats, E. Wilby, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits: Shamanistic Visionary Traditions in Early Modern British Witchcraft and Magic (Brighton, 2005). There is no equivalent for England of the excellent early modern survey in L. Henderson

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10

11 12

13

14

15 16 17

18 19 20

21

22

23

and E. Cowan, Scottish Fairy Belief: A History (East Linton, 2001), now supplemented by Margot Todd, ‘Fairies, Egyptians and Elders: multiple cosmologies in PostReformation Scotland’, in Bridget Heal and Ole Peter Grell (eds), The Impact of the European Reformation (Aldershot, 2008), 189–208. See P. Marshall, ‘Protestants and fairies in early modern England’, in S. Dixon, D. Freist and M. Greengrass (eds), The Religious Worlds of Early Modern Europe (Aldershot, 2009), 139–59. Pitt, Ann Jefferies, 7–9, 20–2. Bodleian Library, Oxford, Clarendon MS 29/ 2443, fo. 102; 2478, fo. 165; 2466. Extracts from these documents are printed in Devon and Cornwall Notes and Queries 13 (1924), 312–14. For other examples of the politicisation of prodigies and the supernatural in the civil war decades, see C. Durston, ‘Signs and wonders and the English civil war’, History Today (October, 1987), 22–8; J. Friedman, ‘The Battle of Frogs and Fairford’s Flies: miracles and popular journalism during the English Revolution’, Sixteenth Century Journal 23 (1992), 419–42. P. Mack, Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England (Berkeley, 1992); P. Crawford, Women and Religion in England 1500–1720 (1993), 106–12. B. Capp, When Gossips Meet: Women, Family and Neighbourhood in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2003), 362. Pitt, Ann Jefferies, 16–17. For a broader cultural association between fairies and royalism, see Marshall, ‘Protestants and Fairies’. Latham, Elizabethan Fairies, ch. 2; Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 266; B. Rosen (ed.), Witchcraft in England 1558–1618 (Amherst, MA, 1991), 64, 68; O. Davies, ‘Angels in elite and popular magic, 1650–1790’, in P. Marshall and A. Walsham (eds), Angels in the Early Modern World (Cambridge, 2006), 301–2. For other Cornish cases, see A.K. Hamilton Jenkins, Cornwall and the Cornish: The Story, Religion, and Folklore of ‘the Western Land’ (1933), 248–50; W.Y. Evans-Wentz, The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries (new edn, Gerrards Cross, 1977), 163–85. A. Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England 1500–1700 (Oxford, 2000), 187–8; Buccola, Fairies, Fractious Women, and the Old Faith, 45–8. Thomas Nashe, The terrors of the night or, A discourse of apparitions (1594), sig. B2v.; Woodcock, Fairy, 19. McClain, Lest We Be Damned, 191, misinterpreting the ‘old form of prayer’ Jeffries was advocating [ie the abrogated Book of Common Prayer] as a Catholic one, mistakenly suggests that she was. Bodleian, MS Clarendon 29/2443, fo. 102; Pitt, Ann Jefferies, 19. For the demonisation of ghost beliefs in this period, see P. Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England (Oxford, 2002), ch. 6. Purkiss, Witch in History, 135, 138; Wilby, Cunning Folk, 63; J. Sharpe, Witchcraft in Early Modern England (2001), 63; A. Gregory, ‘Witchcraft, politics and “good neighbourhood”, in early seventeenth-century Rye’, Past & Present 133 (1991), 31–66. The Bible and Holy Scriptures (Geneva, 1560), fo. 287v. See also Arthur Dent, The ruine of Rome: or An exposition vpon the whole Reuelation (1603), 236–7; Thomas Thorowgood, Digitus dei: new discoveryes with sure arguments to prove that the Jews (a Nation) or people lost in the world for the space of near 200 years, inhabite now in America (1652), 15; Thomas Heywood, The hierarchie of the blessed angels (1635), 567–8.

140 Ann Jeffries and the Fairies 24 Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), 64–5. Cf. Heywood, Hierarchie of the blessed angels, 574. 25 Woodcock, Fairy, 24–5. 26 John Gaule, Select Cases of Conscience Touching Witches and Witchcrafts (1646), 49–50. 27 Reginald Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), 85. See also ibid, sigs B2r–3v, 86, 131, 152–3. 28 Samuel Harsnett, A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures (1603), 134–5; Thomas Ady, A Candle in the Dark (1655), 169. 29 John Webster, Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft (1677), 42, 279–84. 30 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. K.R. Minogue (1973), 381, 7. 31 Ralph Cudworth, The true intellectual system of the universe. wherein all the reason and philosophy of atheism is confuted and its impossibility demonstrated (1678), 834–5. 32 Samuel Pordage, Mundorum explicatio, or, The explanation of an hieroglyphical figure wherein are couched the mysteries of the external, internal, and eternal worlds (1661), 37. Cf. Kirk, 97. 33 ‘A discourse concerning devils and spirits’, in Scot, Discovery of Witchcraft (1665 edn), 50–1. 34 Henry More, Divine dialogues containing sundry disquisitions & instructions concerning the attributes and providence of God (1668), 202–3. 35 Richard Bovet, Panaemonium, or The Devil’s Cloyster, being a Furthe Blow to modern Sadduceism (1684), 208, recounting an incident from the Blackdown Hills, a place where fairies and spirits ‘most ordinarily showed themselves.’ See also 173–4, his account of a Scottish case, ‘the fairy boy of Leith’. John Beaumont, An historical, physiological and theological treatise of spirits, apparitions, witchcrafts, and other magical practices (1705), 104–5, 393–7. Glanvill mentions popular belief in fairies in his account of the famous ‘Drummer of Tedworth’ case: Saducismus Triumphatus (1689), 325. 36 Thomas Browne, Pseudodoxia epidemica (1646), 207; Webster, Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft, 40–1. Cf. Davies, ‘Angels’, 314. 37 Richard Baxter, The Certainty of the Worlds of Spirits (1691), 9. 38 John Aubrey, Miscellanies (1696), 121, 156, 175–6. 39 Robert Kirk, The Secret Common-wealth and A Short Treatise of Charms and Spels, ed. S. Sanderson (Cambridge, 1976), quotation at 1. The best scholarly edition is Hunter, Occult Laboratory, 77–106. Kirk’s holograph manuscript has not survived – the comment about atheism is absent from the earliest surviving copy, but appears on the title page of two eighteenth-century transcriptions. For the textual history, see ibid., 38–41. 40 Hunter, Occult Laboratory, 12. 41 Sanderson, Secret Commonwealth, 15. 42 Hunter, Occult Laboratory, 96. 43 W. Turner, A Compleat History of the Most Remarkable Providences (1697), ‘To the Courteous Reader’, pt. i, 116–20. 44 For expressions of this view, see P. Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (1978); K. Wrightson, English Society 1580–1680 (1982), 220–8. 45 Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 608, though as Thomas himself concedes, nineteenth-century folklorists found abundant evidence of still current fairy belief. 46 Pitt, Ann Jefferies, 5. 47 A. McFarlane, ‘Civility and the decline of magic’, in P. Slack, P. Burke and B. Harrison (eds), Civil Histories; Essays In Honour of Sir Keith Thomas (Oxford, 2000), 145–60.

Peter Marshall 141 48 John Toland, Christianity not Mysterious, or, A treatise shewing that there is nothing in the Gospel contrary to reason, nor above it and that no Christian doctrine can be properly call’d a mystery (1696), 146–7. 49 John Locke, An abridgment of Mr. Locke’s Essay concerning humane understanding (1696), 255–6. 50 Earl of Shaftesbury. A letter concerning enthusiasm, to my Lord ***** (1708), 16–17, 46–7. Cf. Shaw, Miracles and the Enlightenment, 149–51; H.C.E. Midelfort, Exorcism and Enlightenment: Johan Joseph Gassner and the Demons of EighteenthCentury Germany (New Haven, 2005), ch. 5. Fowler replied to Shaftesbury’s pamphlet, but interestingly ignored the gibe about fairies: Edward Fowler, Reflections upon a letter concerning enthusiasm, to my Lord *****. In another letter to a lord (1709). 51 See J. Redwood, Reason, Ridicule and Religion: The Age of Enlightenment in England 1660–1750 (1976). 52 M. Gaskill, Crime and Mentalities in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2000), 87, 108. 53 Cited in Hunter, Occult Laboratory, 29. 54 Fox, Oral and Literate Culture, ch. 3. 55 Pitt, Ann Jefferies, 16–17, 21, 18. 56 John Aubrey, Remaines of Gentilisme and Judaisme, ed. J. Britten (1881), 29, 102, 122, 125. On Aubrey’s cultural and intellectual outlook, see M. Hunter, John Aubrey and the Realm of Learning (1975). 57 Halliwell, Fairy Mythology, 235–6. Aubrey’s contemporary Robert Plott ascribed fairy rings to the percussive action of lightning: L. Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science (8 vols, New York, 1923–58), vol. VIII, 49–50. 58 Pitt, Ann Jefferies, 9. For insightful discussion of the relationship between the culture of plebeian women and the world of popular print, see Capp, When Gossips Meet, 365–9.

8 Wyclif’s Well: Lollardy, Landscape and Memory in Post-Reformation England Alexandra Walsham

The story of Wyclif’s well is firmly interwoven into the fabric of modern Leicestershire folklore. Popular compilations of the local traditions and legends of the county rarely fail to reiterate the curious tale explaining the origins of a vigorous cold spring in Lutterworth, a market town now synonymous with the name of the Oxford academic who inspired the late medieval heretical movement known as lollardy. Already under official investigation for his heterodox theology but enjoying the protection of a powerful royal patron in the guise of John of Gaunt, John Wyclif was allowed to retire to the obscurity of Lutterworth rectory for the last years of his life, dying here of a stroke in 1384 and being buried in the churchyard. Posthumously condemned by the Church as a heretic, in 1428 his bones were exhumed and burnt by officials from the diocese of Lincoln and the ashes scattered in the nearby River Swift.1 Taking two variant forms, the story of the well is closely connected with this event. According to the first version, its petrifying but therapeutic waters arose where one of his bones tumbled from the handcart conveying them to the site of incineration, while the second tells how it emerged spontaneously at the spot at which a member of the ‘mob’ sent to carry out this sentence picked up a bone and then immediately fell, dashing his brains out. Still flowing in the grounds of a local house, it has come to be known as St John’s Well. Incorporated into inventories of the holy wells of the region, and invigorated by burgeoning interest in the occult, more recently it has also been enrolled in the annals of ‘Leicestershire and Rutland earth mysteries’.2 The story of Wyclif’s well is a classic example of an aetiological tale supplying a mythical, metaphysical explanation for a prominent landmark. It attests to the enduring capacity of the natural environment to operate as ‘a vast repository of memory’, to a tendency to spin an imagined past around visible topographical features that is deeply ingrained in human cultures.3 It also conforms with, and superficially bears a striking resemblance to, the Catholic cult of saints. Medieval hagiography is full of stories of springs engendered in miraculous approbation of holy personages: springs that 142

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emerge supernaturally to relieve a drought, quench their thirst, or provide water to baptise their followers; springs that burst forth to commemorate the deeds of the heroic dead or to consecrate the ground where the innocent blood of martyrs is shed; springs that arise as emblems of divine wrath against those who commit heinous sins or engage in sacrilege against their sacred relics. Assimilating pagan motifs into a new religious framework, some such tales reflect the ongoing ecclesiastical struggle to Christianise the European landscape.4 In the case of Wyclif’s well, we find that the ancient paradigm of the fountain testifying to the sanctity of a victim of unjust violence and persecution has attached itself to a figure who has long been regarded as a valiant forerunner of the Protestant reformers. It has grafted itself onto a theologian heralded by sixteenth-century propagandists and their successors as ‘the morning star of the Reformation’ and credited with founding a sect whose role in sowing the seeds of the religious revolution that precipitated England’s decisive break with the Church of Rome in the 1530s is still the subject of heated scholarly dispute. More than a little ironically, it has fused with collective memory of a movement distinguished by its overt hostility to the assumptions about the materiality of the holy that lay at the heart of traditional religion – by the vociferous rejection of images, pilgrimages and veneration of the saints and their remains that also became a hallmark of Protestant thinking. This aim of this essay is to explore the significance of this apparent anomaly, to assess the ostensible incongruity of a cult of lollard sanctity. It seeks to trace the genesis and development of the legend of Wyclif’s well and to illuminate the processes of amplification and embellishment that have subtly transformed it over the centuries. More importantly, it attempts to use this intriguing example of syncretism to analyse the connections between religious consciousness and the landscape in early modern England, as well as the part played by both oral tradition and literate culture in the making of a corpus of post-Reformation and indeed Protestant folklore. It sheds further light upon the hazy interface between lollardy and evangelicalism in the reign of Henry VIII and underlines the need to understand theology and piety not as static entities, but rather as fluid, living and often inconsistent tissues of practice and belief. We may begin by returning to 1428, the year in which Wyclif’s bones were disinterred from their grave and ceremonially consigned to the flames. Carried out on the orders of Richard Fleming, the earnestly anti-Wycliffite bishop of Lincoln, who was himself acting on the instructions of Pope Martin V, this rite of destruction by fire represented the final fulfilment of the decree of anathema that had been pronounced on the Lutterworth rector by the Council of Constance in May 1415. The decision of that synod to condemn a list of some 267 heretical opinions found in his writings followed a series of episcopal and papal investigations of Wyclif’s views dating back to the 1370s.

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But its denunciation of the English schoolman was also closely linked with the proceedings against the Bohemian priest Jan Hus, whose teachings betrayed the explicit influence of Wyclif, and whom it duly excommunicated and handed over to the secular arm for execution.5 In ordaining not only a holocaust of Wyclif’s works but also the burning of his desiccated corpse, the Council revealed its determination to extinguish all trace of his accursed presence and memory. Dispersed by the fast-flowing waters of the river into which it was ritually tipped, the very dust to which he was reduced was cast into oblivion. The exhumation and incineration of his skeleton purged the consecrated ground it had defiled and symbolised the hellfire by which his soul would be consumed. At another level such acts functioned as a kind of posthumous ordeal: to destroy relics without suffering dreadful repercussions was to undermine the pretensions to sanctity of the living individuals of which they were lingering and potent residues. By this means, to echo Margaret Aston, ‘the supernatural was discredited by inertia’.6 Attempts to find concrete evidence of any tradition linking John Wyclif with a well at Lutterworth in fifteenth-century texts have (so far) proved fruitless. William of Worcestre bypassed the town in the course of his travels in the 1480s and when Leland visited it in the early sixteenth century he mentioned that many springs originated in the hills in its vicinity and converged into the Swift, but (unsurprisingly given his Catholic orthodoxy) said nothing about the connection of the settlement, let alone a local well, with a notorious heretic.7 In the 1380s, stimulated by the inflammatory preaching of two local hermits, William Smith and William Swinderby, and subsequently assisted by the residence of the Oxford schoolman himself, Leicester and the surrounding region had been a centre of lollard activity. Henry Knighton, canon of the local Augustinian abbey, wrote in his chronicle that the sect ‘grew so rapidly that you might hardly see two people, but one of them would be a follower of Wyclif’.8 However, by the 1420s heresy was a less significant and declining presence. The support it had once enjoyed among the gentry had waned after the Oldcastle rebellion and it also withered in the face of the determined efforts of Bishop Fleming to suppress it.9 It remains as difficult to assess the extent and continuity of popular sympathy for the rector of Lutterworth and his teachings in this area as it does to discover traces of a tale tying his exhumation with a minor change in the local landscape. This is not, however, the same as saying that no such tradition existed in the ephemeral realm of speech and social memory. Silence is always a sandy foundation on which to erect an historical thesis, but in an era of limited literacy oral circulation of a version of the story nonetheless remains a distinct possibility. It is seemingly not until 1531 that any hint of the legend enters the written record, in the form of words attributed to a draper of Much Hadham in Hertfordshire by the name of George Bull, and preserved by the clerical scribe who prepared a table of persons who abjured their heretical opinions to insert

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in the register of the bishop of London. As well as questioning the necessity of sacramental confession and saying that ‘Luther was a good man’, Bull was reputed to have declared ‘that where Wickleffes bones were brent, sprang up a well or welspryng’. This was itself second-hand information, based on ‘the credence & reporte of M. Patmore Person of Hadham’.10 While little is known about Bull,11 happily rather more can be uncovered about the cited source of the rumour he was heard repeating. Taking his BA at Oxford in 1511, Thomas Patmore was ordained priest and admitted into the fellowship of Magdalen College three years later. Although Patmore was preferred to the benefice of Much Hadham by Bishop Richard Fitzjames in 1515, between 1518 and 1520 we find him at Gonville Hall in Cambridge (then a nest of heresy), where his hot-headed remark that ‘he dyd not set a bottel of hay by the Popes or Byshops cursse’ evidently left an impression, being remembered and used in evidence against him more than a decade later.12 Greatly influenced by the ferment of new ideas that were swirling in the town and university in the 1520s, he soon became a conspicuous figure in early English evangelical circles. In particular, he is one of the few identified members of a shadowy network known as the ‘Christian Brethren’ which played a key role in importing and distributing William Tyndale’s New Testament and other illicit books from the Continent.13 It was in this connection that in 1530, together with the brother of the translator, John Tyndale, and one Thomas Somer, he was apprehended and brought before the Lord Chancellor Sir Thomas More and the Star Chamber. Patmore seems to have escaped the fate of Tyndale, Somer and two other offenders, who were subjected to the humilating punishment of being set upon a horse backwards and paraded at Cheapside during market time with papers on their heads proclaiming their crime and the forbidden bibles and tracts ‘pynned thick’ to their outward attire. These they were then obliged to throw onto a bonfire.14 But he did not elude the scrutiny of John Stokesley, bishop of London, by whom he was interrogated as a suspected heretic. To the charges that he had defiantly declared that ‘the truth of the Scripture hath bene kept from us a long time’, claimed that it was unlawful to burn heretics, and insisted that men could only be saved by God’s mercy and grace, were added his defence of clerical marriage and the allegation that he had personally blessed the union of his own curate and fellow student at Gonville Hill, Simon Smith and one Joan Bennore. Convinced of the doctrine of justification by faith, Patmore had apparently spent a period of time ‘beyond sea’ in Wittenberg, where he was believed to have met Martin Luther and to have read and studied his works, as well as those of other German reformers including Oeclampadius and Melanchthon.15 Patmore became ‘so wrapt in the Bishops nettes’ and was placed under such intense pressure that he abjured and twice bore faggots at Paul’s Cross. Remaining unrepentant, in November 1531 he was deprived of his living and following payment of £100 condemned to perpetual imprisonment in

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the Lollard’s Tower at Lambeth, where he languished for three years, reputedly ‘without fire or candle, or any other reliefe’.16 Hugh Latimer alluded to his sufferings in a letter written to refute William Hubberdine and they also did much to ensure his later inclusion in John Foxe’s famous martyrology as a witness to the ‘truth’.17 In the course of his incarceration he encountered the former Benedictine monk and future martyr Richard Bayfield, who confirmed him in the ‘doctrin’ and ‘kingdome of Christ’.18 Petitions in Parliament and supplications to the king failed to secure his release until Anne Boleyn personally intervened on his behalf in 1534.19 The following year, as the political tide was turning against the independent power of the clergy, Henry VIII set up a commission involving Cranmer, Cromwell, Audley and others to investigate his unjust treatment at the hands of Stokesley and his vicar-general Richard Foxford.20 It is manifestly clear that Thomas Patmore had friends in high places. A major player in the twilight world out of which Protestantism in England first emerged in the 1520s and 30s, his activities highlight the porous boundaries that separated lollardy and the amorphous phenomenon that was evangelicalism in this formative period. While claims about the geographical continuities between the two movements have proved largely inconclusive, the accumulated evidence of personal and social interconnections, especially in the melting pot of mid-Tudor London, remains very suggestive.21 It may be no accident that Patmore dined with his curate Simon Smith at the Bell in New Fish Street, which had been a lollard haunt; nor a mere coincidence that the maidservant whose marriage to Smith the vicar of Much Hadham sacramentally cemented was herself affiliated with the sect. Here we should take particular heed of the intersections and convergences to which Susan Brigden and Anne Hudson have drawn our attention, not least in relation to the clandestine fraternity of clerics and merchants that comprised the ‘Christian brethren’. The livery companies of the city functioned as secret cells of religious dissent, settings in which what Patrick Collinson calls the ‘chemical interaction of old and new heresy’ occurred spontaneously.22 The son of a draper, Patmore himself was made free of his father’s company in 1530: the same company of which Humphrey Monmouth, patron and financial backer of Tyndale, was also a member.23 Despite Foxe’s erroneous supposition that this man was a brother of the Hertfordshire vicar, it is much more likely that Thomas Patmore simply led a double life as layman and priest, moving in and out of overlapping circles of clergy and tradesmen sympathetic to reformist sentiments.24 It was probably in this context that he encountered and shared the story of Wyclif’s well with a fellow draper, George Bull. Although the evidence is chiefly circumstantial, Patmore and Bull seem to exemplify the possibilities for cross-fertilisation between lollardy and Protestantism which some historians continue to regard with considerable scepticism. They re-open the question of whether Wycliffite opinions provided ‘a

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springboard of critical dissent’ from which some individuals were propelled to embrace the new faith. One of the most striking areas of theological congruence between the two movements was their mutual hostility to the reverence late medieval Catholics paid to hallowed persons, objects and places and their representations.25 A shared antipathy to idolatry and superstition could and did predispose lollards to the message preached by early reformers like Thomas Bilney, whose fierce assault on saints, pilgrimages and images was ‘almost indistinguishable’ from the colourful invective against shrines like Our Lady of Walsingham (‘Falsingham’) and St Thomas Becket at Canterbury (‘Cankerbury’) that leaps from the records of heresy trials in the fifteenth century.26 Rooted in Wycliffe’s own writings, but hardened and sharpened by his later disciples, such views struck a chord with Protestant theological priorities. Patmore himself held strong views on this subject. ‘Why shuld we pray to Saints (said he) they are but blockes and stockes?’ Pointing to a painted cloth depicting a secular hunting scene, he declared that ‘hee had as leve pray to yonder hunter […] for a peece of flesh, as to pray to stockes that stand in walles’. He had also taken it upon himself to remove wax offerings left hanging from a tree to which a holy image was fixed, presumably because these votive gifts smacked of the sacrifices bestowed on pagan idols of old.27 Such pronounced opinions and impassioned actions make Patmore’s remarks about the well that arose where Wyclif’s bones were burnt all the more puzzling. How could a corrosive critique of the Catholic economy of the sacred co-exist with the claim that the posthumous persecution of the longdead founder of the lollard sect had precipitated a wonder of nature so similar to those which had validated the sanctity of many medieval saints? A cult centred on the site of Wyclif’s disinterment seems blatantly at odds with what has come to be seen as one of the core features of lollard and Protestant theology. It is ostensibly hard to reconcile with the campaign to dismantle pilgrimage shrines and destroy miraculous wells, which less than five years later, would be launched by the Tudor state itself. Before confronting this problem more directly, it is necessary to stress that this manifestation of reverence for Wyclif was by no means unique. In Bohemia, veneration of the Oxford schoolman had already developed in Hussite circles in the early fifteenth century. Jerome of Prague was accused by the Council of Constance of possessing an image depicting him as a saint and both he and Hus would themselves very soon partake of the same charisma.28 In England, popular canonisation of Wyclif, hitherto respected simply as a ‘gret clerk’ and learned doctor, was given a considerable fillip by the exhumation of his corpse in 1428. Later that year, at his trial in Norwich, the lollard evangelist William White referred to him as ‘beatus’ and shortly afterwards William Emayn abjured the view that ‘Maister John Wyclif was holier and now is more in blisse and hier in heven glorified than Seint Thomas of Canterbury the glorious Martir’. This opinion was echoed by the Essex vicar Thomas Bagley, who was burnt at the stake in 1431. Nearly a

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century later such sentiments were still in circulation: John Stilman was indicted in 1518 for having said that ‘Wickliff is a saint in heaven’, among other offences, and in 1538 John Lambert was explicitly asked if he endorsed this idea.29 The spontaneous sanctification of the Lutterworth rector was accompanied by a growing impulse to regard other prominent lollards, including Sir John Oldcastle and William Sawtry as ‘holy martyrs’. The Norfolk matron Margery Baxter, tried in 1428, not only spoke of her recently executed teacher William White as ‘magnus sanctus in celo’ but also prayed to him daily to intercede for her with God the Father.30 No less striking is the full-blown cult which sprang up at the spot at which Richard Wych was executed on Tower Hill in 1440. Devotees carried away his ashes (sweet-smelling, after the fashion of countless earlier saints, thanks to the efforts of a local apothecary) and erected a cairn of stones and cross at the site. Before long stories of miracles began to be reported, at which point the authorities stepped in and endeavoured to suppress the unofficial shrine by turning it into a dunghill. Half a century later, in 1494, the remains of the octogenarian heretic Joan Boughton, who had herself accounted Wyclif a saint, were removed under cover of night and ‘kepydd ffor a precious Relyk, In an erthyn pott’.31 Historians have found it difficult to interpret such phenomena, remarking on the ‘blatant disregard for consistency’ they appear to embody and concluding somewhat unsatisfactorily that they are simply aberrations and anomalies. For Margaret Aston, Ann Hudson, Norman Tanner, and Shannon McSheffrey they are deviations from type, irregularities that suggest either an ‘imperfect understanding of Lollard teachings’, a selective acceptance of its tenets, or moments when ‘the ingrained habits of medieval piety prevailed over the recently learned theology’.32 In striking contrast, in a recent essay on the short-lived cult of Richard Wych Richard Rex has provocatively suggested that it should not be viewed as evidence of the veneration of an iconic lollard hero, but instead as a reflection of ‘the normal functioning of Catholic devotion’ – as an index of the vitality of orthodox rather than deviant popular piety. Wych, he insists, did not die for distinctively Wycliffite opinions and the sympathy his execution generated centred on the perception that he was an innocent victim of official persecution, a dedicated parish priest who had wrongfully been convicted of the crime of heresy.33 While Rex’s revisionist account of this incident is both clever and compelling, not all the examples cited above can be explained away so ingeniously. In seeking to understand affirmations of Wyclif’s sanctity, and indeed the story of the well that reputedly sprang up in Lutterworth where his bones fell, we need to recognise the complexity of mainstream lollard thinking on this controverted topic. As Christina von Nocklen has argued, Wyclif and his disciples did not deny the existence of saints, they redefined them. No longer mediators between humanity and the deity, they were rather the select company of the predestinate elect.34 Furthermore, Rex’s self-conscious search for a solution that satisfies the

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laws of logic and ‘rationality’ perhaps takes too little account of both the general untidiness of the human mind and the fluid and unstable nature of late medieval lollardy and its sixteenth-century Protestant successor. It is distorting, restricting and anachronistic to judge such phenomena by the standards of the theological principles artificially fossilised in the scholarly editions we now regard as canonical guides. In interpreting Thomas Patmore’s incidental remark about the Lutterworth well that emerged where Wyclif’s bones were incinerated, important lessons can be learned from the late Bob Scribner’s memorable exploration of ‘Incombustible Luther’ and related phenomena. Reports that portraits and other relics of the Wittenberg reformer refused to burn circulated widely from the seventeenth century, but had embryonic origins in the 1520s, while folktales collected by later compilers reveal the development of a welter of myth and legend connecting him with features of the local German landscape, including many springs. The reciprocal processes by which Luther was assimilated into older paradigms of sainthood, and by which those paradigms in turn were transformed by the encounter, lead Scribner to conclude that the Reformation effected neither as radical nor as successful a break with the past as traditional historiography has led us to believe. What they highlight are the muted modifications, rather than bold transitions, that accompanied the religious upheavals of the era and the extent to which Protestantism perpetuated the notion of a providential and moralised universe in which God intervened to punish sin and to endorse the truth. Despite the discomfort such ‘subtle idolatry’ caused to some Protestant observers, Scribner argued that it is a mistake to see these merely as ‘“Catholic survivals” rooted in the “ignorance” of a peasant mentality’. This was a mythology partly perpetuated, if not created, by educated Lutheran pastors themselves.35 Such insights help to illuminate the behaviour of the Protestant relic hunters who scrambled over the still smouldering pyres of Smithfield in the 1550s to collect fragments of the bones and flesh of the Marian martyrs, to the glee of Catholic propagandists like Miles Huggarde, Thomas Stapleton and Nicholas Harpsfield, who presented this as evidence of the rank hypocrisy of their enemies.36 They also provide a framework within which Thomas Patmore’s passing reference to a well linked with the site of John Wyclif’s ignominious exhumation acquires new nuances of meaning, alerting us to the independence that characterised religion as practised, rather than preached, and pointing to the role literate and learned clerics played in shaping and disseminating folk tradition. This fragment of evidence may also provide a modicum of support for the suggestion that lollardy was indeed ‘both more complex and more popular’ than some recent historians, notably Eamon Duffy and Richard Rex, have been willing to concede.37 Others, including Robert Lutton, are beginning to paint a more intricate picture.

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Even so, much ambiguity and many unanswered questions remain. There are undoubted dangers in reading too much into a piece of hearsay, a stray second-hand remark, which has only been preserved in the historical record because it became entangled in a legal investigation for heresy. Does this intriguing wisp in the archives testify to an enduring element of oral and social memory, or was it the product of more recent and self-conscious invention, born of a context in which the corpses of other heretics were being dug from their resting place in consecrated soil and retrospectively shamed? It may not be irrelevant that, just a few months before Bull’s abjuration, the body of the Gloucestershire gentleman William Tracey was disinterred from its grave and (in a fit of excessive zeal for which he was fined £300) burnt by the Chancellor of the diocese of Worcester. This followed the discovery of tell-tale Protestant sentiments in the phraseology of his last will and testament.38 We cannot ignore the century long gap between the disinterment of Wyclif’s relics and the first reference in writing to a spring bearing witness to his sanctity. We cannot establish either continuity or discontinuity with any certainty. Nevertheless, a further task confronts us and that is to account for the tenacity of this legend and its survival (and/or revival?) in subsequent centuries. How and why has the tale of Wyclif’s well persisted for nearly half a millennium? At this juncture, John Wyclif’s critical importance to the project of constructing and buttressing of Protestant identity must be emphasised. As Margaret Aston and others have shown, the figure of the Oxford reformer became a key weapon in Protestantism’s quest for historical legitimation, for evidence of a succession of true believers who had bravely repudiated the errors and corruptions of the medieval papacy and priesthood. To Protestant historians and propagandists Wyclif not only provided a telling retort to the repeated Catholic taunt ‘where was your Church before Luther?’, but gave England cause for self-congratulation in having nurtured one of the first to challenge the Romish Antichrist. Hailing him as ‘an invincible organ’ and ‘most strong Elias’, it was the former Carmelite friar John Bale who first spoke of Wyclif as a ‘morning star’ (‘stella matutina’). The same metaphors of illumination and enlightenment were applied to this ‘valiant champion’ by John Foxe in his Commentarii rerum in ecclesia gestarum (1554) and Actes and Monuments (1563 and subsequent editions), the veritable foundation stone of reformed English hagiography.39 Firmly establishing the reputation of the Oxford academic as a kind of John the Baptist, Foxe was responsible for applying more than a few of the ‘layers of rich brown Protestant varnish’ upon which K.B. McFarlane famously commented in 1952.40 In particular, he did his best to stress Wyclif’s credentials as a martyr, entering him under 2 January into the post-Reformation calendar that prefaced some editions of the book. The desirability of demonstrating that he too had suffered persecution not only explains Foxe’s tacit

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endorsement of the fiction that Wyclif had fled into exile to Bohemia before returning to die at Lutterworth, but also the prominent place he accorded the exhumation of his bones in 1428 in his grand polemical narrative. The cruelty posthumously visited upon him cemented his connection with other dead heroes who had shared the same fate in the reign of Mary, not least Martin Bucer and Paulus Phagius, whose bodies were disinterred from Great St Mary’s Church in Cambridge in 1556.41 Denouncing the brutality and malice of the officials who took up Wyclif’s corpse, Foxe triumphantly celebrated the failure of this scheme to extinguish his memory, declaring as there is no counsaile against the Lord: so there is no keeping down of veritie, but it wil spring and come out of dust and ashes … For though they digged up his body, burnt his bones, & drowned his ashes, yet the word of God and truth of his doctrine with the fruit & successe therof they could not burne: which yet to this day for the most part of his articles do remaine. The story was accompanied by a graphic woodcut of the episode set forth to the eyes of the ‘gentle reader’ (Figure 8.1).42 What should be stressed, though, is that no mention of a prodigious well is made in this section of the text. Nor is there any snide or scoffing reference to such a tradition in the vehement attacks on Foxe’s construction of ‘Saint Wickliffe’ as ‘the protestants great grandfather’, ‘holy patriarke’ and a ‘pseudo-martyr’ launched by Nicholas Harpsfield in the 1560s and by Robert Persons in his Treatise of Three Conversions of England of 1603–4.43 It is also conspicuous by its absence from the Bodleian librarian Thomas James’s Apologie for John Wickliffe (1608), an attempt to demonstrate the Oxford luminary’s conformity with the Church of England and 39 Articles, strongly influenced by the tradition set in motion by Bale and Foxe.44 Nor does it feature in the surveys of Leicestershire provided by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century topographers. William Camden’s Britannia (1586; trans. 1610) and William Burton’s Description of the county published in 1622 noted that the ‘famous John Wickliffe’ had been rector of Lutterworth and that his corpse had been ‘cruelly handled’ and ‘openly burned’ by Bishop Fleming acting on papal orders some forty years after his death. Neither recorded a local legend about a well engendered by this sacrilegious act, though Camden did remark that ‘neere to this towne is a spring so cold that within a short time it turneth strawes and stickes into stones’. This petrifying fountain, to which we shall have cause to return in a later paragraph, was also mentioned by Samuel Clarke in his Geographicall Description of all the Countries in the Known World (1657) and Joshua Childrey in his Britannia Baconica (1660).45 If such a story still existed, it remained either a dormant seed and an underground current, or was regarded by educated antiquaries as too untrustworthy or lacking in authenticity to preserve for posterity.

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Figure 8.1 ‘The Burning of Wickliffes bones’, John Foxe, Actes and Monuments (London, 1563), p. 105.

What does appear in a work published by the Protestant divine Thomas Fuller in 1645 is a hitherto unrecorded snippet of folklore about the River Swift. Fuller had heard that the brook into which the ashes of the burnt bones of Wyclif were cast ‘never since doth drown the Meadow about it’ and went on to explain how this was variously interpreted by those on opposite sides of the Reformation divide: ‘Papists expound this to be, because God was well pleased with the Sacrifice of the Ashes of such a Heretick’, while ‘Protestants ascribe it rather to proceed from the vertue of a such a Reverent Martyr’. He himself dismissed such ‘Waxen Topicall devises’, commenting that ‘Such Accidents signifie nothing in themselves, but according to the pleasure of Interpreters’. Fuller repeated this ‘Vulgar Tradition’ somewhat apologetically in the section on Wyclif he incorporated in his influential Church History of 1655, which defended Foxe’s description of this ‘glorious Saint’ as a martyr against the ‘snarles’ of Robert Persons, saying that, although he had not suffered a violent death or been imprisoned for his faith, the phrase ‘may be justified in the large acception of the word, for a witness of the truth’, besides which his poor body had been indeed been ‘Martyred to shame’. Fuller underlined the self-

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defeating character of the official dispersal of his relics in the town’s stream, transforming the episode into lyrical metaphor of the profound and lasting influence of his teaching: ‘Thus this Brook hath convey’d his ashes into Avon; Avon into Severn; Severn into the narrow Seas; they, into the main Ocean. And thus the Ashes of Wickliff are the Emblem of his Doctrine, which now, is dispersed all the World over’. As for the ‘silly inferences’ of Catholics and Protestants, these should be set aside as the sideeffects of sectarian bias: ‘no solid Judgement will build where bare fancy hath laid Foundation’.46 Imported into the confessional debate about the antiquity of the Protestant religion, by the mid-seventeenth century Wyclif had also become embroiled in the factious struggles that were undermining the unity of the Church of England from within. The Laudians’ positive reassessment of the medieval Catholic Church was accompanied by their conscious rejection of the invisible brotherhood headed by Wyclif. The Anglican royalist Peter Heylyn declared his opinions ‘utterly unworthy to be look’d down on as a part of the Gospel’.47 By the early eighteenth century he was the mascot of low churchmen like John Lewis, who produced a eulogistic biography in 1722, and of nonconformists such as Daniel Neal, whose History of the Puritans (1732–8) repolished his status as the ‘Morning-Star of the Reformation’. William Gilpin’s retelling of the lives of the reformers echoed the familiar theme of the ‘efflugence of light’ by which this learned theologian, raised up as an instrument of providence, had dispersed the darkness and barbarism that clouded the outlook of his contemporaries.48 John Throsby’s Memoirs of the Town and County of Leicester (1777) contained a lengthy celebration of Wyclif in the same Foxeian vein. Applauding the Oxford reformer for his reputed role in translating the Scriptures and ‘promoting that reformation, which afterwards delivered this kingdom from ignorance, superstition, and ecclesiastical tyranny’, he declared that his name held ‘a foremost rank in the register of Fame’ of those who had paved the way for the Protestants of a later generation. Induced by these pious reflections he visited Lutterworth and entered the ‘sacred temple’ in which he had faithfully served his flock and spent his last days, where he saw the alleged remains of his pulpit and a fragment of his vestment: popular sentiment had by this stage engendered a set of spurious Wyclif relics, conceived of not as receptacles of supernatural power but rather curious artefacts of a distant past and a renowned divine. He also went to ‘that hardy stream’ into which Wyclif’s dust had been cast by the hand of ‘furious bigotry’, but seems to have been unaware of any tradition associated with it or a nearby spring.49 It is in 1810, in John Nichols’s monumental History and Antiquities of the county that the subterranean threads of memory we have been tracing resurface, with some striking new variations and embellishments. After recounting the disinterment of Wyclif’s ‘dead carcase’ by the Bishop of Lincoln’s ‘vultures’ and quoting Fuller’s eloquent reflections on the dispersal of his ashes,

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Nichols remarked that the ‘vulgar’ insist that ‘the stream, in ever so great a flood, will not run through that arch’ under which they were thrown. He added: Tradition also says, that, at the time of this ceremony, one person who staid, after the rest had left his grave, in order to search as strictly after the least bit of bone that might remain of him, as he had done into the erroneous tenets of his adversaries, having found one, ran hastily to his companions with it in a triumphant manner; but, before he reached them, fell down, and dashed his brains out; and from the very place where he fell immediately gushed out a spring of water, which to this day is called St. John’s Well.50 Here, then, is a variant of the story that more closely approaches the twentieth-century versions with which we began. Reflecting the process by which oral tradition was gradually being exiled out of the intellectual mainstream and into the ‘graveyard of rural antiquarianism’,51 Nichols made clear his contempt for this foolish and flimsy legend: ‘How far the Protestant is even, with the Papist in this invention, let the reader judge.’52 Despite his scornful implication that the tale originated among rural illiterates, there is much to suggest that the educated heirs of the long legacy of reformed historiography were also partly responsible for its survival. Those on the right of the ecclesiastical spectrum were naturally sceptical, but evangelical Protestants on the left may well have been willing to suspend disbelief and condone it as a harmless but edifying and convenient fiction. Later in the nineteenth century, Wyclif was implicated in a new phase of internal strife over the Church of England’s theological and historical identity. Fresh manifestations of ‘Wyclifolatry’ were a by-product of reaction to the Oxford movement and rise of Anglo-Catholicism, including S.R. Cattley’s new edition of Foxe’s Actes and Monuments – the chief vehicle of his reputation as a Reformation hero. On the other hand, Wyclif and his relics were the vicarious victims of the Tractarian assault on the religious heritage upheld by their rivals: in 1861 in an address to the Leicestershire Architectural and Archaeological Society the collection of his alleged possessions at Lutterworth (which now included a portrait, chair, communion table and pair of candlesticks) was comprehensively debunked by the Gothic revivalist Matthew Holbeche Bloxham. To the dismay of many members of his audience, Bloxham declared that the items dated from later centuries in their entirety,53 though he did not pause to explode the myths of Wyclif’s well and the mysterious behaviour of the River Swift. In 1882, however, a handbook of Lutterworth, written by F.W. Bottrill, not only cautiously endorsed the relics but recounted the tradition that the

Alexandra Walsham 155

water of the Swift refused to flow under the arch of the bridge, though he noted that this ‘superstition’ had withered since the old structure had been replaced by a new one built in 1778. Celebrating the ‘evangelic doctor’ and castigating the ‘impotent malice’ of the pope and council that had condemned him in 1428, he also lifted from Nichols the ‘curious old legend’ of ‘St John’s Well’, adding the observation that it never ran dry, even in seasons of drought.54 An ardent advocate of Wyclif’s role as ‘the father of modern Protestantism’ and the source of English society’s ‘moral and intellectual emancipation’, A.H. Dyson likewise devoted a chapter to the spring in a pamphlet of 1913. In this work, we find that the story has metamorphosed once more. Dyson told how one of Wyclif’s bones had fallen from the bier in which they were being conveyed to the riverside for burning and was trampled into the soil by the crowds that followed. Some years afterwards a man working upon the spot brought to light the missing bone, and, upon taking it from its position, forthwith there issued from the hole where it had lain embedded a fountain of the purest water, which ceased not to flow day or night to the joy of the inhabitants of the town, who regarded it as a display of Divine favour upon the remains of their local saint. The water of the spring, he declared, was immediately looked upon as miraculous and conveyed to a stone drinking fount placed near where the discovery was made. Its capacity ‘to cure all manner of diseases’, especially those connected with the eyes, had endured through the ages.55 Wyclif’s well had thus become a holy well, in a manner uncannily similar to those linked with Celtic and Anglo-Saxon saints of old. One further feature of the delicate transpositions of the interrelated legends we have been examining deserves to be highlighted and that is the way in which these traditions both absorbed and superimposed themselves over preexisting associations of the local landscape. It should not escape notice that Wyclif’s well was located within the grounds of a medieval hospital founded by Roesia de Verdun and her son in 1218 and dedicated to St John the Baptist.56 It is probable that there had long been a spring on this site, whose therapeutic powers were ascribed to the patron saint of the philanthropic foundation within the precincts of which it was found. Sequestered by the Crown in the sixteenth century, the lands of the hospital were first leased and then sold to a family of minor gentry. There is evidence to suggest that the fountain itself became regarded as a kind of public amenity: an entry in the Town Master’s account book in 1716 records that four shillings were ‘paid for a spout of elm 7 foot long to lay at St Johns well’.57 Over time, the distinction between John Wyclif and St John the Baptist (whose own bones were reputedly burnt by Julian the Apostate, emperor of Rome, according to an apocryphal legend perpetuated by late medieval homiletic texts like John Mirk’s

156 Wyclif’s Well: Lollardy, Landscape and Memory in Post-Reformation England

Festial) evidently became impossibly blurred in local memory.58 So too, it would seem, has the identity of the spring in question: recent compilations of the folklore of the county seem to have conflated ‘St John’s Well’ with the celebrated petrifying well to which Camden and other early topographers drew attention.59 It is now situated in the garden of a house called (appropriately) ‘The Springs’. In seeking to unravel the origins and evolution of the legend of Wyclif’s well, then, we have been frustrated by many long silences and archival absences. Over the course of six centuries its meandering streams have often remained immersed beneath the surface of the written record, re-emerging periodically in subtly different guises that defy precise and confident analysis. Nevertheless the story of the posthumous martyrdom of Wyclif’s bones and its many curious echoes has, I hope, served to yield some wider historical insights. It has underlined the extent to which both orality and literacy, speech and text, contribute to the invention of tradition and the equally important part which the advent and entrenchment of Protestantism played in the formation and transformation of a body of folklore. It has raised fresh questions about the connections between lollardy and evangelicalism in the early dynamic stages of the English Reformation and enriched our understanding of the relationship between these movements and concepts of sanctity and martyrdom. It has also demonstrated the capacity of reformed theology to invest the landscape with powerful religious, if not sacred resonances and to sustain and simultaneously transform stories about the supernatural origin of striking topographical features.60 Finally, the legend of the Lutterworth spring has revealed much about the workings of what James Fentress and Chris Wickham have called ‘social memory’.61 It has provided a laboratory in which to investigate the capricious processes of accretion, infection, recontextualisation and suppression that characterise it, and to watch a game of chinese whispers in action. While such tales cannot be approached as repositories of historical fact, indirectly their transmission bears striking witness to continuities and changes in past mentalities and cultures. We may not have reached the bottom of Wyclif’s well, but the journey into its depths has still been a modest voyage of discovery.

Notes 1 A. Hudson and A. Kenny, ‘John Wyclif’, in ODNB. 2 R. Palmer, The Folklore of Leicestershire and Rutland (Wymondham, 1985), 30–1; B. Trubshaw, Holy Wells and Springs of Leicestershire and Rutland (Leicestershire and Rutland Earth Mysteries series, pt. 2, Loughborough, 1990), 21–2; J. Rattue, ‘An inventory of ancient, holy and healing wells in Leicestershire’, Transactions of the Leicestershire Archaeological and Historical Society 67 (1993), 59–69, quotation at 65. J. Goodare has identified and assembled some of the evidence discussed below in ‘Wyclif in Lutterworth: myths and monuments’, Leicestershire Historian 3 (1983–4), 25–35.

Alexandra Walsham 157 3 See A. Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England 1500–1700 (Oxford, 2000), ch. 4, esp. 214–27, quotation at 215; D. Woolf, The Social Circulation of the Past: English Historical Culture 1500–1730 (Oxford, 2003), ch. 9, esp. 310–15. 4 See J. and C. Bord, Sacred Waters: Holy Wells and Water Lore in Britain and Ireland (1985), esp. ch. 6; S. Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature (5 vols, Copenhagen, 1955–8), entries A941.4–A941.55.8; F933.1; F933.6; V140–V144.2. 5 E.C. Tatnall, ‘The condemnation of John Wyclif at the Council of Constance’, in G.J. Cuming and D. Baker (eds), Councils and Assemblies (Studies in Church History 7: Cambridge, 1971), 209–18. R.N. Swanson, ‘Richard Fleming’, ODNB. 6 M. Aston, ‘Rites of destruction by fire’, in eadem, Faith and Fire: Popular and Unpopular Religion, 1350–1600 (1993), 302, referring to the acts of image destroyers. Hus’s own ashes were tipped into the Rhine to prevent a relic cult. 7 William Worcestre, Itineraries, ed. J.H. Harvey (Oxford, 1969); The Itinerary of John Leland in or about the Years, 1535–1543, ed. L. Toulmin Smith (5 vols, 1906–10), vol. I, 19 v.222. A counter-myth about the circumstances surrounding Wyclif’s death was circulating in the fifteenth century: Thomas Walsingham, Historia Anglicana, vol. II: AD 1381–1422, ed. H.T. Riley (Rolls Series, 28:1864), 119–20, says that, on the feast day of St Thomas Becket, Wyclif, who had intended to launch a blasphemous attack on the great prelate, was struck down by the hand of God and paralysed in all his members, as a frightful spectacle to the beholders. 8 Knighton’s Chronicle 1337–1396, ed. G.H. Martin (Oxford, 1995), 309, 282–4, 286–8, 295–7, 307–12, 532–4. 9 R. Rex, The Lollards (Basingstoke, 2002), 89; E. Acheson, A Gentry Community: Leicestershire in the Fifteenth Century, c.1422–c.1485 (Cambridge, 1992), 68–9, 186–98. 10 John Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1570), 1187; repeated in 1583 edn, 1044. 11 He was at neither Oxford nor Cambridge; nor was he a member of the London Drapers’ Company: no George Bull appears in P. Boyd’s Roll of the Drapers’ Company of London Collected from the Company’s Records and Other Sources (Croydon, 1934). 12 J. Foster, Alumni Oxonienses (Oxford, 1891), pt. iii, 126; A.B. Emden, A Biographical Register of the University of Oxford, A.D.1501 to 1540 (Oxford, 1974), 436; C. Henry and T. Cooper, Athenae Cantabrigienses (Cambridge, 1858), 65; J. and J.A. Venn, Alumni Cantabrigienses (Cambridge, 1924), vol. I, iii, 24, 318; Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1583), 1045. 13 Letters and Papers of Henry VIII, [L&P], Addenda, vol. I, pt. i, no. 752, where he is listed as ‘Pathmere’. 14 ‘Two London chronicles from the collections of John Stow’, ed. C.L. Kingsford, in Camden Miscellany XII (Camden Society, 3rd ser., 18: 1910), 5. He is said elsewhere to have been one of those made to carry out the penance: British Library, MS Harley, 425, fo. 15r. I follow the account given by S. Brigden, London and the Reformation (Oxford, 1989), 183–4. 15 Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1583), 1044–5. 16 Ibid. (1570), 1188; ‘Two London Chronicles’, 5. 17 John Strype, Ecclesiastical Memorials (3 vols in 6pts, Oxford, 1820–40), vol. I, pt. i, 179. Anxious to gloss over evidence of an apparent loss of nerve in the face of persecution, Foxe saw his recantations as the involuntary consequences of excessive force and ‘humaine infirmitie’: Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1583), 1045. Forms of pragmatic dissimulation were characteristic of both later lollardy and Henrician evangelicalism. See A. Ryrie, The Gospel and Henry VIII: Evangelicals and the Early English Reformation (Cambridge, 2003), 79–81. Foxe may well have embellished Patmore’s orthodox Protestant credentials.

158 Wyclif’s Well: Lollardy, Landscape and Memory in Post-Reformation England 18 Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1563), 484. 19 L&P, vii, 923. His case was also raised in Parliament by his servant John Stanton: L&P, v, 982; M. Dowling, ‘Anne Boleyn and reform’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 35 (1984), 30–46, quotation at 42. 20 L&P, viii, 1063; John Strype, Memorials of … Thomas Cranmer (2 vols, Oxford, 1840 edn), 643–4. 21 Rex, Lollards, ch. 5; P. Marshall, Reformation England 1480–1642 (2003), 32–4. 22 Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1583), 1045; Brigden, London and the Reformation, 121, 124–3, 190; A. Hudson, The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History (Oxford, 1988), 482–3. See also J.F. Davis, Heresy and Reformation in the South-East of England, 1520–1559 (1983), 54; P. Collinson, ‘Night schools, conventicles and churches: continuities and discontinuities in early Protestant ecclesiology’, in P. Marshall and A. Ryrie (eds), The Beginnings of English Protestantism (Cambridge, 2002), 230. 23 Boyd, Drapers’ Company, 140. 24 As argued by Brigden, London and the Reformation, 206. 25 A.G. Dickens, The English Reformation (2nd edn, 1989), 46–60, quotation at 59. Optimism on this point is shared by J.F. Davis, ‘Lollardy and the Reformation in England’, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 73 (1982), 217–36. Rex, Lollards, ch. 5, esp. 119, by contrast, speaks of the ‘virtual irrelevance of Lollardy to the emergence of English Protestantism’. 26 Brigden, London and the Reformation, 123. The case of the lollard John Pykas, who was strongly influenced by the preaching of Thomas Bilney, is frequently cited: see Hudson, Premature Reformation, 478–80. For Lollard views on saints and pilgrimages, see ibid., 302–9; eadem ed. Selections from English Wycliffite Writings (Cambridge, 1978), 83–8; Heresy Trials in the Diocese of Norwich, 1428–31, ed. N. Tanner (Camden Society, 4th ser., 20: 1977), 11–14, 18, 34, 47, 67, 74, 86–7, 100–1, 142, 148, 154, 179, 192–4, 205, for a sample of references. 27 Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1583), 1044. Other drapers, such as John Hewes, arrested and interrogated at the same time as Patmore and Bull, were equally vociferous in their rejection of ‘vain pilgrimages’ and the ‘false gods’ of images. 28 See M. Aston, ‘John Wyclif’s reformation reputation’, in eadem, Images and Reformers (1984), 262–3; T.A. Fudge, ‘The “Crown” and the “Red Gown”: Hussite popular religion’, in B. Scribner and T. Johnson (eds), Popular Religion in Germany and Central Europe, 1400–1800 (Basingstoke, 1996), esp. 48–50; B.S. Gregory, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA, 1999), 69. 29 For White, see W. Waddington Shirley (ed.), Fasciculi Zizianiorum Magistri Johannis Wyclif cum Tritico (Rolls Series: 1858), 429. Emayn, Bagley and Stilman are all quoted from Aston, ‘John Wyclif’s reformation reputation’, 263. For Lambert, see Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1563), 307. 30 See Hudson, Premature Reformation, 171–2; Gregory, Salvation at Stake, 70; Norwich Heresy Trials, 47. 31 J.A.F. Thomson, The Later Lollards 1414–1520 (Oxford, 1965), 148–51, 156. 32 Aston, ‘John Wyclif’s Reformation Reputation’, 263; Hudson, Premature Reformation, 172, 313; Norwich Heresy Trials, 14; S. McSheffrey, Gender and Heresy: Women and Men in Lollard Communities 1420–1530 (Philadelphia, 1995), 113, and see 147–8. 33 R. Rex, ‘Which is Wyche? Lollardy and sanctity in Lancastrian London’, in T.S. Freeman and T. Mayer (eds), Martyrs and Martyrdom in England c. 1400–1700 (Woodbridge, 2007), 88–106. I am grateful to Dr Rex for sharing a copy of this with me in advance of publication.

Alexandra Walsham 159 34 C. von Nolcken, ‘Another kind of saint: a lollard perception of John Wyclif’, in A. Hudson and M. Wilks (eds), From Ockham to Wyclif (Studies in Church History, Subsidia 5: Oxford, 1987), 429–43. Von Nolcken nevertheless remarks there were cases (e.g. those of Margery Baxter, the cult of Joan Boughton, and indeed George Bull) where ‘individuals […] got things wrong’ and, bowing to the ‘pressures of popular piety’, viewed Wyclif as ‘the wrong kind of saint’ (436–7). It is important to note that Wyclif spoke of the Oxford theologian, biblical scholar, fierce critic of the mendicants, and later Archbishop of Armagh, Richard FitzRalph, as ‘Sanctus Richardus’ or ‘Sanctus Armachanus’. See K. Walsh, A Fourteenth-Century Scholar and Primate: Richard FitzRalph in Oxford, Avignon and Armagh (Oxford, 1981), esp. 457–8. 35 R.W. Scribner, ‘Incombustible Luther: the image of the reformer in early modern Germany’ and idem, ‘Luther myth: a popular historiography of the reformer’, in idem, Popular Culture and Popular Movements in Reformation Germany (1987), 323–53 and 302–22, esp. 315, 317, 318–19, respectively; quotations at 312, 352–3. 36 Miles Huggarde, The Displaying of the Protestantes (1556), 54. Stapleton’s comments in his translation of Bede’s History of the Church of Englande (Antwerp, 1566), Sig. C1r, and Nicholas Harpsfield’s in, Dialogi Sex (Antwerp, 1573 edn: first publ., 1566), 540–1, 666–8, 680–1, 688, applied to miracles associated with the martyrs more broadly. On Protestant relic behaviour, see Gregory, Salvation at Stake, 175–6 and A. Walsham, ‘Skeletons in the cupboard: relics after the English reformation’, in eadem (ed.), Relics and Remains, Past and Present Supplement 5 (Oxford, 2010). 37 E. Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c.1400–1580 (New Haven and London, 1991); Rex, ‘Which is Wyche?’; idem, Lollards; R. Lutton, Lollardy and Orthodox Religion in Pre-Reformation England: Reconstructing Piety (Woodbridge, 2006). 38 See J. Craig and C. Litzenberger, ‘Wills as religious propaganda: the testament of William Tracy’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 44 (1993), 415–31, quotation at 423. 39 Aston, ‘John Wyclif’s reformation reputation’; J. Crompton, ‘John Wyclif: a study in mythology’, Transactions of the Leicestershire Archaeological and Historical Society 42 (1966–7), 6–34. John Bale, Illustrium maioris Britanniae scriptorum … summarium ([Wesel], 1548), fo. 154v; Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1563), 85. 40 K.B. McFarlane, John Wycliffe and the Beginnings of English Nonconformity (1952), 10. 41 Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1563), calendar under 2 January, and 98; (1583), 1966–8 for Bucer and Phagius. Wyclif’s exhumation was remembered by Bishop James Pilkington during the sermon he delivered at the restitution of Bucer and Phagius to their degrees and titles of honour in Cambridge in July 1560: Works, ed. J. Scholefield (Parker Society: Cambridge, 1842), 653. 42 Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1583), 464. 43 Harpsfield, Dialogi Sex (1566), dialogue 6, 824, and Historia Wicleffia, appendix to Historia Anglicana Ecclesiastica, ed. R. Gibbon (Douai, 1622); Robert Persons, A Treatise of Three Conversions of England (1603), pt. i, sig. a4r and 489, pt. ii, 184–9, 194, 196. For the Catholic counter-myth of Wyclif, see A. Kenny, ‘The accursed memory: the Counter-Reformation reputation of John Wyclif’, in idem ed., Wyclif in his Times (Oxford, 1986), 147–68. 44 Thomas James, An apologie for John Wickleffe, shewing his conformitie with the now Church of England (Oxford, 1608). 45 William Camden, Britain, or A chorographicall description of the most flourishing kingdomes, England, Scotland, and Ireland (1610), 1st pagination, 517–18; William Burton, The description of Leicestershire, containing matters of antiquity, historye, armorye, and genealogy (1622), 186–7; Samuel Clarke, A geographicall description of all the countries in the known world (1657), 203; Joshua Childrey, Britannia Baconica: or, the natural rarities of England, Scotland, & Wales (1660), 108.

160 Wyclif’s Well: Lollardy, Landscape and Memory in Post-Reformation England 46 Thomas Fuller, Good Thoughts in Bad Times (Exeter, 1645), 174–6; idem, The Churchhistory of Britain, from the Birth of Jesus Christ, until the year M. DC. XLVIII (1655), 170–1. 47 A. Milton, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600–1640 (Cambridge, 1995), ch. 6, esp. 303–6; Peter Heylyn, Examen historicum: or a discovery and examination of the mistakes, falsities, and defects in some modern histories (1659), 65–7. Heylyn did not even dignify the story of the stream with so much as a dismissal. 48 John Lewis, The History of the Life and Sufferings of the Reverend and Learned John Wicliffe, D.D. (1720). Lewis’s biography was written against Matthias Earbery’s translation of a French work attacking The pretended reformers, or, the history of the heresie of John Wickliffe, John Huss, and Jerome of Prague (1717), which dismissed the opinions of the Lutterworth rector as ‘wicked and abominable’ and accused him of ‘Impiety and Enthusiasm’ (pp. xii, xxx). Daniel Neal, The History of the Puritans or Protestant Non-conformists (1732–8), 4 vols, vol. I, 3. William Gilpin, ‘The Life of John Wicliff’ [1766], in Select Biography, 6 vols (1821), vol. II, 49–50. 49 John Throsby, The Memoirs of the Town and County of Leicester (Leicester, 1777), vol. II, 77–116, citations at 100, 112, 113–16. The Revd J. Curtis’s A Topographical History of the County of Leicester (Ashby-de-la-Zouch, 1831) did not refer to the legend of the well or stream, but did mention the relics (122–3). For the transformation of relics into historical antiquities, see Woolf, Social Circulation of the Past, 191–7. 50 J. Nichols, The History and Antiquities of the County of Leicester (4 vols in 8pts, 1810), vol. IV, pt. i, 297. 51 Woolf, Social Circulation of the Past, 390, and see ch. 10, passim. 52 Nichols, History, vol. IV, pt. i, 297. 53 Crompton, ‘John Wyclif’, 7–8, 15–16; Goodare, ‘Wyclif in Lutterworth’, 26. 54 F.W. Bottrill, An Illustrated Hand Book of Lutterworth, with Notes on the Neighbouring Villages (Lutterworth, 1882), 8–10, 14–15, 18–22. 55 A.H. Dyson, Lutterworth: John Wycliffe’s Town, ed. Hugh Goodacre (1913), 46–7. It is not, however, mentioned in A.H. Dyson and S.H. Skillington, Lutterworth Church and its Associations with a Chapter on John Wycliffe (Leicester, [1916]), which distanced itself from the ‘ignorant credulity’ inspired by his now discredited relics, even as it celebrated Wyclif’s heroic status (quotations from 23). I am grateful to Nick Stargardt for providing me with access to Magdalen College, Oxford’s copy of this rare publication. 56 Burton, Description, 186–7. 57 Leicestershire Record Office, Lutterworth Town Masters Accounts 1707–26, /113/ 1 & 2, cited in Goodare, ‘Wyclif in Lutterworth’, 33. 58 See Theodor Erbe (ed.), Mirk’s Festial: A Collection of Homilies by Johannes Mirkus (John Mirk), 2 vols, Early English Text Society, extra series 96 (London, 1905), i, 182–6, at 185; see also Edward H. Weatherly (ed.), Speculum Sacerdotale, EETS, OS 200 (1936), pp. 197–8. I owe this point to Graham Jones, Saints in the Landscape (Stroud, 2007), pp. 98–9. 59 Trubshaw, Holy Wells, 21–2; Rattue, ‘Inventory’, 65. 60 See my The Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Memory and Identity in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford, forthcoming 2011). 61 J. Fentress and C. Wickham, Social Memory (Oxford, 1992), esp. chaps 2, 85–6, and 200–2.

9 ‘Boiled and Stewed with Roots and Herbs’: Everyday Tales of Cannibalism in Early Modern Virginia Catherine Armstrong

Cannibalism seems a far from everyday occurrence, and yet its incidence in the extraordinary setting of dangerous frontier Virginia was treated by one author in the 1620s as an ordinary and usual part of life. This chapter explores how and why such a seemingly horrific act was normalised in this way by one of the most famous commentators on the early English settlement in North America and what this reveals about early modern attitudes to cannibalism.

‘Printing and adventuring’: hopes and fears for the Virginia enterprise In April 1607 when three ships, the Godspeed, the Discovery and the Susan Constant arrived off the coast of Virginia they carried the first settlers to what became England’s first permanent North American colony. However, when the settlers arrived their success was certainly not assured and in fact failure looked the more likely outcome. They were poorly prepared for what they experienced in the New World as information reaching England on what to expect was sparse. In the earliest years of the seventeenth century a few English explorations charting that part of the North American coast had been made, led by ‘seadogs’ such as Captains John Brereton and George Waymouth. These expeditions had sailed up the coast to the northern territories that a few decades later became New England. Expedition members had published pamphlet reports of their experiences in North America and these became the models for later famous authors. Of these, Brereton’s account was mostly positive. He did not venture far from the coast, his aim being to chart the coastline and make observations on the climate, flora and fauna and native life found there. Like many of his contemporaries, he had difficulty in describing the land he found across the ocean and resorted to comparing it to the known world of Europe. So the weather, for example, was not as hot as France or Italy because ‘the 161

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suns heat is qualified in his course over the ocean before he arriveth on the coasts of America attracting much vapour from the sea’.1 The brief explorations led by Waymouth and Brereton were not the only English experience of the continent at that time. Other adventures in the New World had also ended in failure, leading to the natural conclusion that, although on that fateful April the hopes and ambitions of settlers and observers were high, so were their fears and trepidations. The first English catastrophe in America had been the death of Sir Humphery Gilbert, one of England’s seafaring heroes who for decades afterwards was counted alongside Drake and Raleigh in laudatory poetry and a ballad.2 Given a patent by the queen for the exploration of the northern coastline of North America, he set out with a fleet of three ships. But Gilbert met his death in 1583, in the waters off Newfoundland, when his ship unfortunately sank and he was lost with it. Rumours spread of his calmly reading on deck as the ship went down. Gilbert’s dream of building a military colony, based on those he had known in Ireland, passed to his half-brother, Sir Walter Raleigh, who took over his patent. Nearly a quarter of a century before the Jamestown landings, Raleigh organised an expedition to America, under the leadership of Philip Amadas and Arthur Barlowe, to chart the coast and catalogue the natural storehouse of flora and fauna. Encouraged by what they saw on the coast of what later became North Carolina, Amadas and Barlowe persuaded their sponsor Raleigh to finance a further voyage to the island that they had explored. In 1585 a new voyage, under the leadership of successful seafarer Richard Grenville, landed at Roanoke Island. They were accompanied by scientist Thomas Hariot and artist John White, whose words and pictures would be transformed into print by Theodore De Bry and translated into four languages, making his books famous across Europe. White’s descriptions of the New World were tremendously influential and transformed the mentalité of the early modern Englishman, leading him to incorporate the New World into his way of thinking. Hariot and White did not simply make detached observations of the natural world, they also attempted to immerse themselves in the culture of the natives and to learn from their alien ways. A masque played at Elizabeth’s court in the early 1590s was based on Hariot’s observations of Roanoke natives dancing and performing celebratory rituals with tobacco. Unfortunately, the leaders of the Raleigh’s new colony showed no such understanding in their dealings with the natives. As a result, when Sir Francis Drake stopped at the island on his way back to England, having plundered Spanish settlements in Central America, all the disillusioned English settlers decided to return home with him. A third voyage to the region was attempted in 1587, this time with family groups among the passengers instead of the usual all-male group. However, the natives had been so incensed by the behaviour of the previous colony

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that relations between the two groups were totally broken down. At the same time, the Spanish Armada prevented supply ships from reaching Roanoke and so the third fledgling colony was lost, with no one knowing to this day whether the settlers were murdered by natives or if they went to another island and eventually married into the native population. The mysterious loss of Roanoke was England’s second colonial tragedy after the death of Gilbert, and both events were widely publicised and keenly felt by the English people. These inauspicious beginnings made the task of building a lasting settlement in the New World a daunting one. Despite polemical encouragements from men such as Richard Hakluyt, whose writing in manuscript and print exhorted his fellow Englishmen to build colonies like those of Spain, English men and women in the first decade of the seventeenth century were more convinced of the foolishness of the enterprise than by the promise of riches and wealth. Plays such as Ben Jonson’s Eastwood Hoe!, performed in Blackfriars Theatre and printed in 1605, portrayed these hopes in a satirical light. Describing Virginia as a country where ‘all their dripping pans and chamber pottes are pure gold […] all the prisoners they take are fettrd in gould’, an echo of Thomas More’s Utopia that his educated audience would have recognised, Jonson poked fun at the ambitions of settlers: ‘you may be an alderman there and never be a scavenger, you may be an alderman and never be a slave’.3 Jonson’s parody of the language found in travel narratives of the kind collected by Hakluyt, would surely have put doubts in the minds of some playgoers as to the wisdom of undertaking such risky overseas ventures.4

Cannibalism in Virginia The pre-history of English colonial exploration is essential to a better understanding of how authors and audience reacted to a third colonial tragedy: that of Virginia’s ‘starving time’. The three ships that arrived in Virginia in 1607 bore a varied cargo of gentlemen, craftsmen, labourers and soldiers. The literate amongst them had learned of Virginia by reading travel narratives prior to departure, while the rest received their instructions orally from a document presented to the settlers by the Virginia Company via the leaders of the colony. In this document, its author, Richard Hakluyt, exhorted the colonists to build a secure, fortified settlement close to the sea, but protected from Spanish attack, and to explore the interior. Few of the first settlers took this instruction seriously, preferring instead to devote their time to the fruitless search for gold that Jonson had so skilfully parodied a few years earlier. As Samuel Purchas later commented, ‘the worst mischiefe was our gilded Refiners who with their golden promises made all men slaves in hope of recompense’.5 Either the inability, or simply a neglect, to grow crops and hunt New World fauna meant that the young colony was entirely reliant on trading with local native tribes for food. These tribes were members of a confederacy led by chief

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Powhatan, an elderly but skilled statesman, who earned the respect of the more perceptive of the English settlers. William Strachey, secretary, promoter and historian of the Virginia Company, described him as ‘a goodly old man not yet shrinking though well beaten with many cold and stormy winters’.6 Just as at Roanoke, within two years of arrival the English settlers had angered their native friends. This occurred partly through the ignorant and prejudiced behaviour of European men in assuming they had a natural superiority and partly by their greed and double-crossing when trading with the natives. A poor harvest in the autumn of 1609 meant that the native’s reluctance to share their meagre supplies with their new neighbours grew over the winter months. At the same time, John Smith, the one Englishman who had attempted to understand the natives on equal terms, returned home, as a result of being badly burned in a gunpowder accident and subsequently abandoned by his fellow colonists. His departure further damaged relations with Powhatan but the final straw that determined the colonists’ fate was the poor autumnal weather that prevented the arrival of a supply fleet, which would at least have provided rations to sustain the colony during the winter. With no crops or stores of their own, the English colonists were bereft of food without rations from the natives, and desperation and hunger soon set in. Contrary to the hopes of colonial promoters such as Strachey, Smith and Hakluyt, the English did not exploit the abundant flora and fauna present in the region. To no avail had Strachey described the ‘plenty of swans, geese, brants, duck, widgeon, dotterel, oxeyes, mallard, teale, sheldrakes and diverse diving fowle’ that were present in Virginia in the winter.7 Due to a combination of physical weakness, paucity of accurate weapons, fear of the natives outside the pallisado and lack of knowledge of the terrain, the English did not utilise these species for food. This winter season of 1609–10, known to posterity as the ‘starving time’, became a dark and difficult time. While many settlers died from malnutrition, others died from native attack. It was at this time that some of the group resorted to cannibalism in order to survive. In itself, this is nothing new. Explorers and pioneers before and since have resorted to the eating of human flesh in order to stay alive. The cultural meaning of this sort of cannibalism is distinct from that of ritual cannibalism, with which it will be compared in detail below. However, what is striking in the Virginia case is first, the response which treated the episode as mundane, if not comedic, while seamlessly absorbing it into the narrative of the English ‘conquering’ of early America, and secondly that present day historians have neglected to analyse its meaning as if they too wish to pretend it never happened, fearful to acknowledge that the United States had its hazy beginnings in such a shocking tale. Scholars have preferred to focus on the near failure of Jamestown immediately after the ‘starving time’, when the few remaining settlers decided to abandon the colony, and its mythic ‘rescue’ by Thomas

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Dale and Thomas Gates, who had been delayed by their shipwreck in Bermuda. What then did actually happen in the winter of 1609–10?8 The account that normalised cannibalism to the greatest degree, in the words of William Simmons, was reported by John Smith in his 1624 book A Generall Historie of Virginia, New England and the Summer Isles: A savage we slew and buried, the poorer sort took him up again and eat him, and so did diverse one another boiled and stewed with roots and herbs. And one among the rest did kill his wife, powdered her and had eaten part of her before it was known; for which he was executed as he well deserved: now whether she was better roasted, boiled or carbonado’ed I know not; but such a dish as powdered wife I never heard of. This light-hearted account of cannibalism appeared in a prestigious and well-received book that had been published with the aim of rehabilitating and renewing its author’s reputation as an authority on North America. A more expensive and grand book than any of his other publications, Smith travelled the country distributing his magnum opus to country gentry in what must be one of the first promotional book tours.9 George Percy, John Smith’s rival in Virginia and his successor as leader of the colony, wrote a manuscript account of his time in Virginia between 1609 and 1612, in response to Smith’s Map of Virginia. Percy believed Smith’s work to contain falsehoods because it made Smith out to be a heroic figure who saved the colony. Percy’s account was never published, perhaps because it was too explicit in describing the difficulties faced by the early settlers, including a detailed account of their extreme hunger (spellings have been modernised): And the next Tide [they] went up to James Towne where they might Read A lecture of misery in our peoples faces and perceive the scarcity of victuals And understand the malice of the Salvages who knowing our weakness had diverse Times assaulted us without the fort Finding of five hundred men we had only left About sixty. The rest being either starved through famine or cut off by the Salvages And those which were Living were so meagre and Lean that it was Lamentable to behold them for many through extreme hunger have Run out of their naked beds being so Lean that they Looked Like Anatomies Crying out we are starved We are starved others going to bed as we imagined in health were found dead the next morning.10 Was Percy’s account suppressed because of this graphic description of the starvation of the English, including their total inability to manage local

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resources or feed themselves? Equally likely, it could be because he did not prevaricate when describing the cannibalism that took place: Now all of us at James Towne beginning to feel that sharp prick of hunger which no man truly describe but he which hath Tasted the bitterness thereof A world of miseries ensued…having fed upon horses and other beasts as long as they Lasted we were glad to make shift with vermin as dogs Cats Rats and mice…And now famine beginning to Look ghastly and pale in every face that nothing was spared to maintain Life and to do those things which seem incredible As to dig up dead corpses out of graves and to eat them and some have Licked up the Blood which hath fallen from their weak fellows And amongst the rest this was most Lamentable That one of our Colline murdered his wife Ripped the childe out of her womb and threw it into the River and after chopped the Mother in pieces and salted her for his food The same not being discovered before he had eaten Pte thereof for the which cruel and inhumane fact I adjudged him to be executed the acknowledgment of the deed being enforced from him by torture having hung by the Thumbs with weights at his feet a quarter of an hour before he would confess the same.11 Percy’s account is horrific because of the detail he included about the pregnancy of the eaten wife and of the torture required to extract a confession from her husband. Percy’s version is also the most judgemental of all the reports, perhaps because when the event took place he was the leader of the colony and felt that it fell to him to maintain a degree of moral and social order. His brutal, moralistic account of the crime is very different from the off-hand report in Smith’s A Generall Historie that made a joke of the method of cooking and seasoning of the wife’s flesh. The only other early account to mention cannibalism is William Strachey’s ‘True Repertory of the wracke and redemption of Sir Thomas Gates’. This appeared in printed form in Purchas, His Pilgrims, a collection of travel narratives published in 1624, the same year as Smith’s Generall Historie.12 Strachey probably wrote his account between 1611 and 1612 and distributed it privately among interested parties in London. He was certainly aware that rumours already abounded about the cannibalism incident: ‘these are they that roared out the tragicall historie of the man eating of his dead wife in Virginia’, he wrote (my italics). He told the story by quoting from his master, the then governor of Virginia, Sir Thomas Gates: One of the company who mortally hated his wife and therefore secretly killed her…to excuse himselfe he said that his wife had died that he hid her to satisfie his hunger and that hee fed daily upon her…his house was

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searched where they found a good quantity of meale, oatmeale, beanes and pease…he was burned for his horrible villainy. Interestingly, Strachey chose to deny that the cannibalism ever took place and that it was those ‘roaring’ voices in England who had perpetuated the story in order to hinder the Virginia enterprise.13 Instead, he claimed that a murder had taken place with the perpetrator’s chosen defence being that his wife had died and he had feasted on her body to survive, an indication of how commonplace cannibalism driven by necessity was in the minds of those living in a struggling frontier society. Gates reported, however, that other foodstuffs were found in the perpetrator’s house. These were not, as Smith had hinted, used to season and complement the human meal, but rather they proved that the guilty man had no need to resort to cannibalism through hunger, as he had claimed. Elsewhere in his accounts, Samuel Purchas professed himself unsure which account of cannibalism to believe: ‘a report was the one had slew his wife and had eaten part of her: this is by others denied’, he explained.14 It seems that the flippant remarks in John Smith’s A Generall Historie were part of a complex and changing pattern of rumour and report of cannibalism in Virginia. To understand how the cannibalism tale originated and was manipulated, it is important to compare it to the development of the story of the ‘starving time’ in early oral, manuscript and printed accounts. Some early commentators glossed over the incident altogether, or mentioned only the hunger of the early settlers and not the accusation of cannibalism. Orally-transmitted rumours of starvation and cannibalism had obviously reached England by mid-1610, because the Virginia Company’s own promotional tract referred to them: ‘but from this ship ariseth the rumour of the necessity and distress our people were found in, for want of victual, for though the noise hath exceeded the truth, yet we do confesse a great part of it’.15 The anonymous author was clearly ready to acknowledge that the settlers had been starving, but not that cannibalism was committed. The poor state of the surviving colonists, as witnessed when Sir Thomas Gates’ and Thomas Dale’s lost fleet finally arrived, became fixed in the minds of English readers by poems such as Richard Rich’s The Lost Flock Triumphant of 1610. Here, the colonists are described as ‘oppressed with grief, discontent in mind’, although no mention is made of their hunger.16 Supporters of the colonial experiment tried to combat accounts of famine. In 1611, after arriving home unexpectedly, Lord De La Warr’s report to the Virginia Company repeatedly emphasised that he had left corn growing in the fields and ten months’ provision in the store cupboard. Seeking to banish the spectre of starvation from the minds of readers, the Company released this positive report for publication and Purchas included it in his collection of travel narratives.17 Writing five years after the ‘starving time’, when Virginia was still an insecure and dangerous place to live,

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Ralph Hamor (who famously described the marriage negotiations between Pocahontas and John Rolfe), devoted several pages of his pamphlet to describing how easy it was to grow crops, hunt wildlife and thus avoid ‘the bruit of famine’ in Virginia.18 Having left Jamestown earlier in 1609, Smith obtained information from William Simmons about events that took place in the colony after that time, and used this for his books written in 1612 and 1624. In his earlier work, Map of Virginia, one of the most popular travel narratives, the cannibalism episode was represented much more subtly, however, merely reporting that ‘of 500 within 6 months after there after remained not many more than 60 most miserable and poore creatures. It were too vild [sic] to say what we endured’.19 Smith attributed the tragedy to the laziness of the English. They starved ‘for want of providence, industry and government, and not the barrenness and defect of the country as is generally supposed’.20 The stories of cannibalism in Virginia represent a complex mixture of oral, manuscript and print testimony, reflecting the political and social tensions within Virginia as well as the fluid early modern understanding of the eating of human flesh. To comprehend what readers and listeners thought of these accounts, it is important to explore our own ways of conceptualising the act as well as how it was interpreted in the past.

Cannibalism: reality or hegemonic discourse? Historians and anthropologists have struggled for decades over the meaning of cannibalism in early modern societies. This debate has been coloured by a natural revulsion at the act and also by confusion over whether, indeed, ritual cannibalism exists at all.21 William Arens highlights problems with observations of cannibalism, pointing out that many commentators who reported it had not witnessed the act themselves and did not speak the language of the natives whom they accused of cannibalism.22 For Arens, cannibalism is always a rumour rather than a reality, an interpretation mirrored in the response of commentators on early Virginia who simply refused to acknowledge or believe that the act of cannibalism took place, instead recognising that such rumours were spread by those intending harm on the reputation of the accused. As Arens points out, what is important about cannibalism is that people think it exists, rather than whether it does exist. Many other anthropologists and historians have ridiculed Arens’s assertions. Frank Lestringant called his work ‘crazed revisionism’, and demonstrates with copious case studies that accounts of cannibalism from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries are direct reflections of observed historical reality.23 Thomas Abler examined both Jesuit records of contact and archaeological data concerning Iroquois tribal groups in Canada and deduced that

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they did practise cannibalism. While he acknowledged the possibility that some Jesuits made up or exaggerated these stories in order to alienate the natives and justify their forced conversions, Abler found such consistency in the accounts that he concluded total fabrication was unlikely.24 Genuine cultural misunderstandings were entirely possible, as when Captain James Cook met the Hawaiians in the eighteenth century and both sides feared that the other were cannibals.25 At the same time, André Green highlights the ‘paradox du cannibalisme’, which is that just as it is gradually disappearing among native cultures, our own culture’s interest in the topic is growing.26 Controversially, Arens is ‘dubious’ about the existence of ritual cannibalism at all. The act has always been associated either with people on the fringes of civilisation or on the fringes of the known world. In literature and travel narratives ‘the cannibal’ immediately became ‘the other’ and over time ‘the other’ (i.e. anyone not white, not European) became ‘the cannibal’. It was not the reports of eyewitnesses but rather the European tendency to exoticise the Caribs and other tribes that led to accusations of native cannibalism.27 Not only did the far-distant Americans fall victim to this rhetorical turn. In 1612, the geographically closer but still alien Irish were described by Sir John Davies as ‘little better than Canniballes who doth hunt one another and hee that hath most strength and swifnes doth eat and devour all his fellows’.28 Both Herodotus and Montaigne interpreted cannibalism in this way and consequently it has become associated with distance in both space and time. The classical interpretation of cannibalism also provided the dimension that your enemy, whoever that may be, undertook the ‘Thysetean feast’ so, for example, Romans accused Christians of cannibalism, as well as other excesses. Prior to the European ‘discovery’ of the New World, accusations of cannibalism were always made about enemies in wartime, a trend that has continued into more modern times. For example, in the late eighteenth century Napoleon Bonaparte was rumoured to be a cannibal, and during the First World War British propaganda accused German soldiers of the same. Most infamously, the accusation was made in the medieval period against the Jews, creating the ‘Blood Libel’, the lie that Jews were killing and eating Christian children in a gross parody of the Eucharist. In Elizabethan literature the themes of anti-Semitism, capitalism and cannibalism were explored in Marlowe’s Jew of Malta (1591–2) and Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice (1600).29 Ben Jonson, too, refers to cannibalism on several occasions, sometimes in a punning way, at other times to create horror within a tragedy. In The Staple of News a group of English cooks migrate to America in order to convert the cannibals and make them ‘good eating Christians’.30 Don Hendrick believes that Jonson’s views, like those of many of his contemporaries, were directly influenced by Montaigne’s essay ‘On Cannibalism’.31 Far from being a direct analysis of cannibalism, the essay is more concerned with the interpretation of other cultures and is in the form of a dialogue between the voice of reason

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and the views of the common people. Montaigne portrays the Native Americans as different, though not evil, but on the contrary, filled with the virtues of the ‘noble savage’. Although the natives perform cannibalism of vengeance, he argued that, as Christians, the Portuguese cruelty was much worse.32 Once the Protestant reformation had taken hold in England and parts of Europe, the debate over flesh eating was mirrored in the popular rejection of trans-substantiation in the Catholic mass.33 The doctrine of the real presence had always been connected to anthropophagy and early Christians were at pains to deny that they were cannibals. Charles Zika and others have also linked cannibalism to witchcraft and fears over the power of mothers and the vulnerability of children in their charge. Witches’ teats became symbolic of demonic bloodsucking.34 Early modern medicine, too, had its connections with cannibalism. A seventeenth-century New England physician, educated at Harvard, used remedies made from human corpses and his method was far from unusual. European pharmacopoeias described the use of ‘mummy’ (the embalmed remains of someone who had died suddenly), blood and other body parts. A brisk trade developed in the bodies of executed criminals to provide the raw materials for this practice. Moreover, the number of cases where the medicinal use of human body parts was recorded rose around the time that the Protestant meaning of the Eucharist was being popularly debated.35 These examples show that far from being an extraordinary, horrific occurrence the act of eating human flesh was part of a number of complex discourses and had a wide variety of meanings during this period. When turning to cannibalism in the New World these European contexts must be borne in mind because all European settlers acted in and observed the Americas using pre-existing patterns and schemes of knowledge absorbed in the old world.36

New World cannibalism: Spanish and French observations Despite the anthropological debate, during the sixteenth century the connection between cannibalism and the New World is irrefutable. The word itself probably derives from the Arawak word ‘caniba’ meaning ‘bold’: the name that the natives gave themselves.37 Cannibalism became linked in the European imagination with bloodthirsty and cruel behaviour, and those voicing concerns over the American adventure often used the term polemically to generate horror and revulsion. The Spanish used descriptions of ritual native cannibalism to justify their own cruelty and aggression in Central America and the Caribbean. The earliest accounts of New World cannibalism came in 1493 from the diaries of Dr. Diego Chanca who sailed with Columbus. They were then spread to a wider public in Peter Martyr’s popular De Orbe Novo in 1511. However, neither Chanca nor Martyr saw cannibalism first-hand and they had little concrete evidence for it. Martyr

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took the fairly brief accounts by Chanca and turned them into the elaborate ‘cannibal’s barbecue’, the legend of which spread rapidly throughout Europe.38 The Spanish saw native cannibalism as a corruption of their own belief in the Catholic Eucharist but Protestants, too, used cannibalism to make a religious point. The Protestant Jean de Lery used his account describing the ritual practices of the Tupinamba of Brazil to discredit transsubstantiation. Later in the sixteenth century, moving away from descriptions of cannibalism to satisfy hunger that Chanca and Martyr had produced, André Thevet, De Lery and Montaigne portrayed cannibalism as a ritual act of revenge on an enemy tribe. There was a fierce debate over the true nature of native cannibalism, with De Lery arguing that he had seen cannibalism personally when in Brazil, and that accounts of the ‘cannibal barbecue’, of people being roasted on spits, were false.39 Hans Staden, a German living in Lisbon, who travelled to Brazil, also gave a detailed gendered account of ritual cannibalism among the natives there, describing the role of the native women of the tribe whose job it was to prepare and cook the meat.40 Bernal Diaz also claimed he was an eyewitness to the act, when travelling in Mexico with Cortes and his conquistadors. He wrote about the Mexican’s ritual sacrifice of seventy-two enemy prisoners, after which they ‘ate their flesh with chilmole [a sauce made of tomatoes and peppers]’.41 Thevet’s exploration narrative of South America was the first to be published in French. He argued that there were two sorts of flesh-eater, the ‘anthropophagi’, who eat humans purely for revenge, and thus still retain their humanity, and the ‘cannibals’ whose desires are bestial and uncontrollable.42 As these examples show, most Europeans agreed that cannibalism was something done by exotic natives to each other or, occasionally, targeted towards the settlers themselves. During the sixteenth century, however, these representations of native ritual cannibalism were far from static and a commentary developed about the justifiable eating of human flesh. While all the Spanish and French accounts mentioned so far imbued the act with an aura of horror or tragedy, at the same time, cannibalism could be mentioned in an incredibly blasé manner, as in Smith’s account of the ‘starving time’ incident. But Smith was not the first European traveller to write of cannibalism with humour.

The antecedents: other punning and cannibalism by white men As well as describing the horrors of cannibalism, De Lery was the first to make light of the subject. While he lived with the Tupinamba, he spent much of the time unsure as to their intentions, concerned by the language barrier and mystified over their cultural display. He described his fear at being awoken one night by a native brandishing a human foot. Initially struck

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dumb with terror, he later realised that he was being invited to the native festivities and not being prepared for the pot. In his 1579 Histiore nouvelle du Nouveau Monde, fellow Protestant, Urbain Chauveton ironically reported on a group of Spanish monks, eaten during the season of Lent. He said that the meat of the Spanish is too tough for eating ‘unless it is marinated and softened for two or three days before eating’.43 This is very similar to the joke Smith made about the Virginia episode, in which he made light of the preparation and seasoning of the human meal. New World cannibalism, real or imagined, was not only a feature of native society. The Spanish ate human flesh when facing starvation, and their enemies, the English and the French, used tales of Spanish explorers resorting to cannibalism of necessity as propaganda to fuel the Black Legend.44 Spanish greed was symbolised as cannibalism, with the Native Americans as their victims. Because the western tradition of shipboard and survival cannibalism was well known by this period, European audiences connected it with colonial exploration and empire.45 Arens takes this one step further and argues that both types of cannibalism, for food or for ritual, can be deemed customary, in that they are bound by certain symbolic discourses and meanings.46 The drawing of lots, the drinking of blood, the eating only of certain body parts and the identification of the ‘other’ as chosen victim often accompanied the episodes of cannibalism for food, especially after shipwrecks.47 De Lery made a joke of this sort of cannibalism too, describing how his ship arrived off the Breton coast where the captain told everyone that he was going to sacrifice one of his passengers to feed his crew. De Lery was not worried about this himself, because he was so thin as to be inedible.48 Accounts of European cannibalism in America have a precedent in the tales of shipwrecked sailors and nor was punning about cannibalism new. These examples help to explain why and how the representations of the Virginia episode changed between 1609 and 1614. The immediacy of the tragedy of the ‘starving time’ meant that initial reports by George Percy and William Simmons were either judgemental and moralistic or brief and refusing to mention cannibalism explicitly. Percy’s description is the most vivid, but his version was never published, almost certainly at the request of the Virginia Company. William Strachey denied the rumours circulating in London that cannibalism had taken place by claiming that it was a case of personal hatred triggering a murder, rather than hunger triggering cannibalism. Presumably Strachey thought that an individual who decided to murder his wife because he hated her could be found anywhere whereas the taint of cannibalism in Jamestown might lead to accusations of the settlers ‘going native’ and being corrupted by the New World environment. The Virginia Company, Richard Rich, Lord De La Warr and Ralph Hamor all neglected to mention the cannibalism episode although they wrote about the ‘starving time’ itself. Their books and pamphlets were published to try

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to boost the prospects of the still-struggling colony, so it is natural that they wished to diminish any negative rumours. It was not until John Smith’s later publication, A Generall Historie, that the episode was far enough in the past and the colony of Virginia more secure, that the off-hand, joking description of the cannibalism is seen. Which method of telling the story endured until the accounts of later historians: the moralistic, the denying or the punning? To answer this question it is important to look at the account of the ‘starving time’ written by Robert Beverley, a historian of Virginia, based in England. In his fourvolume work, The History and Present State of Virginia (1705), Beverley’s narrative is coloured by events that happened after the ‘starving time’ which further estranged the white settlers from their native neighbours, especially the 1622 massacre and the 1644 war. But he still wrote that part of the blame for the ‘starving time’ rested with the English themselves: And yet, for all this, they continued their Disorders, wasting their old Provisions, and neglecting to gather others; so that they who remain’d alive were all near famish’d, having brought themselves to that Pass, that they durst not stir from their own Doors to gather the Fruits of the Earth, or the Crabs and Mussels from the Water-side: Much less to hunt or catch wild Beasts, Fish or Fowl, which were found in great Abundance there. They continued in these scanty Circumstances till they were at last reduced to such Extremity, as to eat the very Hides of their Horses, and the Bodies of the Indians they had killed; and sometimes also upon a Pinch they wou’d not disdain to dig them up again to make a homely Meal of after they had been buried. And that Time is to this Day remember’d by the Name of the Starving Time.49 To Beverley, in Arens’s terms, the ‘exo-cannibalism’ of consuming one’s enemies is less reprehensible than the ‘endo-cannibalism’ of consuming one’s compatriots. Beverley rendered the story as the English eating the bodies of dead Indians and even once buried digging them up again in utter desperation. Unlike the account in Smith’s A Generall Historie, surely that which influenced Beverley’s description, Beverley did not explain that the settlers ate the bodies of natives ‘boiled and stewed with roots and herbs’, nor does he mention the separate case of the man who ate his wife. Beverley was an ardent admirer of Smith and believed that without him the colony of Virginia would have failed much sooner and so his omission of details from Smith’s account is significant. In conclusion, to return to the punning extract in John Smith’s A Generall Historie, what was it that made him turn the horrific murder and cannibalism of one of the first English women in Virginia into a light-hearted joke? He followed the trope established by other visitors to the New World, such as Jean de Lery, for whom cannibalism was both a horror and a source of amusement.

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Smith was also influenced by other stories of the event circulating around London society from 1610 onwards. Satirists and detractors of the colonial enterprise such as Ben Jonson wanted to make the English undertaking seem pointless or too dangerous and they used stories such as this one to their advantage. Smith, too, had become disillusioned with Virginia; he had been ostracised by the other leaders of the colony while in America and rejected by the Virginia Company on his return. This encouraged him to turn his attention to New England and write promotional tracts about that region to the north. Perhaps it was Smith’s treatment in Virginia that led him to make light of such a tragedy. Alternatively, perhaps the unmarried Smith’s joke had more to do with gender relations than cannibalism: ‘now whether she was better roasted, boiled or carbonado’ed I know not; but such a dish as powdered wife I never heard of’, he wrote, perceiving that hen-pecked husbands of disruptive wives often wished they could create this sort of dish and that his mostly male readership would have enjoyed such a joke. Or perhaps, as the event had happened fifteen years earlier, he thought it was no longer disrespectful to make a joke, but instead that it made good rhetorical sense to lessen the blow of the ‘starving time’ for the reader, by turning it into a pun. In this way, what initially seems to us a strange way to treat a grave and horrific subject, can be understood as Smith’s effort to render the extraordinary origins of early Virginia into an everyday story of English men abroad.

Notes 1 John Brereton, A Brief and True Relation of the Discoverie of the North Part of Virginia (1602), 15. 2 ‘Londons Lotterie’ (1612), in Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 74 (1966), 259–92. 3 C. Hertford and P. Simpson (eds), Ben Jonson (Oxford, 1954), vol. IV, 569. 4 See C. Armstrong, Writing North America in the Seventeenth Century (Aldershot, 2007), esp. ch. 8. 5 S. Purchas, Purchas, His Pilgrims (Glasgow, 1951), vol. 18, 477. 6 William Strachey, Historie of Travell into Virginia Britania, eds L.B. Wright and V. Freund (Hakluyt Society, 2nd series, 1951), 57. Unprinted in his lifetime (despite seeking the patronage of Francis Bacon), Strachey’s account of the shipwreck off the coast of Bermuda in his Historie influenced William Shakespeare’s The Tempest. In turn, this created a template for later accounts of the history of the Jamestown settlement. 7 Strachey, Historie of Travell, 126. 8 In recent decades, most historians of Virginia have taken the cannibalism story at face value or ignored it completely, reinforcing the view that cannibalism of necessity was indeed commonplace. M. Geiter and W.A. Speck, Colonial America (Basingstoke, 2002), 54, mentions the event ironically, making an exclamation of it: ‘The situation became so bad that they were forced to eat the flesh of those who died. There was even a man who killed his wife!’. R. Middleton, Colonial America: A History (Oxford, 2002), 52, a popular undergraduate textbook, para-

Catherine Armstrong 175

9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

29 30 31 32 33 34 35

phrases Smith’s 1624 account: ‘many were reduced to eating the flesh of their dead companions or local inhabitants, disguising the taste with herbs and roots’. S. Adams, The Best and Worst Country in the World (Charlottesville, 2001), 162–4, explores the starving time in more detail than most modern historians. Quoting extensively from Smith and Percy, he does not examine these narratives in the context of other cannibalism tales, nor does account for the differences in the telling of the story of the ‘starving time’. D. Cressy, Coming Over (Cambridge, 1986), 6. G. Percy, ‘A Trewe Relacyon’ (1612), at www.virtualjamestown.org [accessed 16 Nov 2007]. Idem. Purchas, Purchas, His Pilgrims, vol. 19. Geiter and Speck’s twenty-first-century account mirrors Strachey’s denials, see n. 7 above. Purchas, Purchas, His Pilgrims, vol. 18, 538. Anon., A True and Sincere Declaration of the Purposes and Ends of the Plantation begun in Virginia (1610), 10. R. Rich, The Lost Flocke Triumphant (1610), sig. B. Purchas, Purchas, His Pilgrims, vol. 19, 87. Ralph Hamor, A True Discourse of the Present Estate of Virginia (1615), 16–17. I am sure he means ‘vile’ here rather than ‘wild’. John Smith, A Map of Virginia (Oxford, 1612), 105. W. Arens, The Man Eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy (New York, 1979), 9. W. Arens, ‘Rethinking anthropophagy’, in F. Barker, P. Hulme and M. Iverson (eds), Cannibalism and the Colonial World (Cambridge, 1998), 25. F. Lestringant, Cannibals: The Discovery and Representation of the Cannibal from Columbus to Jules Verne (trans. R. Morris: Cambridge, 1997), 6. T. Abler, ‘Iroquois cannibalism: fact not fiction’, Ethnohistory, 27 (1980), 313. G. Obeyeseleere, ‘British cannibals: contemplation of an event in the death and resurrection of James Cook, explorer’, Critical Inquiry 18:4 (1992), 633. Barker, Hulme and Iverson, ‘Introduction’, Cannibalism and the Colonial World, xiii. Arens, ‘Rethinking anthropophagy’, 41. J. Ohlmeyer, ‘“Civilizing of those rude partes”: colonization within Britain and Ireland 1580s–1640s’, in N. Canny (ed.), Origins of Empire (Oxford, 1998), 131. J. Phillips, ‘Cannibalism qua capitalism’, in Barker, Hulme and Iverson (eds), Cannibalism and the Colonial World, 197. R. Cawley, The Voyagers and Elizabethan Drama (Boston, 1938), 301. D. Hendrick, ‘Cooking for the Anthropophagi: Jonson and his audience’, Studies in English Literature 17 (1977), 239. S. Rendall, ‘Dialectical structure and tactics in Montaigne’s “Of Cannibals”’, Pacific Coast Philology (Oct 1977), 60. M.L. Price, Consuming Passions: The Uses of Cannibalism in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (New York, 2003), 3, 8. C. Zika, ‘Cannibalism and witchcraft in early modern Europe: reading the visual images’, History Workshop Journal 44 (1997), 77–105. K. Gordon-Grube, ‘Anthropophagy in post-Renaissance Europe: the tradition of medicinal cannibalism’, American Anthropologist (1988), 406.

176 ‘Boiled and Stewed with Roots and Herbs’ 36 See A. Grafton, New Worlds, Ancient Texts (Cambridge, MA., 1992) for more on this theme. 37 Lestringant, Cannibals, 15. 38 Barker, Hulme and Iverson, ‘Introduction’, 17–18. 39 Lestringant, Cannibals, 23, 26. 40 ‘Hans Staden, A History of His Captivity 1557’, in S. Castillo and I. Schweitzer (eds), The Literatures of Colonial America (Oxford, 2001), 79. 41 Bernal Diaz del Castillo, ‘A history of the conquest of new Spain’, in Castillo and Schweitzer (eds), Literatures of Colonial America, 58. 42 Ibid., 48. 43 Lestringant, Cannibals, 79, 127. 44 Price, Consuming Passions, 104. 45 Barker, Hulme and Iverson, Cannibalism and the Colonial World, 24. 46 Arens, ‘Rethinking anthropophagy’, 46. A.W.B. Simpson, Cannibalism and the Common Law (Chicago, 1984), challenges this point, arguing that the British only ever ate human flesh out of desperation and so could never be ‘convention-bound’. 47 Obeyeseleere, ‘British Cannibals’, 640. 48 Lestringant, Cannibals, 79. 49 Robert Beverley, The History and Present State of Virginia in four parts (London, 1705), at ‘Documenting the South’, www.docsouth.unc.edu/index [accessed 14 November 2007].

10 Glimpses of the Obscure: The Witch Trials of the Channel Islands1 Darryl Ogier

The Channel Islands have been characterised as having ‘the dubious distinction of being, proportionate to their size, the witch-hunting capital of Atlantic Europe’.2 The figures bear this out: the main islands, Jersey and Guernsey, have areas of about 118 and sixty-four square kilometres respectively. Jersey has twelve parishes; Guernsey, ten. In the sixteenth century, the larger island probably had a population of 10,000 or more; the smaller something well under that number.3 Yet G.R. Balleine listed no fewer than sixty-five witch trials coming before Jersey’s Royal Court between the 1560s and 1660s, and although several trials proceeded no further than the indictment stage, thirty-three led to execution, while the Court condemned another eight people to perpetual banishment. Fifty-seven of the Jersey trials were of women.4 For Guernsey, notably the smaller island, the figures are still more shocking: Carey Curtis found record there in the period 1563–1649 of as many as seventy-six women and twenty-seven men brought before its Royal Court accused of witchcraft, resulting in fifty executions, and twenty-six banishments, for terms ranging from a period of years to life.5 The precipitant to the trials in both islands appears to have been the English Act agaynst conjuracions inchantments and witchecraftes of March 1563. The Chronique de Jersey mentions that about the time that the work of a Royal Commission appointed in June 1562 was underway, two witches, one called Anne Michelle and one seemingly known as ‘La Blanche Vestue’ were burned in Jersey, and the Court registers also record the trial of Thomasse Becquet for the crime de sorcerie, resulting in her acquittal in May 1563.6 In Guernsey, the earliest trials were of Martin Tulouff and his mother Françoise Regnouff, both sentenced to be burned at the stake on 17 November 1563, of Collette Salmon, similarly condemned two days later, and of Collenette Gascoing, sentenced on 22 December 1563 to a whipping followed by the nailing of an ear to the pillory and its excision, and her banishment for life.7 William Monter (quoted in the first sentence of this essay), has drawn attention to the clustering of executions in some years rather than others, 177

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citing by way of example those in Jersey in 1585 and in Guernsey in 1617, and attributes some significance to the supposed attendance of witches at sabbats as contributing to numbers accused and executed.8 Although Monter does not refer to torture, it is a commonplace that it was often under torture that victims confessed to having attended sabbats, meeting there individuals who they named, and who were prosecuted in turn. Monter goes on to account for the scale of the fatal record of the Channel Islands’ witch hunts by stressing the absence of appellate courts, which have been shown to have had a moderating tendency on sentences handed down by inferior jurisdictions elsewhere.9 There follows a modest attempt to bring to light some features of the witch trials in what Monter calls the ‘deservedly obscure Channel Islands’;10 to examine the contribution that awareness of the sabbat on the part of the island authorities, and the absence of procedures for appeal from their courts, may have made to the totals of trials; to explore the facts that the smaller jurisdiction had the greater number of trials, which were more likely to result in execution; and to present something of the context in which the dreadful record of Channel-Island witch hunting arose.

Jersey procedures Trials took place before the Royal Courts of both islands, each presided over by a Bailiff, appointed for life, and each served by twelve permanent jurymen, the Jurats. In both islands procedures were grounded in the medieval law of Normandy but with differences in detail. In Jersey, unless a confession was volunteered, or proofs ‘as clear as day’,11 procedures commenced with an indictment, brought at parish level, with selected parishioners reporting whether they found a case to answer. In the later seventeenth century, parish connêtables would assemble sworn men monthly, in order to receive reports of malefactors, and the same custom may have prevailed in earlier times.12 Should the accused be found culpable, he or she was then imprisoned,13 and invited to submit to an enquête of twenty-four men, assembled by the Crown’s Law Officers. In order to obtain agreement to an enquête, or to secure a confession, the thirteenth-century Grand Coutumier – which remained the fundamental text of Norman, and hence island, law – permitted imprisonment for up to a year and a day ‘with little to eat and drink’,14 although in a few cases persons who refused an enquête were summarily banished, perhaps for reasons of economy, or perhaps in some cases because of a paucity of informants, where accusations were levelled at foreigners.15 A five-sixths majority of the enquête finding the criminal guilty was required to secure a conviction for a felony,16 punishable by death, although in cases of acquittal by an enquête, or where imprisonment had been endured for a year without submission, and suspicions remained, Jersey’s Court might still order lesser punishments. This it did in 1609, for example,

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after five members of an enquête would not charge Georgette Alixandre with sorcery: she was banished, on pain of being whipped. The Court did the like in 1649, in the case of Guillemete du Vaistain, of Normandy, who refused an enquête, and on account of suspicion remaining, and her confession to incest, was whipped and banished.17 Jeanne Machon, who similarly resisted, was banished on suspicion of ‘the diabolic and detestable crime of sorcery’ the following year.18 Even when discharging persons accused of witchcraft without punishment, Jersey’s Court might still issue cautions, often referring to the wandering or perambulating (tournoyer) of the individual. This happened in the case of Pernelle Fallu, released on 2 July 1597 under warning, and on her son’s guarantee that she should keep to her house, ‘without wandering, to avoid the scandals that she caused several with her mutterings and moanings’.19 Perrine Alixandre withstood a year and a day in Mont Orgueil Castle, and was warned in 1611 not to tournoyer par les maisons, and neither to menace nor intimidate her neighbours, on pain of corporal punishment.20 Elizabeth Grandin was acquitted, on 1 June 1648, following the outcome of an enquête. On noting her ‘lubricious, wicked, and scandalous life’, the Court implored the woman to live in the fear of God, as they did also her bastard daughter, Marie, and to refrain from cursing, disparaging, or defaming her neighbours, from begging, and from unstopping the entrances to the little hillside fields, or côtils, for which Jersey was then, as now, notable,21 the whole on threat of banishment ‘comme une personne meschante et inutille’.22 In some cases, Jersey’s Court found this sort of perambulation sufficient to make a person suspect of sorcery: Collas Lamy, discharged in 1626, had stirred up suspicions of sorcery by his habit de tournoyer par le païx, and was told to get a job, on threat of chastisement.23 Sometimes the Court went further: Françoise le Mestre was discharged on 15 December 1597 from a charge ‘pour le crime de sortilege’ on ‘express prohibition no longer to perambulate about the island, on pain of being found convicted of the said crime’.24 Elizabeth and Marie Grandin, just mentioned, and Marguerite le Quesne were acquitted of charges of sorcery on 5 June 1606, the Court threatening that they would be ‘found culpable of the said crime and judged accordingly’, should they be itinerant about the island or its houses, menacing or defaming people, and rather that they should live in the fear and service of God, in peace and concord with their neighbours, working loyally to earn their living and a better reputation.25 The harsh inference must be that the Jersey Court sometimes regarded itinerancy, and probably the begging associated with it, as prima facie evidence of sorcery.

Guernsey procedures In Guernsey, legal proceedings generally commenced following reports coming to the notice of the Law Officers of the Crown. After preliminary

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investigation, a suspect would formally be accused by the Officers, and remanded in Castle Cornet, later being brought before the Court for examination, and given the opportunity to submit to an enquête, with the same provisions regarding imprisonment as in Jersey, should this be declined. Again the emphasis was on securing a confession or incontrovertible evidence of guilt and, in obtaining this, Guernsey’s Court interpreted the Norman coutume more liberally than its Jersey counterpart, leading to procedures described with some heat by Thomas Le Marchant (d. 1684). Enquête panels in Guernsey he protested, regularly numbered many more than the twenty-four men provided for in the customary law, and the five-sixths’ majority necessary to secure conviction had been abrogated. Le Marchant alleged that enquêtes were tainted by prejudice, and that their abuse had been particularly fatal to pretended sorcerers, ‘condemned on the credulity of simple, superstitious folk, and on the report of only two or three of them, and even though more than 2000 [sic] have perhaps been examined and enquired of before’.26 Certainly it was true that scores of people (of both sexes) would be invited to give evidence at Guernsey enquêtes, for example as many as 208 in the trial of Katherine Eustace in 1581, and 171 in the trial of Collas Becquet in 1619.27 Evidence revealed at the enquête was brought before the Court, witnesses were examined, including, in some cases, by the accused, and sentence was pronounced. As in Jersey, in Guernsey punishment might be mitigated in cases of those not convicted of the capital offence, but against whom suspicions remained; the sentence usually taking the form of banishment, sometimes preceded by corporal punishment, as mentioned above in the case of Collenette Gascoing. Others were simply banished for life, without other punishment, as happened to three women in 1613, and to another three, five years later.28 Still other people were banished for fixed periods, ranging from six to fifteen years.29 References to perambulations do occur in the Guernsey records. The acquittal of Guillemine la Bourse in 1622 was accompanied by an instruction to her son to take her in and maintain her without allowing her to beg, ‘ny aller de lieu en lieu’, and numerous other records incidentally identify accused witches as given to itinerant begging, as in the cases of Françoise Regnouff, tried in 1563, who had begged for milk; of Olivier Omont, tried in 1613, who sought bread and other alms; of the well-reported Becquets, tried in 1617, and others.30 When occurring in Guernsey, begging appears to have been a factor in bringing about accusations of maleficia, in a manner familiar throughout much of Europe, and without quite the inference of witchcraft expressed in a few of the Jersey cases. Once maleficia was established, however, outcomes could be equally serious in the smaller island, and procedures often more cruel.

Torture As indicated above, the law of both islands dictated, in the Roman Law tradition, that obtaining a confession was of the utmost importance; a

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concern that was symptomised by a sentence of 8 August 1617 on Jeanne Guignon, when Guernsey’s Court threatened her with burning alive should she not confess, as her co-accused, who were to receive the relative mercy of strangulation before burning, had done.31 According to the commentator on Norman law, Guillaume Terrien (d. 1573 or 1574), referring to the Repetitio in capituli Raynutius de testamentis of Guillaume Benoist (1455–1516), ‘it is insufficient that the accused be convicted by witnesses, if he does not confess the deed by his own mouth, where it is a question of the extreme penalty, or loss of a member’ – save only in the case where witness information could be corroborated to such an extent that the facts were incontrovertible (effectively if the accused was taken in the act, which was hardly likely in witchcraft cases) – ‘And consequently in a capital case, so that the proof be plainly made, the accused must be put to torture, to take the confession of his mouth’.32 Commenting on the treatment of torture in the late-medieval Glose annexed to the Grand Coutumier, which was influential in the islands, the jurist Jean Poingdestre (1609–91) nonetheless stated that in the Jersey of his day, ‘we do not use tortures and intensely cruel [géhaineux] torments of times past at all’,33 and there is no mention of torture in the records of the Jersey witch trials, whether in Poingdestre’s era or earlier. The situation in Guernsey again differed markedly, that island’s Court explaining to the English Privy Council in 1579 that it did apply torture in grave cases, such as murder, when there were insufficient witnesses and strong suspicions of guilt arose from circumstantial evidence, but confession was not forthcoming,34 for example, in the putting to torture of a party of violent robbers in 1586 in order to secure confessions.35 Le Marchant, commenting on Terrien’s work and its use and abuse in Guernsey, reported that the torture of alleged witches had even resulted in limbs being torn off, an allegation given some support by a contemporary of Le Marchant’s recalling that the strappado had been customarily employed, ‘by which meanes sometimes theire shoulders were turned round and sometimes theire thumbs toarne off’.36 The humane Le Marchant was not prepared to concede that in its requirements for a confession, Guernsey’s Court, in contrast to its abuse of the enquête tradition, was, in this instance, following the customary law. Rather, he alleged that its members, having introduced ‘a new form of enquiry’, tortured ‘poor simple persons whom the credulity and superstition of the ignorant regarded as sorcerers’, to make them confess, ‘for fear’ that if the victims went to execution still maintaining their innocence, ‘the people would believe their words and have a sinister opinion of the said judges’.37 When it did order the torture of alleged witches, as it frequently did, the Guernsey Court most usually did so after conviction and sentencing had taken place; indeed sometimes after a confession had already been obtained, with the supplementary motive of eliciting the names of accomplices. This apparently could lead to the ‘clustering’ of prosecutions and executions, as we

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seem to find in the twelve trials of 1622 that resulted in seven reported executions.38 Collete de l’Estac, the wife of Thomas Tourgis, who on 8 May 1622 was sentenced to death, claimed that Collenette Robin and Catherine Hallouvris had been present at the sabbat with her, and it is likely that that information was supplied under torture.39 Collenette Robin was duly sentenced to death on 28 May 1622.40 Torture after conviction is explicitly referred to in the sentences of execution of Tourgis himself; Jeanne, his daughter and of Michelle Shivret, which followed on 17 October 1622, as it had been when the same sentence was handed down to Estienne le Compte and Mary Blanche a few days earlier, the intention being recorded in each of these cases to make the convicted persons give the names of accomplices.41 By contrast, there is no reference to the sabbat, whether framed in an accusation, extracted by compulsion, or voluntarily offered in confession, in the copious, if occasionally fragmentary, records of Jersey, where torture was not part of the judicial process. The clusters that occurred in Jersey demand quite different explanations, since the court evidence makes clear that the sabbat had no part to play in them. The contribution that the absence of appeal procedures, from either island, may have made to those clusters similarly warrants exploration.

Appeals The Royal Courts of Jersey and Guernsey, although enjoying a significant degree of independence, were not sovereign in the sense of having complete judicial autonomy. They were subject to supervision by the English Privy Council, which took a close interest in island affairs, and exercised a prerogative, if cautious, appellate jurisdiction. Rules for appeals from Jersey’s Royal Court, laid down by order of the Council dated 13 May 1572, did not debar criminal appeals,42 and indeed representations in such causes are known to have been entertained, even if only rarely, as in 1620 when the Council relieved one William Poingdestre of a Royal Court sentence for battery.43 The commentator Philippe Le Geyt (1635–1716) supplied other examples.44 Yet no records suggest that any appeal against a sentence of witchcraft was ever sought. This is easily explicable given not only the importance attached to obtaining a confession in criminal causes, but also that, as far as possible the execution of sentences was carried out immediately after being pronounced,45 leaving no time for victims or their families to approach the superior jurisdiction. The Council’s jurisdictional relationship with Guernsey differed: an Order in Council dated 9 October 1580, which crystallised practices, flatly disallowed appeals in ‘any cause criminal or of correction’.46 In Guernsey, as in Jersey, sentences were to be executed as far as possible on the day they were pronounced – though some time must have been allowed for postsentence torture – leaving little time for appeal on the part of the victim,

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even if this had been allowed, or for reflection on the part of the Court.47 Le Marchant, reasoning in a manner that anticipates the conclusions of later historians concerning the Parlement of Paris and other appeal courts, suggested that had appeals been allowed to judges of assize or the Council, these honourable, intelligent, perceptive, and worldly persons would have forthwith exposed the deceit of the accusers, and the insufficiency of the evidence, censured the superstitious and reckless zeal of the judges and the other officers of the king, upheld the innocence of the poor persons accused of wrong, and vindicated the honour and reputation of the inhabitants of the aspersion that they had acquired because of the foregoing, that the said island swarmed with sorcerers.48 It is reasonable, in respect of both Jersey and Guernsey, to think that appeal to a superior court – the legal and proper one for the islands being the Privy Council – if possible, would have had a tempering effect on the horrifying numbers of executions, though the fact is that, with regard to witchcraft, as with most other crimes, the Council did not involve itself in insular affairs. The Council’s interest in witchcraft in England was often limited to how far that crime might threaten the monarchy,49 a matter with which the Acte against sedicious wordes and rumours uttered againste the Queenes mooste excellent majestie of 1581 had concerned itself. This would not suggest that the Council’s members would pay any particular attention to the Jersey and Guernsey trials; rather their concerns with island affairs gave the maintenance of order and the status quo high priority: a point A.J. Eagleston noted long ago.50 Witchcraft may have been associated in the Council’s minds with just the sort of disorder and instability that they would have expected to be controlled and suppressed at the local level, using the regulatory role proper to the insular authorities.

Plague and the Jersey trials The year of the first trials, 1563, was a difficult one. Not only was war and the enforcement of Protestantism bringing upheaval, it was also a plague year in both islands.51 Connections between sorcery and plague are also related to the links between itinerancy and witchcraft evidenced in the Jersey court registers. Fears arose in 1583 of the likelihood of pestilence (then present at Southampton), visiting Jersey and on 17 August the authorities prohibited communications with the English port and its environs.52 The infection did spread to the island, nonetheless. On 25 September 1584, Jersey’s Colloquy (the island church assembly) noted that persons who were ill, or had illness in the family, having resort against divine injunction to sorcerers or sorceresses should be called before their consistory (the parish church court) to be censured, and the Royal Court was enjoined to address the issue.53 On 26 March

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following, the Colloquy, after deciding to request the Court to provide for the nourishment of the poor without begging, resolved also to ask that witches and suspects should be punished.54 On 6 October 1585, Mathieu and Jean le Broc were imprisoned for looking to cure the daughter of Jacques le Broc by seeking out a woman long suspected of sorcery, and Jacques himself was sent to join them, on account of having allowed improper actions in his house in that connection.55 This same year Jersey saw one of the clusters alluded to by Monter, amounting to five trials and executions. The first sentence, of 2 November 1585, on the long-suspected Jeanne le Vesconte, noted that she employed the art diabolique de sortilege, ‘towards both persons and their goods, in infecting some, and curing others’.56 Two others confessed to a satanic pact: Pasquette le Vesconte ‘to have contracted and made alliance with the devil and by his means perpetrated infinite crimes and murders’,57 and Jean Mourant, who acknowledged, in what is recognisable as the language of legal contracts, ‘his connection with the devil by a deal and promise confirmed under pledge and gift of one of his members’, under which vow and leadership he had committed ‘infinite troubles, crimes, and murders’.58 The next recorded Jersey trials, accounting for the second highest annual total of executions after those of the plague year 1585, took place in 1591. Balleine notes five convictions, all resulting in execution. Again, the Colloquy appears to have been influential, and again the trials arose in a time of plague; the next known outbreak after that of 1585. On 24 September 1591 the Colloquy discussed how ministers should approach those suffering from the plague or other contagious ills, going on to resolve that any of the sick or their families that had recourse to sorciers or those suspected of being witches should be excommunicated until publicly admitting their fault.59 This censure was followed on 23 December 1591 by an order of the Royal Court which noted that persons habitually consulted sorciers and devins when troubled or afflicted, and declared that those who did so were as culpable as those whom they consulted, and further that to leave such actions unpunished, which were so contrary to the word of God, threatened to bring divine retribution down upon the Court’s members themselves. Consequently, the Court prohibited anyone from receiving counsel or remedy from any sorciers or devins or those suspected of being the same.60 In the meantime, another witch hunt had commenced, and on 7 October one Symon Vauldin was condemned to strangulation and burning at the stake, after confessing to communication with the devil in the forms of a cat and crow, so confirming suspicions of witchcraft long held against him.61 Three more people were executed, and one was released under caution.62 The alleged spread of contagion by witches was perhaps associated with the reported itinerancy of some. The word ‘infecting’ occurs in the records of 1585, when Jeanne le Vesconte was accused of ‘infectant les uns’, and more general accusations levelled in plague years at witches for causing illness or death must refer, in at least some instances, to plague deaths. The Court and

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church records also reveal that devins were popularly resorted to for cures when plague was present. We can see that, rather than by reference to the sabbat, the peaks in executions in Jersey, and the prosecutions leading to them, can partly be explained in terms relating to activities that challenged Protestant ideas of correct responses to epidemic crisis. This was expressed most explicitly in the ordinance of 1591, which revealed the godly to be fearful of their own fate if they allowed resort to sorcerers to continue unpunished. The peaks can also be explained partly in the context of a heightened awareness of itinerancy and sorcery in times of plague, with the consequence that some people, accused of the maleficia of causing illness, were tried and executed. Perhaps Jersey exhibited something of the situation reported of the alleged plague-spreaders of Reformation Geneva, said, in Monter’s words, to have been ‘technically in league with the Devil, although often lacking most of the other ordinary paraphernalia of witchcraft’.63 If they had been able to appeal, very likely fewer alleged witches would have been killed, but, on the evidence, clusters of executions were a consequence of numbers of accusations, and the scale of accusations, at root, lay not in concerns about the sabbat, but, more usually, in concerns about plague, and the alleged powers of witches to kill or cure.

Order and the Guernsey trials While it is clear that in Guernsey too there were more witch trials in some years than others, the record of the trials shows that it was also the case, as Le Marchant’s reference to impressions of ‘swarming’ hints, that witch hunting was in some degree endemic. Certainly the early seventeenth-century statistics suggest as much, and an observation of 1629 alleged of the people of the island that ‘if an Ox or a Horse perhaps miscarry, they presently impute it to Witchcraft, and the next old woman shall straight be hal’d to Prison’.64 It is to be questioned if the peaks in prosecutions and executions were brought about according to conventional explanations, and why, in this low-level endemic scenario, with torture usual, and the sabbat ever present, clusters did not, in fact, occur more regularly. Perhaps in Guernsey, as in Jersey, other previously unconsidered factors may have led to more accusations arising, and more trials and executions occurring, in some years rather than others. The twelve trials and seven executions of 1622 described above do look to be susceptible to explanation according to conventional wisdom, and torture and the sabbat certainly find mention in the records. In the records of the fourteen trials that took place in the year 1617, resulting in eight executions,65 similar references are also numerous. Yet in this instance, Harriet Allez, in a discussion of the prosecution of Collette du Mont, has pointed to the significance of an ordinance of Guernsey’s Royal Court dated 20 January 1617, which nominated Jurats to go into the parishes to enquire into and bring before the Court persons responsible for crimes,

186 Glimpses of the Obscure: The Witch Trials of the Channel Islands

malefices and public offences, so supplying a machinery that brought longstanding local suspicions to a head.66 The impression that something more than the sabbat may account for rashes of accusations, and hence prosecutions, against the somewhat endemic background is reinforced by reference to the incomplete records of 1631, which indicate that at least thirteen trials took place in Guernsey that year, resulting in two executions, five releases, three cases where the outcome is unrecorded, and eight banishments: an inflated total to be accounted for by the fact that at the Court’s banishing of Susane Jouane, the widow of Estienne le Compte (executed in 1585), for sorcery, it also saw fit to banish, untried, the woman’s four daughters on the same account.67 These trials took place in a year following a visitation of the plague that had necessitated taxation to succour Guernsey’s poor, measures restricting travel, and the construction of a camp for infected victims. The plague was followed by dearth, which in the spring of 1631 led to price controls on bread.68 The trials of that year occurred at the time of a drive, surely stimulated by these conditions, to rid Guernsey of delinquents and suspects, so much so that on 3 October 1631 the Court’s members explicitly resolved to prosecute the ordinance of 20 January 1617 with renewed vigour, and to seek out vagabonds, idlers, and others en charge au pays, submitting them to the investigations of Jurats, who, as provided for under the ordinance, would receive written monthly reports from the parishes for the Court to give order.69 Five of the 1631 trials commenced in the month succeeding this reiteration of the law of 1617. Similar disciplinary concerns, perhaps owing something to the witch hunt spreading through France at about the same time, underlay a representation made on 19 October 1644 to Guernsey’s Court by one of the Law Officers, protesting that delays in seeking out of sorciers et sorcieres by enquêtes and making proper punishments had resulted in complaints and allegations of serious ills daily occurring. The Court ordered enquiries to be made in suspect parishes before Christmas.70 On this occasion no witch hunt appears to have commenced; the popular insurrection against taxation that erupted the following month perhaps diverting attention away from suspects.71 The likely role of the Court in initiating panics, nonetheless, remains noteworthy.

Conclusion Concerns with discipline and order were common to the islands’ Courts, being illustrated here by the Jersey measures of 1591 and those of Guernsey in 1617, 1631 and 1644. Examples of actions regulating other areas of activity, often similarly brought in as responses to social and economic conditions, could be duplicated many times over.72 In the Reformation and post-Reformation situation, the authorities of each island sought to preserve, demonstrate, and advance their traditional governance, and the witch hunts

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may be connected with that interest. One can say this without reviving a fullscale ‘acculturation thesis’: fundamentally the Courts and other authorities were there to maintain and exercise power. In pursuing alleged witches, they not only rid their jurisdictions of perceived inutiles, but often, however unwittingly, made common cause against un-neighbourliness with the wider population, serving the advancement and retention of power. More could be said of the Channel Islands’ witch hunts in connection with such power relations, or of the extent to which a ‘charity refusal model’ might apply, or about the possibility of a loss of a pre-Reformation consensus that may have accommodated devins and healers, and so on. For the present, the evidence suggests that as regards the clustering of executions in Jersey, this was a consequence not of an importance attached to sabbats, but that sometimes – if only sometimes – peaks arose in connection with the fear and presence of plague in the island. Clusters of executions in Guernsey – though torture, and references to sabbats made under torture, had a part to play – could also arise in times of crisis, whether pestilential or more general, and sometimes followed associated drives for strict policing of the parishes and the better enforcement of discipline originating from the Court. Effective procedures for appeal from the Courts might have limited executions, but these were not available from, sought of, or offered by the Council. A closer adherence by the Guernsey Court to the ancient proprieties concerning enquêtes probably would have had a similarly tempering effect in that island; and, in both islands, if the Courts had been less accessible than they clearly were, then that too might have limited prosecutions.73 Robin Briggs has usefully described a modern trend to finding ‘many reasons why’ in discussions of witchcraft.74 Whilst the worth of international comparisons and of the conclusions of distinguished scholars to any treatment of the Channel Islands’ witch trials and the patterns of prosecutions and executions they exhibit is not to be denied, the trials should be explained in their own terms, on the evidence. We may see through a glass, darkly, but we do have to look at the sources to see much at all. There is in the shadows something of a historically specific everyday, with its concerns about pestilence, vagrancy, tradition, justice and the social order, and more, illuminated, however faintly, by reference to the extraordinary.

Notes 1 I am grateful to the Master and Fellows of Peterhouse, Cambridge, for electing me to a Senior Research Associateship held in 2006, facilitating creation of this essay in highly congenial circumstances. The Société Jersiaise kindly supplied a Millennium Grant. It is a further pleasure to thank Harriet Allez, Anna Baghiani, Fru Jeune, Mari Jones, Linda Romeril, and Roman Roth. 2 W. Monter, ‘Toads and Eucharists: the male witches of Normandy, 1564–1660’, French Historical Studies 20 (1997), 563–95, quotation at 594.

188 Glimpses of the Obscure: The Witch Trials of the Channel Islands 3 H. Evans, ‘The Religious History of Jersey 1558–1640’ (Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 2001), 11–12, n. 39; D.M. Ogier, Reformation and Society in Guernsey (Woodbridge, 1996), 3, n. 1. 4 G.R. Balleine, ‘Witch trials in Jersey’, Société Jersiaise Bulletin Annuel 13 (1939), 179–398, esp. 381–3. Balleine relied upon transcriptions made from the Royal Court series Cattel by ‘Mlle Boisset’. These copies are now in the library of the Société Jersiaise, ref: ‘Folklore 1 Box General Item 1’. With a single exception, where I have consulted the original – see n. 22, below – I have followed Balleine and give references to Cattel volumes that Mlle Boisset made to the originals, now deposited with the Jersey Archive under ref. D/Y/E1. 5 S.C. Curtis, ‘Trials for witchcraft in Guernsey’, Transactions of La Société Guernesiaise 13 (1937), 109–43, esp. 135–41. These and the Jersey figures suggest statistics varying slightly from those presented in W. Monter, ‘Witchcraft in Geneva, 1537–1662’, Journal of Modern History 32:187, revised in ‘Toads and Eucharists’, 597, and in R. Muchembled (ed.), La Sorcière au village (xv–xviii siècle) (Paris, 1979), 124. Figures depend upon how a trial is defined (Balleine for example includes causes not progressing beyond indictment) and whether accusations associated with defamation are included. M. McGuinness, ‘The Guernsey witchcraft trials of 1617, the case of Collete Becquet’, Current Legal Issues 2 (1999), 624 calculates that 116 ‘public prosecutions’ took place between 1563–1650, of which forty-six resulted in execution, and forty-one in banishment. 6 G. Syvret (ed.), Chroniques, des îles de Jersey, Guernesey, Auregny et Serk, auquel on a ajouté un abrégé historique des dites Iles (Guernsey, 1832), 87; Cattel 7, fos 70v, 71v. 7 Greffe, Guernsey [hereafter ‘Greffe’], Jugements, vol. I, 374–5. 8 Monter, ‘Toads and Eucharists’, 595. See also B. Ankarloo, S. Clark and W. Monter, Witchcraft and Magic in Europe: The Period of the Witch Trials (2002), 9; B.P. Levack, The Witch-hunt in Early Modern Europe (3rd edn, Harlow, 2006), 87. 9 Monter, ‘Toads and Eucharists’, 595; A. Soman, ‘The Parlement of Paris and the great witch hunt (1565–1640)’, Sixteenth Century Journal 9 (1978), 29–44. 10 Monter, ‘Toads and Eucharists’, 594. 11 P. Le Geyt, Les Manuscrits de Philippe Le Geyt, Ecuyer, Lieutenant-Bailli de l’Ile de Jersey, sur la constitution, les lois, et les usages de cette île (4 vols, Jersey, 1846–47), vol. IV, 340. 12 Le Geyt, Manuscrits, vol. I, 252. 13 Le Geyt, Manuscrits, vol. I, 251. 14 G. Le Rouille, Le Grant Coustumier du pays et duche de Normandie tres utile et profitable a tous practiciens … (Paris, 1534), fo. 85v. 15 Cattel, 16, fo. 225r (24 Jan. 1626); 18, fo. 207r (30 May 1650). 16 Le Geyt, Manuscrits, vol. II, 103. 17 Cattel, 15, fo. 284v (8 Jun. 1609); 18, fo. 145v (24 May 1649). 18 Cattel, 18, fo. 207v (30 May 1650). 19 Cattel, 14, fo. 237v: ‘qu’elle baillera de garder sa maison sans tournoyer pour eviter aux scandalles qu’elle a donné a plussieurs de ses murmures et mescontentemens, de laquelle son filz Mathieu est devenu plege’. 20 Cattel, 15, fos 369v, 403r. 21 This was a ‘trick of removing the bundles of furze, that blocked the gates of the cotils, so that sheep might stray, a form of spite that appears in other trials of the period’, Balleine, ‘Witch Trials’, 388. 22 Cattel, 18, fo. 152v: ‘ugne vie lubricque, meschante et scandalleuse […] derechef enjoint à ladite Grandin de vivre en la crainte de Dieu et non mesdire ny

Darryl Ogier 189

23

24 25

26

27 28 29 30

31 32

33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

destracter ny mal parler de ses voysins ny mendier aucunement ny destouper les [altered from ‘ses’] coutilz sur peyne d’estre bannie hors de ceste isle, comme une personne meschante et inutille’. Cattel, 16, fo. 225v: ‘Collas Lamy, fils Laurens, detenu prisonnier sur l’acusation des officiers pour crime de sortilege […] a estey ledit Lamy trouvey deschargé de la dite acusation, et a raison que il a acaustumé de tournoyer par le païx qui le rend supsonnés et oysif que donner subjet au peuple de le supsonner’. Cattel, 14, fo. 252r: ‘soubz deffences expresses de ne plus tournoyer par l’ysle sur peine d’estre reputee attainte dudit cryme’. Cattel, 15, fo. 189r: ‘n’ont totallement chargé du crime de sortilege […] sont relaschees du chasteau avec commandement qu’ilz quelles [?] n’ayent a tournoyer par l’ysle ny par les maisons ny menacer ny detracter de personne, sur peine d’estre tenues pour coulpables dudit crime’. T. Le Marchant, Remarques et Animadversions, sur l’Approbation des Lois et Coustumier de Normandie usitées es jurisdictions de Guernezé et particulierement en la Cour Royale de la ditte isle, eds J. Guille and P. le Cocq (2 vols, Guernsey, 1826), vol. II, 219–20. Curtis, ‘Trials for Witchcraft’, 113. Curtis, ‘Trials for Witchcraft’, 136–7. Curtis, ‘Trials for Witchcraft’, 135–41. Greffe, Crime, vol. III, 227; vol. I, fos 9r–14r; vol. III, 14, 19. The Becquet trials were first published in J.L. Pitts, Witchcraft and Devil Lore in the Channel Islands: Transcripts from the official records of the Guernsey Royal Court, with an English translation and historical introduction (Guernsey, 1886), 9–21. Greffe, Crime, vol. III, 93. G. Terrien, Commentaires du Droict Civil tant public que privé, observé au pays et Duché de Normandie (Paris, 1574), 526: ‘il ne suffit que l’accusé soit convaincu par tesmoins, s’il ne confesse le faict de sa propre bouche, là où il est question du dernier supplice, ou de mutilation de membre: nisi factum aliter esset adeò notorium, ut nulla tergiversatione celari posset. Et pourtant en cause capitale, combien que la preuve soit pleinement faite, l’accusé doit estre mis en la torture, pour tirer la confession de sa bouche’. J. Poingdestre, Les Commentaires sur l’Ancienne Coutume de Normandie (Jersey, 1907), 34. TNA: C47/10/12, fo. 23r. Greffe, Crime, vol. II, fos 37r–40r. Le Marchant, Remarques, I, 22; II, 248–54; Greffe, Greffe collection no. 58 (Viscount Hatton’s treatise), 137. Le Marchant, Remarques, vol. I, 21–2. Curtis, ‘Trials for Witchcraft’, 137–8. Greffe, Crime, vol. III, 213, 214 (bis), 217, 218. Greffe, Crime, vol. III, 219. Greffe, Crime, vol. III, 226 (3 Oct. 1622), 227. H.M. Godfray and A. Messervy (eds), Ordres du Conseil et pièces analogues enregistrés à Jersey (Jersey, 1897), vol. I (1536–1678), 60–2. Godfray and Messervy, eds, Ordres du Conseil, I, 106–7. Le Geyt, Manuscrits, vol. IV, 341–3. P. Le Geyt, Privileges Loix et Coustumes de l’Isle de Jersey avec un essay pour des reglemens politiques (Jersey, 1953), 90; Terrien, Commentaires, 530. D. Ogier, The Government and Law of Guernsey (Guernsey, 2005), 59–60. See also Anon. (ed.), Reglemens des Commissaires Royaux, envoyés par S.M. le Roi Jacques I. L’Année 1607 (Guernsey, 1814), 70.

190 Glimpses of the Obscure: The Witch Trials of the Channel Islands 47 Le Marchant, Remarques, vol. II, 258. 48 Le Marchant, Remarques, vol. I, 22. 49 J. Sharpe, Instruments of Darkness: Witchcraft in England 1550–1750 (1996), 47; W. Notestein, A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 (Washington DC, 1911), 26–7. 50 A.J. Eagleston, The Channel Islands under Tudor Government 1485–1642: A Study in Administrative History, ed. J. Le Patourel (Cambridge, 1949), 160–1. 51 Ogier, Reformation and Society, 80; A. Glendinning, Eye on the Past Yearbook 1992 (Jersey, 1992), 24. 52 J.A. Messervy (ed.), Actes des Etats de l’Ile de Jersey 1524–1596 (Jersey, 1897), 43. 53 C[ambridge] U[niversity] L[ibrary], Dd.11.43, fo. 9r: ‘Ceux qui estans malades ou ayans gens malades ont recours aux sorciers et sorcieres ou personnes souspeçonnees de l’estre contre le commandement exprez du seigneur seront appellez au Consistoire pour estre censurez, et le Magistrat prié d’y mettre la main’. 54 CUL: Dd.11.43, fo. 10r: ‘Outreplus d’ordonner certaine punition aux sorciers ou personnes souspeçonnees de l’estre’. 55 Balleine, ‘Witch Trials’, 397. 56 Cattel, 12, fo. 283v: ‘tant vers les personnes que vers leurs biens, en infectant les uns et guarissant les aultrez’. 57 Cattel, 12, fo. 284v: ‘ha confessé d’avoir conctraté et faict alliance avec le diable et par son moyen perpetré infinys crimes et homicides’. 58 Cattel, 12, fo. 285r: ‘ledit Jean Morant ha de sa propre bouche confessé son accointance avec le diable par marché et promesse confermée soubz gage et don de l’ung de ses membres, soubz l’aveu et conduite duquel havoit commys infinyes troubles, crimes, et homicides’. 59 CUL: Dd.11.43, fo. 67v: ‘Ceux qui estans malades ou ayans gens malades ont recours aux sorciers ou personnes souspeçonnees de l’estre seront excommuniez publiquement de la Cene et n’y seront point receus qu’ils n’ayent faict recognoissance publique’. 60 Balleine, ‘Witch Trials’, 390. 61 Cattel, 14, fo. 6v. 62 Balleine, ‘Witch Trials’, 381. 63 W. Monter, Witchcraft in France and Switzerland: The Borderlands During the Reformation (Ithaca, 1976), 47. 64 P. Heylyn, A Full Relation of Two Journeys: The One Into the Main-Land of France, the Other Into some of the adjacent Ilands (1656), 297. 65 Curtis, ‘Trials for Witchcraft’, 136–7. 66 Greffe, Jugements, vol. II, fos 287r–287v, cited by H. Allez, ‘Confessions of a dangerous kind: the forces which shaped the accusations, form and outcome of the 1617 witch-trial of Collette Du Mont’ (Unpublished B.A. Dissertation, London School of Economics, 2004), 6. It is to be hoped that these conclusions will be published. 67 Greffe, Crime, vol. III, fos 418r–426r; IV, 1–2; Curtis, ‘Trials for Witchcraft’, 139–40 muddles dates. 68 Island Archives, Guernsey: Historical Documents, vol. XI, fos 212, 228, 239; Actes des États de l’Île de Guernesey 1605 à 1651 (ed. anon., Guernsey, n.d.), 161–2. 69 Greffe, Jugements, vol. III, fo. 5v. 70 Greffe, Crime, vol. IV, 272. 71 F.B. Tupper, The History of Guernsey and its Bailiwick; with Occasional Notices of Jersey (2nd edn, Guernsey, 1876), 260. 72 E.g. Ogier, Reformation and Society, 94–177; P. Le Geyt, ‘Essay pour des Reglemens Politiques’, in eadem, Privileges, 94–108.

Darryl Ogier 191 73 William Trumbull noted 540 causes current before the Cattel division of Jersey’s Royal Court in 1677 and that Guernsey’s Court was not much less busy than Jersey’s: J. Stevens, J. Arthur and C. Stevens (eds), The Channel Islands Journals of Charles and William Trumbull 1677 (Jersey, 2004), 68, 124; my impressions are that this was typical of the earlier period also. 74 R. Briggs, ‘“Many reasons why”: witchcraft and the problem of multiple explanation’, in J. Barry, M. Hester and G. Roberts (eds), Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe: Studies in Culture and Belief (Cambridge, 1996), 49–63, 63 et passim.

11 The Extraordinary Case of the Blood-Drinking and Flesh-Eating Cavaliers1 Angela McShane

In May 1650, A Perfect Diurnall of Some Passages and Proceedings of Parliament and in Relation to the Armies in England and Ireland reported that ‘very lately […] at Milton in Barkeshire’ a ‘company of [5] Royalists at an alehouse, being drunke, they out of zeale of affection to their King at Bredagh, would drink his health in blood, and to effect this, unanimously agreed to cut a peece of their Buttocks, and fry their flesh that was cut off on a grid-iron’. The group were discovered when one man’s ‘excessive bleeding’ forced his companions to call a surgeon. In turn, this alerted another man’s wife who lived nearby. She burst into the room and ‘laid about her’ with a pair of tongs ‘so sav[ing] her husband cutting of his flesh’. The ensuing commotion drew the attention of the authorities. The men were questioned by the Governor of Wallingford, Major Arthur Evelyn, and were bound over to appear before the next Quarter Sessions.2 Little further information about the case remains. Although the reporter anticipated a hearing before the Berkshire sessions, records do not survive for this period, and no clear reference to the case has been found elsewhere. The village of Milton was situated on the road between Wallingford and Wantage. It had one major inn near the church, known in the lateseventeenth century as ‘The Dogg’.3 During and after the civil war, local loyalties ranged from ardent Anglican royalism to Presbyterian and sectarian radicalism. Nevertheless, the county was a royalist stronghold until 1646, when, after a long siege ending in the surrender of the castle to General Fairfax, Major Arthur Evelyn was appointed Governor of Wallingford. After that time, the castle was used to confine dissidents and concerns about a royalist resurgence in the area were high.4 In what follows, the cultural contexts in which this remarkable episode in Milton took place, and from which contemporary behaviours and their meanings were inevitably constructed, will be explored. We will see how such events, rather than simply appealing to our taste for the bizarre and spectacular, can illuminate something of the everyday experience of royalists in interregnum England. On one hand, multiple imaginary readings of 192

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the report drawn from the very real discourses and milieu of 1650s England will be examined, offering a broad range of perspectives from which contemporary readers of opposing political and religious stances might have received the piece. On the other hand, it will be argued that these unusual drunken antics might also be read as an attempt to enact a secular sacrament, expressing and strengthening a loving bond with the absent King, and as a means to heal and strengthen the blood of the dismembered ‘body politic’: reflecting, more broadly, a politicisation of drinking, developing from the mid-seventeenth century that was to have far reaching consequences, perhaps even to our own day.5

Reading sensations Joy Wiltenburg has argued that, by the seventeenth century, ‘sensationalist’ accounts [of crime] had become ‘cultural agents’, with an ‘ability to mould common responses to extreme violations of social norms’ and can be an important source for historians of popular culture.6 Such accounts, she points out, worked by fostering shared emotional responses of repugnance and horror through a range of literary strategies. However, even though cultural vocabularies (such as the languages of social distinction; biblical stories and allegories; classical mythology and exemplars; emblems and visual tropes), were widely shared, or appropriated, in 1640s and 50s England, responses to sensational stories, and the way in which readers applied them to lived experience, could be hotly contested in accordance with political, religious and social divisions.7 A Perfect Diurnall was an officially sanctioned parliamentary news-serial that ran from 1640 to 1655.8 Edited, for the most part, by Samuel Pecke, it was no simple propaganda tool.9 As Jason Peacey has shown, editors and writers, even of government-sponsored news-pamphlets, frequently promoted their own views by judiciously selecting, juxtaposing, editing and commenting on news stories.10 This was perhaps especially true in 1650 when that master of collection and juxtapositioning, John Rushworth, oversaw the production of A Perfect Diurnall.11 The Milton story was positioned alongside various more and less sensational home reports, mostly dealing with concerns over ‘dangerous persons to the Commonwealth’ in the wake of the ‘Act against Papists, Soldiers of Fortune and Cavaliers’, which, one report recorded, had been read for the second time at court sessions all over the country.12 Remarkably, neither the (anonymous) author of the ‘letter from Berkeshire’, nor the editor, offered any further gloss on the story. Though certainly a disreputable tale, the events were left to speak for themselves to a broad readership that almost certainly reached across the political and religious spectrum, from Anglican royalists to Fifth Monarchy men. The number of news-pamphlets began to drop under the republic but access to printed information about events as they unfolded, whatever its

194 The Extraordinary Case of the Blood-Drinking and Flesh-Eating Cavaliers

provenance, had become an essential requirement.13 How might this widely differing readership have interpreted this strange occurrence? My own readers might want to suggest that the (possibly fictional) antics of drunken men are hardly worth analysing. But, as Phil Withington has recently pointed out, it is only by studying the ‘interpersonal dynamics of drinking’ that ‘questions relating to the practices, rituals and attitudes surrounding the consumption and meaning of drink’ can be investigated.14 Contemporaries certainly considered stories of drunken behaviour worth reporting and a serious enough matter for the authorities to enquire into more deeply. Excessive drinkers were occasionally able to persuade magistrates that being ‘in their cups’ had lead to uncharacteristic behaviour – a ‘want of due se[v]eritie’ complained of by divines – but, at this time of heightened superstition and fear, such reports were regarded in an altogether more sinister light.15 In the aftermath of war and regicide, the company that ‘disaffected’ men kept needed to be monitored and, where possible, controlled. A Perfect Diurnall reported that cavaliers in Exeter had been divested of their weapons and persuaded to swear to a ‘negative engagement not to act anything prejudiciall’.16 Nevertheless, the social behaviours of such men still required careful surveillance. Although healthing was a customary practice, during the civil war years it had become ever more violent and politically divisive, increasingly involving gestures, prayers and curses, rituals and speech-acts that, unchecked, could lead to serious consequences.17 Sermons, old, new, or in revised editions, published during the war years, warned that men in drink were ‘unmasqued’. The prolific pamphleteer Richard Younge (alias ‘Junius Florilegus’) reminding his readers of Plato’s aphorism, ‘wine […] is the daughter of Verity’, advised that drunkenness ‘discovers the secrets of the heart’ and ‘disapparels the soule.’18 For those who held to this philosophy, the activities of drunken cavaliers inadvertently exposed both their own true calibre and that of their cause. With so little corollary evidence, we cannot easily examine the contingent nature of the events the report described. We can, however, look more laterally at the cultural and conceptual frameworks within which the subjects, writers and readers of the report operated. Taverns and alehouses could be both literary spaces and arenas for cultural discourse.19 Younge likened the tavern to a private library, with pots and glasses instead of books ranked on the shelves, in which ‘they will one with a coale, another with a candle, fill al the wals and seelings with Epithalmiums, Elegies, and Epitaphs’. The common tendency of even poorly educated men in company, ‘the veriest lack-latins’, was to perform, compose and discuss poems, songs and other literary forms, effectively disseminating literary knowledge and its implications as exemplar. As Younge pointed out, ‘all is spoken in print that is spoken by [drunkards], though their phrase (the apparel of their speech) hath a rash outside, and fustian linings’.20 It was in just this kind of drink-sodden environment that

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classical, biblical and literary knowledge was most likely to influence people’s behaviour directly. It would be no big step from reciting, composing and inscribing to enacting literary ideas, and we might reasonably surmise that whatever the (clouded) thinking behind this extraordinary case of rumpslashing and blood-drinking, it was likely to have been at least partly inspired by literary models.

Extraordinary readings We can approach the Milton story by turning to some of the more lurid interpretations that may immediately have suggested themselves to Diurnall readers. A thirst for blood was a familiar image in sensationalist literature. It was a characteristic attributed variously to anthropomorphised weapons, papists, rebels, conspirators and other devilish, vengeful villains. Alternatively, heroic, passionate figures might be drawn into blood-lust by the horror of a great injustice, or despair. During the war years, parliamentarian and royalist writers increasingly hurled accusations of outrageous bloodthirstiness at each other. Indeed, the King himself was dubbed a ‘man of blood’, an epithet that played a vital role in the charges brought against him at his trial.21 Readers antagonistic to the royalist cause may have discerned in the Milton story a coven of male witches, imbibing blood as part of a charm that would work in the uncrowned Prince Charles’s favour (styled the ‘King of Bredagh’ in the report), as his struggle continued in Ireland. The cutting of flesh from the buttock could be read as the inversionary act of the witch or demon, while the necessary dropping of breeches it entailed implied potentially sodomitic practices.22 Presbyterian schoolmaster and clergyman, Thomas Hall, declaimed that drunkards and health-drinkers were blasphemous ‘Black Devils’ and ‘observers of superstitious and heathenish customes’, while Richard Younge argued that the drunkard was particularly susceptible to the devils demands: he was ‘demonaicall; obsessed , or rather possessed with a Devill […] of his own choosing […] Yea [drunkards] may most fitly be compared to the Devil himselfe; whome they most of all resemble’. Imagining a company of drunkards as a group of necromancers, Younge described how by, making the Alehouse or taverne their study; their circle the pot, themselves the conjurer, mens soules the hire, reputation of good fellowship the charme, the characters healths, the Goblin raised is the spirit of the buttery; and [they] drink God out of their heart, health out of their bodies, wit out of their heads. He also pointed out that ‘health drinking upon their knees was first invented and used as the Devils drink-offering […] which the Pagan idolaters, sorcerers and witches consecrated and gave to Beelzebub […] as Basil and Augustine affirme.’23

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An alternative interpretive model is suggested in non-conformist clergyman John Geree’s 1648 pamphlet, written ‘for the satisfaction and […] direction of a godly Parliament-Man’. Describing health drinking as ‘in genere malorum – a work of darkness’, he argued that drinking healths to the monarch was tantamount to the idolatrous worship ‘the Papists perform to deceased saints’.24 For many in civil-war England, ‘papist’ and ‘cavalier’ were synonymous terms, a viewpoint further supported by a growing royalist martyrology (culminating with the death of the King), which tended to focus on well-known gentlemen-at-arms, many of whom were Catholic.25 Bloodthirsty (though not blood-drinking) papists had been luridly described in the pamphlet press, most recently during the Irish rebellion. Blood was thought to carry with it the vital spirits and the soul, so that, by drinking the blood of Protestants, papists could capture their souls. This idea was publicised in 1617: ‘[The Pope] thirsteth after blood […] He thirsteth after our soules, which if he carry along with him into hell, we may not safely question him, Pope why dost thou this?’26 Based on these literary possibilities, readers could interpret the healthdrinking in Milton as a ‘horrid blasphemy’ committed by a devilish crew of Catholic cavaliers, presumably using their own flesh and blood to replicate that of Christ in a parody of the mass. This would indeed have been an extraordinary and supremely blasphemous act. But, these interpretations are problematic on several counts. In the first place, while letting and drinking blood, and possibly cooking or consuming flesh, in the context of a lewd, hedonistic entertainment was typical of the witch’s modus operandi, the sabbat was not intrinsic to accusations of witchcraft in England as it was in Europe.27 Moreover, if the writer or editor had wished to impute witchcraft as a reason for the outrage, they could easily have said so, especially as a report of a witch taken in Monmouth appears just a few lines further on. The two stories are separated in the text, however, by anxieties about ‘high flowne cavaliers’ and the preservation of general order and peace by the ‘eminency in the county’.28 This places the Milton story in the domain of practical concerns about disbanded and disaffected cavaliers, rather than fears about witchcraft and demonic powers. Secondly, blasphemy of word or deed was prosecuted with increasing fervour by puritan officials, attracting very large fines for those who swore volubly and, after the 1650 Blasphemy Act, a sentence of at least six months imprisonment.29 Such an outrageous blasphemy as the subversion of the sacrament, representing a direct threat to the well-being of the community, would surely have provoked at least summary imprisonment? But these men appear only to have been bound over to face charges at a later date. Moreover, on the limited evidence we have, they appear to have been respectable men. They had sufficient standing to be given access to an unattended private room in the tavern; at least one was married; and when another found himself in difficulties they were able to call for an expensive surgeon. Such

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men are surely unlikely to have perjured their souls to such an extreme extent, however drunk they were. Lastly, it must be in doubt that these men were thought to be papists. Letting a room to a group of known papists would have put the landlord’s licence seriously at risk. The report refers to them as ‘royallists’ rather than cavaliers, while the ingesting of their own blood and spirits did not signify a papist appropriation of unsuspecting Protestant souls. On the contrary, as Edward Leigh’s Annotations upon all the New Testament (1650) pointed out, ‘To give a man blood to drink is to kill him, as Tomyris of old said to King Cyrus.’ Queen Elizabeth I had ‘effectually accomplisht’ the role of the Angel in Revelations because she had ‘made the [Jesuits and] Priest[s] to undergoe a bloody death, to drink blood, and also made all that received and entertained them to drink blood too’.30 Readers sympathetic to the Royalist cause could draw upon an alternative range of blood-drinking and flesh-eating motifs, allowing them to interpret the Milton story, in some sense positively, as a ritual pact between vengeful conspirators. Texts of vengeance depended upon the taste of blood and flesh to enhance their visceral horror. One well-known tale of vengeance, so popular it was often printed as a ballad story, was Titus Andronicus, where, in revenge for the loss and murder of his sons and rape of his daughter, Titus feeds the scheming Empress of Rome a pie made of the flesh and blood of her own guilty sons.31 Increasingly during the war, royalist literature appropriated and reiterated the biblical axiom ‘blood cries out for blood’, accusing parliamentarian rebels of devillish bloodthirstiness, and threatening them with like reward.32 These incriminations became almost hysterical in response to the deaths of royalist martyrs, Charles Lucas and George Lisle in 1648 and, from 1649, the King himself. In 1648, The Parliament Porter, describing the ‘sceane of blood and horror’ at the siege of Colchester, concluded: ‘Goe on in blood fell monsters, tread on Kings,/Yet know that vengeance hastes on Eagles Wings’.33 An Elegie on the Death of […] Sir Charles Lucas charged the rebels with being ‘mighty monsters, who outvie/ The strange man-eating Anthopophogi’; they had ‘suckt Bourchers blood’ and ‘this seven yeares, whilst none controules,/ Have quaft our purple Blood in mazor Bowles’.34 The image of drinking blood from mazors – traditional, domestic wooden vessels – implying the uncivilised poverty of Scots, Presbyterians and Puritans, and the sacrilegious use of non-precious vessels from which to drink sacred blood, was repeated in The Parliament Porter.35 In 1649, Mercurius Pragmaticus described the ‘Royall-sacred bloud of Kings’, as ‘milk for babes of Grace’ which ‘Weighes heavie when ’tis spilt/ and loudly at Heav’n gate, it rings/To scourge rebellious guilt.’36 And a mock litany prayed of the ‘Juncto’ [parliament]: ‘May the blood they have shed,/and their King murdered,/aloud for vengeance cry:/til the Heavens do send,/some plague for their end,/that have destroyed monarchy.’37

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Royalist clergyman Francis Quarles inadvertently provided a model of the ‘Revengeful Man’ in his 1646 collection of Meditations, soliloquies, and prayers. His spirit inspired by the voracious and inexorable eagle, his soul damned with the passions of hatred and injured honour, the man filled with desire for vengeance finds his only comfort in ingesting the blood of his enemy: O What a Julip to my scorching soule is the delicious blood of my Offender! and how it cooles the burning Fever of my boyling veynes! It is the Quintessenee of pleasures, the height of satisfaction, and the very marrow of all delight, to bath and paddle in the blood of such, whose bold affronts have turn’d my wounded patience into fury? […] My Eagle spirit flies […] and like ambitious Phaeton climbes into the fiery Chariot, and drawne with fury, scorne, revenge, and honor, rambles through all the Spheares, and brings with it confusion and combustion; my reeking sword shall vindicate my reputation, and rectifie the injuries of my honorable name, and quench it selfe in plenteous streames of blood. […] My conscience is blood-proofe, and I can broach a life with my illustrious weapon with as little reluctation, as kill a Flea that sucks my blood without Commission, and I can drinke a health in blood upon my bended knee, to reputation.38 The archetype of bloodthirsty rebellion, the history of Cataline’s conspiracy, was known to every grammar-school boy in the kingdom. Ben Jonson’s treatment of the tale dramatically illustrated the horrific, blasphemous, blood-drinking ritual with which the conspiracy was ushered in: Bring in the wine and bloud You have prepared there […] I have kill’d a slave, And of his bloud caused to be mixed with wine. Fill every man his bowl. There cannot be A fitter drink, to make this sanction in. Here, I begin the sacrament to all. The effect of this blood-drinking was at once symbolic, physical and psychological. On one hand creating a guilty bond between the conspirators and on the other, as Cataline declaims, the ingestion of the slave’s blood poured ‘Fierceness into me, and with it fell thirst/ Of more and more’.39 In 1648 and 1649 royalist texts likened the parliamentary cause to Cataline’s conspiracy.40 The Famous Tragedie of Charles I (1649), a bitter play pamphlet, told the story of the Royalist demise. In Act I Cromwell and Hugh Peters plan the death of the King. In Act II the executions of Lucas and Lisle at the end of the siege of Colchester are portrayed as a betrayal so shocking it leads to the

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conversion of a parliamentarian soldier. He, in Act IV, murders Colonel Rainsborough in direct blood vengeance. In Act II, as the besieged royalists watch in vain for relief to arrive, and await the parliamentarian onslaught, George Lisle prepares a loyal health (in sherry) for all those about to make their last stand. He reminds his men of the classical precedents for feasting in the face of the enemy, so raising them culturally above their enemies, usually represented as antagonistic towards ‘civilised’ education derived from ‘pagan’ texts. Lisle taunts the army outside the gates: ‘[they] should participate of our flowing cups would they but take the paines to come amongst us, such as the Roman Cataline did provide for those he had drawn into his confederacy, wine mixt with bloud (an horrid sacrament)’.41 Literary representations of blood-drinking and flesh-eating, motivated by the desire to wreak violent revenge, may perhaps have influenced royalist readings or, indeed, served as models for the Milton cavaliers. Stories of siege warfare had particular resonance for the residents of Milton. The King visited Wallingford Castle several times during the war, and the Wallingford siege was a long drawn out affair – lasting sixteen weeks – although, unlike Colchester, it ended with honour unimpaired, on both sides.42 Royalists, rendered inactive by defeat; perhaps under threat of sequestration; under surveillance by their communities (and their wives); and forced to incorporate new and detested forms of government, taxation and manners into their lives, might well have been moved by a sense of injustice and dishonour to the making of a desperate and disreputable pact, appropriating the bloody rituals of rebels in a conspiracy against the new state. However, as with the parliamentarian readings discussed above, none of these sensationalist models completely fit the facts because they all necessitated cutting and ingesting the flesh and vital spirits of others, rather than one’s own.

Ordinary readings An alternative approach is suggested by cultural theorist Ben Highmore’s analysis of Sherlock Holmes’s methods and motivations. Holmes, Highmore points out, is terrified by the mundane, and turns to the intoxicating effects of cocaine for relief. However, when some bizarre and puzzling events are brought to his attention – through the small ads in the newspaper, or an unexpected call at the door – it is precisely Holmes’ acute observation of the dull, repetitive course of the everyday that enables him to unravel the extraordinary mystery.43 What might we learn by drawing out the more ordinary elements in the Milton story? Here, a group of men, who once had something better to do, meet in a typical rural tavern: they talk politics, get drunk, and challenge each other to ritual acts of bravado.44 These were relatively ordinary men, not poor, but not rich either: none are named in the account, suggesting that none had a name worth mentioning. Surrounded by an equally ordinary materiality, their

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private room had a fireplace, gridiron and tongs, allowing them to stir up the fire, warm drinks, or cook. Younge described just such a typical tavern scene, set up to cope with heavy drinking, as ‘a large roome, ranked ful of Pots, Cannes, Glasses, Tobacco Pipes, rashers on the coales, red herrings, a gammon of bacon, caveare, Anchovies, […] together with a Jordane for their urine on the one side and a boule for their vomit on the other’.45 The men would have carried knives, to eat with, and, possibly, fashionable arms, such as daggers. Even the account of being disturbed by a firetong-wielding wife was not an uncommon occurrence, although its inclusion in this tale may have been intended to augment the humiliation and impugn the masculinity of the men concerned.46 The popularity and ubiquity of what were termed the ‘Lawes and Ceremonies to be observed’ of drinking are also reflected in the story.47 Largely inspired by classical models, the upsurge of wine-drinking, healthing, and drunkenness in early modern England had already caused much consternation amongst divines and worthies, sparking a range of sermons and moralising texts.48 These uniformly related changes in drinking practices since the late-sixteenth century: lamenting, ‘Heretofore it was a strange sight to see a drunken man, now it is no newes; heretofore it was the sinne of Tinkers, Hostlers, Beggars, &c now of farmers, [Citizens] Esquires, knights, &c’; ‘Heretofore wine was only sold in Apothecaries shops, and drunk rather in time of sickness then in health: now its vented in Tavernes, as if it grew in the Thames’.49 If, as is likely, the Milton healthers were ex-soldiers (Berkshire experienced several sieges and the battle of Newbury), we could attribute their behaviour to the natural effects of militarisation.50 The Famous Tragedie reflected how loyal health drinking had changed during the civil war, becoming imbued with new significations. In contrast to the Cataline aberration, Lisle appropriates the sacramental ritual as a means of creating a bond of love, rather than fear, between those engaged in arms for the King. Lifting the spirits, and acting as a spur to courage, healthing was accompanied by singing, not of sacred music, but of loyal drinking songs of the kind that were issued on single sheets, or in royalist miscellanies.51 At the same time, it was hoped that performing their loyal drinking rituals in full view of the besieging army ‘will mad the rebels’. In this, royalists achieved their end. One letter, sent to the House by a parliamentarian commander at Colchester, claimed ‘Our Purdues lie so near the enemy, as to hear them discourse [and] drink Healths.’52 Moreover, royalist drinking was maddening enough to attract the derision of the Parliamentarian press. In 1648 Mercurius Britanicus Alive Again advised cavaliers thinking of restarting the war ‘to eschew all those inconveniencies and timely contain yourselves at your Clubs, and there under the Rose vent all your set forms of execrations against the Parliament and Army […] like Persians consult in your drink of your great affairs and speak of such attempts in cold

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blood, next morning you would dread to think on […] six beer glasses of Sacke brings the King and all his Progeny unto you’.53 Our extraordinary case might, then, have been a fairly ordinary act of royalist militarymachismo, a defiant statement about their continued identity as the King’s soldiers.54 But, this neither completely explains their healthing in blood, nor, more especially, the cooking of their flesh. Blood-letting was a common experience in seventeenth-century England. One treatise on the subject warned against the ‘wilfull temeritie and rashnesse of some ignorant people, which for every small impediment have recourse presently to letting of bloud […] and do urge forward the Chirugian and euen greedily draw upon themselves […] manifold inconueniences’. Where you let the blood from, why and what you did with it were all significant.55 These men chose to bleed from their buttocks, which had no particular medical significance (though one text recommended bleeding from ‘the haemmorroids’).56 On the other hand, a wound on the buttock would be less easily remarked upon, while the backside was a favoured area for joking and swearing. Perhaps this was an early example of satirising the purged, Long Parliament, described as ‘the Rump’ by Clement Walker in 1649 (though not generally used as a term of abuse before 1659), while jokes about ‘Crumwell’ and the Saints ‘loving a Bum-well’ were in circulation even earlier.57 The location for their incisions may simply have been dictated by the desire to furnish their ritual with blood to drink and flesh to cook. Military men would have been only too familiar with the range of wounds that could be inflicted safely on the body. If they could avoid infection, cutting the buttock should have provided blood and flesh, while inflicting only a minor lesion. ‘Bad’ blood, drawn for medical reasons, was carefully discarded, but healthdrinking in ‘good’ blood may not have been uncommon, despite flying in the face of religio-scientific opinion: as expressed in 1616 by William Harvey that ‘the soul is in the blood’; or in Hobbes’s 1651 translation of Deuteronomy 12:23: ‘Eat not the blood, for the blood is the soul, that is, the life’.58 Heated pamphlet debate over the use of animal blood in cooking drew on the same fears and beliefs.59 Nevertheless, in 1621, Robert Burton decried the behaviour of young gallants in the throes of love, ‘for it is an ordinary thing for these enamoratos of our times […] to stab their arms [and] carouse in blood’.60 Bernard Capp relates a 1650s episode, in which a young man cut the flesh above his heart in order to drink a health in blood to his love.61 And, in 1661, Presbyterian divine Thomas Hall reminded his readers of the ‘extreme practices’ of ‘fanatic and frantick’ men of ‘extreme opinions’: ‘they rant they roar, they sing, they swear, they drink they dance, they whore they lye, they scoff, yea some there are (I hope not many) that put their own blood into their drink, and then drink a health to the King and to the confusion of Sion and its King’. This ‘horrid […] blasphemy’, reported to him, Hall states, ‘by persons of good repute’, may have derived from the report on Milton.62

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Drinking blood mixed with wine, then, was commonly linked to the heated passions of love. Burton described love of country and friendship amongst men as ‘a sacred communion’ and quoted Plato’s saying that, only lovers ‘will dye for their friends, and in their Mistris quarrel’.63 As the Perfect Diurnall had reported, the Milton royalists’ extravagant demonstrations of self-sacrificial loyalty were inspired by the ‘zeal of their affection for their King’. Charles I’s own discourses, and fate, suggested a porous boundary between the King’s body and that of his subjects, within and between members of the body politic. In a speech at Oxford, he declaimed: ‘I bleed in your wounds […] give me your hearts and preserve your own bloods. The heart of the Prince is kept warme with the blood of his subjects’.64 As Jerome de Groot has argued, combined with the metaphor of the King as the heart of the nation, ‘the influence of blood on the body [was rendered] more pervasive, invasive and inclusive than the standard hierarchical structures deployed by political theorists’, leading to the royalist male body being ‘celebrated [in elegies] as part of a loyalist corporate whole’.65 Royalism depended upon a loyalty based primarily on the passion of love, rather than the less reliable motivation of man’s inevitably flawed reason. Indeed, the effect of reason without love was ‘crazy brained’ rebellion and republicanism. Drinking could temper and release the bonds of reason and allow the flow of natural affection the loyal subject should feel.66 This philosophy required moderation, however, and even well-intentioned drinking could easily lead to the opposite effects of those desired. As Burton pointed out, ‘Love and Bacchus are violent Gods, [they] so furiously rage in our minds; that they make us forget all honesty, shame and common civility’.67 Even royalist publications, aiming to galvanise disheartened cavaliers with the hope that the King’s cause could still be won, expressed exasperation with the despondent, dissolute drinking that brought the Kings cause into disrepute. In a sermon originally preached before the King at Oxford, army chaplain William Chillingworth thundered against: they that maintain the King’s Righteous Cause with the hazard of their Lives and Fortunes; but by their oathes and curses, by their drunkenness and debauchery, by their irreligion and prophaneness, fight more powerfully against their partie, then by all other meanes they doe or can fight for it; […] that strict caution which properly concerns themselves in the Book of Deut 23.9 […] When thou goest to Wars with thine Enemies, then take heed there be no wicked thing in thee; not only no wickedness in the Cause thou maintainest, nor no wickedness in the means by which thou maintainest it; but no Personal Impieties in the Persons that maintain it […] I cannot but feare that the goodnesse of our cause may sinke under the burthen of our sinnes.68 The Famous Tragedie also reflected this concern. As the Colchester soldiers drink their loyal healths, Lisle warns them of the need to avoid excess, but

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acknowledges that, at such a time, his words carried too much ‘sage to palliate the drink’. Captains were only too aware that, instead of acting as a spur to action, drinking could render men incapable or uncontrollable. Worse, it could become a displacement activity. In 1649, Mercurius Pragmaticus castigated ‘Cavalier Babies, whose ambition it is to set at home and pick their fingers and drinke healthes in the behalfe of his Majesty. Is this a time to compound my masters?’69

Melancholy and the everyday experience of defeat Why did ardent royalists turn so resolutely to drink and drunken rout? These were not young men who had rejected the idea of achieving patriarchal status.70 These were respectable men who had been, and still were, willing to sacrifice everything for their King. The issues at stake were enormous. What would make them ignore the overwhelming imperatives of shame and reputation, bringing upon themselves and their cause castigations of cowardice and vice, even from their own side? Royalists did not just indulge in the occasional bout of drunkenness: they embraced the vice as a badge of identity. They revelled in and made a virtue of it. What virtue could be found in what was universally acknowledged as sinful behaviour? Here we return to Sherlock Holmes, and his desperate relationship with the ‘post-enlightenment plague’ of ‘boredom’. While cultural theorists consider repetition as fundamental to understanding the everyday experience of ‘modernity’, historians more often characterise early modern life, especially in the civil war and interregnum period, as a dynamic struggle in which ordinary people were consciously engaged. Sources dictate that times when nothing out of the ordinary was happening and life went on in an undisturbed and unremarkable way are not easy to find. Perhaps the instability and unpredictability of early modern life tended to militate against the possibility of boredom, as Robert Musil suggested, ‘In earlier times […] people were like stalks of grain […] moved back and forth more violently by God, hail fire, pestilence and war than today’.71 The popularity and ubiquity of texts on the pre-enlightenment scourge of ‘melancholy’ invites us to think again, however.72 The best-known contemporary study is Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, revised and reprinted five times between 1621 and 1638, and (posthumously) twice more in the 1650s. Additionally, in 1640, Jacques Ferrand’s 1623 treatise on ‘love melancholy’, translated and prefaced by a garland of poetic tributes from scholars, was printed in Oxford. The debilitating feelings of fear and sorrow that characterised ‘melancholy’, Burton argued, were caused by a combination of mundane idleness and disappointed love: elements fundamental to the social and literary practices of cavaliers at home and in exile.73 Melancholy increasingly occurred as a theme in literary works over the seventeenth century, and its dangers were highlighted through the ‘frequent employment [of] metaphorical language mapping external macrocosmic conflict onto the internal

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microcosm – passions were “seditions”, [and] the cause of “Civil Dissension” in the soul’.74 Indeed, Ferrand asserted that ‘the diverse and violent peturbations of love-melancholy which afflict the mind of a passionate lover [deprived of a loved one] are the causes of greater mischiefs than any other passion of the mind whatsoever’.75 Melancholic diseases, brought about by the disappointment of royalist affections, not only threatened the mental health of individuals, they endangered the well-being of the whole body politic. While it would be anachronistic to elide modern ‘boredom’ with the early modern condition of melancholy, the insights of scholars into boredom, and what Julia Kristeva termed ‘abjection’, offer some useful phenomenological and psychological models against which to read the extraordinary behaviour of our cavaliers, and others like them. Describing boredom as symptomatic of a disenchanted individual for whom ‘a sceptical distance from the certainties of faith, tradition [and] sensation renders the immediacy of quotidian meaning hollow or inaccessible’; ‘nothing means, nothing pleases, nothing matters’; Elizabeth Goodstein also points out that, ‘Boredom […] is a defence. A refusal to feel that protects a self, threatened by its own fear or desire or need for what it seems to eschew. A means of stabilizing subjective existence, without confronting the gaps between imagination and reality, that render defence against feeling necessary.’76 Similarly, Kristeva characterises abjection as ‘one of those violent dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable’. Abjection, she posits, is caused by a disturbance in ‘identity, system [and] order [that] does not respect borders, positions, rules’.77 The early 1650s witnessed fundamental changes in local and national government and in the policing of morals, manners and the household economy. All these changes had to be newly incorporated into the contexts of the ‘everyday’. For royalists, previously engaged in the intense life or death struggle to defend the monarchy, the new work-a-day situations those adjustments created brought with them the ‘melancholy’ of the defeated, disillusioned, displaced, confused, bereaved and love-sick. De Groot argues that the Kings execution led to ‘a crisis of representation and a wounding that could not be sutured’ or located ‘within a recognisable narrative’: the ‘illusory guarantee of signification collapsed’.78 Not only did cavalier actions ‘speak’ loudly of these feelings of alienation, they were given articulation in the poems, plays, songs and stories, circulated via manuscript, print and word of mouth, that helped to maintain the identity and coherence of the royalist cause during and after the civil war.79 At the same time, royalist drinking was both caused by, and a cause of, social and political isolation. Younge described the ‘company keeper’ as ‘the barrenest piece of earth in all the Orb: the Common-wealth hath no […] use of him […] he hath not so much as a voice in the common-

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wealth’.80 The unaccustomed lack of a voice and standing in their communities undoubtedly drove many royalists deliberately to drink beyond acceptable norms, set by a society which they could not acknowledge, and refused to take part in.81 Perhaps drunkenness provided a temporary escape from the everyday drudgery of defeat, or the exhausting replaying of hopes and plans for a royalist recovery. But, as Edward Muir has pointed out, ‘what rituals do is not so much mean as emote’.82 Cavaliers, disillusioned with monarchy, and alienated from the Commonwealth, needed to renew their sense of identity, and re-engage emotionally both with each other, and an imagined State to come. Healthing rituals expressly sought to inspire the virtuous passions of love and fortitude, and to inhibit cowardice, tedium and melancholy. They also provided important tests of inclusion, so successful that they were incorporated into an unofficial state policy after the Restoration.83 The most common remedy for melancholy, recommended by medical authorities, was the ingestion of wine. Burton commented: ‘I do not find a more precise remedy, then a cup of wine or strong drink […] it takes away fear and sorrow [and] he that can keep company and carouse, needs no other medicines.’84 Some writers even suggested drinking to the point of extreme drunkennes, to distract the sufferer from their sorrows. Medical and religious texts claimed a close connection between the ‘heart’s blood’ and the ‘blood of the grape’; one sermon declared that ‘Wine is the blood of the earth’; others pointed out that their medical properties were also entwined.85 A pamphlet entitled The Blood of the Grape, addressed to his ‘inthrauled Country’, explained that ‘the liquid part diffused in the substances of the Plants themselves, which as their blood conserveth life in them […] the Blood of the Grape […] as it appeareth to be blood, in it is life’. Claiming that wine could restore both life and health, the pamphleteer declared that it was better to drink too much than too little as ‘all affects of diseases of plenitude or fulnesse are more safe because more curable then diseases of Emptinesse’.86 Where wine drinking offered no cure, bleeding was recommended by the medical authorities, with arms, ankles, ‘hammes’, thighs, or haemmorhoids, being the usual points of access recommended.87 The human body was thought to ‘possess extraordinary medicinal and curative powers’.88 Consequently, blood and mummified flesh were commonly used as medicine for disturbances of the brain, such as the ‘falling sickness’ [epilepsy], and the worst effects of melancholy (though not mentioned as cures by Burton or Ferrand). In the classical tradition, to be effective as a medicine, blood and flesh was cut from the fresh wounds of a gladiator. Ingesting fresh human blood, from a body that had died violently, was believed to revitalise the drinker. The drunken Milton cavaliers might easily have conceived of themselves as defeated gladiators, and by mixing their own fresh blood with the ‘blood of the vine’, they created a

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drink with medical properties that could ease their melancholic condition and rejuvenate their blood. Possibly, the accusation of cooked flesh was inspired by a smell of cooking flesh occasioned by the cauterising of wounds, or it too could have signalled the preparation of a ‘body’ medicine for mental disturbance, as ‘mummy’ to ingest. Whilst the abject mutilation of their bodies produced shared pain and scars, creating a pact, their blood and flesh provided medicine that could ward off the drowning effects of despair and despondency.

Conclusion By drawing upon current understandings of the popular cultures of seventeenth-century England, brought about not least by Bernard Capp, and many of the notable contributors to this book, numerous contradictory readings of the bizarre events in Milton in 1650 emerge, perhaps none of which are entirely satisfactory. While the actions of these drunken royalists may have been understood in various sensational ways, taken to their conclusion, they made little sense. If an act of atrocious blasphemy, this would not fit with their affection to the King; if a Catline conspiracy, or act of bloody vengeance, they replicate it poorly, in drinking their own and not their enemies’ blood. Their desire to mutilate themselves may signify a determination to mark themselves as a loyal band, willing to form a desperate pact to overthrow the new state. Yet, our ordinary readings may have led us to a more extraordinary conclusion. Excessive drinking could do more than enhance your masculinity, display your military-style bravado, or madden your old enemies. Flesh, blood and wine could all be used as medicine for distressed and distracted minds and bodies. The royalists of Milton prepared their ritual feast as a way to emote; as a secular sacrament, in memory of the old King and in celebration of the new; and also as a way to heal the body politic within themselves, through the efficacious use of bodily medicine for their affective disorders. A ritual drinking that could, for a time at least, ease the melancholy of their meaningless, everyday existence, helping them to survive until God’s vengeance was wreaked, and the King returned.

Notes 1 Bernard Capp sent me this story some years ago. His students will instantly recognise the hallmarks of his generous gifts of ‘goodies from the archive’. It is with great pleasure and enormous gratitude that I return it to him here. My thanks to the early modern research seminars at Merton College, Oxford and Leicester University for stimulating discussions on earlier versions of this paper, and especially to Joanne Bailey, David Crowley, Martin Ingram, Jason Peacey, Dave Postles, Tim Reinke-Williams, Claudia Stein and Phil Withington for their help and comments. 2 29 Apr.–6 May 1650, 218.

Angela McShane 207 3 P.H. Ditchfield and W. Page (eds), A History of the County of Berkshire (4 Vols, 1907–24), vol. IV, 361–5. 4 History of […] Berkshire, vol. III, 517–31. 5 For royalist drinking see L. Potter, Secret Rites and Secret Writing: Royalist Literature, 1641–1660 (Cambridge, 1989), 134–8; J. Scodel, Excess and the Mean in Early Modern Literature (Princeton and Oxford, 2002), ch. 7; A. Smyth, ‘Profit and delight’: Printed Miscellanies in England, 1640–1682 (Detroit, MI, 2004), 154–68; M. Keblusek, ‘Wine for comfort: drinking and the royalist exile experience, 1642–1660’ and A. McShane, ‘Roaring royalists and ranting brewers: the politicisation of drink and drunkenness in political broadside ballads from 1640–1689’ both in A. Smyth (ed.), A Pleasing Sinne. Drink and Conviviality in 17th-Century England (Woodbridge, 2004), 55–88; A. McShane, ‘“No Kings rule the World/ Without Love and Good Drinking”: political and material cultures of drinking in seventeenth-century England’, unpublished paper, IHR Seventeenth Century Seminar, Jan 2009 (publication forthcoming). 6 J. Wiltenburg, ‘True crime: the origins of modern sensationalism’, American Historical Review 109 (2004), 1377–1404, 1378. 7 See R. Chartier, Cultural History (Cambridge, 1993), esp. 40–5. 8 From 1643 to 1649 the title was A Perfect Diurnall of Some Passages in Parliament and some other parts of the Kingdome. 9 For Pecke see J. Raymond, The Invention of the Newspaper: English News Books 1641–1649 (Oxford, 1996), 13, 24, 28, 33, 48, 53, 66, 74, 76, 103; J. Peacey, Politicians and Pamphleteers: Propaganda during the English Civil Wars and Interregnum (Aldershot, 2004), esp. 159, 191–2, 246. 10 Peacey, Politicians and Pamphleteers, 105, 246. 11 J. Raymond, ‘Rushworth , John (c.1612–1690)’, ODNB; idem, Invention, 173, 308. 12 Perfect Diurnall, 29 Apr.–6 May 1650, 219. 13 Raymond, Invention, 13–14; See also I. Atherton, ‘The itch grown a disease: manuscript transmission of news in the seventeenth century’, in J. Raymond (ed.), News, Newspapers and Society in Early Modern Britain (2002 edn); J. Miller, After the Civil Wars (Harlow, 2000), ch. 4. 14 P. Withington, ‘Company and sociability in early modern England’, Social History 32:3 (August, 2007), 293; see also B.A. Tlusty, Bacchus and Civic Order: The Culture of Drink in Early Modern Germany (Charlottesville, 2001), 1. 15 Robert Harris, The Drunkards Cup (1622), unpaginated [A+5]; Junius Florilegus, The Odious Despicable and Dreadful Condition of the Drunkard Anatomized (revised edn, 1649), 21; See also D. Rabin, ‘Drunkenness and responsibility for crime in the eighteenth century’, Journal of British Studies 44 (Jul., 2005), 457–77. 16 Perfect Diurnall, 29 Apr.–6 May, 1650, 223. 17 For a history of healthing see William Prynne, Healthe’s Sicknesse. Or, a compendious and briefe discourse proving the drinking and pledging of healthes to be sinfull and utterly unlawfull unto Christians (1628), 15–20 and Harris, Drunkards Cup, 17–20, 28–9; on changing healths see McShane, ‘No kings rule the world’; on cavalier rituals see also Potter, Secret rites, 134–8; L. Marcus, The Politics of Mirth. Jonson, Herrick, Milton, Marvell, and the Defense of Old Holiday Pastimes (Chicago, 1986), 214; S. Achilleos, ‘The Anacreontea and a tradition of refined male sociability’ and M. Keblusek, ‘Wine for comfort’, both in Smyth (ed.), A Pleasing Sinne, 21–35, 69–88; J. De Groot, Royalist Identities (Basingstoke, 2004), 111. 18 I. Green, ‘Younge, Richard (fl. 1636–1673)’, ODNB; Florilegus, Drunkard Anatomized, 7; see also Harris, Drunkards Cup, 22.

208 The Extraordinary Case of the Blood-Drinking and Flesh-Eating Cavaliers 19 M. O’Callaghan, ‘Tavern societies, the Inns of Court, and the culture of conviviality in early seventeenth-century London’, in Smyth (ed.), A Pleasing Sinne, 37–54. 20 Florilegus, Drunkard Anatomized, 10; See J. Fleming, Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England (Pennsylvania, 2001); T. Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, chaps 4 and 5; On libraries as social spaces see K. Loveman, ‘Books and sociability: the case of Samuel Pepys’s library’, Review of English Studies, forthcoming. 21 See P. Crawford, ‘“Charles Stuart, that man of blood”’, Journal of British Studies 16:2 (1977), 41–61. 22 S. Clarke, Thinking With Demons (Oxford, 1997), chaps 2 and 6; see also C. Wells, ‘Leeches on the body politic: xenophobia and witchcraft in early modern French political thought’, French Historical Studies 22:3 (1999), 351–77; cf. A. Shepard, ‘“Swil-bolls and tos-pots”: drink culture and male bonding in England, c.1560–1640’, in L. Gowing, M. Hunter and M. Rubin (eds), Love, Friendship and Faith in Europe, 1300–1800 (Basingstoke, 2005). 23 Thomas Hall, Funebria Florae, the Downfall of May Games (1660), 1; Florilegus, Drunkard Anatomized, 3–4, 16. 24 John Geree, θειοψαρµακον. A Divine Potion to preserve spirituall health, by the cure of unnaturall health-drinking (1648), vol. 1, 7–8. See also Barnabe Rich, The Irish Hubbub (1619), 24. 25 E.g., John Smyth and Charles Brandon. See I. Roy, ‘Royalist reputations: the cavalier ideal and the reality’, in J. McElligot and D.L. Smith (eds), Royalists and Royalism During the English Civil Wars (Cambridge, 2007), 89–111. 26 A Solemne Ioviall disputation, theoreticke and practicke; briefely shadowing the Law of Drinking together, with the solemnities and controversies occurring (1617), 10. 27 Clark, Thinking with Demons, 15; Wells, ‘Leeches on the Body Politic’. 28 Perfect Diurnal, 29 Apr.–6 May 1650, 219. 29 B.S. Capp, ‘Republican reformation: family, community and the state in interregnum Middlesex, 1649–60’, in H. Berry and E. Foyster (eds), The Family in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2007), 47. 30 Edward Leigh, Annotations upon all the New Testament (1650), 605. 31 Extant ballad sheets include, Titus Andronicus complaint (1629); The lamentable and tragicall history of Titus Andronicus (c. 1661). Ballads on the subject were registered in 1594 and 1656 see, H.E. Rollins An Analytical Index to the Ballad-Entries in the Register of the Company of Stationers of London (Hatboro, PA, 1967); entry nos. 1123, 2643. 32 See Genesis 3 v.10–11: ‘The voice of thy brother’s bloud crieth unto me from the ground’; 9. v.5–6: ‘At the hands of everie man’s brother will I require the life of man. Whoso sheddeth man’s bloud, by man shal his bloud bee shed.’ 33 4 Sept.–11 Sept. 1648, 7–8. 34 An Elegie on the Death of that most Noble and Heroick Knight, Sir Charles Lucas […] by the Excellent Rebell Fairfax (1648). 35 4 Sept.–11 Sept. 1648, 1: ‘let base elves/ Trample on Prince and Peers/ Sucking our bloods to fat themselves/ Another seven years’; 2, described the ‘bloody conspirators at Westminster and Derby house’ as ‘Quaffing the peoples blood in Mazor bowles’. 36 Mercurius Pragmaticus (for King Charles II), 24 Apr.–1 May 1649, 1. 37 A Curse against Parliament Ale (1649), 6. 38 Francis Quarles, Boanerges and Barnabus: Judgement & mercy for afflicted soules, or, Meditations, soliloquies, and prayers (1646), 193–6. 39 Ben Jonson, Cataline’s Conspiracy (1611), sig. C4; (1669 edn), 13.

Angela McShane 209 40 For example, An Elegie on […] Sir Charles Lucas: ‘[the rebels] With Cataline, have sworn to Levell all/ To your distinction Diabolicall’ and ‘they shall receive their Hire/With Cataline, in never dying fire’. 41 Famous Tragedie, 16–18. 42 Ditchfield and Page, History of […] Berkshire, vol. III, ‘The borough of Wallingford’, 517–31; for the Colchester Siege, see B. Donagan, War in England, 1642–1649 (Oxford, 2008), ch. 15. 43 B. Highmore, Everyday Life and Cultural Theory (2002), 2–5. 44 For male sociability, see Shepard, ‘Swil-bolls and-pots’. 45 Florilegus, Drunkard Anatomized, 10. 46 On women using violence to restore order, see B.S. Capp, When Gossips Meet, Women Family and Neighbourhood in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2003), 263–6, 311–18; G. Walker, Crime, Gender and Social Order in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2003), ch. 3, esp. 86–96. 47 [Thomas Heywood], Philocothonista, or, The drunkard, opened, dissected, and anatomized (1635), pt. ii, esp. ch. 12; see also Harris, Drunkards Cup; sigs A2r–v; Solemne ioviall disputation, passim. 48 For classical models see Achilleos, ‘Anacreontea’; for sermons see Robert Bolton, Some Generall Directions for a comfortable walking with God (edns, 1625, 1626, 1630, 1634, 1638); Prynne, Healthes Sicknesse; Rich, Irish Hubbub. 49 See Harris, Drunkards Cup, sig. A2v, and on recent increase in numbers, 2. These lines were repeated by Florilegus, Drunkard Anatomized, 20 – who added ‘Citizen’ to the list of culprits and the comment on wine. 50 B.A. Tlusty, ‘The public house and military culture in Germany, 1500–1648’, in B. Kümin and B.A. Tlusty (eds), The World of the Tavern. Public Houses in Early Modern Europe (Aldershot, 2002), 136–56; De Groot, Royalist Identities, 111; Roy, ‘Cavalier realities’. 51 Famous Tragedie, 16–18; Smyth, Profit and Delight; McShane, ‘Roaring Royalists’, 72–5. 52 ‘Proceedings in Parliament: July 1–August 1, 1648’, in [John Rushworth ed.] Historical Collections of Private Passages of State: 1647–8 (7 Vols, 1721), vol. VII, 1172–3. 53 16 May 1648, 5. 54 See Keblusek, ‘Wine for comfort’, 60. 55 Simon Harward, Phlebotomy: or, a Treatise of letting of Bloud (1601), sig. A2v. See also Nancy Siraisi, Medieval and early Renaissance Medicine (Chicago, 1990), ch. 4, esp. 105–9. 56 Jacques Ferrand, ειπωατµανια, or a treatise discoursing of the essence, causes […] and cure of love, or erotique melancholy (trans. E. Chilmead: 1640), 262, 339. 57 B. Worden, The Rump Parliament (Cambridge, 1977), 4; The Second Part to the Same tune or The Letanie Continued (Thomason’s MS, 13 Nov. 1647). 58 Quoted in C. Hill, ‘William Harvey (no parliamentarian, no heretic) and the idea of monarchy’, Past & Present 31 (1965), 101. 59 See Anon., A Bloudy Tenent confuted, or, bloud forbidden (1646). 60 Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy (1651 edn), 527. 61 Quoted in B. Capp, ‘Cultural Wars in the 1650s’, unpublished paper for ‘Sex and the (pre-modern) City’ Conference, IHR, 31 Jan. 2009. 62 Thomas Hall, Funebria Florae: The downfall of May Games etc (1661), 1. My thanks to Martin Ingram for kindly drawing this passage to my attention. 63 Burton, Anatomy, 427–8, 533. 64 The Kings Maiesties speech […] before the Vniversity and city of Oxford (1642), 5. 65 De Groot, Royalist Identities, 13–16, 148.

210 The Extraordinary Case of the Blood-Drinking and Flesh-Eating Cavaliers 66 Achilleos, ‘Anacreontea’, 33, quotes Herrick on the effects of drink: ‘Rouze the sacred madnesse; and awake/ The frost-bound-blood, and spirits; and to make/ Them frantick with the raptures, flashing through/ The soule, like lightening, and as active too’; see also McShane, ‘Subject and object: material expressions of political love’, Journal of British Studies 48:4 (2009). 67 Burton, Anatomy, 542. 68 W. Chillingworth, A Sermon preached at the publike Fast before his Majesty at Christchurch Oxford (Oxford, 1644), 12–13. 69 24 April–1 May 1649, 13. 70 Shepard, ‘“Swil-bolls and-pots”’; idem, ‘Manhood, credit and patriarchy in early modern England c.1580–1640’, Past & Present 167 (2000), 75–106. 71 E.S. Goodstein, Experience Without Qualities: Boredom and Modernity (Stanford, 2005), Preface. 72 See discussions in A.H. Kitzes, The Politics of Melancholy from Spencer to Milton (New York, 2006), esp. chaps 5–6; M. Altbauer-Rudnik, ‘Love, madness and social order: love melancholy in France and England in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries’, Gesnerus 63 (2006), 33–45; A. Gowland, ‘The problem of early modern melancholy’, Past & Present 191 (2006), 77–120. 73 See discussion in Kitzes, Politics of Melancholy, ch. 6, esp. 155–60. 74 Gowland, ‘Problem of early modern melancholy’, 118; 84–6. 75 Ferrand, ειρωτοµνια, 7; see Altbauer-Rudnik, ‘Love madness and social order’, 33–6. 76 Goodstein, Experience Without Qualities, 2–4. 77 J. Kristeva, ‘Approaching abjection’, in A. Jones (ed.), The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader (2003), 389, 391 and idem, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (trans. L.S. Roudiez, New York, 1982), ch. 1. 78 De Groot, Royalist Identities, 142–3; 171–2. 79 See M. Keblusek, ‘Wine for comfort’, 57–60; De Groot, Royalist Identities, ch. 6. 80 Florilegus, Drunkard Anatomized, 14. 81 Potter, Secret Rites, 138, ‘the prison and tavern are […] enclosures in which, with the help of alcohol, the cavalier can carry on rituals of loyalty […] once a private macho routine, [rituals] had become both a secular liturgy and a way of parodying the authority of a government they refused to recognise […] drunkenness […] [released] the body into a world of quasi mystical experience’, 138–9, 147–9, 203. 82 E. Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe (2nd edn, Cambridge, 2005), 299; 1–11; 298–301. 83 See McShane, ‘No Kings rule the World’. 84 Burton, Anatomy, 389–90. 85 Warning to Drunkards, [B7]. 86 Tobias Whitaker, The Blood of the Grape (2nd edn, 1654), 2–11. The 1638 edition claimed that ‘humane life from infancy to extreme old age [could be maintained] without any sicknesse by the use of wine’. 87 Burton, Anatomy, 398–401. 88 This paragraph draws upon the following: L. Noble, ‘“And make two pasties of your shameful heads”: Medicinal cannibalism and healing the body politic in Titus Andronicus’, ELH 70 (2003), 677–708, quotation at 681; R. Sugg, ‘“Good physic but bad food”: early modern attitudes to medicinal cannibalism and its suppliers’, Social History of Medicine 19:2 (2006), 225–40; K. Gordon-Grube, ‘Anthropophagy in post Renaissance Europe: the tradition of medicinal cannibalism’, American Anthropologist, new ser., 90:2 (Jun., 1988), 405–9; Wells, ‘Leeches on the body politic’.

12 Mother Shipton and the Devil Darren Oldridge

The prophetess and witch Mother Shipton was a stock character in English popular literature in the late seventeenth century. She was the subject of at least sixteen different books and one play between 1641 and 1700. In 1699, her face was so famous that the author of the comical chapbook The Essex Champion, or The Famous History of Sir Billy of Billerecay was able to exploit it in a notably cruel portrait of one of his characters: ‘Her Cheeks are like two shrimpled skins of parchment, and her nose comparable to that in the picture of Mother Shipton’.1 Shipton’s abilities as a seer were as well known as her ugliness. By the late 1600s she was reputed to have prophesied most of the great events in the nation’s history. Seeking to describe the exceptional nature of the royal declaration on religious liberty in 1672, the poet Alexander Radcliffe reached for a reference that was already well worn: ‘No not one word can I of this great deed/ In Merlin or old Mother Shipton read’.2 An event was remarkable indeed if it was not prefigured in the cryptic verses of the Yorkshire crone. The origins of Shipton’s legend are obscure, but her appearance in print can be dated to The Prophesie of Mother Shipton in the Raigne of King Henry the Eighth, a six-page pamphlet published in 1641. As the title implies, the text contained an ‘ancient prophecy’ apparently rediscovered by its enterprising publisher, and was prefaced by a narrative describing Mother Shipton’s intervention in the career of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, whom she predicted would see but never enter the city of York. This warning proved true when the cardinal was recalled to London at the threshold of the city, but not before he had sent his agents to visit the prophetess. Shipton greeted Wolsey’s men with a display of magic that convinced them of her powers and vouchsafed the predictions in the rest of the text. This mixture of narrative and prophecy characterised the published accounts of Mother Shipton for the remainder of the century. Unlike other ‘ancient prophets’ who were known by their words alone, Shipton emerged as a personality in her own right, a tendency that was especially marked from the 1660s onwards. 211

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This chapter will focus on the character and appearance of Mother Shipton rather than the prophecies ascribed to her name. This is because the Yorkshire seer underwent a series of transformations in the course of her literary career that was possibly unmatched by any other figure in Stuart England: from a sorceress to a witch in the 1640s, and from a witch to the Devil’s daughter after 1667. These changes in character were accompanied by a physical makeover of equally radical proportions: from a middleaged woman to an ancient and repulsive hag. Since a large number of Shipton texts have survived, it is possible to trace these transformations through the second half of the seventeenth century, and to speculate on their connection to wider social and cultural trends in the period. The Mother Shipton literature relates to several themes in the recent historiography of popular culture in Stuart England. As a female prophet, Shipton’s popularity coincided with the rise of visionary women in the sectarian movements of the civil war and interregnum, and the subsequent reaction against such women among the clerical hierarchy. As a witch figure, her story developed over the period that witnessed the most intense English witch hunts in the 1640s and the steady decline and eventual disappearance of witch trials in the last quarter of the century. Finally, Shipton’s emergence as a demonic figure sheds light on popular representations of the Devil in early modern England. Peter Lake and Nathan Johnstone have recently shown that cheap print could convey Protestant ideas about the Devil as a tempter, especially in the context of crime pamphlets; others have argued that popular literature was a repository for pre-Reformation attitudes towards the Devil, often starkly removed from the teaching of Protestant divines.3 The demonisation of Mother Shipton provides an interesting case study of popular depictions of the Devil and, by extension, the audience to which they were presented. The first part of this chapter will track the various embellishments and transformations of Mother Shipton’s character between 1641 and 1700. It will show that she was converted from a sorceress to a witch figure in the early years of her published history, but was not identified with the Devil until the 1660s. Paradoxically perhaps, her subsequent demonisation coincided with her emergence as a comical and generally sympathetic character. The second part of the chapter will attempt to explain this process in the context of attitudes towards witchcraft and prophecy in Stuart England, and the failure of Protestant conceptions of the Devil to sink deep roots in popular culture.

I There was little suggestion in 1641 that Mother Shipton was a witch; nor was she presented as a necromancer or a sorcerer who dealt with evil spirits. Rather, she appears in The Prophesie of Mother Shipton as an accomplished

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magician and seer. When Wolsey’s agents arrive at her door, she greets them by name before they have been introduced; and when one of them warns that she will be burned when the cardinal comes to York, she replies with a show of symbolic magic: Wee shall see that, said shee, and plucking her hankerchieffe off her head shee threw it into the fire, and it would not burne; then shee tooke her staffe and turned it into the fire, and it would not burn, then she tooke it and put it on againe. Now (said the duke) what meane you by this? If this had burn’d (said she) I might have burned.4 Convinced of her powers, her guests immediately ask her to predict their fortunes, and she responds with a series of cryptic announcements that are deciphered, and vindicated, in the pages that follow. The accuracy of Shipton’s predictions is confirmed by Wolsey’s recall from the outskirts of York, and his subsequent death on the journey back to London. Shipton’s magical skills in this narrative underscored her ability to foretell the future, but they did not implicate her in witchcraft. In English law and practice, witchcraft was defined by the performance of harmful magic or – more rarely – compacting with wicked spirits. Shipton’s character resembled that of a local magician or ‘cunning woman’ rather than a witch. Wolsey’s threat to have her burned tends to support this view: death by burning was reserved for cases of heresy, and was linked indissolubly in Stuart popular culture with the fate of Protestant martyrs such as Ann Askew. The episode with the handkerchief and staff echoed Biblical stories and contemporary miracle literature: the burning bush in Exodus 3:1–2, and accounts of bibles and the flesh of martyrs miraculously unconsumed by fire. In these cases, the preservation of objects in the flames was a sign of purity and divine favour. It would stretch a point to suggest that Mother Shipton was a pious character in the earliest version of her life, but she was apparently untouched by suspicious of necromancy or maleficium. The 1641 woodcut of Mother Shipton on the title page of The Prophesie further dispels the taint of witchcraft. It depicts a respectable and unremarkable Tudor housewife. (She is described as ‘Shipton’s wife’ in the pamphlet.)5 But this pictorial representation of Mother Shipton proved to be short lived. Indeed, it was in her physical appearance rather than her words or actions that Shipton’s character underwent its earliest sequence of transformations. Two new collections of her prophecies were published in 1642: Foure Severall Strange Prophesies and Two Strange Prophesies Predicting Wonderfull Events. These carried woodcuts presenting the prophetess as a dramatic hooded Sybil gazing intently ahead and pointing with the finger of one hand. In one version, she stares towards the diminutive figure of Wolsey who stands in a tower overlooking York. Like the earlier portrait, there is nothing witch-like in this new image, but Shipton has acquired a

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stature and aura of supernatural authority that was entirely absent in her original representation. This imposing image of Mother Shipton was no more enduring than its predecessor. In the same year another publication, Six Strange Prophesies, presented a new face for the prophetess that was to fix her appearance for the rest of the century. The woodcut on the title page borrowed from the other pamphlets by depicting Shipton in profile, pointing one finger towards Wolsey in the tower. It also retained the wart that appeared on her cheek in the hooded portraits. But the new version of Shipton was much older and uglier than her previous incarnations. Her face is deeply lined and her nose curves downwards, Punch-like, towards a sharply jutting chin. A handkerchief or shawl covers her head and she has acquired a walking staff. These last two accoutrements were, presumably, the objects that proved to be wonderfully immune to fire in the original story, but Shipton’s aged and haggard face is taken from contemporary images of witches. This becomes obvious when the woodcut from Six Strange Prophesies is compared to other pamphlets from the period: the figure on the title page of A Most Certain, Strange and True Discovery of a Witch (1643), for example, bears a striking likeness to the new version of Mother Shipton, as does the crone depicted in Thomas Dekker’s slightly later The Witch of Edmonton (1658). While the 1642 pamphlet gave Shipton the appearance of a witch – an image that was reproduced and copied throughout the decade – she did not at this stage acquire any demonic associations. The Shipton pamphlets published during the civil war and interregnum repeated the story of her meeting with Wolsey’s emissaries, but added little to the original narrative. Instead, they tended to amplify and gloss the prophecies printed in 1641. Tim Thornton is undoubtedly correct that the appeal of the first cycle of Shipton literature was its apparent relevance to the political crisis in this period, notably the warning of a ‘great battell betweene England and Scotland’.6 As a result, Shipton’s character has received less attention than the supposed meaning of her riddling pronouncements. While her appearance changed on the covers of the pamphlets, she remained essentially a cunning woman and seer in the pages within. The only suggestion of demonism in these early texts is a woodcut on the title page of Fourteene Strange Prophecies (1648), in which the small figures of a dragon, a king and a horse appear in the sky above Shipton’s head. The dragon may allude to the Devil, but its presence is probably explained by a typically opaque passage in the accompanying predictions: ‘then will the dragon give the bull a great snap’. A king and a horse also appear in the prophetic text.7 The most dramatic and enduring embellishments to Shipton’s character occurred in the second wave of publications that began in the late 1660s. The first contribution to the new cycle was produced by the Irish hack writer and pornographer, Richard Head, and was probably first published in

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1667.8 The Life and Death of Mother Shipton greatly expanded the narrative that prefaced the original prophecies, and added numerous predictions ‘newly collected and historically experienced’. In other words, Head appears to have invented texts ‘foreseeing’ events that had already happened and then lauded their remarkable accuracy. Head’s account of Shipton’s parentage and nativity, and the adventures that attended her career, introduced strong elements of demonism and comedy. He developed the motif of witchcraft that was already implied in Shipton’s appearance to explain the source of her powers. He described how her mother, Agatha, was seduced by the Devil in the shape of a handsome young man whom she met on a riverbank: Agatha casting up her eyes, and there seeing a face so lovely, could not suspect a Devil hid in that comely shape; whereupon in a lamentable tone she exprest all that troubled her, informing him of her great wants, and that knowing not how to work, she could not provide what her necessaries required. Pish (said the Devil), this is nothing, be ruled by me and all shall be well. This encounter borrowed a recurrent motif in witchcraft pamphlets published after 1590: the Devil accosting a poor person in the guise of an attractive stranger, hearing of their misfortunes and promising riches in return for their service. Head also followed the convention that the treasure Agatha received from the fiend turned into worthless leaves after he disappeared.9 The same pattern was recorded in depositions in the East Anglian witch trials in 1645, as well as the popular literature that gathered around them.10 If most of the gifts that the stranger bestowed on Agatha proved to be illusions, one at least turned out to be authentic. She fell pregnant with the Devil’s child. The result was a baby girl with a ‘strange and unparrallel’d physiognomy […] which was so mishapen that it is altogether impossible to express it fully in words’. The child was placed in the care of a nurse, whose task was complicated by daily visits from its father in the form of devilish animals and disembodied sounds. The young Shipton was sent to school, where she learned ‘more in a day than other children in a month’ and took revenge on her schoolmates when they taunted her enormous nose: ‘Some were pinch’t and yet no hand seen that did it, others struck speechless when they were about to say their lessons’. This caused her removal from school and forced her to earn a living as a soothsayer. She quickly acquired a reputation ‘for her notable judgment in things to come’, attracting a large and profitable audience as a fortune teller. Head devoted the rest of his book to the opaque pronouncements of the Yorkshire Sybil: ‘containing the most important passages of state’ from the reign of Henry VII to the Restoration.11 Head’s book reinvents the Shipton legend, but it does not completely abandon its source material. The woodcut on the title page combines a scene from

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the original narrative with one from Head’s new version. On the right, the decrepit Mother Shipton drops a knotted handkerchief into a fire, while on the left her mother sits beside her demonic suitor in the guise of a gallant young man. The Devil’s identity is betrayed by a pair of cloven hooves and a snake tail that curls above the flames. This scheme was repeated in a second, more complex woodcut in 1668 (Figure 12.1). Here the Devil’s tail is thrust into the flames below Shipton’s handkerchief, transforming the bonfire into the pit of hell. A troop of witches tumble in the sky above the Devil’s head and a satanic betrothal is enacted in the space above the clasped hands of Agatha and her beau. This image presents the most sophisticated reworking of Shipton’s legend in the context of satanic witchcraft, and confirms her new status as a demonic figure. This status was emphasised in a jestbook that carried the new woodcut in 1668. Mother Shipton’s Christmas Carrols was the first entry in the genre to concentrate entirely on its heroine’s adventures at the expense of her prophecies. Here Shipton is described explicitly as a witch, and her sorcery is accomplished with the aid of demons. She also acquires a pair of cloven hooves. The text consists of a series of magical pranks played by the crone against those who offend her. On being ignored by the guests at a great feast, she whistles up an army of demons to carry away their food. On another occasion, she ends a quarrel with a company of old women by making them lift up their skirts to avoid an imaginary flood as they walk through the middle of town, ‘which made such laughter to all that beheld them that they followed them, shouting and throwing rotten eggs and apples at their arses’. As this story indicates, Shipton’s antics are presented in a broadly positive light – at the very least, readers are not encouraged to sympathise with her victims. This is most obvious in a story about a money lender who falls foul of the crone: Another time, she meeting with an old rich usurer with a bag of money under his arm, she beg’d a penny of him, who told her she looked like a witch. At which Shipton, being much displeased, was resolved to serve him a trick for his jeer. And one day watching him as he was looking out at his chamber window into the market, she by her cunning caused an artificial pair of horns to be grafted on his forehead, so that he could not draw his head in again. Here Shipton appears to avenge an obvious breech of charity, and her efforts are welcomed by the rest of the neighbourhood. A crowd gathers to mock the man trapped in the window, and when the horns drop from his head they are gathered up and fastened to the town cross above a notice condemning ‘Old Clutch the Usurer’. Shipton’s magic is presented as a social good, notwithstanding its demonic source.12 Neither Richard Head nor the anonymous author of Mother Shipton’s Christmas Carrols offer moral judgement on their heroine’s acquaintance

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Figure 12.1

Frontispiece of Mother Shiptons Christmas Carols (London, 1668).

Source: With kind permission Bodleian Library.

with the Devil. Nor do they imply that she faced a reckoning for her deeds. Indeed, Head ends his book by affirming the great success and good reputation that she enjoyed. In 1670 a play based on the prophetess’ story, The Life of Mother Shipton, attempted to place her in a more conventional moral context. The printed edition of the text is attributed to ‘T.T.’, who was later identified as Thomas Thomson.13 Thomson’s text adapts the narrative from Head’s book and pads out the story with plagiarised extracts from the

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works of Philip Massinger and Thomas Middleton. His version of Shipton is, in some respects, the most thoroughly demonised to appear in the seventeenth century. He conflates the characters of Agatha and Mother Shipton into one person, so that Shipton enters a pact with a demon at the beginning of the play. This invests her with magical powers but also transforms her from a young woman to a revolting hag. As the story unfolds, Shipton is accused of witchcraft but escapes punishment through demonic intervention, while an assembly of fiends report on her adventures to their master in hell. At this point, however, Shipton confronts the appalling consequences of her actions. She realises she is destined for hell and falls into despair; and in this broken condition she takes comfort in the possibility of God’s mercy: Then detestable Shipton look into the glass of thy infirmities, which are so many they a’most work a despair in me […] yet have we not powers above that over hel’s prevalency are predominant? Then will I cleave to them! But is it not too late? Sooner I confess would have been better. But surely a heart penitentially inclined is not contemptible! Then Devil look to thyself. Thou thinkest I am thine, but thou shalt find ere long thou art deceived. Apparently fortified with saving grace, Shipton confronts the demon with whom she originally compacted. At first she tries to outwit him by demanding great powers that she knows are beyond his gift; when he refuses she claims he has broken their pact and should set her free. The demon responds by summoning Satan from hell to claim her soul but he discovers he is powerless against her. The play concludes with the appearance of an angel who assures Shipton that her plea for God’s mercy has been accepted. In a somewhat ill-judged attempt to win her back, the Devil returns with a magical scroll conferring the ability to foresee the future. Shipton grabs the paper but offers nothing in return, asserting that ‘all your temptations are airy and too weak to besiege my fortified soul’.14 As befits the work of a serial plagiarist, Thomson’s play presents a tangle of diverse and rather contradictory messages. The passage in which Shipton rejects her bondage to Satan and falls on God’s mercy in the hope of salvation echoes the conversion narratives of pious Protestants. Equally, her attempt to trick the demon out of his bargain with her borrows from folk tales of guileful mortals outwitting the Devil. Such tales circulated in cheap print throughout the seventeenth century, despite their theologically suspect implication that people could defeat Satan through their own efforts.15 Nonetheless, Thomson’s reworking of Shipton’s legend did at least acknowledge the sinful nature of her relationship with the Devil, and placed her in a narrative of transgression, punishment and forgiveness. Thus two different versions of Shipton’s character were available in the last quarter of the

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century: in one she was a merry and unrepentant associate of the Devil, and in the other she was a redeemed witch. Interestingly, it was the first of these two incarnations that proved the most popular. Richard Head’s book went through four new editions between 1684 and 1697. At the same time, a new life of the prophetess, The Strange and Wonderful History of Mother Shipton (1686), also followed the lead given by Head and the Christmas Carrols. It repeated the story of Shipton’s infernal conception and infancy, during which ‘her father, the foul fiend, is reported several times to have visited her’, and described a series of ‘merry pranks’ that she played on her neighbours as a young woman. After recounting her prophecies, and explaining how they accurately foretold the nation’s history from the Reformation to the fire of London, the author described Shipton’s good reputation and her death in comfortable old age.16 New editions of Shipton’s original prophecies were also published in 1682 and 1700, but none of the Shipton literature printed after 1670 presented her in a negative light, or attempted to revive her portrayal by Thomas Thomson as a witch reprieved by the grace of God. It seems that the print market was happy to accept, and extend, the image of Mother Shipton as an utterly demonic but essentially positive character.

II What does the Shipton literature reveal about Stuart England? It should be said at the outset that the writers who developed Mother Shipton’s character between 1641 and 1700 produced few works that were intended for close analysis. Many entries in the genre were opportunistic, derivative or downright fraudulent. It would be unwise, perhaps, to tease too many theological nuances from the work of Richard Head or Thomas Thomson. It might also be a mistake to expect a consistent message to emerge from the diverse publications that exploited Shipton’s name: her popularity may well have derived from her capacity to appeal to a number of different audiences. At the same time, the sheer commercialism of the genre makes it a crude barometer of public taste. The writers and publishers who exploited Shipton’s legend were trying to reach a large market, and the reprints of several titles suggest that they managed to do so. The ways in which Shipton’s character developed (or failed to develop) presumably reflected what the readers wanted, or at least the publishers’ perception of their readers’ interests. The fashioning of Mother Shipton’s character can be partially explained by the combination of prophecy and narrative that distinguished the genre. Broadly speaking, Shipton was most closely associated with witchcraft and the Devil in those texts that emphasised narrative over prophecy; conversely, her status as a witch was least pronounced when prophecy came to the fore. Thus, the first cycle of pamphlets in the 1640s, and later

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collections of predictions such as Forewar’d Fore-Armed, or England’s Timely Warning (1682), either ignored witchcraft completely or only implied it in their illustrations. In texts that contained no prophecies at all – such as Thomson’s play and Mother Shipton’s Christmas Carrols – the themes of witchcraft and demonism were central. It is not hard to see why this was so. The main appeal of ‘ancient prophecies’ was the light they could shine on contemporary and near-future events, and this light was dimmed if the source was believed to be untrustworthy. The words of a witch were unlikely to inspire confidence, still less the words of the Devil’s offspring. This problem was particularly acute when Shipton’s pronouncements were identified with a political cause. After 1642 her prophecies were widely believed to favour the parliament against the king, and were the object of partisan interpretation by the parliamentarian astrologer William Lilly.17 It is perhaps no coincidence that the first edition of the prophecies, which abjured any suggestion of witchcraft, was published by the puritan sympathiser, Richard Lowds.18 When Shipton’s words carried less political significance – or social circumstances in general did less to promote a hunger for ancient revelations – writers had more freedom to explore the demonic potential in Shipton’s character. The tension between Mother Shipton’s role as an oracle and her reputation for witchcraft was tacitly acknowledged by some contributors to the genre. The clumsy denouement to Thomson’s play, in which Shipton steals the power of prophecy from Satan without surrendering her soul, was probably an attempt to reconcile these aspects of her character. Some later editions of the prophecies replaced the usual image of Shipton as a witch figure with illustrations that sent a more positive message. Mother Shipton’s Prophesies (1663), for instance, borrowed a print of Henry VIII defeating the pope from the Book of Martyrs. Given the obvious difficulty of presenting a witch as a prophetic figure, one needs to ask why Shipton was transformed into a witch at all. The answer may be that the witch was the best available stereotype in cheap print for a female soothsayer in mid-seventeenthcentury England. This model was imposed on Shipton’s character at an early stage in her career as a popular icon, but it was not fully developed in the period when attention focused chiefly on the veracity of her predictions. The fact that Shipton assumed the appearance of a witch so quickly – despite the problems this may have created for her status as a seer – probably testifies to the power of the witch stereotype in the 1640s. While Shipton’s physical transformation may reflect contemporary ideas about witchcraft, her subsequent demonisation certainly sheds light on popular representations of the Devil. It may seem strange that her acquaintance with Satan after 1667 resulted in comedy rather than malevolence, but in this respect the Shipton literature was not unique. There was a rich tradition of ‘merry devil’ tales in seventeenth-century cheap print. The Devil’s role as the punisher of villains made him an appealing character in comic

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ballads. In ‘The Feasting of the Devil’, for instance, the fiend gorges himself on a banquet of deserving victims: A rich fat usurer stew’d in his marrow, And by him a lawyer’s head and green sawce; Both which his belly took like a barrow, As if till then he had never seen sawce. These morsels were washed down with ‘two roasted sheriffs’ and a ‘puritan poacht’, along with a slice of ‘churchwarden pye’.19 In other tales the joke was reversed, with ‘Old Beelzebub merry’ chased away by screaming fishmongers and scolding wives.20 The blunt comedy of such texts anticipated the ‘merry pranks’ performed by the Devil in Head’s life of Mother Shipton and the Christmas Carrols. Alongside their humour, Shipton’s adventures after 1667 were notable for the success that their heroine obtained through the Devil’s favour. Indeed, the more conventional morality of Thomson’s Life of Mother Shipton appears to have attracted fewer readers and imitators than the tales in which she went unpunished. Here again, the Shipton literature belonged to a broader tradition of popular publications. In 1661 a collection of songs and ballads, Merry Drollery, included a number of tales in which people encountered the Devil and prospered as a result. In one, a poor man meets the fiend on a forest track and seals a ‘covenant’ with him. The Devil promises him seven years of prosperity, at the end of which he must bring a beast into the wood that cannot be named. When the seven happy years expire, the man dresses his wife in feathers and lime and leads her backwards on all fours into the forest. The Devil examines the creature and announces that ‘of all the beasts that ever I saw I never saw none so grim’. Released from his compact, the ‘man he went home with his wife and they lived full merrily’. In other tales in the collection, the Devil is variously gulled, beaten and castrated by wily individuals with whom he unwisely makes deals.21 Merry Drollery was republished at least twice before the end of the century. The Shipton stories of the same period combine the Devil’s role as a punisher of unpleasant characters with the idea that other, more sympathetic ones could keep his company without being damned as a consequence. What does this literature reveal about popular conceptions of the Devil? Historians have recently argued that a distinctively ‘Protestant Devil’ emerged in the English Reformation – one that was intimately associated with human weakness and susceptibility to sin – and against whom constant vigilance was required.22 Perhaps inevitably, this view of the Devil was most evident in the private writings of devout men and women and the published work of Protestant divines. The role of the Devil in English culture at large is harder to discern. It is obvious that his representation in

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texts such as Merry Drollery and the Mother Shipton literature was somewhat detached from the sermons of Protestant churchmen. Equally, some puritan writers warned against the corrosive effects of sensational pamphlets. William Perkins condemned ‘merry ballads and bookes’ in his immensely influential catechism of 1597, and John Bunyan decried frivolous chapbooks in the 1660s.23 But the market for such material does not, in itself, demonstrate that its readers were immune to Protestant ideas. Some sensational texts involving the Devil – notably crime stories in which villains were egged on by demons to commit robbery or murder – were broadly consistent with reformed theology. More generally, readers may well have enjoyed outlandish tales about the Devil without thinking too closely (or caring particularly) about their religious implications. What the ‘merry devil’ literature does show, however, is the existence of alternative representations of the Devil alongside the teaching of Protestant clergy. In the case of Mother Shipton, it appears that these representations were not mere ‘survivals’ of pre-Reformation motifs but a flourishing aspect of popular culture. Mother Shipton did not acquire demonic associations until the late 1660s, and her subsequent demonisation owed far more to the world of Merry Drollery than to Protestant ideas of the Devil. Nor was she the first character to undergo this process. The popular figure of Friar Bacon experienced a similar makeover in the early seventeenth century. Originally a learned magician who rescued his friends from the evil sorcerer Friar Bungay, Bacon was reinvented around 1608 as Peter Fabel, the hero of The Merry Devil of Edmonton. Despite making a pact with the Devil, Fabel enjoyed a happy and prosperous life and unlike Faust, he escaped damnation by outwitting the Devil on his deathbed.24 The demonisation of Friar Bacon and Mother Shipton reflected the gender assumptions of early modern England: he became a necromancer who mastered the Devil, while she turned into a witch with a satanic father. (Although in one case she too outwits the Devil but only with God’s help). In both cases their transformation was informed by conceptions of the Devil far removed from Protestant orthodoxy, and both characters proved to be popular in their demonised forms.25 Twenty years ago, Bernard Capp surmised that comic tales about the Devil had widespread appeal in Stuart England.26 The case of Mother Shipton tends to support this view and attests to the vitality of this tradition in the second half of the seventeenth century. Shipton’s various transformations between 1641 and 1700 also indicate the power of popular stereotypes to mould the image of literary characters in dramatic ways. Thus, the Sybil who foretold the triumph of a puritan army in the 1640s became the merry daughter of Satan some thirty years later. Who would have predicted it?

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Notes 1 William Winstanley, The Essex Champion, or The Famous History of Sir Billy of Billerecay (1699), 209. 2 Alexander Radcliffe, ‘Dr Wild’s Humble Thanks for His Majesty’s Gracious Declaration’, in The Ramble, an Anti-Heroick Poem (1682), 74. 3 N. Johnstone, The Devil and Demonism in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2006), ch. 5; P. Lake with M. Questier, The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat (Yale, 2002), 40–53; D. Oldridge, The Devil in Tudor and Stuart England (Stroud, 2010), ch. 4. 4 The Prophesie of Mother Shipton in the Raigne of King Henry the Eighth (1641), 2. 5 Ibid., 3, 6. 6 ‘Reshaping the local future: the development and uses of provincial political prophecies, 1300–1900’, in B. Taithe and T. Thornton (eds), Prophecy (Stroud, 1997), 51–62; Prophesie of Mother Shipton, 4. 7 Ibid., 4, 5. 8 The dating of Head’s text is problematic. The earliest surviving edition carries the publication date of 1677 but refers in its title to ‘the present year 1667’. The text was certainly in circulation before 1670, when parts of it were plagiarised by the author of The Life of Mother Shipton (1670). 9 Richard Head, The Life and Death of Mother Shipton (1677), title page, 2, 4–5. 10 C. L’Estrange Ewen, Witch Hunting and Witch Trials (New York, 1929), 293. 11 Head, Life and Death, title page, 10, 13–15. For the Devil’s money turning to leaves, see The Roxburghe Ballads. Vol. II, ed. W.M. Chappell (vols. I and II, Hertford: 1869 and 1874), vol. II, 227. 12 Mother Shipton’s Christmas Carrols, with her Merry Neighbours (1668), 2–3. 13 Gerard Langbaine, An Account of the English Dramatick Poets (1691), 503–4, ascribed the play to Thomson in 1691, describing him as an ‘author of the meanest rank and a great plagiary’. 14 T.T., The Life of Mother Shipton, A New Comedy (1670), 45–6, 53–4. 15 See Oldridge, The Devil, ch. 4, for examples. 16 The Strange and Wonderful History of Mother Shipton (1686), 6, 8–9, 21. 17 William Lilly, A Collection of Ancient and Modern Prophecies (1645). 18 For the political appropriation of Shipton’s prophecies, see J. Friedman, Miracles and The Pulp Press During the English Revolution (1993), 67 and Thornton, ‘Reshaping the local future’, 58. 19 W.N., The Second Part of Merry Drollery (1661), 26, 27–8. 20 Roxburghe Ballads, vol. I, 331–6; vol. II, 368–71. 21 W.N., Merry Drollery (1661), 7–11; Second Part, 12–15. 22 Oldridge, The Devil, chaps 2–3; N. Johnstone, ‘The Protestant Devil: The experience of temptation in early modern England’, Journal of British Studies 43:2 (2004); eadem, The Devil, ch. 3. 23 William Perkins, The Foundation of Christian Religion (1597), sig. A2v; John Bunyan, Sighs From Hell (1666), 147–8. 24 For the original story of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, see The Merry Devil of Edmonton, ed. W.A. Abrams (Durham, NC, 1942), 13–15; The Life and Death of the Merry Deuill of Edmonton (1631), sigs Bv–B2. 25 The Merry Devill of Edmonton was reprinted four times between 1608 and 1631, and a new version was published in 1631. 26 B.S. Capp, ‘Popular Literature’, in B. Reay (ed.), Popular Culture in SeventeenthCentury England (1985), 216–17.

13 ‘Bleedinge Afreshe’? The Affray and Murder at Nantwich, 19 December 1572* Steve Hindle

At the Lent assizes held at Chester in April 1670, the sheriff of Cheshire Roger Wilbraham had the uncomfortable experience of witnessing the murder trial of the heir to a prosperous gentry estate.1 Wilbraham noted in his diary that Thomas, the eldest son of Sir Peter Brooke, had been arraigned for killing one of his employees. Finding the labourer at his work, Brooke had ‘barbarously killed him unawares to a man, […] without any expostulation or provocation’. The trial records reveal that at Christleton, on 1 December 1669, Brooke had fatally wounded William Haslehurst of Heswall ‘on the hinder parts of the head’ with ‘a briar hook’.2 Wilbraham thought that young Brooke was lucky to escape the gallows, and did so only because the jury had found that he was ‘non compus mentis when he did the fact’.3 This episode of fur-collar crime moved Wilbraham deeply, and set him musing on the vulnerability of men of his social class to the vagaries of the criminal justice system, especially in cases of murder.4 As he sat disinterestedly through the apparently endless arraignments of the robbers, burglars and thieves who were hurried miserably through the dock by the half-dozen, Wilbraham idly recalled the family legend that one of his ancestors had enjoyed a similarly narrow escape almost exactly a hundred years earlier. Richard Wilbraham, the sheriff noted, had been one of two ‘worthy gentlemen’ tried in 1572 for the ‘supposed murder’ of one Roger Crockett, ‘who chanced to be slain in a fray at Nantwich’. The case against Richard Wilbraham, the sheriff remembered, had been far from robust. Wilbraham had, he believed, been the victim of a malicious prosecution sustained by the perjured evidence of a household servant suborned by the victim’s widow, who allegedly bore mortal hatred to the entire Wilbraham family. The perjury was only brought to light, it was said, by the gallows confession of the ‘dangerous witness’, which ‘his guilty conscience extracted from him’ when condemned to death for an unrelated felony. Although Wilbraham could not recall the perjurer’s name, he had heard that the man, ‘being pinched in conscience’, had confessed on the 224

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scaffold that he was suborned by his mistress and ‘induced by her large premises’ to endanger the lives of the accused ‘by a false oath’. The sheriff believed that the story had a happy ending, at least for Richard Wilbraham, who ‘lived prosperously many years after to see her end that had conspired his’. Wilbraham nonetheless noted the historical irony that ‘a descendant of the family after 100 years should come to possess the [sheriff’s] chair so neer unto the bar where his ancestor had his trial’. The Brooke prosecution had brought the Nantwich affray and its aftermath very ‘seasonably to mind’, and he recorded that ‘it did verie much raise and affect’ his spirits. As for the sources of the episode, Wilbraham noted, somewhat laconically, that he ‘had the whole story by tradition’. The memory of the attempt to frame his ancestor was, therefore, a scrap of judicial folklore passed from father to son for the edification of the Wilbraham family. The story was a reminder of the fragility of wealth, status and reputation; of the central role of conscience and integrity in the workings of fate; and, above all, of the perils of perjured evidence.5 Other elite families doubtless had their oral traditions of dark doings and judicial retribution, just as they had of more positive anecdotes.6 The Wilbrahams, however, also had access to a quasi-judicial archive. Although his diary account betrays little evidence that he had consulted it recently, Roger Wilbraham confessed to having ‘seen an authentick register’ of the ‘proceedings’ arising from the murder at Nantwich. The document to which Wilbraham referred is a quite remarkable set of depositions entitled ‘Examinations touching the death of Roger Croket, of Namptwiche, in the Countie of Chester, Gent’.7 Its sixty folios contain the testimony of no less than 116 persons (thirty-nine of them female) – from gentlemen, clergymen and schoolmasters to tailors, shoemakers and salt-boilers – taken in the immediate aftermath of the coroner’s inquest, held in St Mary’s Church Nantwich, on Saturday 22 December 1572, into the causes of Crockett’s death.8 The witnesses describe in vivid detail not only the everyday traffic of social and economic relationships in a late sixteenth-century market town, but also the extraordinary circumstances of Crockett’s murder and of the even more curious rituals associated with the subsequent, and unusually well-documented, coroner’s inquest. Not only was the body of the deceased painted by a local artist, but those suspected of the murder were brought before the corpse in accordance with the traditional belief that in their presence the wounds would ‘bleede afreshe’ to incriminate the killers. The validity of all this testimony was, more remarkably still, subsequently challenged, amid lurid accusations of subornation and perjury, in the court of star chamber. By opening out the historical evidence relating to the investigation to Crockett’s death, it is hoped that those wounds will once again ‘bleede afreshe’, disclosing in unparalleled detail popular understandings of the nature and causes of fatal violence in sixteenth-century society.9 In

226 ‘Bleedinge Afreshe’? The Affray and Murder at Nantwich, 19 December 1572

reconstructing the eruption of casual slaughter in Elizabethan Nantwich, therefore, this paper engages with two themes which have been central to the recent work of Bernard Capp: historical perceptions of crime and deviance;10 and the historiographical potential and limitations of depositional evidence.11 The murder of Roger Crockett also offers a case-study of the potential for the extraordinary to occur in everyday life, and provides an opportunity to reflect on the strengths and weakness of the various methodologies which might permit the relationship between the ordinary and the extraordinary to be explored in historical context.

The everyday By the second half of the sixteenth century, Nantwich had assumed a place as one of the most significant market towns in Cheshire.12 Its population, numbering about 1800 by the 1580s, largely earned its living from dairying, especially cheese-making, and from the manufacture of leather. Its significant resources of brine linked the town into a national market for salt, and the demand for labour in its two-hundred-odd wych-houses (where brine was evaporated in enormous vats), although seasonal, was very substantial.13 Located on the main road from London to Chester, Nantwich was a significant staging post for military and civilian traffic to Ireland, and had developed a sophisticated network of inns to accommodate travellers. It was also, increasingly, a centre of judicial and administrative activity, playing host annually to one of the county sessions whose meetings had since the 1530s rotated quarterly round the towns of Cheshire.14 Despite the periodic presence of the county elite on the Nantwich bench, however, the institutional structure of the town itself was relatively underdeveloped, urban governance still being exercised by rural manorial lords through the traditional fora of courts baron and leet. Several of the longestablished families who had run Cheshire society since the fifteenth, and in large measure since the thirteenth century, – the Cholmondleys, the Wilbrahams, the Hassalls and the Maistersons – therefore continued to play leading roles in the politics of Nantwich, exercising considerable social and economic power as a consequence of their enormous property-holdings, supplemented by increasing trading interests in cheese, salt and leather; and significant political patronage through the holding of lucrative local office. These were the men who reconstructed the town after it was destroyed by fire in 1583, and their substantial mansion houses still dominate the built environment over four centuries later.15 Together this small knot of reliable men, bound even more tightly together by affinity and clientage – the Maistersons and the Wilbrahams were especially heavily inter-married – monopolised the exercise of authority in Nantwich.16 This, then, was the increasingly prosperous, but polarising, context in which Roger Crockett’s social and economic pretensions caused such

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ructions.17 The Crocketts had made their money from trade rather than property, though like many would-be members of the county elite they had sought to vindicate their pretensions to gentility by purchasing land. Although he owned property in several neighbouring villages, Crockett’s wealth ultimately derived from the town’s most profitable inn, The Crown. The ambiguous status of the family is nicely captured by the fact that although they appear on a list of freeholders compiled in 1579, the Herald’s Visitation of the following year ignores the Crocketts altogether.18 As in many other urban contexts, there was little to distinguish a lesser gentleman from the wealthy townsmen who had clambered their way into the civic elite having made their money from trade. Whether Crockett had always been sneered at by men whose social confidence was bolstered by the unquestioned authority of ancient lineage will never be known. But it is almost certain that his aggressive behaviour in the land market marked him out as a rich churl, a man who did not know how to conduct himself in the company of real gentlemen. In the summer of 1572, Crockett outbid one of the members of the Hassall family for the renewal of the lease of the Ridley Field, one of the town’s most valuable pastures, from which rents and use-rights would generate very considerable income. This was merely the latest battle in a dirty little war over property rights during which Hassall and Crockett had not only exchanged insults (each bidding the other ‘a turd in thie teethe!’) during holy communion but had also sued one another both in the county court and at the Hustings in London.19 By the winter of 1572, speculation was rife about Crockett’s intentions, especially in respect of a plan to drain the pasture which marked him out not only as an arriviste, but also as an improver. Crockett was due to take possession just before Christmas, and the Hassalls and their allies determined that this would not be an occasion for good cheer. Wednesday 19 December 1572 dawned ‘colde and frostie’.20 By 7am the inhabitants of Nantwich were nonetheless going about their usual business, just as they would on any dark winter’s morning. Those who stood at their doorsteps or who gazed through their windows would have detected little or no departure from the routines of everyday life. The tailor, John Hewitt, noted that Thomas Wettenhall passed by his shop window on his way to oversee the pasturing of his flocks, as he did every morning.21 Work had started even earlier for others. Ellen Ince, the wife of one of the town’s many prosperous butchers, was behind her counter selling meat to Widow Wixsted.22 Margaret Smith and Margaret Shenton were running errands for their master, having been sent to buy ‘a pennyworth of worte [unfermented beer] and a messe of milke’ from Thomas Wilson.23 Marjorie Crewe was in a backhouse baking bread; Margaret Buckley was spinning in her master’s kitchen; Joan Sparrow was milking in the town fields; her brother Edmund was weaving in a chamber in their mother’s house; Hugh Lowe was chopping wood for fuel; and Humphrey Mainwaring was preparing to

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teach at the schoolhouse beside the church.24 The sweat associated with the salt industry was already dripping in numerous wych-houses. Richard Wright was daubing the walls of one; Alice Worall was crossing the road to begin work in another; Marjorie Parker, a salt-boiler, was watching the brine ‘seathinge’ in a third.25 For others, routines deviated only very slightly from their quotidian rhythms. Though Cicely Huxley might regularly be found milking cattle or buying goods in the shops on the High Street, she was on this particular morning spinning at her wheel in the hall of her master’s house.26 Only the most substantial men of leisure, like the gentleman Richard Wilbraham, had yet to rise and breakfast. Others, of course, were only in town for the day: John Lovatt, who dwelled by Acton parish church, was walking into Nantwich to buy a bushel of malt which he hoped to have ground at Thomas Wettenhall’s mill.27 None of these sights were unusual, least of all on Wood Street, which was well known not only for its wych-houses but also for its labourers’ cottages, shops and its blacksmith’s forge. As they hurried about their business, these townspeople – men and women, masters and servants, producers and consumers – doubtless stopped to pass the time of day, or at least to acknowledge one another with a nod of the head or wave of the hand, perhaps even a social kiss.28 Some of these gestures, however, were probably furtive, perhaps even apprehensive, for there was tension in the air. Ales Worrall suspected something was amiss when Roger Wettenhall ignored her usual greeting: ‘she badd him good morrowe and he spoke not to her againe whereat she greatly marvelled for that he was wont to speake very courteously to her’.29 Wettenhall was doubtless disquieted by the rumour, rancour and recrimination caused by Roger Crockett’s acquisition and intended drainage of Ridley Field. Crockett’s enemies regarded him as ‘a villain and a cut throte to take anie man’s lyvinge over his head’; and had repeatedly taunted him, even in the church and churchyard, as a coward and a knave.30 From the liminal security of their own doorsteps, the women-folk among his enemies had railed at him and predicted his downfall.31 Others had sought to provoke his mother by ironically calling her ‘the lady of Ridley Field’.32 Many of the inhabitants predicted an outbreak of violence: Jeffrey Minshull told Nicholas Maisterson that there would be ‘much knocking of custards in the street one day’ about the contested lease.33 Even the children of the town had heard rumours: Ralph Ince’s daughter, still only a ‘lyttle girl’, had been told by her playmates that ‘ther wold be mischeef’ and that Crockett ‘wold be beaten’ if he came to take possession.34 The milkmaids were also, it seems, gossiping about the possibility of an impending fracas.35 Rumour very rapidly turned to menace. Crockett was threatened with the breaking of his bones and the cracking of his skull if he dared venture too close to his opponents the Hassalls. ‘I wold to God that the Ridley Field were a fyshe poole’, wished one inhabitant, for Crockett ‘will have his

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braynes knocked out one day about yt’.36 These threats were so serious and so extensive that several of the parties swore the peace against one another, with the result that by the end of November 1572 there was an extensive network of recognizances binding the Wettenhall brothers not to assault Wilbraham or Hassall, and over a dozen named individuals not to assault Bridgett Crockett. Roger Crockett himself, however, declined to get involved: he apparently drew up a list of those against whom he might need protection, but ‘because they had constantly reputed him to be a coward he would not have the peace of them for shame unless they did sumwhat’.37 Indeed, the factionalism which divided the town evidently had a spatial dimension: Crockett was warned that he was not welcome on the ‘side of the water’ (the River Weaver) where Hassall’s allies dwelt and accordingly determined that he should ‘come as little amongst Hassall’s neighbours as he could’.38 He had even planned to absent himself from Nantwich on the day that his servants were due to begin working in the disputed pasture. In the event he did not do so, and his attempt to take possession was hindered by a day-long vigil by Anne Hassall, who armed with a quarterstaff intimidated Crockett’s servants into the belief that she and her company would fight with their master.39 The apprehensive bustle of Wood Street on the morning of Wednesday 19 December therefore represented the quavering calm before a storm that had been long in the brewing. Jeffrey Minshull wished ‘there were some quietnes made amongst them for feare lest knockynge or devilry should come of it’.40 If harmony was the social ideal of the Elizabethan urban community, this was an uneasy peace, threatened by an incipient feud.41

The affray And then, almost inevitably, came the sound of clattering staves, shrieking women and pounding feet.42 Reynold Jackson came out of his wych-house with a ‘shystinge rake’ in his hand to see what all the fuss was about. Cicely Huxley ‘lokynge through the glass windows’ of her master’s parlour ‘saw the people run in the streete and left her spinning’. Ellen Ince saw the outbreak of the fracas through a side window, drove the dogs out of the butcher’s shop and ‘shut up the doores’.43 The most notable reaction was that of the town’s most prosperous and respected resident, Richard Wilbraham, running half-dressed towards the scene of the affray. His servant Margaret Buckley was spinning in the kitchen when she heard her master ‘comyng downe the steyres out of hys chamber newely risen out of his bed’.44 At least three other witnesses specifically commented on the disarray of Wilbraham’s clothing, clear enough implication that he, at least, had not anticipated (still less planned) the brawl, and had been startled awake by the noise: Wilbraham apparently came to the fray ‘with a staff in his hand in his hose and dublett untruste, a redde petticote, a white furre hanging

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out behind without shoes or slyppers and a cappe on his hedd’, ‘holding up his hose upon his hyff with the one hand and holdinge his staff downe in th’other’.45 As he dashed towards the brawl, the women cried out to him ‘Alas, Mr Wilbraham, make the best of yt!’, to which he apparently responded that that was his intention.46 Narratives of what actually happened that morning in Wood Street are conflicted (to an even greater extent, as we shall see, than at first they may seem). Resolving their contradictions demands the skills more characteristic of a playground teacher than of a historian. Nonetheless, it seems probable that the affray began when one of Roger Crockett’s allies, Thomas Wettenhall, carrying a ‘short dubbynge hoke’ (a hedge hook) was attacked by Thomas Wilson who was armed with a long pikestaff. Wettenhall was taken aback by an assault from a neighbour with whom he had no quarrel, and asked ‘what meanest thou man, wilt thou kyll me?’ He defended himself as best he could but was ‘sore hurt in diverse places of the body’.47 Bleeding from the mouth, Wettenhall took refuge in a nearby garden and collapsed against a malt kiln, when another of Crockett’s enemies, William Hassall, leapt over a hedge and was about to strike him. That Hassall was immediately restrained by his father on the grounds that their victim ‘hath hurte enough already’ suggests that Wettenhall had been merely the bait in a trap designed to lure Roger Crockett to come to his aid.48 Sure enough, when Crockett crossed the Weaver, and tried to push his way through the crowd of bystanders, his antagonists closed around him: ‘here comes the villain, down with him!’, shrieked Anne Hassall. He staggered against a gatepost, only to be taunted by Edmund Crewe (‘stande & keep thie feete!’) who struck him on the head.49 What happened next perforce remains conjectural. On one account, Crockett was literally beaten to death by a gang of armed assailants who had been stockpiling weapons for the ambush. So many blows were rained on Crockett that they would have knocked him down ‘if he had been Braynes great bull’. Bruised all over, bleeding from his ears and nostrils, his left eye almost gouged out, his skull crushed, he allegedly suffered a ‘heinous stroke or mortal blow to the heart’.50 In the counter-narrative, Edmund Crewe’s ‘lytle tappe’ on Crockett’s head was the only blow struck, and it alone proved fatal51; the victim having a ‘sore fall’ from which he could not be stirred even as his head lay cradled in Cicely Huxley’s lap and a poor woman Margaret Hall took him by the arm and ‘bade him ryse’.52 It was at this point that Richard Wilbraham, still in a state of deshabille, arrived on the scene: one witness noted that the fallen Crockett was surrounded by women, but that in ‘the twinklinge of an eye’, the armed men were ‘all gone’.53 The multiple folds of testimony converge again only in the account of the fatal denouement. Anne Ankers explained that she rushed to the scene, ‘pulled her kercheyf from round her head’ and bound it about Crockett’s. Asked how he fared, he could answer only ‘well, I thank

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you’, but he subsequently vomited ‘braynes and blood’.54 Crockett was soon, it seems, a dead man walking. Agnes Clare helped him back home, only for him to collapse onto a bed to announce his impending demise, exclaiming ‘Lord have mercie upon me for I am but a gone man’.55 These words reflected his fear that his wound might prove fatal, but they were also a calculated attempt to sway a prospective prosecution. Before he lost consciousness Crockett apparently accused the Hassalls, the Wilsons, Edmund Crewe and Richard Wilbraham as co-conspirators in his murder.56 He died at about 9pm, a dozen or so hours after the assault. Whether the sight that confronted Richard Wilbraham as he arrived at the end of Wood Street – a wounded man whose bleeding head was cradled in the lap of a woman; a crowd of bystanders carrying working tools (or were they weapons?) – belongs to the world of the everyday or of the extraordinary is a moot point. The notion of ‘order within disorder’ is now so firmly entrenched in the historiography of crowd actions that it comes as something of a shock to encounter an episode in which violence against the person is so conspicuous.57 The scholarly controversy – perhaps better described as a historiographical brawl – over the nature and extent of violent crime in early modern England originally turned on what has proved to be a question mal posée (‘how violent was a violent society’?) and has been fought to an unresolved stalemate.58 It is, nonetheless, clear that the murder rate was declining even before the advent of modern medical technologies in the nineteenth century.59 While it might be accepted that the incidence of homicide may not even be an appropriate, let alone the most sensitive, historical index of inter-personal conflict, there are other indications that violence was probably a more familiar part of life in sixteenth-century England than it subsequently became. Outright physical coercion (by husbands, by fathers, by masters), for instance, occupied a semi-legitimate place within the household;60 and the apparatus of social discipline with which the streets were littered meant that punishments of shame, pain and death were a familiar sight within the local community.61 Even so, although casual, and sometimes fatal, violence might have been common in sixteenth-century England, it was never condoned and there were very well-established mechanisms for containing it and for dealing with the aftermath at law.62 In some respects, then, the discourses associated with the Nantwich affray sit very comfortably with the historiographical orthodoxy on the nature and extent of violence in early modern society. This was a world in which the social elite, especially in the North and often with the support of their servants or retainers, were as willing to participate in the kind of brawls that might be thought more characteristic of their social inferiors;63 in which assaults might be carried out with whatever weapons were at hand;64 in which accusations of knife-crime were taken particularly seriously;65 and in which aggressive behaviour by women was regarded as particularly unnatural.66 It is accordingly unsurprising that all these issues figure

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prominently in the convoluted and contradictory witness statements of those who gave evidence concerning the death of Roger Crockett. Was it coincidence that so many of those gathered in Wood Street had tools – dubbing hooks, fire shovels, pikestaffs – about them which might easily be used to inflict injury, or had weapons been stockpiled for the purpose?67 Did Cicely Huxley really arrive on the scene concealing ‘a sharpened dagger secretly lapped in clothe’?68 And which was the real Anne Hassall: the hysterical harridan who incited her husband to beat Crockett’s brains out and taunted her mortally-wounded enemy with the words ‘aryse villain! If thou hads’t me in this case thou wouldst not help me up!’;69 or the considerate, and heavily pregnant, neighbour who attempted to succour the unfortunate victim?70 So was this merely the unfortunate consequence of a public quarrel which had got out of hand or the result of a brutal premeditated attack? Edmund Crewe seems to have confessed to having delivered the fatal blow, and his allies immediately spread the story that he had acted alone. They nonetheless took the precaution of having him spirited away beyond the jurisdiction of the county magistrates, an exile from which he was never to return.71 Crockett’s allies were determined to prove that Crewe was part of a wider conspiracy and accordingly set out to incriminate a number of his confederates including not only Wilson, the Hassalls father and son, but even the most prominent gentleman in the town, Richard Wilbraham. And Bridgett Crocket’s subsequent strategy illustrates how the mechanisms for investigating and punishing fatal violence worked in practice, and how they might be mobilised by the relatives of homicide victims in sixteenth-century England. It also propels the story of the Nantwich affray from the realm of the everyday to that of the extraordinary.

The extraordinary In order to verify her conviction that her husband had been the victim of a frenzied, premeditated attack, Bridgett Crockett commissioned a local painter to preserve the evidence of numerous violent strokes to the victim’s head. John Hunter accordingly ‘toke the veiwe of the corpse and thereupon framed a picture or image semblable in all parts as neere as his skill did extend’: the resulting image apparently displayed as many as thirty wounds to Crockett’s skull.72 The inquest itself did not take place until the following Saturday, fully three days after the fracas, one of the two county coroners, Richard Wilbraham’s brother-in-law John Maisterson, presiding.73 In the meantime, the body ‘was sett at the dore’ of The Crown ‘to be viewed and seene of the people’, although it was alleged that ‘fewe men might or could abyde to come neare the same for the horriblenes of the smell’.74 On the Saturday, at the height of the market, the naked corpse was carried on a bier to the church, where a jury of sixteen men had been empanelled.75

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Proceedings in sixteenth-century coroner’s inquests are not welldocumented and the office of the early modern coroner still awaits serious academic analysis.76 The description of events in Nantwich church that Saturday evening is, therefore, all the more remarkable.77 In the first place, there was evidently an argument over the composition of the inquest, an issue of particular significance since, although by the middle of the sixteenth century trial juries were no longer expected to be ‘self-informing’, in the sense of being familiar with the circumstances of crimes tried before them, coroner’s juries were almost invariably made up of men who by definition knew the local context and the protagonists extremely well.78 Richard Crewe, a yeoman of the Bridge End in Nantwich, was summoned to sit on the inquest, but on account of his name was ‘set asyde’, almost certainly because he was a relative of the chief suspect Edmund Crewe.79 In the second place, Bridgett Crockett was sufficiently mistrustful of the physical evidence that she sought to produce in the church the painting of her husband’s numerous wounds. When this evidence was discounted as inadmissible, she and Roger Wettenhall attempted to persuade the coroner to subject those suspected of the murder to the ritual of ‘corpse-touching’, more commonly called the ‘ordeal of the bier’.80 The Hassalls and Wilbraham, they insisted, should be forced to view the corpse to see whether ‘the dead body would expel excrements and fall to bleede afreshe in the sight of them all’.81 The ordeal usually functioned either to deter the potential murderer who might otherwise be tempted to commit the un-witnessed and therefore perfect crime, or to flush out the suspect whose guilt might be implied by his reluctance to take the test. Wettenhall’s justification of the practice on the basis of ‘the opinion of Aristotle and the common experiment’ perfectly encapsulates the symbiotic relationship between learned and popular culture in early modern England.82 The coroner, however, would have nothing to do with this ritual, replying that he would attempt it only if Wettenhall could ‘show some book cast where the like has been done’.83 This self-consciousness about legal precedent might have represented genuine scepticism about the potential of this peculiar compound of science, religion and magic to reveal the identity of the murderer, but it could equally be made to look like special pleading in the light of genuine fear that the ordeal would vindicate Crockett’s claims about Maisterson’s ‘murderous’ kinsmen. It may not be insignificant in this respect that corpsetouching, often initiated simultaneously with post-mortem examinations, remained common practice in coroners’ inquests throughout the seventeenth century.84 A coroner unwilling to preside over the ordeal might easily be regarded as negligent, perhaps corrupt. Maisterson even laid himself open to the charge that, in silencing wounds that might have named his friends and allies, he was an accessory after the fact to Crockett’s murder. On this occasion, the jury found no evidence of a co-ordinated attack on Roger Crockett, and recorded a verdict of homicide by Edmund Crewe

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acting alone. Their foreman, Randle Goldsmith, subsequently affirmed that ‘they saw no more strokes’ upon Crockett’s body than those to which their verdict had referred.85 This was not, of course, what Bridgett Crockett wanted to hear and it is accordingly unsurprising that the account she offered of John Maisterson’s proceedings in Nantwich parish church constitutes a pathology of inquisitorial practice. Bridgett accused Maisterson of systematic corruption from the moment he had delayed the inquest, to the attempt to pack the jury with his allies, to his heavy-handed and misleading summary of the evidence.86 In particular, John Hunter, the painter she had commissioned, had allegedly been intimidated by Maisterson, who had first threatened his wife and family when she sought to exhibit the picture he had produced, and then dismissed it as a fabrication. Worse still, the whole inquest, Bridgett argued, had been a cover-up designed to protect the interests of the coroner’s kinsmen: Maisterson had, it was alleged, concealed the wounds on the corpse and held the inquest in private, ordering that the church doors be kept shut and ‘the people kept out’ so that they ‘shuld not see the heinous and many strokes appearing upon his body’.87 Finally, the coroners apparently instructed the jury to accept that the wounds demonstrated that fatal blow had been but ‘a lyttle’ one: numerous witnesses testified that Thomas Hulse had drawn attention to the ‘dalke’ or depression in Crockett’s skull only to dismiss it as the natural ‘marking or proportion of his head’.88 Bridgett Crockett’s attempt to sway the coroner’s jury evidently failed. Frustrated in her attempt to have anyone other than Crewe indicted for the murder, she took what was by the Elizabethan period the relatively usual step of initiating an ‘appeal of murder’.89 This ancient procedure offered the next-of-kin an alternative mode of proceeding if the coroner’s verdict proved unsatisfactory, if the trial jury failed to convict or if the defendant somehow evaded punishment.90 It might also, however, be vexatiously initiated, especially as a means of securing financial compensation.91 Such an approach involved considerable risk: the appellant had to sue in person and to secure pledges from witnesses to present evidence, all of which would have been co-ordinated by the coroner under the usual proceedings. Worse still, Crockett was exposing herself to the possibility that, if acquitted, the accused might recover damages against her, an outcome whose likelihood was considerably increased by the fact that in cases of appeal, as opposed to indictment, the defendants were allowed counsel.92 The privy council nonetheless took Crockett’s appeal extremely seriously, and on 26 December 1572 required the chief justice of Chester Sir John Throckmorton and other commissioners to investigate the circumstances.93 The commission apparently sat for six days at Chester and for a further six at Nantwich and Wybunbury, and even ordered Crockett’s body exhumed some two weeks after it had been buried.94 It was under these circumstances that the extensive ‘proceedings’ concerning Crockett’s death were collated.95

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Bridgett Crockett’s case depended upon the testimony of those who had alleged that her late husband had died in a frenzy of blows orchestrated by ruthless conspirators. Central here was the evidence of Thomas Palin, Crockett’s servant at The Crown who had already given his version of events to the Nantwich coroner.96 Bridgett apparently told him that since he had sworn once, he must do so again, not only because ‘thy master is slaine’ but also because she would see him well rewarded for his pains. This promise might easily be made to look like subornation, as subsequently became clear when Richard Wilbraham and Richard Hassall prosecuted Palin in the court of star chamber for having perjured himself at the instigation of his mistress and her ally Thomas Wettenhall, ‘an envious craftie and venomous spider seeking to suck innocent bloude’.97 That this might have been a pot-kettle-black scenario is, however, suggested by Palin’s own testimony before the coroner that he had himself been offered bribes by the Hassall faction to give evidence to the effect that there had been no conspiracy and only one, accidental, fatal blow.98 Palin was thought vulnerable to bribery because he was ‘a naughtie lewd fellow of noe credit nor account’. The words of men like Palin (or John Salter of the Leicestershire village of Sileby in the 1630s) could not be trusted precisely because they were ‘worth little or nothing’.99 The rewards dangled before Palin had, indeed, been substantial: he was, at various times, promised not only cash, but access to pasture, subsidised rent, easy credit and a stake in the salt industry. As a 26-year-old unmarried servant – an ageing but angry young man – the prospect of a house of his choice must have proved particularly alluring.100 But above all, he was promised patronage (‘the love of all the towne & gentlemen of the countrey’) if he was prepared to tailor his evidence to suit the single blow theory.101 Patronage, arguably the most valuable currency of all, might be traded (perhaps even counterfeited) by both sides in the dispute: Bridgett Crockett allegedly sought to suborn Palin with a similar vision of a cockaigne in which his mistress ‘wold never see him want’.102 And so it was that Palin gave evidence on Crockett’s behalf at Chester, incriminating not only the conspirators but also the coroner himself. The bare bones of what actually happened in the aftermath of the Nantwich affray can be reconstructed from the proceedings minuted in the crown book of the Chester assizes. In July 1573, some twenty-five individuals from Nantwich were bound to appear and give evidence concerning the death of Roger Crockett. As a result the Nantwich cordwainer, Edmund Crewe, was indicted (in his absence) by the coroner for homicide, though there is no evidence that he was subsequently tried, let alone convicted. The following February (1574) twenty-one individuals appeared before the Chief Justice, presumably to answer the appeal of murder initiated by Bridgett Crockett; and six of them (Richard, Anne and William Hassall, Richard Wilbraham, Thomas Wilson and Robert Grisedale) were bailed for a subsequent appearance. At the

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Michaelmas assizes, all six of these were discharged by proclamation.103 Crockett’s attempt to prove a conspiracy had apparently failed. Wilbraham, Hassall and Maisterson nonetheless sought revenge on those who had accused them. In the winter of 1575, almost three years after he had given such damaging evidence against them, they allegedly arranged for Thomas Palin, on the evidence of a ‘notorious thief’ Roger Brook, to be indicted as accessory to stealing the goods of a carrier who lodged at The Crown. At the Lent assizes in February 1576 both Palin and Brook were convicted and condemned to hang for felony.104 The narrative of what happened on the morning appointed for their execution (3 March) is doubtless tainted by the dramatic conventions of the star chamber strategy.105 Under the protection of Maisterson, Brook was apparently confident that he would not, in fact, hang, and went ‘leaping and dancing, laughing and scoffing’ to the scaffold. On the ladder, knowing ‘his lesson what he must say’, Brook confessed to the robbery, and ‘after he had played his parte came down from the scaffold much like a vice man in an enterlude’.106 Palin, by contrast, blindfolded with a handkerchief and with the halter about his neck, really believed himself to be on the point of execution. The clergyman hearing his ‘last dying speech’ was doubtless disappointed to hear him confess only that ‘he died for the testimony of a truth concerning the death of his master’.107 Just as Palin was about to be turned off, however, John Maisterson approached him on horseback, and promised him a reprieve if he should confess that his evidence in the appeal of murder had been suborned.108 Gallows reprieves of this kind were far from unknown in early modern England, and at least one condemned felon who escaped the noose at the last minute seems to have done so when the evidence against him was revealed to be perjured.109 Palin allegedly confessed that it was true that ‘I came [into Wood Street] even as my master fell and everyone said that Richard Wilbraham knocked him downe […] I thought I might sweare yt but I saw it not’.110 Whether or not this account was tactically embellished, however, it is clear that Palin was reprieved, and subsequently released under the terms of a general pardon.111 Wilbraham family legend provides some further corroborating detail. Roger Wilbraham’s 1670 account of the gallows confession might not have named the perjurer but it certainly did name the clergyman: the radical Protestant preacher, Christopher Goodman, vicar of St Bridget’s Chester, with whom John Maisterson had probably conducted numerous prison visits.112 Whether Palin really did confess his fraudulent testimony to Christopher Goodman on the gallows, as was alleged in star chamber, can never be verified. It is certain, however, that nobody was ever punished for the murder of Roger Crockett. When the Nantwich affray was remembered, it was regarded (by those, like Roger Wilbraham, who had a vested interest in ensuring that skeletons remained firmly locked in family cupboards) less

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as the appallingly casual slaughter of an arriviste landlord than as the prelude to a malicious conspiracy to destroy one of the leading gentlemen of the town. The subsequent fate of the other protagonists is only slightly clearer. When Anne Hassall died in 1611, the Nantwich parish clerk described her as a ‘mirror of vertue’.113 And as for Bridgett Crockett, Roger Wilbraham thought that ‘misfiring of her aims and fearing that they might prosecute her whom she had maliciously prosecuted’, she had ‘left the country and was never heard of after’.114 Wilbraham was apparently (perhaps conveniently) forgetting the thickets of litigation, in star chamber and elsewhere, in which Crockett (together with her new husband Francis Turville) and her enemies became entangled over the next six years.115

Epilogue And so the narrative of the Nantwich affray and its aftermath evaporates into the ether of Star Chamber rhetoric, leaving only half-heard echoes of mutual recrimination. Such ‘fictions in the archives’, it has been suggested, can be interpreted only through the ambient ooze of postmodernist assumptions about subjectivity and narrativity.116 There is, of course, a danger in privileging some kind of objective truth over the valid multiple truths rehearsed in the performance of stories. The telling of a story, after all, constitutes a historical event, and fiction invariably trades register with the truth of what is already known or suspected. When deployed in the law courts, ‘fictional’ narratives offer historians representations of actions and words that their authors hoped would be persuasive, or at least plausible, both to the moral community of the neighbourhood and (especially) to the authorities. Legal fictions of this kind might disclose verisimilitude or moral truth, rather than verifiable accounts of actual historical happenings, but they are not necessarily untrustworthy, still less invariably falsified. Even so, star chamber litigation obscures what really happened in Nantwich that winter morning, and leaves us only with innuendo and invective, engrossed with astonishing precision in interminable sentences stretching across acres of fading parchment: ‘Whether you chanced to touch the said Wettenhall with your elbow as he went paste causing him to revile you?’ […] ‘By whom and how often were you suborned and procured, and in writing or remembrance?’[…] ‘the blow was given in the hurliburlie of the affray’ […] ‘he had no wound or stroke but only the one dry blow on the head with a staff’ […] ‘a matter most lamentable that a poore man should be troubled and vexed for the testifying of a truth and his knowledge on her majesties behalf in the said cause of murder being a matter most heinous and detestable amongst all men to be punished to the greatest extremitie’ […] And so it goes on, in litigation that was to last at least six years.117 We can be certain only that Roger Crockett died on 19 December 1572, and that the inhabitants of Nantwich heard the ‘passing peal knowle’ for him.118

238 ‘Bleedinge Afreshe’? The Affray and Murder at Nantwich, 19 December 1572

At a distance of over 400 years, of course, it matters little whether Roger Crockett really was assassinated, whether John Maisterson really was corrupt, or whether Thomas Palin really did perjure himself. To paraphrase Edmund Wilson’s notorious criticism of Agatha Christie’s detective fiction, ‘Who cares who killed Roger Crockett? However great the temptation, the historian should not play the role of ‘judge, still less a hanging judge’.119 The proceedings relating to the affray at Nantwich, nonetheless, provide a vivid demonstration of the astonishing historiographical potential of the kind of depositional evidence of which social and cultural historians have recently made such imaginative use. On the one hand, the testimony of witnesses to homicide (no less than of those giving evidence in cases of defamation or adultery) might be read ‘against the grain’, the historian listening attentively to the asides casually disclosed between the lines of the – often formulaic, sometimes laconic, occasionally hyperbolic – answers to interrogatories. When heard in this register, the milkmaids, weavers, salt-boilers and blacksmiths of Nantwich inadvertently disclose to us the rhythms and routines of their everyday existence, a world of industry, traffic and conversation in which their contemporary interrogators were largely uninterested. There is enormous potential in this kind of material for the creation of what the German academic tradition has called Alltagsgeschichte, the reconstruction of everyday life through the painstaking study of its regular transactions.120 We might learn about who worked where and when, about who spoke with whom and how regularly, perhaps about the gestures with which social interaction was habitually inflected, possibly even about the power-laden and often gendered significance of particular places and spaces.121 But reading against the grain is more than a question of picking up on incidental detail; it also implies both listening for silence and for absence and recognising that meaning might be deferred. By studying the actions and words which contemporaries found abhorrent, upsetting or anti-social, historians might reconstruct through their unspoken assumptions the more positive attitudes and values to which they aspired. This is the kind of social history which, amidst the lurid, vitriolic and partisan accusations of violence, disorder and immorality generated by an adversarial legal system, chooses instead to amplify the faint chink of the ‘small change of neighbourliness’.122 But if the exploitation of depositional evidence points (however subconsciously) in one direction towards the German tradition of Alltagsgeschichte, it also opens to us the possibility of at least a partial engagement with the Italian tradition of micro-istoria, in which the study of a single, remarkable, well-documented event discloses an otherwise obscure social world.123 This reduction in the scale of observation to a single incident, involving only a single household, maybe even only a single individual, represents what has been characterised as a shift from the ‘systematic’ history of everyday life to the ‘episodic’ history of the extra-ordinary event.124 It elaborates the role of the particular; focuses on narrative and its reception; and, above all, complicates what might at first sight seem to be a simple account.125

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Despite the recent tendency to emphasise the methodological divergence of the German and Italian (to say nothing of the French) schools of social history, however, the historiographical dichotomy between the everyday and the extraordinary is arguably a false one. To be sure, it is axiomatic that any ‘extraordinary’ event (the painting of a smashed skull) or belief (the expectation that a dead man’s wounds would bleed in the presence of those who had caused them) can be recognised as such only in the context of the ‘normality’ from which they (to whatever degree) deviate in nature or intensity. To this extent, micro-histories arguably work best when fully contextualised by the analysis of the social and economic matrices in whose interstices they occur. If, as Edward Thompson once argued, the discipline of history is the ‘discipline of context’,126 then micro-history is perhaps best disciplined by convergence with the anglo-phone tradition of local history, influenced as it is by the practices of empirical sociology which have made possible the reconstruction of both contemporary and historical communities.127 The appeal of the study of the early modern period nonetheless lies precisely in its almost unlimited capacity to disclose the co-existence of the strange with the apparently familiar, the interpenetration of the ordinary and the extraordinary. With some irony, Hayden White wrote disdainfully in 1966 of the professional historians of the twentieth century as ‘“sane” men who excel at finding the simple in the complex and the familiar in the strange’.128 More sophisticated and adventurous scholarship has since demonstrated that this is precisely the opposite of what social and cultural history can and should achieve: the quarry is not the simple, but the complex; not the familiar, but the strange. In Robert Darnton’s terms, historians have come, since the 1980s, to avoid the average and embrace the eccentric.129 The various ways in which historians have sought to resolve the apparent contradiction between the average and the eccentric, between the familiar and the strange, and between the ordinary and the extraordinary, therefore constitute a barometer of historiographical change. The new cultural history is often criticised for its tendency to dissect particular episodes without explaining why they now seem alien to modern sensibilities. But these juxtapositions of the ‘old’ (custom, for example, or superstition) and the ‘new’ (law, or reason) generate those social dramas which were so extraordinary even to contemporaries that they were thought worthy of record, leaving for the historian legible traces of shifting contexts of speech, belief, thought and action. It is precisely these sorts of clashes (raised voices, violent deeds, draconian judgements) that help us to recognise ‘early modernity’ for what it is, a period in which flashpoints of extraordinary change illuminate the otherwise traditional routines of everyday life. Indeed, it is the very alterity of the early modern period that renders its study so attractive130 – and at the same time so challenging – for this is a foreign country to which there

240 ‘Bleedinge Afreshe’? The Affray and Murder at Nantwich, 19 December 1572

are no cheap flights. Its history has become so compelling precisely because of the historiographical determination, exemplified in the work of Bernard Capp, to find the complex in the simple and the strange in the familiar.

Notes *I am grateful to Bernard Capp for his friendship and advice over many years; to the editors for giving me the opportunity to offer another micro-history of dark deeds in Nantwich; and to Charlotte Emerson, Heather Falvey, Malcolm Gaskill and Keith Wrightson for comments on earlier drafts. 1

The following account is based on Chester and Cheshire Archives and Local Studies Service, Chester [hereafter CCALSS], DDX 196/1 (extract from the Wilbraham Family Diary, dated 1670, and copied by George Fortescue Wilbraham in 1872). This forms the basis of the briefer account printed in J. Hall, A History of the Town and Parish of Nantwich, or Wich-Malbank in the County Palatine of Chester (Nantwich, 1883), 198 (though Hall misidentifies the gentry family involved as the Bromleys rather than the Brookes). 2 The National Archives (formerly the Public Record Office), Kew [hereafter TNA], CHES 24/137/1, unfol. (coroner’s inquisition, 2 Dec. 1669; grand jury indictment, 11 Apr. 1670); CHES 21/5, fos 96r, 100r. 3 For the trial and sentencing of the insane, see J.H. Baker, ‘Criminal courts and procedure at common law, 1550–1800’, in J.S. Cockburn (ed.), Crime in England, 1550–1800 (1977), 105. For contemporary legal opinion, see Michael Dalton, The Country Justice (3rd edn, 1626), 243. 4 Cf. C. Herrup, The Common Peace: Participation and the Criminal Law in SeventeenthCentury England (Cambridge, 1987), 151, 163. 5 The penalties for perjury were increased under the terms of 5 Elizabeth c.9 (1563). Cf. M.D. Gordon, ‘The invention of a common law crime: Perjury and the Elizabethan courts’, American Journal of Legal History 24 (1980), 145–70; Gordon, ‘The Perjury Statute of 1563: A case history of confusion’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 124:6 (1980), 438–54. 6 D. Woolf, The Social Circulation of the Past: English Historical Culture, 1500–1730 (Oxford, 2003), 377. 7 CCALSS DDX 196. ‘The proceedings form the basis of two previous accounts: The rather bald summary’, in Hall, Nantwich, 99–101; and the somewhat convoluted narrative in J. Lake, Great Fire (Nantwich, 1983), 51–8. Cf. the allusions to the case in M. Gaskill, Crime and Mentalities in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2000), 227; and G. Walker, Crime, Gender and Social Order in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2003), 119–21. 8 A very conscientious JP took ‘only’ twenty-eight witness depositions in a notorious multiple murder case which he investigated in Jacobean Suffolk. Thomas Cooper, The Cry and Revenge of Blood (1620), 47. 9 Violent death in sixteenth-century England is, curiously, better documented in the nascent tradition of the murder pamphlet than in the laconic records of murder trials, within which very few witnesses’ depositions survive: J. Bellamy, Strange, Inhuman Deaths: Murder in Tudor England (Stroud, 2005), 16. 10 B.S. Capp, ‘Serial killers in seventeenth-century England’, History Today 46:3 (1996), 21–31; idem, ‘Arson, threats of arson and incivility in early modern

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11

12 13

14 15

16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

England’, in P. Burke, B. Harrison and P. Slack (eds), Civil Histories: Essays in Honour of Sir Keith Thomas (Oxford, 2000), 197–213. B.S. Capp, ‘The poet and the bawdy court: Michael Drayton and the lodginghouse world in early Stuart London’, The Seventeenth Century 10:1 (1995), 27–37; idem, ‘The double standard revisited: Plebeian women and male sexual reputation in early modern England’, Past & Present 162 (1999), 70–100; idem, When Gossips Meet: Women, Family and Neighbourhood in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2003), passim; idem, ‘Life, love and litigation: Sileby in the 1630s’, Past & Present 182 (2004), esp. 58–9. For this paragraph see, Lake, Great Fire, ch. 2. W.H. Chaloner, ‘Salt in Cheshire, 1600–1870’, in idem, Palatinate Studies: Chapters in the Social and Industrial History of Lancashire and Cheshire (Chetham Society, 3rd ser. 36, 1992), 102–20; L. Gittins, ‘Salt, salt mining and the rise of Cheshire’, Transactions of the Newcomen Society 75:1 (2005), 139–59. T. Thornton, Cheshire and the Tudor State, 1480–1560 (Woodbridge, 2000), 131, 242. C.J. Kitching, ‘Fire disasters and fire relief in sixteenth-century England: The Nantwich Fire of 1583’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 54 (1981), 171–87. Cf. P. Clark and P. Slack, ‘Introduction’, in P. Clark and P. Slack (eds), Crisis and Order in English Towns, 1500–1700: Essays in Urban History (1972), 22. For this paragraph, see Lake, Great Fire, 44. Hall, Nantwich, 103. CCALSS DDX 196, fos 52v (dep. Richard Chetwode), 53r (dep. John Pyker). TNA: STAC 5/C41/3, m.3 (interrogatories to be ministered to Thomas Wilson, no. 6). CCALSS DDX 196, fo. 40v (dep. Thomas Hewitt). CCALSS DDX 196, fo. 49r (dep. Ellen Ince). CCALSS DDX 196, fo. 51v (deps. Margaret Shenton and Margaret Smith). CCALSS DDX 196, fos 19r (dep. Hugh Lowe), 22v (dep. Humphrey Mainwaring), 25v (dep. Reynold Jackson), 28r (dep. Edmund Sparrow), 44r (dep. Joan Sparrow), 58v (dep. Marjorie Crewe). CCALSS DDX 196, fos 21v (dep. Richard Wright), 48r (dep. Marjorie Parker), 57r (dep. Alice Worrall). CCALSS DDX 196, fo. 37r (dep. Cicely Huxley). CCALSS DDX 196, fo. 23v (dep. John Lovatt). Cf. D. Levine and K. Wrightson, The Making of an Industrial Society: Whickham, 1560–1765 (Oxford, 1991), 280; Capp, ‘Life, Love and Litigation’, 81. CCALSS DDX 196, fo. 57v (dep. Ales Worrall). CCALSS DDX 196, fos 4r (dep. Roger Wettenhall), 33v (dep. John Brett). CCALSS DDX 196, fos 12r–12v. Cf. L. Gowing, Domestic Dangers: Women, Words and Sex in Early Modern London (Oxford, 1996), 98. CCALSS DDX 196, fo. 14v (dep. Nicholas Maisterson). CCALSS DDX 196, fo. 14v (dep. Nicholas Maisterson), a reference to ‘custardpates’ or skulls (OED). CCALSS DDX 196, fos 47r (dep. Ralph Ince), 48v (dep. Ellen Ince). CCALSS DDX 196, fo. 50r (dep. Anne Ankers). CCALSS DDX 196, fo. 11r (dep. Thomas Palin). CCALSS QJF/4/2/26–27, 33r–33v (recognizances issued by Hugh Calveley JP at Lea, 21 Nov. 1572); CCALSS DDX 196, fos 1v (dep. Thomas Wettenhall), 14v (Nicholas Maisterson). Cf. S. Hindle, ‘The keeping of the public peace’, in P. Griffiths,

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38 39 40 41

42

43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57

58

59 60

A. Fox and S. Hindle (eds), The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England (1996), 213–48. CCALSS DDX 196, fo. 5r (dep. Roger Wettenhall). CCALSS DDX 196, fo. 3v (dep. Thomas Wettenhall). CCALSS DDX 196, fo. 42r (dep. Thomas Dodd). K. Wrightson, ‘The politics of the parish in early modern England’, in Griffiths, Fox & Hindle (eds), Experience of Authority, 18; idem, ‘The “Decline of neighbourliness” revisited’, in N.L. Jones and D. Woolf (eds), Local Identities in Late Medieval and Early Modern England (Basingstoke, 2007), 26–8; cf. J. Bossy, Peace in the Post-Reformation (Cambridge, 1998), 77–100. For endemic malice, see L. Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (1977), 95–9; and D.W. Sabean, Power in the Blood: Popular Culture and Village Discourse in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge, 1984), esp. 31–2. CCALSS DDX 196, fos 23v (dep. John Lovett), 25v (dep. Reynold Jackson), 26r (dep. William Jackson), 44r (dep. Joan Sparrow), 52r (dep. Margaret Smith), 54v (dep. John Gorste), 55r (dep. Nicholas Reade), 59v (dep. Margery Crewe). CCALSS DDX 196, fo. 25v (dep. Reynold Jackson), 37r (dep. Cicely Huxley), 49r (dep. Ellen Ince). CCALSS DDX 196, fo. 57v (dep. Margaret Buckley). CCALSS DDX 196, fos 13r (dep. Thomas Palin), 37r (dep, Cicely Huxley), 25v (dep. Reynold Jackson), 57r (dep. Jane Gardener), 39r (dep. Margaret Hare). CCALSS DDX 196, fo. 57r (dep. Jane Gardener). TNA: CHES 38/28/2, fo. 3. CCALSS DDX 196, fo. 37v (dep. Cicely Huxley). TNA: CHES 38/28/2, fo. 15; CCALSS DDX 196, fo. 37v (dep. Cicely Huxley). CCALSS DDX 196, fos 39r (deps. William Foxley, John Key), 39v (dep. Robert Forrest), 40v (deps. William Greene, Thomas Bressy), 50r (Roger Hockenhull). CCALSS DDX 196, fo. 52r (dep. Margaret Smith). CCALSS DDX 196, fo. 37v (dep. Cicely Huxley). CCALSS DDX 196, fo. 23v (dep. John Lovett). CCALSS DDX 196, fos 40r (dep. John Hill), 43v (dep. Agnes Clare). CCALSS DDX 196, fos 43v (dep. Agnes Clare). CCALSS DDX 196, fo. 16v (dep. Nicholas Maisterson). Cf. Gaskill, Crime and Mentalities, 234–8. Cf. E.P. Thompson, Customs in Common (1991), esp. 224; A. Wood, Riot, Rebellion and Popular Politics in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, 2002), ch. 3, esp. 95–6. J.A. Sharpe, ‘Domestic homicide in early modern England’, Historical Journal 24:1 (1981), 29–48; L. Stone, ‘Interpersonal violence in English society 1300–1980’, Past & Present 101 (1983), 22–33; and their subsequent debate: J.A. Sharpe, ‘The history of violence in England, some observations’, and L. Stone, ‘The history of violence in England, a rejoinder’, Past & Present 108 (1985), 206–15, 216–24. Cf. J.S. Cockburn, ‘Patterns of violence in English society: Homicide in Kent 1560–1985’, Past & Present 130 (1991), 70–106; idem, ‘Punishment and brutalisation in the English Enlightenment’, Law and History Review 12:1 (1994), 155–79. J. Beattie, Crime and the Courts in England, 1660–1800 (Oxford, 1986), 107–12. S. Amussen, ‘“Being stirred to much unquietness”: violence and domestic violence in early modern England’, Journal of Women’s History 6:2 (1994), 70–89; idem, ‘Punishment, discipline and power: the social meanings of violence in

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61

62

63

64 65 66 67

68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75

76

77 78 79 80

81 82 83 84 85

early modern England’, Journal of British Studies 34 (January, 1995), 1–34; Walker, Gender, Crime and Social Order, 24–33. M. Ingram, ‘Shame and pain: Themes and variations in Tudor punishments’, in S. Devereaux and P. Griffiths (eds), Penal Practice and Culture, 1500–1900: Punishing the English (Basingstoke, 2004), 36–62. J.M. Kaye, ‘The early history of murder and manslaughter, Parts I & II’, Law Quarterly Review 83 (1968), 365–95, 569–601; T.A. Green, ‘The jury and the English law of homicide’, Michigan Law Review 74 (1976), 414–99. M.E. James, ‘The murder at Cocklodge, 28 April 1489’, Durham University Journal 57:2 (1965), 80–7; R.W. Hoyle, ‘The Earl, the Archbishop and the Council: The affray at Fulford, May 1504’, in R.E. Archer and S. Walker (eds), Rulers and Ruled in Late Medieval England: Essays Presented to Gerald Harriss (1995), 239–56. J.A. Sharpe, Crime in Seventeenth-Century England: A County Study (Cambridge, 1983), 128; Walker, Crime, Gender and Social Order, 77–9. Sharpe, Crime in Seventeenth-Century England, 129. Walker, Crime, Gender and Social Order, 81–99. CCALSS DDX, fo. 40r (dep. John Hill): there were allegedly ‘about half a score of weapons viz bylles and staves standynge in the parlour or hall’ of Hassall’s house. TNA: CHES 38/28/2, fo. 3. CCALSS DDX 196, fo. 12v (dep. Thomas Palin). TNA: CHES 38/28/2, fo. 4. CCALSS DDX 196, fos 28r–28v (dep. William Sparke), 28v–29r (Edmund Sparrow). CCALSS DDX 196, fos 8r (dep. Roger Wettenhall), 41v (dep. John Hunter). CCALSS DDX 196, fo. 18v (dep. Bridgett Crockett). For Maisterson (d.1586), see Hall, Nantwich, 107, 310–11, 417; Lake, Great Fire, 45, 56–8, 78–9. CCALSS DDX 196, fo. 10r (dep. Roger Wettenhall). CCALSS DDX 196, fo. 53r (deps. Thomas and Isobel Barton). The business of most inquests was done ‘commonly in the streete in an open place’. Thomas Smith, De Republica Anglorum, ed. Mary Dewar (Cambridge, 1982), 108. The scholarship on the early modern coroner remains fragmentary: see T. Rogers Forbes, ‘Crowner’s Quest’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 68, part I, (1978), 1–52; Sussex Coroners’ Inquests 1485–1558, ed. R.F. Hunnisett (Sussex Record Society 79, 1985), xiii–xiv; M. MacDonald and T.R. Murphy, Sleepless Souls: Suicide in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1990), 110–14, 139–43; Gaskill, Crime and Mentalities, 246–8. Cf. A.F. Oakley, ‘Sir John Reresby and the moor: A seventeenth-century Coroner’s inquest’, History of Medicine 3 (1971), 27–31. Green, ‘The jury and the English law of homicide’, 489–99. CCALSS DDX 196, fos 13r (dep. Thomas Palin), 60r (dep. Richard Crewe). R.P. Brittain, ‘Cruentation in legal medicine and in literature’, Medical History 9:1 (1965), 82–8; K. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England (1971); 220; 578, 597–8; V. Campion-Vincent, ‘The tell-tale eye’, Folklore 110 (1999), 13–24. CCALSS DDX, fo. 10r (dep. Roger Wettenhall). B.S. Capp, ‘Popular literature’, in B. Reay (ed.), Popular Culture in SeventeenthCentury England (1985), 198–234. TNA: STAC 5/T38/32, m. 1. Gaskill, Crime and Mentalities, 227–31, 292–3, 306. CCALSS DDX 196, fo. 60v (dep. Randle Goldsmith).

244 ‘Bleedinge Afreshe’? The Affray and Murder at Nantwich, 19 December 1572 86

87 88 89 90

91 92 93 94

95 96 97 98 99

100 101 102 103 104

105 106

107

108 109

CCALSS DDX 196, fos 18v–19r (dep. Bridget Crocket). She subsequently alleged that over a period of six years Maisterson had systematically ‘cloaked’ and ‘shadowed’ at least two dozen murders in the county: TNA: STAC 5/T38/32, m. 1. For corruption among coroners, see Gaskill, Crime and Mentalities, 247–8; and Bellamy, Strange, Inhuman Deaths, 32–3. CCALSS DDX 196, fo. 3r (dep. Thomas Wettenhall), 10r (dep. Roger Wettenhall). CCALSS DDX 196, fos 3v (dep. Thomas Wettenhall), 10r–10v (dep. Roger Wettenhall). Crockett’s appeal survives as TNA: CHES 38/28/2, fo. 1. Baker, ‘Criminal courts and procedure’, 17–18; Cockburn, Calendar of Assize Records, Eliz I and James I, 87; J.G. Bellamy, The Criminal Trial in Later Medieval England (Toronto, 1998), 35–9. J.H. Baker, An Introduction to English legal History (3rd edn, 1990), 575. The right to counsel for defendants in felony trails emerged only in the 1730s. J.H. Langbein, The Origins of Adversary Criminal Trial (Oxford, 2003), ch. 5. TNA: CHES 38/28/2, fo. 2 (PC to Throckmorton CJ, 26 Dec. 1572). CCALSS DDX 196, fo. 60r (dep. Richard Crewe); TNA: STAC 5/T38/32, m. 1. It was not unknown for corpses to be exhumed in cases where coroners’ verdicts were delayed or challenged. Gaskill, Crime and Mentalities, 217, 227, 247, 253, 256. TNA: STAC 5/W4/27, m. 1. CCALSS DDX 196, fos 11r–14r (dep. Thomas Palin), with the decisive testimony at fo. 12r. TNA: STAC 5/W8/9, m. 1 (interrogatories to be ministered to Thomas Palin). CCALSS DDX 196, fos 13v–14r (dep. Thomas Palin). TNA: STAC 5/W4/27, m. 1. Cf. Capp, ‘Life, Love and Litigation’, 62, 71; A. Shepard, ‘Honesty, worth and gender in early modern England, 1560–1640’, in H. French and J. Barry (eds), Identity and Agency in England, 1500–1800 (Basingstoke, 2004), 87–105; idem, ‘Poverty, labour, and the language of social description in early modern England’, Past & Present 201 (2008), 51–95; idem, ‘Worth, age and social status in early modern England’, Economic History Review (forthcoming). J. Walter, Crowds and Popular Politics in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2006), 94. CCALSS DDX 196, fos 13v–14r (dep. Thomas Palin). TNA: STAC 5/W8/9, m. 1. TNA: CHES 21/1, fos 60r, 61v, 64r, 67r. TNA: CHES 21/1, fo. 74v records the imprisonment, trial and conviction of both Palin and Brook on 20 Feb. 1576, though the loss of the relevant gaol files precludes examination of their indictments. Cf. S. Hindle, The State and Social Change in Early Modern England, c.1550–1640 (Basingstoke, 2000), ch. 3, esp. 82–7. TNA: STAC 5/T38/32, m. 1. For ‘enterludes’ in Cheshire, see E. Baldwin, L.M. Clopper and D. Mills (eds), Records of Early English Drama, Cheshire including Chester (Toronto, 2007), xxxiii, lxix, lx, 48, 70, 202, 715, 789, 845, 996. TNA: STAC 5/T38/32, m. 1. J.A. Sharpe, ‘“Last dying speeches”: religion, ideology and public execution in seventeenth-century England’, Past & Present 107 (May 1985), 144–67. TNA: STAC 5/T38/32, m. 1. For examples of gallows reprieves in sixteenth-century England, see K. Kesselring, Mercy and Authority in the Tudor State (Cambridge, 2003), 143–4; Sharpe, ‘“Last Dying Speeches”’, 149–50.

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TNA: STAC 5/W4/27, m. 2 (answer of Thomas Palin). The full details of Palin’s subsequent written confession are insinuated in TNA: STAC 5/W8/9, m. 1 [no. 15]. 111 TNA: CHES 21/1, fo. 76v notes that both Brook and Palin were pardoned in this way, under the terms of 18 Elizabeth I, c.24. Cf. Cockburn, Calendar of Assize Records, Introduction, 128; Kesselring, Mercy and Authority, 57–73. 112 CCALSS DDX 196/1. For Goodman, see J.E.A. Dawson, ‘Goodman, Christopher (1521/2–1603)’, ODNB. For Goodman’s prison visits and subsequent petition for better allowances for prisoners, see CCALSS QJF13/10/4 (24 Sept. 1584). 113 CCALSS P120/2, unfol. (25 Aug. 1611). 114 CCALSS DDX 196/1. 115 TNA: STAC 5/C41/3 (Crockett vs. Wilson & Wibraham, 1575); W4/27, 8/9 (Wilbraham & Hassall vs. Palin, 1577–78); T38/32 (Turville vs Hulse & Maisterson, 1578). 116 N.Z. Davis, Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in Sixteenth Century France (Cambridge, 1987). 117 TNA: STAC 5/T38/32, m. 1 refers to litigation not only in star chamber but also in chancery, high commission and at common law in the years immediately following the affray. 118 CCALSS DDX 196, fos 35v (dep. Thomas Shenton Jr), 45v (dep. Ales Sparrow). 119 D. Knowles, ‘The historian and character’, in idem, The Historian and Character and Other Essays (Cambridge, 1964), 13. 120 B.S. Gregory, ‘Is small beautiful? Microhistory and the history of everyday life’, History and Theory 38:1 (1999), 100–11. 121 S. Hindle, ‘The shaming of Margaret Knowsley: Gossip, gender and the experience of authority in early modern England’, Continuity & Change 9:3 (1994), 391–419; Capp, When Gossips Meet, 49–55. 122 Capp, When Gossips Meet, 49–68, quotation at 56. 123 G. Levi, ‘On Microhistory’, in P. Burke (ed.), New Perspectives on Historical Writing (Cambridge, 1991), 93–113; C. Ginzburg, ‘Micro-history: two or three things that I know about it’, Critical Inquiry 20 (1993), 10–35; E. Muir and G. Ruggiero, ‘Introduction: The crime of history’, in E. Muir and G. Ruggiero (eds), History From Crime: Selections From Quaderni Storici (Baltimore, 1994), vii–xviii. 124 D. Bell, ‘Total history and microhistory: The French and Italian paradigms’, in L. Kramer and S. Maza (eds), A Companion to Western Historical Thought (Oxford, 2002), 269. 125 Levi, ‘On Microhistory’, 110. 126 E.P. Thompson, ‘Anthropology and the discipline of historical context’, Midland History 1:3 (1972), 45. 127 The classic studies in this tradition are K. Wrightson and D. Levine, Poverty and Piety in an English Village: Terling, 1525–1700 (New York, 1979); and D. Levine and K. Wrightson, The Making of an Industrial Society: Whickham, 1560–1765 (Oxford, 1991). 128 H. White, The burden of History’, History and Theory 5:2 (1966), reprinted in idem. Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore, 1978), p. 50. 129 R. Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (1984), 14. 130 H. Bonheim, ‘Mentality: The hypothesis of alterity’, Mentalities/Mentalité 9 (1994), 1–11.

Publications by Professor Bernard Capp, FBA Compiled by Tim Reinke-Williams

Monographs The Fifth Monarchy Men: A Study in Seventeenth-Century English Millenarianism (London: Faber, 1972) Astrology and the Popular Press: English Almanacs 1500–1800 (London: Faber, 1979); also published as English Almanacs 1500–1800: Astrology and the Popular Press (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979) Cromwell’s Navy: The Fleet and the English Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989) The World of John Taylor the Water-Poet, 1578–1653 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994) When Gossips Meet. Women, Family and Neighbourhood in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003)

Journal Articles ‘Godly rule and English millenarianism’ [Review Article], Past & Present 52 (1971), 106–17 ‘The millennium and eschatology in England, Past & Present 57 (1972), 156–62 ‘English youth groups and The Pinder of Wakefield’, Past & Present 76 (1977), 127–33; reprinted in Paul Slack (ed.), Rebellion, Popular Protest and the Social Order in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1984) ‘Popular culture and the English Civil War’, History of European Ideas 10:1 (1989), 31–41 ‘John Taylor ‘The Water-Poet’: A cultural amphibian in seventeenth-century England’, History of European Ideas 11 (1989), 537–44 [Debate] ‘Fear, myth and furore: re-appraising the “Ranters”’, Past & Present 140 (1993), 164–71 ‘The poet and the bawdy court: Michael Drayton and the lodging-house world in early Stuart London’, The Seventeenth Century 10:1 (1995), 27–37 ‘George Wharton, Bellum Hybernicale, and the cause of Irish freedom’, English Historical Review 112:447 (1997), 671–7 ‘The double standard revisited: Plebeian women and male sexual reputation in early modern England’, Past & Present 162 (1999), 70–100 [Review Article] ‘Women and the everyday in early modern Europe’, Historical Journal 44:1 (2001), 291–6 246

Tim Reinke-Williams 247 ‘Playgoers, players and cross-dressing in early modern London: The Bridewell evidence’, The Seventeenth Century 18:2 (2003), 159–71 ‘Life, love and litigation: Sileby in the 1630s’, Past & Present 182 (2004), 55–83 ‘A Door of Hope re-opened: The Fifth Monarchy, King Charles and King Jesus’, Journal of Religious History 32:1 (2008), 16–30 ‘Bigamous marriage in early modern England’, Historical Journal 52:3 (2009), 537–56

Chapters in edited volumes ‘The political dimension of apocalyptic thought’, in C.A. Patrides and Joseph Wittreich (eds), The Apocalypse in English Renaissance Thought and Literature (Manchester, 1984) ‘The Fifth Monarchists and popular millenarianism’, in J.F. McGregor and Barry Reay (eds), Radical Religion in the English Revolution (Oxford, 1984) ‘Popular literature’, in Barry Reay (ed.), Popular Culture in Seventeenth-Century England (London, 1985) ‘Separate domains? Women and authority in early modern England’, in Paul Griffiths, Adam Fox and Steve Hindle (eds), The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, 1996) ‘Naval operations’, in J.P. Kenyon and Jane Ohlmeyer (eds), The Civil Wars: A Military History of England, Scotland, and Ireland 1638–1660 (Oxford, 1998) ‘Arson, fear of arson and incivility in early modern England’, in Peter Burke, Brian Harrison and Paul Slack (eds), Civil Histories. Essays Presented to Sir Keith Thomas (Oxford, 2000) ‘Transplanting the Holy Land: Diggers, Fifth Monarchists and the New Israel’, in Robert N. Swanson (ed.), The Holy Land, Holy Lands, and Christian History (Studies in Church History, 36, 2000) ‘Gender, conscience and casuistry: Women and conflicting obligations in early modern England’, in Harald E. Braun and Edward Vallance (eds), Contexts of Conscience in Early Modern Europe (Basingstoke, 2004) ‘Gender and the culture of the English alehouse in late Stuart England’, in Anu Korhnen and Kate Lowe (eds), The Trouble with Ribs: Women, Men and Gender in Early Modern Europe (Helsinki, 2007) ‘Republican reformation: Family, community and the state in Interregnum Middlesex, 1649–60’, in Helen Berry and Elizabeth Foyster (eds), The Family in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2007) ‘Gender and family’; ‘Popular culture(s)’; and ‘Rebels and revolutionaries’, in Beat Kümin (ed.), The European World 1500–1800: An Introduction to Early Modern Europe (London, 2009) ‘Comment from a historical perspective’, in Beat Kümin (ed.), Political Space in Pre-industrial Europe (Aldershot, 2009)

Miscellaneous short publications ‘Sir Nicholas de Dagworth: The career of a royal servant in the 14th century’, Norfolk Archaeology 34:2 (1967) ‘English almanacs 1500–1700’, Notes & Queries 18:12 (1971) ‘Will formularies’, Local Population Studies 14 (1975) ‘Serial killers in 17th-Century England’, History Today 46:3 (1996), 21–6 ‘A lost Elizabethan actors’ company: Sir William Holler’s players’, Notes & Queries 44:1 (1997)

248 Publications by Professor Bernard Capp, FBA ‘Long Meg of Westminster: A mystery solved’, Notes & Queries 45:3 (1998) ‘The Burbages at law (again)’, Notes & Queries 47:4 (2000) ‘The marital woes of Barnaby Rich’, Notes & Queries 47:4 (2000) ‘The Potter almanacs’, The Electronic British Library Journal (2004) Author’s Response to Review of When Gossips Meet: Women, the Family and Neighbourhood in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2003), Reviews in History (2004) Articles in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004): Allestree, Richard (b. before 1582, d. c. 1643), almanac maker and mathematician Ames, Joseph (1619–1695), naval officer Andrews, William (1634/5–1712/13), astrologer and teacher of mathematics Appleton, Henry (d. 1657), naval officer Archer, John (d. 1639), separatist minister and writer Askham [Ascham], Anthony (c. 1517–1559), writer on astronomy and almanac maker Badiley, Richard (c. 1616–1657), naval officer Blackborne, Robert (c. 1620–1701), naval official Booker, John (1602–1667), astrologer Bourne, John (bap. 1620, d. 1667), naval officer Bourne, Nehemiah (1611–1691), naval officer and official Brayne, John (d. 1654), clergyman and Seeker Bretnor, Thomas (1570/71–1618), astrologer and medical practitioner Cary, Mary (b. 1620/21), millenarian Coelson [Colson], Lancelot (1627–1687?), astrologer and medical practitioner Coley, Henry (1633–1704), astrologer and mathematician Cox, Owen (d. 1665), naval officer Coxere, Edward (bap. 1633, d. 1694), sailor Drage, William (bap. 1636, d. 1668), physician and apothecary Edlin [Edlyn], Richard (1631–1677), astrologer Evans, John (b. 1594/5?, d. in or after 1659), astrologer and medical practitioner Fiske, Nicholas (1579–1659), astrologer and medical practitioner Goodsonn [Goodson], William (b. 1609/10, d. in or after 1680), naval officer Gresham, Edward (1565–1613), astrologer Harvey, John (bap. 1564, d. 1592), astrologer Harvey, Richard (bap. 1560, d. 1630), astrologer and polemicist Heth, Thomas (fl. 1563–1583), writer on astrology and mathematician Heydon, Sir Christopher (1561–1623), soldier and writer on astrology Holwell, John (b. 1649, d. in or after 1686), astrologer and mathematician Hopton, Arthur (c. 1580–1614), mathematician and almanac maker Jinner, Sarah (fl. 1658–1664), compiler of almanacs and medical practitioner Kirby, Richard (1649–1693?), astrologer and medical practitioner Krabtree [Crabtree], Henry (1642/3?–c. 1693), astrologer and Church of England clergyman Le Neve [Neve], Jeffrey (1579–1653), astrologer and medical practitioner Moulton, Robert (c. 1591–1652), naval officer Parker, George (1654–1743), astrologer Patridge, Dorothy (fl. 1694), midwife and student in astrology Simpson, John (1614/15–1662), Fifth Monarchist preacher Slingsby, Sir Robert, baronet (1611–1661), naval officer and administrator Spittlehouse, John (bap. 1612, d. in or after 1657), Fifth Monarchist Stoakes [Stokes], John (c. 1610–1665), naval officer Swan, John (bap. 1605, d. 1671), Church of England clergyman and encyclopaedist

Tim Reinke-Williams 249 Taylor, John [called the Water Poet] (1578–1653), poet Tipper, John (b. before 1680, d. 1713), mathematician and almanac maker Wharton, Sir George, first baronet (1617–1681), astrologer and royalist Whetstone, Sir Thomas (1630/31–1668?), naval officer and adventurer Wing, Vincent (1619–1668), astronomer, astrologer, and land surveyor

Reviews Review of Blair Worden, The Rump Parliament 1648–1653 (London, 1974), in English Historical Review 90:357 (1975) Review of Bryan W. Ball, A Great Expectation: Eschatological Thought in English Protestantism to 1660 (1975), in English Historical Review 92:363 (1977) Review of Hillel Schwartz, The French Prophets: The History of a Millenarian Group in Eighteenth-Century England (Berkeley, 1980), in American Historical Review 86:2 (1981) Review of Michael Macdonald, Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety, and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1981), in American Historical Review 87:4 (1982) Review of James K. Hopkens, A Woman to Deliver Her People: Joanna Southcott and English Millenarianism in an Era of Revolution (Austin, 1981), in American Historical Review 88:2 (1983) Review of Christopher Hill, Barry Reay and William Lamont (eds), The World of the Muggletonians (London, 1983), in English Historical Review 100:397 (1985) Review of Barry Reay, The Quakers and the English Revolution (London, 1985), in English Historical Review 102:405 (1987) Review of Richard L. Greaves, Saints and Rebels: Seven Nonconformists in Stuart England (Macon, Georgia, 1985), in English Historical Review 103:406 (1988) Review of R.C. Richardson and G.M. Ridden, Freedom and the English Revolution. Essays in History and Literature (Manchester, 1986), in English Historical Review 104:412 (1989) Review of Patrick Curry, Astrology, Science and Society (Woodbridge, 1987), in English Historical Review 106:418 (1991) Review of Michael Hunter, Annabel Gregory and Samuel Jeake (eds), An Astrological Diary of the Seventeenth Century: Samuel Jeake of Rye, 1652–1699 (Oxford, 1988), in English Historical Review 106:419 (1991) Review of Sari R. Hornstein, The Restoration Navy and English Foreign Trade, 1674–1688 (Aldershot, 1991), in Mediterranean Historical Review 7:1 (1992) Review of Patrick Curry, Prophecy and Power: Astrology in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1989), in English Historical Review 108:426 (1993) Review of Kaspar von Greyerz, Vorsehungsglaube und Kosmologie. Studien zu englischen Selbstzeugnissen des 17. Jahrhunderts (Göttingen, 1990), in English Historical Review 109:431 (1994) Review of Marie Roberts, Gothic Immortals. The Fiction of the Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross (London, 1990), in History of European Ideas 18:5 (1994) Review of David Loades, The Tudor Navy: An Administrative, Political and Military History (Aldershot, 1992), English Historical Review 110:439 (1995) Review of David Delison Hebb, Piracy and the English Government 1616–42 (Aldershot, 1994), in English Historical Review 111:442 (1996) Review of Anthony Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination in England, 1500–1800 (London and New Haven, 1995), in Economic History Review 49:2 (1996)

250 Publications by Professor Bernard Capp, FBA Review of Ann Geneva, Astrology and the Seventeenth Century Mind: William Lilly and the Language of the Stars (Manchester, 1995), in English Historical Review 112:447 (1997) Review of J.R. Jones, The Anglo-Dutch Wars of the Seventeenth Century (London, 1996), in William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 54:3 (1997) Review of Richard Harding, The Evolution of the Sailing Navy, 1509–1815 (London, 1995), in English Historical Review 113:450 (1998) Review of G. de la Bédoyère, Particular Friends. The Correspondence of Pepys and Evelyn (Woodbridge, 1987), in English Historical Review 114:457 (1999) Review of Ian Bostridge, Witchcraft and Its Transformations, c.1650–c.1750 (Oxford, 1997), in American Historical Review 104:2 (1999) Review of Barry Reay, Popular Cultures in England 1550–1750 (London, 1998), in English Historical Review 115:461 (2000) Review of Marion Gibson, Reading Witchcraft: Stories of Early Modern English Witches (New York, 1999), in American Historical Review 106:1 (2001) Review of Barbara Howard Traister, The Notorious Astrological Physician of London: Works and Days of Simon Forman (Chicago and London, 2001), in Journal of Early Modern History 6:4 (2002) Review of Hilary Hinds (ed.), The Cry of A Stone, by Anna Trapnel (Tempe, 2000), in English Historical Review 118:475 (2003) Review of Alexandra Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2003), in Reviews in History (2004) Review of Richard L. Greaves, Glimpses of Glory: John Bunyan and English Dissent (Stanford, 2002), in American Historical Review 109:3 (2004) Review of Ben Coates, The Impact of the English Civil War on the Economy of London, 1642–1650 (Aldershot, 2004), in Economic History Review 57:3 (2004) Review of Laura Gowing, Common Bodies: Women, Touch and Power in SeventeenthCentury England (London and New Haven, 2003), in History: Review of New Books (2004) Review of John Watkins, Representing Elizabeth in Stuart England: Literature, History, Sovereignty (Cambridge, 2002), in English Historical Review 119:483 (2004) Review of Mihoko Suzuki, Subordinate Subjects: Gender, Literary Form and the Political Nation in England, 1588–1688 (Aldershot, 2003), in English Historical Review 119:484 (2004) Review of Jessica Munns and Penny Richards (eds), Gender, Power and Privilege in Early Modern Europe (Harlow, 2003), in English Historical Review 119:484 (2004) Review of Phil Withington, The Politics of Commonwealth: Citizens and Freemen in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2005), in Economic History Review 58:4 (2005) Review of Patricia Crawford, Blood, Bodies and Families in Early Modern England (Harlow, 2004), in Gender & History 18:1 (2006) Review of David Como, Blown by the Spirit: Puritanism and the Emergence of an Antinomian Underground in Pre-civil War England (Stanford, 2004), in Journal of Ecclesiastical History 57:4 (2006) Review of James Daybell, Women Letter-Writers in Tudor England (Oxford 2006), in Reviews in History (2008) Review of Ariel Hessayon, “Gold Tried in the Fire”: The Prophet Theaurau John Tany and the English Revolution (Aldershot, 2007), in American Historical Review 113:4 (2008) Review of Whitney R.D. Jones, Thomas Rainborowe (c.1610–1648): Civil War Seaman, Siegemaster and Radical (Woodbridge, 2005), in English Historical Review 124:502 (2008)

Index

Alehouses [taverns; inns] 33, 35, 66, 69, 88, 90, 92, 94, 192, 194, 196, 199, 200, 226–227, 232, 235–236 Almanacs and astrology 86–87, 91, 94 Angels 134 Anglicanism 130 Anti-social behaviours [taboos] 3, 13, 201, 216 Aristotle 233 Armada, The 163 Aubrey, John 19, 137 Ballads 91, 137, 162, 197, 220–222 Banquets see Feasting Baxter, Richard 11, 13, 129, 134 Bible [biblical allusions; Gospel; Scripture] 12, 33, 131–132, 145, 193, 195, 197, 201, 213 Blood and bleeding 4, 13, 113, 117, 143, 166, 172, 192–210, 230–231, 233, 238 Blount, Thomas 19 Bodies [corpses; flesh; mummies] 2, 4, 15, 23, 37, 49, 91, 111–117, 147, 149–153, 166, 168, 170–171, 173, 192, 195–196, 199, 201, 205–206, 225, 232–234 ‘Body politic’ 193, 202, 204, 206 Boyle, Robert 129, 134 Bunyan, John 222 Burton, Robert 132, 203, 205 Camden, William 18, 151, 156 Cannibalism 4, 161–176, 197–198, 201 Capp, Bernard 3, 11, 66, 87, 89, 100, 131, 201, 206, 222, 226, 240 Catholicism 44, 87–88, 112, 131–133, 136, 143–144, 147–149, 152, 154, 193, 195–197 Cecil, Robert 11 Channel Islands, The 177–191 Chapbooks 211, 222

Charles I 128, 192–193, 195, 197, 198, 200–202, 220 Charles II 35, 44 Chaucer, Geoffrey 15 Civil Wars 88, 192, 212, 214 Civility and the cultivation of manners [bodily control or restraint] 10, 14–15, 18, 22, 95, 99 Classical and Greek literature [mythology; allusions] 12, 14, 32, 37, 90–91, 169, 193–195, 197, 200, 202, 205 Clergymen [ministers] 73, 76, 108, 128–129, 132, 134–136, 143–145, 147, 150–151, 198, 201, 212–222, 225, 236 Comedy see Humour Commonwealth 193, 204–205 Coroner 225, 233–235 Courtesy and conduct literature 14, 17, 21–22 Courts 15, 48–65, 69–70, 72, 105–124, 145, 177–191, 192, 224–245 Courtship 43–44 Credit, honour and reputation 41–42, 49–50, 61, 68, 92, 95–97, 115, 183, 203, 215, 217, 219, 225, 229, 235 Cromwell, Oliver 198, 201 Cromwell, Thomas 146 Cudworth, Ralph 133 Cursing see Verbal insults Debt 31–47, 49–51, 61 Defoe, Daniel 22 Dekker, Thomas 14, 214 Depositional evidence 48–65, 116–117, 224–245 Disease see Medical ailments Divine Providence see God Drink, drinking and drunkenness 12, 36, 40, 53, 68, 80, 88–89, 92, 94–95, 192–210 251

252 Index Eucharist 170–171, 196, 198 Elizabeth I 162, 197 Evangelism 143, 146, 156 Exclusion Crisis, The 87, 99 Explorers and captains 19, 161–162, 164, 167, 169, 171 Fairies 4, 127–141 Families and kin see Social relationships Famine [starvation; hunger; dearth] 167–168, 173, 186 Farting [flatulence, breaking wind] 4, 9–30 Feasting 4, 36, 53–54, 118, 199, 206, 216, 221 Ferrand, Jacques 203–205 Flesh see Bodies Foxe, John 146, 150–154 Friendship see Social relationships Gallows confessions 224, 236 Geree, John 196 Ghosts see Spirits Glanville, Joseph 129, 134 God 56, 127–128, 134, 137, 147, 149, 151–152, 184, 203, 206, 218 Grand Tour 31, 39 Hakluyt, Richard 163–164 Harvey, William 201 Henry VIII 21, 143, 146, 220 Heresy and heretics 105, 108–109, 120, 142–160 Hobbes, Thomas; ‘Hobbism’ 129, 133, 201 Households [household economy; domestic] 32, 43, 48–65, 127, 131–132, 136, 204, 231, 238 Huguenots 136 Humour [comedy; jokes; laughter] 17, 19–23, 66, 72, 80, 86–104, 174, 215, 220–221, 236 Hus, Jan 144, 147

Johnson, Samuel 10 Jonson, Ben 15–16, 19, 22, 163, 169, 174, 198 Kirk, Robert

134–135

Landlords and tenants see Social relationships Lilly, William 220 Locke, John 135 Lollardy 142–160 London 33, 38, 43, 49, 86–104, 127, 134, 136, 145, 147, 211, 226–227 Luther, Martin 145, 149–150 Martyr 143, 146, 148, 150–152, 156, 213, 220 Martyr, Peter 170–171 Masculinity 3, 13, 34, 92, 96–97, 131, 200–201, 206 Masters and servants 33–35, 37, 39, 44, 54, 92, 95, 127, 224, 227–229, 231, 235 Medical ailments 11, 31, 33, 36–37, 43–44, 55–56, 91, 106, 116, 127–128, 155, 183–187, 205 Medical treatises, authorities and physicians 12, 16–18, 90, 94, 114, 118, 205 Medical treatments 1, 94, 127, 130–131, 184, 201, 205 Melancholy 39, 203–206 Middleton, Thomas 218 ‘Middling-sort’ 136 Miracles 135, 142, 148 More, Sir Thomas 16, 133, 145, 163 More, Henry 129 Murder see Violent crime

Inheritance 31–47 Inventory 49–53, 59 Isham family 31–47

Nashe, Thomas 131 Neighbours see Social relationships Newsbooks 88 Newspapers 86–104 New World, The 161–176, 134 North, Roger 12

James I 15, 132 Jestbooks 18–19, 22–23, 87, 216 Jesuits 168

Oral traditions 48, 55, 58–62, 143–144, 150, 154, 156, 225 Orphans 48–65

Index 253 Pamphlets 2, 80, 87, 111–114, 127–128, 161, 168, 172, 193, 196, 198, 201, 205, 211–215, 219, 222 Papists see Catholicism Parliament 19, 43, 128, 130, 146, 192, 197, 200, 220 Patriarchy 97–99, 203 Pecke, Samuel 193 Pepys, Samuel 2, 12, 19 Percy, George 165–166 Perkins, William 222 Pitt, Moses 127–141 Plays and theatre 3, 211, 217 Pope 2, 88, 143, 145, 150, 155, 196, 220 Proof (standards of) 105, 108–111, 114 Prophesies, prophets and visionaries, 94, 130–131, 136, 211–223 Protestantism 4, 132, 142–160, 183, 185, 197, 212, 218, 221–222 Punishments and penal symbols 66–85, 105–109, 115, 118–120, 145–148, 166–167, 177–191, 196, 204, 218, 231–232, 237 Puritan 95, 153, 196–197, 220–222 Rebellion [revolution; riot] 3, 202 Reformation(s) 131, 143, 149, 152, 170, 185–187, 219, 221 Relics 142–160 Restoration 31, 87–88, 100, 129, 205, 215 Ridings and ‘rough music’ 71, 74, 78, 96–97 Royal Society 129, 134 Royalism 31, 44, 130–131, 153, 192–210 Rumour 145, 167–168, 228 ‘Rump, The’ [Long Parliament] 201 Saints 19, 142–143, 147–149, 152, 155, 201 Satirical literature 14, 18 Satan [Devil; demons; demonology] 22, 76, 88, 107–109, 111–113, 132–133, 136, 170, 185, 195, 211–223 Scatology 18–23, 87, 89

Scepticism [atheism; unbelief] 127–141, 233 Schools and methodologies of history 1–4, 61, 80, 105, 226, 237–240 ‘Scientific Revolution’ 129 Scolds and scolding 1, 67–70, 87, 92, 99, 221 Scot, Reginald 109, 114, 119, 132–133 Sectarian and politically radical groups 3, 19, 73, 88, 92, 131, 192–193, 212 Sermons and moralising texts 194, 200, 202, 222 Sex [lust; sexual immorality] 13, 39–40, 78, 86–87, 90, 92, 95–98, 114, 215 Shakespeare, William 11, 21, 169 Smith, John 164–168, 172–173 Social relationships 4, 31–47, 48–65, 72, 77, 93, 97, 224–225 Songs and singing 200–201, 221 Spirits [ghosts] 105–124, 131, 136 Sports 33–36, 43 Stow, John 77–78 Strachey, William 164, 166–167 Taverns see Alehouses Taylor, John (the Water Poet) 3, 87, 90, 100 Toland, John 135 Trades-people [trades; merchants] 38, 44, 49, 51, 54, 62, 89, 93, 144, 146, 226–227 Trans-substantiation 170–171 Tyndale, William 145 Vagabonds [beggars; rogues; itinerancy] 94, 99, 179, 180, 183–184, 186, 187, 200 Verbal insults [cursing; defaming] 4, 66–85, 79, 227–228, 230, 232 Violent crime 95, 108, 142–143, 152, 224–245 Weapons 200, 229–230, 231 Webster, John 14, 133 Witches and witchcraft [maleficia; the sabbat] 79, 105–124, 129, 132–134, 170, 177–191, 195–196, 211–223 Witness testimony see Depositional evidence

254 Index Wolsey, Thomas 211, 213–214 Wood, Anthony 2 Woodcut images 151, 213–216 Wyclif, John 142–160

Yeomen and husbandmen 127 Younge, Richard 194

48–65,