When Gossips Meet: Women, Family, and Neighbourhood in Early Modern England (Oxford Studies in Social History)

Oxford Studies in Social History General Editor: Keith Thomas

When Gossips Meet

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When Gossips Meet Women, Family, and Neighbourhood in Early Modern England

BERNARD CAPP

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford 2 6 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi São Paulo Shanghai Taipei Tokyo Toronto Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Bernard Capp 2003 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2003 First published in paperback 2004 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data applied for ISBN 0–19–925598–9 ISBN 0–19–927319–7 (Pbk.) 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Typeset by Regent Typesetting, London Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd, King’s Lynn, Norfolk

PREFACE

This book explores some of the myriad ways in which women negotiated the constraints embedded in the patriarchal society of early modern England. It covers a turbulent period from the mid-sixteenth century to the beginning of the eighteenth, focusing throughout on women below the gentry and aristocracy. Elite women, though far better documented, lived very different lives, and their presence often overshadows the silent majority in discussions of female experience. The decision to focus on the poor and ‘middling sorts’ has played a large part in determining the chronological range of this book. Before the mid-Tudor period few women could write, and we depend on official records, especially court depositions, to hear their voices—albeit at second hand. This depositional evidence is extremely rich from the Elizabethan period to the end of the seventeenth century, especially in the records of the ecclesiastical courts, but many of the problems confronting ordinary women, and many of the strategies they developed in response, would have been familiar both before and after the period surveyed here. Female strategies of accommodation and negotiation proved as resilient as the patriarchal order itself. Readers will find few statistics and no tables in this book. Despite the importance of quantification as a tool in the historian’s armoury, cultural attitudes and the nuances of domestic and neighbourly relationships demand other methods of investigation. To see how women responded to drunken or violent husbands or obstreperous neighbours we must explore the social dynamics involved. The sources I have drawn upon are varied in character. The most important are ecclesiastical and secular court records, and I have used archival materials from Berkshire, Cambridgeshire, Leicestershire (whose archdeaconry records proved enormously rich), London, Oxfordshire, and Sussex. They provide a balance between urban and rural communities, and between southern and midland counties; if the north and west are somewhat under-represented, printed records have helped to compensate. I have also drawn extensively on the rich pamphlet literature of the period, on prescriptive writings, and on personal records of all kinds, including the Diary of Samuel Pepys. Though Pepys and his wife were already moving in elite circles during the diary period (the 1660s), their

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origins were modest and the diary gives a vivid picture of domestic relationships in the professional or ‘upper-middle’ strata of society. It provides too an unrivalled picture of employer–servant relationships, and rereading the diary from the perspective of their maidservants throws a fascinatingly different light on the household. This book, long in the making, would have taken still longer but for grants of sabbatical leave from the University of Warwick, a research award from the British Academy in 1995–6, and study leave in 2000–1 funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board. I am grateful to the staff of many record offices for their help, especially those in the Leicestershire RO, the Guildhall, and the Bodleian. I would also like to thank friends and colleagues at Warwick for a stimulating and congenial atmosphere sustained for over thirty years, especially Robin Clifton, a founding father of the History Department, and in more recent years Steve Hindle and Peter Marshall. I have learned much too from younger scholars with whose doctoral theses I have been involved either as supervisor or examiner, especially Dr Claire Stone, Dr Elizabeth Foyster, Dr Dinah Winch, and Dr Amanda Flather. My debt to other scholars who have explored some of the same territory, Susan Amussen, Anthony Fletcher, Laura Gowing, Martin Ingram, Garthine Walker prominent among them, will be evident in much of what follows. I am grateful too to Paul Griffiths for first drawing my attention, many years ago, to the riches of the London Bridewell court minute books. Tony Morris and then Ruth Parr at OUP have been encouraging and patient throughout. Sir Keith Thomas, the editor of this series, read the whole typescript and offered some helpful suggestions. My good friends Brian and Margaret Buckley were enthusiastic supporters of this project from the start, and I am saddened that Brian alone has lived to see its fruition. Helen and Michael, and now Jacob and Bella, have provided support and distractions in ways that defy categorization. The issues explored in this book bear on many other societies and periods, and I have chosen to avoid technical terms and modernize quotations in order to make the social and cultural world of our ancestors more readily accessible. Dates are given Old Style, but with the year taken as beginning on 1 January. In footnote references the place of publication is London unless otherwise stated. Manuscripts are cited by folio or page number, wherever available, and otherwise by date. B.C. March 2002

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Since the book went to press research in this field has continued apace. Important recent titles include Joanne Bailey, Unquiet Lives: Marriage and Marriage Breakdown in England, 1660–1800 (Cambridge, 2003); Laura Gowing, Common Bodies: Women, Touch and Power in Seventeenth-Century England (New Haven, 2003); Alexandra Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2003); D. M. Turner, Fashioning Adultery: Gender, Sex and Civility in England 1660–1740 (Cambridge, 2002); and Garthine Walker, Crime, Gender and Social Order in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2003). The RSC’s revival in 2003 of John Fletcher’s The Tamer Tamed (first performed 1611), a ‘sequel’ to The Taming of the Shrew, provided another intriguing insight into seventeenth-century debates on gender. April 2004

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CONTENTS

Abbreviations

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1. Introduction

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The Patriachal Edifice Women and Patriarchy: Acceptance, Negotiation, and Defiance

2. Patriarchy and the World of Gossips Patriarchal Theory: Tensions and Gaps Women Without Men Women, Work, and Patriarchy When Gossips Meet Gossiping

3. Families and Gossips: The Experience of Marriage Domestic Politics The Injured Wife: Strategies for Redress Desperate Remedies: Divorce, Flight, and Homicide

4. Maidservants and the Politics of the Household The Terms of Service Social Realities: Law and Practice The Good Employer The Bad Employer Surviving Service: The Politics of the Household Domestic Alliances and Rivalries Covert Resistance: Pilfering, Slander, and Exposure Overt Resistance Flight Conclusion

5. Women and Neighbours: Female Disputes Quarrels: The Language of Insult Insults as Street Theatre

3 15 26 26 36 42 49 55 69 72 84 114 127 129 131 139 143 149 155 166 175 178 181 185 189 197

The Politics of Defamation Defensive Tactics Physical Violence and the Law

6. Women and Neighbours: Disputes with Men Male Threats Female Strategies of Defence Male Honour and Women on the (Counter-) Offensive

7. Women as Citizens: Public and Political Life Community and Reputation Gossip and the Politics of Pressure Activating the Machinery of Law Networks and Mutual Protection Women as Citizens: National and Micropolitics The Roots of Political Awareness Women and Public Life Juries of Matrons Midwives and the Public Sphere Female Politics: Petitioning Direct Action: Women and Public Protest Conclusion

200 203 217 225 226 234 252 267 268 272 281 284 288 290 294 298 301 306 311 318

8. Recreation, Religion, and Female Culture

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Women, the Family, and Recreation Separate Recreations: Married Women Young Women and Maidservants The Recreations of Young People Same-Sex Recreations Women and the Festive Calendar Religion and Beliefs Gender and ‘Superstition’ A Sub-Culture of Women?

321 327 333 338 345 348 353 363 365

9. Conclusion

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Bibliography of Manuscript Sources

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Index

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ABBREVIATIONS

Amussen, Ordered Society BCB BL Bodleian BRO Cockburn (ed.), Calendar CUL EcHR Fletcher, Gender GL Gowing, Domestic Dangers HMC Ingram, Church Courts LMA LRO Mendelson and Crawford, Women OAO OBSP Pepys Ballads Pepys, Diary PRO RO Roxburghe Sharpe, Defamation

TRHS WRO WSRO

S. D. Amussen, An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1988) Bridewell Court Minute Books British Library Bodleian Library, Oxford Berkshire Record Office J. S. Cockburn (ed.), Calendar of Assize Records Cambridge University Library Economic History Review A. Fletcher, Gender, Sex & Subordination in England 1500–1800 (New Haven, 1995) Guildhall Library, London L. Gowing, Domestic Dangers: Women, Words, and Sex in Early Modern London (Oxford, 1996) Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts M. Ingram, Church Courts: Sex and Marriage in England, 1570–1640 (Cambridge, 1987) London Metropolitan Archives Leicestershire and Rutland Record Office S. Mendelson and P. Crawford, Women in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1998) Oxfordshire Archives Office Old Bailey Sessions Papers The Pepys Ballads, ed. W. G. Day and H. Weinstein (Cambridge, 1987–94) The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. R. Latham and W. Matthews (1970–83) Public Record Office Record Office The Roxburghe Ballads, ed. W. Chappell and J. Ebsworth (1866–99) J. A. Sharpe, Defamation and Sexual Slander in Early Modern England: The Church Courts at York (Borthwick Papers, 58; York, 1980) Transactions of the Royal Historical Society Warwickshire Record Office West Sussex Record Office

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1 Introduction

I May 1698 two Holborn women, Margaret Kingston and Katherine Alderidge, stood trial at the Old Bailey for the murder of one Ann Barker. The prosecution alleged they had followed her to a public house where they kicked and beat her to death, ‘saying, they would be revenged of her for picking Kingston’s husband’s pocket’. The two women did not deny the assault, though an obliging surgeon saved them from the gallows by testifying that the victim had probably died from a diseased liver, rather than her injuries.1 Such an incident, though as rare in the seventeenth century as today, raises a multitude of questions that reach far beyond those addressed in the trial. Why had Margaret taken it on herself to avenge her husband’s wrongs, rather than leaving it to him or reporting the alleged thief to a constable? Why would a friend join in the attack? More generally, how can we reconcile such a brutal assault with the passive behaviour expected of women in a patriarchal society? The brief trial report provides no clues, but this book will explore the wider context in which such an incident could occur. It will seek to unravel some of the complexities and contradictions in relations between men and women, and among women themselves, over the century and a half from the accession of Elizabeth in 1558 to the end of the Stuart line in 1714. England in this period was ‘patriarchal’ in the loose sense that its political, social, economic, religious, and cultural life was dominated by men. In almost every field women were subordinated, marginalized, or excluded, though many of these social arrangements rested on convention rather than law. There was no patriarchal system, rather an interlocking set of beliefs, assumptions, traditions, and practices, and the largely informal character of patriarchy enabled each generation to adapt it to changing circumstances.2 Male domination was so rooted in the culture that contemporaries found it almost impossible to imagine a society based on fundamentally different principles. Most contemporaries, of both sexes, understandably accepted the assumptions on which 1

OBSP, 4–9 May 1698, 4. The best general survey is Mendelson and Crawford, Women; on patriarchy’s adaptability see Fletcher, Gender. 2

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they had been raised, and very few escaped that cultural straitjacket. Even the most radical critics could think of no realistic means to effect change. But if women did not challenge the patriarchal order, neither did they simply accept it on its own terms. Anthony Fletcher has drawn attention to ‘a huge untold story of the contestedness of English patriarchy within the early modern home’.3 This book sets out to tell something of that story, and to show how women might influence their own domestic lives and the affairs of their neighbourhood. We will see how many found ways to limit, evade, or accommodate male domination, both by their own efforts and by harnessing the support of their female friends or ‘gossips’. The informal nature of patriarchal order could serve women’s interests as well as men’s, and enabled the resourceful to modify at least their own personal circumstances. This study focuses throughout on women in the middling and lower levels of society. The writings of women from the landed elites speak primarily of their own very different world, and are an unreliable guide to the lives of the silent and unlettered majority. Modern scholars have increasingly addressed the issue of women’s agency, which forms a central motif in the survey by Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford. Some have explored their economic activities, while Amy Erickson has shown women fighting to protect their economic interests within marriage. Others have investigated women’s readiness to pursue their interests through legal means, whether suing over debts in local borough courts or turning to the ecclesiastical courts to protect their good name.4 Studies of non-elite women face huge methodological problems, however, for we usually hear their voices only as mediated by court officials or other male contemporaries. That exacerbates the problems facing any historian aspiring to reach behind partial and partisan narratives to establish ‘what really happened’. Many recent scholars have preferred to follow Natalie Davis in using depositions to reconstruct cultural values rather than reliable narratives.5 Depositions 3

Fletcher, Gender, 198. Mendelson and Crawford, Women; M. Prior, ‘Women in the Urban Economy: Oxford, 1500–1800’, in ead. (ed.), Women in English Society 1500–1800 (1985); P. Earle, ‘The Female Labour Market in London in the Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries’, EcHR, 2nd ser., 42 (1989), repr. in P. Sharpe (ed.), Women’s Work: The English Experience 1650–1914 (1998); P. Sharpe, ‘Literally Spinsters; A New Interpretation of Local Eeconomy and Demography in Colyton in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, EcHR, 2nd ser., 44 (1991); A. L. Erickson, Women and Property in Early Modern England (1993), 235 and passim; C. Muldrew, ‘Credit and the Courts: Debt Litigation in a Seventeenth-Century Urban Community’, EcHR, 2nd ser., 46 (1993), which shows that as many as 15% of plaintiffs were women; Gowing, Domestic Dangers. 5 N. Z. Davis, Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France (Cambridge, 1987); Gowing, Lyndal Roper, and Garthine Walker are among scholars who have pursued Davis’s lead. 4

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were invariably incomplete and often contradictory, and we can never assemble a comprehensive picture of incidents that occurred several centuries ago. Yet such records can offer far more than ‘fiction in the archives’, and in the legal disputes used for this book we often have a battery of depositions by neighbours from which to establish at least a core of agreed fact. I would like to focus attention once more on social behaviour as well as representations and values, to ask how ordinary women acted in a variety of situations, what they hoped to achieve, and how far they succeeded.

   The intellectual and structural foundations of male domination have been analysed fully elsewhere, and only a brief summary is needed here.6 Scripture provided the first and most important ideological prop. God had created Eve (Woman) as companion and helpmeet for Adam (Man), making the principle of female subordination an integral part of the Creation story. The preacher Matthew Griffith urged women to remember that Eve had been created from Adam’s side, not his brain, and warned them not to behave ‘as if you had wisdom and discretion enough of your selves’.7 The Creation story was reinforced by the associated myth of the Fall, which told how Eve’s moral weakness had led Adam to disobey God, plunging the human race into sin, misery, and mortality. Many other texts confirmed that female subordination was ordained by God, a message developed by the New Testament epistles of St Paul and St Peter. St Peter stressed the continuity between Judaic and Christian teaching, urging wives to be subject to their husbands, ‘even as Sara obeyed Abraham, calling him lord: whose daughters ye are’ (1 Pet. 3: 1–6). For Christians as for Jews, Adam represented the fallen state of all mankind, and Eve symbolized all women. The puritan minister John Brinsley could remark as a truism in 1645 that women were ‘naturally more prone to be deceived and misled’, and asked rhetorically, ‘How many of Eve’s daughters do we daily here see following their mother?’ Another puritan, Daniel Rogers, told his female readers bluntly, ‘Remember, thy sex is crazy, ever since Eve sinned.’8 The allegorical marriage between Christ and his Church offered a rather more positive image, but again signalled female inferiority. For in every well-ordered 6 7 8

281.

See Mendelson and Crawford, Women; Fletcher, Gender, ch. 4; Amussen, Ordered Society. M Griffith, Bethel: or, a Forme for Families (1633), 243–4. J. Brinsley, A Looking-Glasse for Good Women (1645), 6; D. Rogers, Matrimoniall Honour (1642),

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family, according to the puritan preacher William Gouge, ‘an husband carrieth a resemblance of Christ, and is after manner a Saviour’, employing his superior reason, moral judgement, and strength to ‘redeem’ his wife from the consequences of her frailty.9 Female subordination was also thought to reflect the natural order, a second powerful prop. The principle of hierarchy and order held a central place in medieval and early modern culture, with equality, especially equality of the sexes, viewed as unnatural. Medical science derived from the Greeks taught that men were physiologically different from women, and superior. The elements composing the human body were combined differently in each sex, with women’s predominantly moist and cold constitution rendering them irrational, emotional, impulsive, and sexually rapacious. St Paul’s description of women as ‘the weaker vessel’, a phrase frequently invoked, was endorsed by a medical science which depicted women as physically, intellectually, and morally inferior. Biology also confirmed the biblical view that women’s bodies were designed for the primary function of bearing children. The pain women suffered in childbearing, said the minister William Thomas, ‘is their proper way to Heaven; for that’s the work which God hath committed them to do’.10 It could also be viewed as punishment for Eve’s sin, and for many centuries European culture regarded childbirth, and women’s sexual organs and functions more generally, as in some way shameful and unclean.11 Women were thus thought to embody base passions and attributes that threatened man’s higher nature. Even their everyday speech and gestures betrayed a vulgarity which might subvert the order and decorum of civilized, male society. A writer on the art of polite conversation remarked in 1683 that women ‘are generally an unthinking sort of creatures, and scarce reflexive on what they say, being overruled by their passions’, warning readers that ‘to laugh as women do sometimes, with their hands on both sides, and with a lascivious agitation of their whole body, is the height of indecency and immodesty’.12 In the eighteenth century writers came to believe that women embodied a natural modesty and refinement, but earlier commentators associated them with a raw Nature which posed a constant threat to male civility and culture.13 Third, the patriarchal mindset recognized a close link between 9

W. Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties (1622), 346; D. Cawdrey, Reformation Promoted (1656), 18. W. Thomas, Christian and Conjugal Counsell (1661), sig. A7v. 11 See e.g. P. Crawford, ‘Attitudes to Menstruation in Seventeenth-Century England’, Past and Present, 91 (1981). 12 D.A., The Whole Art of Converse: containing Necessary Instructions for all Persons, of what Quality, and Condition soever (1683), 14, 37. 13 Cf. U. Rublack, The Crimes of Women in Early Modern Germany (Oxford, 1999), 13–14. 10

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domestic and political order. Adam, the first father and first magistrate, had ruled with a natural and divine authority, answerable only to God. The parallel between royal and domestic authority was stressed in most writings on the family. ‘A household is as it were a little commonwealth,’ explained Dod and Cleaver in one of the most influential of the domestic conduct-books popular in the period. No man could be fit to bear public office unless he already knew how to govern his family. A husband was ‘the prince of the household, the domestical king,’ said William Whately. Domestic theorists were thus able to clothe fathers with something of the sacred majesty of kingship, making dissent by their wives, children, or servants akin to treason. Political theorists, for their part, could link royal authority to a form of government that was familiar to all and accepted as natural. The association gave powerful reinforcement to authority at every level, combining domestic, national, and even divine sovereignty in a comprehensive and coherent system of order.14 Robert Pricke explained in 1609 that God himself was ‘a most wise and holy householder’, who had perceived mankind’s innate dislike of authority and therefore ‘set upon all superiors the sweet and amiable name of Father and Mother’ to make it more acceptable. Like most commentators, Pricke stressed that the fifth commandment, requiring obedience to one’s father and mother, covered all those in authority, from prince to schoolteacher.15 The parallels surfaced again in the popular image of the ‘body politic’, in which both king and father appeared as the head, with their subjects or families as limbs. Daniel Rogers’s comment that ‘Two heads in a family confound all’ would have been seen as a truism; a twoheaded creature was clearly a freak of nature.16 The law provided a fourth prop for male superiority, both in principle and practice. A man’s word carried more weight than a woman’s in any court hearing, and the word ‘testimony’ was indeed derived from testis. The gendered character of the law was further illustrated in the treatment of rape cases. Lord Chief Justice Hale explained that a husband who discovered another man raping his wife was entitled to kill him on the spot, ‘se defendo’—in self-defence. The husband not only ‘owned’ his wife’s sexuality, he could, in this situation, regard their two bodies as one.17 Yet in any trial for rape it was notoriously difficult to secure a conviction. If there was no evidence except the bare word of the alleged 14 J. Dod and R. Cleaver, A Godly Forme of Household Governement (1614), sig. A7, A8v; W. Whateley, A Bride-Bush. Or a Direction for Married Persons (1623), 204; Rogers, Matrimoniall Honour, 258; Amussen, Ordered Society, ch. 2. 15 R. Pricke, The Doctrine of Superioritie, and of Subiection (1609), sig. B1. 16 Rogers, Matrimoniall Honour, 270. 17 Sir Matthew Hale, Historia Placitorum Coronae (1736), i. 485.

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victim, the widespread prejudice that women were untrustworthy, libidinous, and swayed by passions such as malice and revenge, tipped the scales heavily against her.18 In a still more extreme manifestation of the legal culture, a man who killed his wife would be hanged for murder, whereas a wife who murdered her husband was burned for petty treason. The law itself thus enshrined the principle that the husband was a king within his household.19 Far more important in everyday life was a man’s legal right to dispose of his wife’s money and moveable property without her consent or even knowledge. The law also treated widowers far more generously than widows; a widower had a life interest in the whole of his wife’s property, whereas a widow was entitled to only a third of her husband’s, or half if there were no children, and usually forfeited this if she remarried.20 There were, admittedly, occasions when the law could work to the woman’s advantage. If a husband and wife committed burglary together, for example, the man would be hanged for felony while his wife would be judged not legally responsible, the law assuming she had simply obeyed his orders. But even these benefits served as reminders of female subordination, and contemporaries recognized that the law functioned to uphold male interests.21 Finally, history, custom, and language reinforced the intellectual and legal foundations of patriarchy. For most people, female subordination was something imbibed from infancy, not a concept to be scrutinized. Children grew up in a society which accepted hierarchy as a universal principle of nature, with gender perceived as an integral part. Most people absorbed social conventions from their parents, masters, and preachers, a process of social osmosis reinforced by the jokes they heard and the harassment they saw directed at nonconformists. Those born with an independent or rebellious spirit could find no model in history or any other European society to suggest that any different pattern of gender relations could be legitimate or practicable. Indeed, proverbial wisdom held that England was already ‘the paradise of women’, and that if a bridge were ever to be constructed over the Channel, Continental women would rush across it. The preacher Zachary Crofton judged it ‘the glory of England, that their women are not so servilely submisse as the 18

On rape see Ch. 6, below. Hale, Historia, i. 377–82. 20 Erickson, Women and Property; T. Stretton, Women Waging Law in Elizabethan England (Cambridge, 1998), ch. 2 and passim. 21 M. Dalton, The Countrey Justice (1677), 374–5; Hale, Historia, i. 45, 516; E. Chamberlayne, Angliae Notitia; or, the Present State of England (1669), 451. For examples see OBSP 11–13 Apr. 1678, 7; OBSP 16–18 May 1678, 3; OBSP 17–18 July 1690, 1–2; OBSP 10–17 Dec. 1690, 1; OBSP 6–9 Dec. 1693, 4; cf. T.E., The Lawes Resolution of Womens Rights (1632), passim. 19

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French’.22 Women in England were certainly better off than in most of southern or eastern Europe, as some educated women themselves acknowledged.23 But for Crofton, and most contemporaries, the proverb probably served to reassure men that any complaints were by definition absurd. If English women already enjoyed unparalleled freedoms, how could they have any legitimate grievances? A multitude of other proverbs and aphorisms repeated the message of women’s inferiority, making their subordination appear both natural and necessary. Traditional wisdom held it was foolish to be moved by a woman’s tears, as by seeing a goose barefoot; both signified nothing, and the analogy hinted that women were as irrational as dumb animals and birds.24 Patterns of language thus reinforced social attitudes, which in turn shaped language itself, so that we find negative concepts acquiring female associations and vice versa. The word ‘gossip’, for example, originally meaning a godparent of either sex, gradually lost its value-free character and took on predominantly negative and female connotations.25 Similarly, though ‘shrews’ could be spiteful, waspish persons of either sex, and both sexes might ‘scold’, both terms were overwhelmingly applied to women.26 The most elaborate expositions of the patriarchal order can be found in the homily ‘Of the State of Matrimony’ and in domestic conduct-books spelling out the reciprocal duties of husbands, wives, children, and servants, and addressing problems readers might encounter in daily life.27 22 Chamberlayne, Present State, 449, 452–3; T. Dekker and J. Webster, West-ward Hoe (1607), in The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, ed. F. Bowers (Cambridge, 1955), ii. 356; W. Rye, England as Seen by Foreigners (1865), 7–8, 14, 73, 197; Z. Crofton, Bethshemesh Clouded (1653), 195. 23 Eugenia, The Female Advocate; or, A Plea for the just Liberty of the Tender Sex (1700), 52. Women’s legal position was in fact better in some parts of Europe: Erickson, Women and Property, 233, and sources there cited. 24 B. Rich, The Honestie of this Age [1614], ed. P. Cunningham (1844), p. xxi; D.N., Figure of Six (1652), sig. Bv; E. Ravenscroft, The Canterbury Tales [1694], ed. E. S. Henry (1987), 286; Fletcher, Gender, 70–4; Mendelson and Crawford, Women, 60–5. 25 See Oxford English Dictionary (1979 edn.), s.v. ‘gossip’. 26 For male shrews see T. Dekker, The Ravens Almanack [1609], in The Non-Dramatic Works, ed. R. B. McKerrow, iv (1963), 264; for male scolds/scolding see e.g. R. H. Helmholz (ed.), Select Cases on Defamation (Selden Soc., 1985), 23; S. A. H. Burne (ed.), The Staffordshire Quarter Sessions Rolls, ii. 1590–1593 (1930), 290; GL, MS 9064/13, fo. 9; LRO, 1D 41/13/60, fo. 48. 27 Certain Sermons or Homilies appointed to be read in Churches in the Time of Queen Elizabeth (1851), 534–49. On conduct-books see A. J. Fletcher, ‘The Protestant Idea of Marriage in Early Modern England’, in id. and P. R. Roberts (eds.), Religion, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge, 1994); Fletcher, Gender, ch. 11; Amussen, Ordered Society, ch. 2; K. M. Davies, ‘Continuity and Change in Literary Advice on Marriage’, in R. B. Outhwaite (ed.), Marriage and Society: Studies in the Social History of Marriage (Cambridge, 1981); Alison Wall, Power and Protest in England 1525–1640 (2000), ch. 5; A. Shepard, ‘Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England, with special reference to Cambridge, c.1560–1640’ (Ph.D., University of Cambridge, 1998), introd. and ch. 6.

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Most writers were aware that patriarchal theory might be challenged at several points. Many acknowledged, for example, that some wives were superior to their husbands morally, intellectually, and spiritually. Dod and Cleaver conceded, remarkably, that ‘if at this day, a due survey should be taken of all men and women, throughout his Majesty’s dominions, there would be found in number, moe [more] women that are faithful, religious, and virtuous than men’.28 But patriarchal theory easily accommodated such contradictions, insisting that wives must obey bad husbands just as subjects must obey bad kings. Arguments based on individual merit were judged irrelevant in the context of divine authority, for to grant equality to a woman, however capable and virtuous, would flout God’s own decree. ‘Without question it is a sin for a man to come lower, than God hath set him’, thundered the preacher William Whately. ‘It is not humility, but baseness, to be ruled by her, whom he should rule.’ Richard Baxter made the same point in more measured language: ‘God hath said in his law, the husband shall rule the wife; . . . And if she should agree with him not to rule her, it were ipso facto null.’ It would transgress the law of nature too, for a wife governing her husband was both ‘monstrous and unnatural’.29 Writers agreed that family and state alike rested on fundamental principles of order, and that disobedience in either spelled anarchy and confusion. ‘You know that the first government that ever was in this world was in a family,’ Robert Abbott declared in 1653, ‘and the first disorder that ever was in the world was in a family; and all the disorders that ever fell out since, sprung from families.’ Defenders of patriarchy could thus deploy arguments from Scripture, nature, reason, and history, and repel an assault on one part of its foundations by forces drawn from other parts of the citadel. As Mendelson and Crawford remark, ‘the aggregate effect of the whole system of discourses was more than the sum of its parts’.30 Patriarchal principles, ubiquitous at every social and cultural level, naturally helped to determine the roles seen as appropriate for each sex. Writers and preachers insisted that women should be confined to the private, domestic sphere. ‘God hath made the man to travail abroad, and the woman to keep home’, explained the influential Elizabethan preacher Henry Smith. ‘God hath appointed their station to them 28

Dod and Cleaver, Godly Forme, sig. P3v. Whately, Bride-Bush, 98; Rogers, Matrimoniall Honour, 258–62; R. Baxter, A Holy Commonwealth [1659], ed. W. M. Lamont (Cambridge, 1994), 115–16; Pricke, Doctrine of Superioritie, sig. Lv; cf. J.S., A Brief Anatomie of Women (1653), 5. 30 Rogers, Matrimoniall Honour, 270; R. Abbott, A Christian Family, Builded by God (1653), sig. A4; Mendelson and Crawford, Women, 72. 29

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both, the one, without, the other within,’ echoed Daniel Rogers.31 The woman’s role was to manage the household, look after the children, and oversee her maids. Her entire life should revolve around the home. Some contemporaries compared the good housewife to a snail or tortoise, images derived from the ancient world and reflecting the fact that both were literally inseparable from their homes. The snail was a fitting model, one writer remarked, ‘because she carries her house upon her back, to show where her mind and ordinary abode must be’—a gloss that subtly delimited women’s mental as well as physical sphere.32 Writers and preachers condemned those who preferred to ‘gad abroad’ as idle, slovenly, or worse. ‘The wise man maketh such gadding abroad a note of a light and lewd housewife,’ Thomas Gataker warned in 1637.33 The effects of these entrenched attitudes are manifest at every turn. Women played no formal part in public affairs, whatever influence some might wield behind the scenes. Sir Thomas Smith, discussing ‘the persons of the commonwealth’ in 1583, remarked: ‘we do reject women, as those whom nature hath made to keep home and to nourish their family and children, and not to meddle with matters abroad, nor to bear office in a city or commonwealth no more than children and infants.’34 Women were barred from office in both central and local government, and from voting. Typically, this exclusion rested on convention and propriety, not law. Technically a spinster or widow with freehold land was eligible to vote in parliamentary elections, but the few who tried to exercise their right were strongly discouraged.35 The only significant exception was the ability of women to inherit the English throne, an anomaly which contemporaries agreed had no bearing on any other aspect of gender relations. Women were also excluded from any formal role in the Church, a marginalization reinforced by the suppression of nunneries after the Reformation. They were barred from higher education, played no role in the legal profession, and were kept firmly on the margins of the medical profession, working mainly as nurses and midwives. Though some 31 H. Smith, A Preparative to Marriage (1591), 55; Rogers, Matrimoniall Honour, 198. The identification of female respectability with an exclusively domestic sphere is often ascribed to the late 18th or even 19th century, but the arguments were familiar generations earlier. 32 Abbott, Christian Family, 77; R. Braithwaite, The Description of a Good Wife (1618), sig. B2v; T. Gataker, Marriage Directions briefely couched together, in Certaine Sermons (1637), 194; M. Griffith, Bethel: or, a Forme for Families (1633), 282. According to William Secker, the Greek artist Phidias had drawn an emblematic woman sitting under a snail-shell: Secker, A Wedding Ring Fit for the Finger (1658), 36. 33 Gataker, Marriage Directions, 195; Abbott, Christian Family, 21; Rogers, Matrimoniall Honour, 277. 34 Sir Thomas Smith, De Republica Anglorum, ed. M. Dewar (Cambridge, 1982), 64. 35 Mendelson and Crawford, Women, 396–7.

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practised informally as physicians or bone-setters, they encountered increasing hostility from male practitioners. Women’s position in economic life was similarly marginal. As conditions worsened in the sixteenth century, they were increasingly excluded by guild regulations from trading independently, except as widows. Girls could still serve apprenticeships, but few were able to pursue their craft independently thereafter. If some opportunities remained open, mainly in retail and victualling, or as milliners, it is clear that women were firmly excluded from the most important and profitable sectors of the economy.36 To modern readers, this sketch of the gender order in early modern England will suggest a regime deeply misogynistic, the product of male contempt, fear, and self-interest packaged as principle. The social order undoubtedly served male interests, but most writers balanced their assertion of patriarchal authority with a vigorous denunciation of domestic tyranny, condemned by Gouge as ‘heathenish, and sottish arrogancy’.37 They stressed that men had duties as well as rights, and urged the importance of love, care, and mutual forbearance. The Bible taught that husbands and wives were one flesh, and most writers sought to promote a loving, companionate relationship. ‘Husbands and wives should be as two sweet friends,’ Daniel Rogers insisted. A man should seek his wife’s advice and consent on all family matters, and not demand more than she could readily concede. Gouge memorably summed up the proper exercise of a husband’s authority as ‘A forbearing to exact more than his wife is willing to do, or to force her to dwell where it is not meet, or to enjoin her to do things unmeet in themselves, or against her mind ’. That was a significant concession, and by no means unusual. Another guide, Thomas Hilder, pleaded, ‘let me beseech thee that art a husband, that all the commands thou dost lay upon thy wife may be in the nature of requests and entreaties.’38 As we will see, most writers condemned the use of violence by husbands as shameful. Men and women should exercise mutual restraint. ‘Husbands must hold their hands and wives their tongues,’ Henry Smith directed in 1591, a typical view.39 36 There is no full modern account, but see A. Clark, Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century, 3rd edn., with introd. by A. L. Erickson (1992); L. Duffin and L. Charles (eds.), Women and Work in Pre-Industrial England (1985); Sharpe, Women’s Work; Mendelson and Crawford, Women, ch. 5; Fletcher, Gender, ch. 12. 37 Certain Sermons or Homilies, 537–9; Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties, 358; Rogers, Matrimoniall Honour, 265. 38 Rogers, Matrimoniall Honour, 200; Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties, table of contents, treatise  (my italics); T. Hilder, Conjugall Counsell: or, Seasonable Advise, both to Unmarried and Married Persons (1653), 104. 39 H. Smith, Preparative, 69; see Ch. 2, below.

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Commentators stressed too that husbands and wives each had their particular responsibilities, and should not trespass beyond them. For women, that promised at least some autonomy within the home. Daniel Rogers condemned ‘foppish husbands’ who meddled in the affairs of kitchen and dairy, ‘as if they would have an oar in each boat’, and fully understood their wives’ irritation. ‘What wise woman would not break into a mixed passion of fulsome indignation and contempt?’ he demanded.40 Most conduct-books were written by ministers with pastoral experience and responsibilities, and their exhortations for husbands to be loving and considerate, echoing New Testament teachings, helped to soften the stress on male authority. At the same time, their primary aim was always to secure male authority, not compromise it. They sought to define patriarchy in terms that would render it effective as well as harmonious and fair. Judith Bennett has argued that companionate marriage depended entirely on the husband’s goodwill, and was at best a ‘voluntary egalitarianism shadowed by inequality’.41 The impact of the conduct-books is far harder to assess. Many were substantial and relatively expensive works, aimed primarily at professional men, gentlemen, and prosperous tradesmen who would already share most of their values. But we also find Nehemiah Wallington, a young and fairly impecunious turner, buying a copy of Gouge’s weighty guide when he married, and occasionally we catch a glimpse of how well the arguments could be absorbed. Robert Burnam, a London chandler enraged when his wife refused to live with him, declared that ‘a wife rebelling against her husband doth rebel against God, against the law of God, against the Lord Jesus, and against the church of Christ’.42 The patriarchal message, moreover, did not depend solely or even primarily on conduct-books for its dissemination. Many, like Gouge’s, had originated in the pulpit, and a stream of unpublished sermons spread very similar ideas, while the homily ‘Of Matrimony’, read from pulpits across the country and probably reaching a larger audience than all the conductbooks put together, contained all their central ideas. A variety of shorter printed works repeated their message. Daniel Cawdrey offered his Reformation Promoted as a condensed version of Gouge’s tome, with the author’s blessing, for readers who could not afford the original.43 The message was further reinforced by cheap ballads and chapbooks which 40

Rogers, Matrimoniall Honour, 198. J. M. Bennett, ‘Medieval Women, Modern Women: Across the Great Divide’, in D. Aers (ed.), Culture and History 1350–1600: Essays in English Communities, Identities and Writing (1992), 154. 42 P. Seaver, Wallington’s World: A Puritan Artisan in Seventeenth-Century London (1985), 79; R. Burnam, A Remonstance, or a Necessitated Vindication (1645), 13–14. 43 Cawdrey, Reformation Promoted (1656), sig. A3v–5r. 41

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disseminated in simple terms the traditional picture of male and female character, and the responsibilities proper to each sex. Many of the assumptions and arguments found in such writings were derived from more scholarly works. Thus The Virtuous Wife, published in 1667, set out her qualities in terms familiar from the conduct-books, and probably lifted from them. Illustrated with two crude woodcuts, it probably sold for only 2d. or 3d., and was clearly targeted at a humble audience.44 Similarly, two companion pieces by the balladeer Martin Parker, Hold your hands, honest Men and Keep a Good Tongue in your Head, summed up traditional advice on the proper behaviour and roles of men and women respectively.45 As Parker’s titles indicate, even popular fare might try to balance the gospel of male authority with support for companionate marriage and the recognition of mutual responsibilities and separate roles within the household. Balladeers found a steady market for humorous accounts of the disasters that followed whenever men and women strayed outside their proper spheres.46 It is clear that patriarchal ideas and values were absorbed by most of the population. But it may well be that many men absorbed their authoritarian thrust while ignoring the qualifications on which preachers also insisted. The homily ‘Of Matrimony’ itself lamented that ‘the common sort of men’ regarded moderation in domestic relations as ‘womanish cowardice’, and saw it as ‘a man’s part to fume in anger, to fight with fist and staff’.47 Much of the popular printed fare offered a crude if jocular misogyny instead of a measured patriarchal message. One early piece, The Scole House of Women, depicted them as garrulous, deceitful, lustful, idle, and power-hungry, adding some humorous twists to traditional arguments. In its flippant version of the Creation myth, a dog runs off with the bone God has just removed from Adam’s side, forcing him to fashion Eve from the dog’s rib instead—which ‘explained’ why women were always bawling and barking at men over trifles. The degrading and animalistic associations of this jest found parallels in other popular lore, such as the proverbial wisdom that Where many geese be, be many turds, And where be women, be many words.

A humorous chapbook lumped ‘wanton maids’ with monkeys and apes as symbols of lechery, while promiscuous women were frequently 44 45 46 47

L. Price, The Vertuous Wife (1667). Roxburghe, iii. 236–48. Mendelson and Crawford, Women, 205–6, 256. Certain Sermons or Homilies, 537.

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derided as ‘salt bitches’.48 Other balladeers and hack poets fed traditional prejudices by depicting girls and young women as always desperate for sex. In The Maids Complaint for the want of a dil-doul [dildo] a girl of 16 offers all her money to any young man willing to relieve her sexual frustration, while another ballad shows a bold country wench making advances to a young tailor, only to decide that his ‘yard’ is too short, and send him packing.49 The author of a A Strange Wonder or a Wonder in a Woman (1642) summed up popular misogynystic thinking by declaring that while a few women might be angelic, among ‘many thousands . . . you shall scarce find one that is not guilty of one abominable crime or another’. The ‘wonder’ trailed in his title was to find virtue in any woman.50 Pamphleteers like scholars disposed of the ‘problem’ of good women by dismissing them as too rare to be of any general significance. This misogyny was often reflected too in the spoken language of the age. Anthony Fletcher has documented the aggressive and frequently demeaning terminology which men at all levels of society used to describe the sexual act itself.51 And if wife-beating was condemned from the pulpit, it was often encouraged by proverbs, jests, and ballads, many of which recommended it as the only means to subdue a disobedient spouse. ‘Teach her manners with a crabtree cudgel’, one pamphleteer advised the henpecked husband in 1671.52 A cavalier newspaper recounted with glee the old story of a drunkard who beat his scolding wife and broke her arm. Asked why he had paid the bone-setter double the fee requested, he quipped that he would break her other arm next time and was paying in advance.53 Several balladeers travelled still further down this road of jocular sadism. One described how a man had tamed his nagging, unfaithful wife by blinding her, to render her helpless and dependent; another showed a husband who declared that his scolding wife must be mad, and had her kept in fetters as a lunatic. A character in one Jacobean citycomedy advises a henpecked husband to curb his wife by any means he 48 Here begynneth the Scole House of Women (1560), sig. B4v; D.N., Figure of Six, (1652), sig. A8, Bv. On salt bitches see Ch. 5, below. 49 ‘The Maids Complaint’, Pepys Ballads, iv. 50; cf. ‘A pleasant new ballad; being A Merry Discourse between a Country Lass and a young Taylor’, Roxburghe, iii. 604–6; ‘The Country Lawyer’s Maid Joan’, Roxburghe, iii. 585–7; B. Capp, The World of John Taylor the Water Poet, 1578–1653 (Oxford, 1994), 116. 50 I.H., A Strange Wonder, 2; cf. Mendelson and Crawford, Women, 58–65. 51 Fletcher, Gender, 93–4. 52 The Married Men’s Feast (1671), 1; Fletcher, Gender, 192–3; Capp, World of John Taylor, 118; J. Wiltenburg, Disorderly Women and Female Power in the Street Literature of Early Modern England and Germany (Charlottesville, Va., 1992), ch. 6. 53 Mercurius Fumigosus, 34 (17–24 Jan. 1655), 267; A. Copley, Wits Fittes and Fancies (1595), 85–6.

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can, and if all else fails to ‘set fire to the pan and blow her up with gunpowder’.54 It would be rash, of course, to equate misogynist fantasies with more general popular attitudes, still less with social behaviour. The broad ideology of male supremacy and authority was clearly disseminated throughout society, accompanied by a mass of far more contradictory advice on how this should be translated into everyday behaviour. The principle that men should govern their wives seems to have been widely internalized, by both sexes. Men and women alike mocked henpecked husbands and cuckolds, and often equated the two. Moreover men could be held publicly accountable for their wives’ misbehaviour. When two London women slandered Pratt’s daughter in 1575, his wife retaliated by having not the two offenders but their husbands brought before the Bridewell governors, who ordered them to ‘give their wives warning to keep their tongues better’. Similarly, when Margaret Ridhall was presented before a London church court in 1588 for being drunk and disorderly, the clerk noted that her husband held himself to blame, and ‘submitteth himself to take double punishment’ if he failed to prevent her committing such an offence in future.55 Judges in the court of Star Chamber took a similar view when a ‘clamorous’ female plaintiff disturbed their proceedings in 1603: they had the woman whipped, but also fined her husband £20 for failing to govern her properly.56 The right of men to use force to ‘correct’ wayward wives remained a contested area, as we have seen. While the respectable middling sorts increasingly came to associate such behaviour with the uncouth poor, the law regarded the use of ‘reasonable’ force as permissible, and magistrates generally intervened only in extreme circumstances.57 We can also find men, and occasionally women too, urging a neighbour to beat his wife for behaviour they viewed as offensive.58 Many women had no compunction in beating their children or maidservants, and some may have regarded physical chastisement as an inevitable part of domestic life, however much they resented it when directed at themselves. 54 ‘The Scoulding Wife’, Pepys Ballads, iv. 136; ‘Couragious Anthony’, ibid. 146; ‘A Caution for Scolds’, Roxburghe, iii. 507–10; Everie Woman in her Humour (1609), sig. F4v. 55 BCB 2, fo. 63; E. J. Fripp (ed.), Notes and Accounts of the Corporation of Stratford-upon-Avon (Dugdale Society, 1922–9), i. 32, 73; GL, MS 9064/13, fo. 18. 56 Stretton, Women Waging Law, 52. 57 Fletcher, Gender, 192–203; Amussen, Ordered Society, 128–9; M. Hunt, ‘Wife Beating, Domesticity and Women’s Independence in Eighteenth-Century London’, Gender and History, 4 (1992); T.E., Lawes Resolution, 128–9; see below, chs. 2, 3, 6. 58 P. Collinson, The Birthpangs of Protestant England (1988), 72; LRO, BR II/18/13/376; for women urging male violence see PRO, STAC 8/102/16; Rublack, Crimes of Women, 205.

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  : , ,   With traditional gender roles upheld by the law, pulpit, custom, and alehouse jokes, it is hardly surprising that we find no serious attempt to challenge them. Most women knew their lives would be dominated by bearing and raising children, which may well have convinced them that gender roles were indeed naturally determined. Most single women were too poor and marginal to make effective use of their freedom. Women lacked the education to equip them for scholarly debate, and had no public forum. While a few spirited individuals managed to publish their ideas, they and their readers found it almost impossible to break out of the intellectual constraints of patriarchal assumptions and theories. Women had equally few positive role models through whom they could challenge the traditional view of female inferiority. Queen Elizabeth I, like Margaret Thatcher, liked to present herself as a unique phenomenon, not a model for others to emulate. Few biblical figures offered roles that were both positive and appropriate. The story of Judith, who saved Israel by flirting with the enemy general Holofernes, plying him with liquor and cutting off his head while he slept, was more likely to frighten men than inspire women, and suggested that even the noblest women were deceitful and dangerous. Writers insisted moreover that God employed such instruments only in the most exceptional circumstances, and that they ‘ought not to be drawn into precedent’.59 The Virgin Mary, by contrast, symbolized the conventional female virtues of purity and obedience, though some Protestants viewed even Mary with suspicion; Dorothy Leigh advised new mothers that Mary was an unsuitable name for a girl, because of her association with Catholic idolatry and the cult of virginity.60 The models usually held out to women were wives and mothers who had embodied conventional wifely virtues. Though many had clearly been tough and resourceful individuals, their stories were used to reinforce established values. Thomas Gataker’s account of Joice Featly cited appropriate biblical texts for each of her virtues, painting a picture that matched conduct-book ideals at every turn. William Gouge’s wife Elizabeth was likewise remembered as a model ‘wife, mother, mistress, neighbour’, a pious and diligent housewife who ‘carefully kept Saint 59

J. Brinsley, A Looking-Glasse for Good Women (1645), 36. D. Leigh, The Mothers Blessing (10th edn., 1627), 34–42; for a counter-view see B. Spencer, A Dumb Speech. Or, a sermon made, but no sermon preached (1646), 44 (‘a true, a very , that is, by interpretation, excellent’). 60

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Paul’s precept to keep at home’, avoided idle company, and devotedly breastfed her brood of thirteen children. The didactic intent is evident in the titles of many such accounts, as in Imitations and Cautions for Christian Women: or, the Life and Death of that Excellent Gentlewoman Mrs. Mary Bewley (1659). She had been pious, wise, reserved, diligent, and modest, supporting her husband and ‘sometimes seasonably and discreetly admonishing him’, but always ‘wisely compliant with his will, and that in some things wherein many wives will have their will’.61 Many ballads and chapbooks conveyed the same normative message, praising couples who played their proper roles, and spelling out the disastrous consequences whenever these rules were broken. Yet if patriarchal values were never seriously threatened, their domination was less than total. A small but growing band of women writers spoke out vigorously for the female sex, supported by male sympathizers. Their aims were generally modest, and they argued from within the traditional intellectual framework. Accepting the primacy of scriptural authority, they ransacked the Bible for pious and heroic women, and tried to reinterpret the Creation story. Eve was God’s last and so finest work of creation, they pointed out, and while Adam was made from dust, she was created from his body, a more honourable material. Others combed through ancient and modern history, compiling lists of illustrious women to refute the claim that the female sex was by definition weak and foolish. Many pointed out too that women were indispensable not only for the continuation of the human race, but for the functioning of every household. ‘He that hath no wife, hath no house,’ William Austin acknowledged, citing the German humanist Cornelius Agrippa.62 None of these writers could break wholly free from the cultural shackles in which they had been raised. Neither did any of the radical movements thrown up by the civil wars envisage any significant change in the role of women. Gerrard Winstanley could imagine a society without money, private property, or distinctions of birth, but accepted the patriarchal order as natural. Women played an unprecedented role as 61 T. Gataker, Saint Stevens Last Will and Testament (1638), 13; N. Guy, Pieties Pillar: or a Sermon preached at the Funerall of Mistresse Elizabeth Gouge (1626), 41–3, 50–1; Imitations and Cautions, 4; cf. J. Birchall, The Non-Pareil, or the Vertuous Daughter (York, 1644), 17; J. Toy, A Sermon preached in the Cathedral Church of Worcester (1642), 19–20. 62 W. Austin, Haec Homo Wherein the Excellency of the Creation of Woman is described (1637), 58. For a representative collection of texts see S. Shepherd (ed.), The Women’s Sharp Revenge (1985); for surveys, L. B. Wright, Middle-Class Culture in Elizabethan England (New York, 1935), ch. 13; C. Camden, The Elizabethan Woman (1952), ch. 9; D. Purkiss, ‘Material Girls: The SeventeenthCentury Woman Debate’, in C. Brant and D. Purkiss (eds.), Women, Texts & Histories 1575–1760 (1992).

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preachers and prophets in some radical religious groups, notably the Quakers, but they never claimed that their gift of the Holy Spirit could or should undermine the traditional social order.63 Even the most intellectually liberated saw little prospect of practical change. No radicals, male or female, called for the right of women to attend grammar schools or universities, hold public office or vote, or participate in business or the professions on equal terms. To the modern reader, the limited expectations and aspirations of women writers are a striking feature of their work. Instead of demanding changes in the law or social, economic, and political practice, they preferred to campaign on the less sensitive issue of female worth, asserting that women had been unfairly disparaged and deserved greater respect. While this was arguably an essential prerequisite, it posed no threat to male hegemony. The Good Womans Champion. Or, a defence for the weaker vessel proclaimed its modest ambitions through its title-page. Most women writers were apologetic and defensive in tone, acknowledging their intellectual ‘weakness’. If such disclaimers might be a protective device, they also suggest how far women had internalized their own inferiority. Lucy Hutchinson, an intelligent and educated woman, nonetheless believed that Queen Elizabeth’s success was founded on her submission to her male counsellors. Dorothy Leigh, whose influential The Mothers Blessing had reached a tenth edition by 1627, urged her readers ‘not to be ashamed to show their infirmities, but to give men the first and chief place: yet let us labour to come in the second’, a modest goal as long as there remained only two sexes. Elizabeth Warren added a prefatory disclaimer to her book, explaining that, conscious of ‘mental and sex-deficiency, I decline all controversies’. The parliamentary licenser took her self-denigration at face value by adding the patronizing comment, ‘Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings’.64 Male champions proved similarly blinkered. John Dunton argued that the triumphs of Elizabeth and Anne showed that ‘God and Nature intended, that women should govern as well as men’, but denied this had any wider significance. Queens embodied qualities which set them wholly apart from the rest of their sex, he insisted, arguing implausibly that Queen Anne ‘possesses a masculine spirit beneath the softer body of a woman’.65 When ordinary 63 K. Thomas, ‘Women and the Civil War Sects’, Past and Present, 13 (1958); C. Durston, The Family in the English Revolution (Oxford, 1989); P. Crawford, Women and Religion in England 1500–1720 (1993), chs. 7–8. 64 A.I., The Good Womans Champion (?1650); L. Hutchinson, Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, ed. J. Sutherland (Oxford, 1973), 48; Leigh, Mothers Blessing, 16–17; E. Warren, The Old and Good Way Vindicated (1645), sig. A3 (the licenser was quoting Ps. 8: 2). 65 J. Dunton, Petticoat-Government. In a Letter to the Court-Ladies (1702), sig. A3v; id., The Prerogative of the Breeches (1702), 23.

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women displayed heroic or ‘masculine’ qualities, even their admirers felt uncomfortable. A civil-war news-writer sounded almost embarrassed as he narrated the story of a courageous Banbury matriarch, whose defiance of the cavaliers had brought her to the gallows. This was valour, he observed, surely ‘beseeming a nobler sex’.66 Towards the end of the seventeenth century, we at last find a number of female writers shifting their focus from women’s inherent worth to the institution of marriage, and relations within it. One of the most thoughtful was Mary More, whose views on gender relations are all the more striking as she acknowledged that her own experience of marriage had been positive and harmonious. More nonetheless denounced the subjection of women, which she argued had perverted the true message of Scripture; the rights women should enjoy by the laws of God and Nature were denied by the laws of Parliament, where men simply ‘enacted their own wills’ and convinced themselves that might was right.67 This text circulated only in manuscript, but others, even more outspoken, reached print. Several condemned marriage as mere slavery. The Female Advocate (1700), one of the most forceful, appeared in response to a marriage sermon by John Sprint, who had rehearsed the traditional gospel of female obedience. The author, ‘Eugenia’, was brutally dismissive. Vowing to shun ‘the clutches of a husband’, and pitying those already trapped ‘in the House of Bondage’, she brushed aside Sprint’s biblical arguments as mere impudence. ‘Insolent man!’ she exclaimed. ‘To preach us gravely into slavery and chains.’ Eugenia penned a savage caricature of the deference Sprint thought a husband could expect from his wife, ‘a slave sitting at his footstool, and trembling at every word that comes like thunder and lightning from the mouth of the domestic pharaoh’. His sermon, she jibed, would ‘spoil the gravity, and debauch the devotions of a saint’, and she advised him to emigrate to Spain or Muscovy where his views might prove more acceptable.68 Ridicule and contempt made powerful weapons, and it is striking to find them deployed against a scriptural defence of patriarchy; such an attack would have been inconceivable a generation earlier. Yet Eugenia could offer no constructive proposals for change. For most women without a private income, the spinsterhood she advocated would spell a life of poverty, toil, and perhaps dependence far less 66

A Perfect Relation of the Cause and Manner of the Apprehending [of] Mistris Phillips (1643), 2. M. More, ‘The Womans Right’ [c.1674–80], in S. Trill, K. Chedgzoy, and M. Osborne (eds.), Lay By your Needles Ladies, Take the Pen: Writing Women in England, 1500–1700 (1997), 246– 54. 68 Eugenia, Female Advocate, pp. v–vi, 13, 20, 52; cf. J. Sprint, The Bride-Womans Counsellor (1700). 67

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attractive to most than marriage. Nonetheless, her savage analysis was echoed by several contemporaries. The Maids Vindication (1707) matched its fiery spirit, denouncing The greatest lasting’st plague of life, Husband: the constant gaoler of a wife, A proud insulting domineering thing, Abroad a subject, but at home a king,

but the only remedy it offered was a separatist fantasy. The author invited young women to join her, And make a commonwealth among ourselves, Where by the laws that we shall there ordain, We’ll make it capital to mention Man. Man! We’ll for ever banish from our sight.69

Mary Astell’s Reflections upon Marriage offered a far more substantial but equally damning analysis of gender in marriage and society at large. Astell ascribed male domination to history, culture, and force, not reason or religion. Men held every position of power, and framed the laws; ‘all the swords and blunderbusses are theirs,’ she added with heavy sarcasm, ‘which by the strongest logic in the world, gives them the best title to every thing’. That title was reinforced by the fact that ‘Immemorial prescription is on their side in these parts of the world, ancient tradition and modern usage.’ All this explained but could not justify women’s slavish spirit in accepting and internalizing male claims. Astell was disgusted to find even wealthy, well-bred women preferring to turn their competitive energies against one another, while tamely accepting the gilded slavery to which men had consigned them: [Women] are for the most part wise enough to love their chains, and to discern how very becomingly they are set. They think as humbly of themselves as their masters can wish, with respect to the other sex, but in regard to their own, they have a spice of masculine ambition, every one would lead, and none will follow.

Astell could see no prospect of them forcing change, and recognized that men were never likely to surrender power willingly. Like the satirists, she dreamed instead of separate female communities where unmarried women of means could opt out of an institution and society they despised.70 The idea of such a Protestant nunnery clearly held some 69

The Maids Vindication: or, the Fifteen Comforts of living a Single Life (1707), 4, 7. M. Astell, Reflections upon Marriage (3rd edn., 1706), in B. Hill (ed.), The First English Feminist (1986), 85–6; B. Hill, ‘A Refuge from Men: The Idea of a Protestant Nunnery’, Past and Present, 117 (1987). 70

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appeal among educated women. At the close of the seventeenth century the proportion of women never marrying, from circumstance or choice, reached a record level of perhaps 20 per cent, and it is perhaps unsurprising that some toyed with the idea of other living arrangements, some of them with lesbian overtones. In 1725 Mary Wandesford of York left the substantial sum of £1,200 to establish a community of twelve single, poor gentlewomen where they could ‘retire from the hurry and noise of the world’.71 Such projects might provide a refuge for a few individuals, but implicitly conceded the impossibility of transforming marriage or society. These early feminist writers saw the history of gender relations as little more than the history of oppression and victimization. Though the poor rarely articulated their thoughts on such matters, some may have taken a similar view. In 1739 Mary Collier, a lowly Hampshire washerwoman, painted a bleak picture of labouring women’s lives as an endless cycle of ill-paid drudgery, with no prospect but old age and poverty. Like Astell, she blamed their plight not on God’s will but on historical and cultural forces, declaring her conviction that women Could never be for slavery designed, Till time and custom by degrees destroyed That happy state our sex at first enjoyed.72

Historians have found no trace of such a ‘happy state’. Relations between the sexes remained fundamentally stable for many generations. It could indeed be argued that early modern England experienced no meaningful ‘history’ of gender relations, but an enduring pattern of male hegemony based on structures and principles accepted as natural, and endorsed by custom, law, and divine authority. Male contemporaries would not have agreed. While all men believed that male supremacy was necessary and right, many saw their superiority as constantly under threat, especially within the family. David Underdown has argued that the period witnessed a crisis in gender relations, citing the literary evidence of plays, sermons, ballads, and jokes, and the formidable battery of repressive sanctions directed at single mothers and ‘unruly’ women branded as shrews, scolds, or witches. Underdown has acknowledged that there is no sign of any concerted attempt to overthrow male hegemony, and no evidence that it was in any real danger 71 J. M. Bennett and A. M. Froide, Singlewomen in the European Past 1250–1800 (Philadelphia, Pa., 1998), esp. chs. 9–11; Autobiography of Alice Thornton, 323. 72 M. Collier, The Woman’s Labour, in Two Eighteenth Century Poems, ed. E. P. Thompson and M. Sugden (1989), 15, 22.

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of collapse, and other scholars have argued that the use of repressive measures such as the cucking-stool was too patchy and localized to justify any talk of crisis. But many scholars would accept the existence of a widespread sense of anxiety about gender relations among Tudor and Stuart Englishmen.73 A vast body of contemporary literature bears witness to this perceived ‘problem’. Satires, sermons, plays, ballads, and jokes reflected the fear that women did not genuinely accept male authority, dreamed of subverting it, and flouted it at every opportunity. Throughout the period men complained that women wanted their own will, and that within the privacy of the family the imperatives of religion and law counted for little. Thomas Cranmer, England’s first married archbishop, once remarked in the safety of a biblical annotation, ‘The will of a woman must be followed, or else all the fat is in the fire.’74 A wry joke on the Fall held that ‘when man lost free-will, woman found it, and hath kept it ever since’, and countless other jests turned on the suspicion that few men really ruled their wives. According to The Married Men’s Feast at Barnet, retailing an old story, all the married men in England were once invited to a lavish feast if they could swear they really controlled their wives, but, as the author remarked sadly, a lark’s leg would be enough to feed all those who qualified.75 Many wondered whether even apparently docile wives could be trusted, for how could men ever be sure that their children were really their own? Might they all be cuckolds?76 The more men disparaged women as weak, deceitful, and lustful, the more they stoked their own fears. Everyone knew, moreover, of women who did not even pretend to be submissive. In the mid-sixteenth century Bishop Hugh Latimer was scandalized by the married viragos he encountered: ‘Ye are underlings, underlings, and must be obedient’, he railed. For many, he complained, this was ‘made a trifle and a small matter’, but it was deadly serious: ‘it is a sad matter, a godly matter, a ghostly matter, a matter of damnation and salvation’.77 73 D. Underdown, ‘The Taming of the Scold: The Enforcement of Patriarchal Authority in Early Modern England’, in A. Fletcher and J. Stevenson (eds.), Order and Disorder in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1985); M. Ingram, ‘“Scolding Women Cucked or Washed”: A Crisis in Gender Relations in Early Modern England?’, in J. Kermode and G. Walker (eds.), Women, Crime and the Courts in Early Modern England (1994). But note Marjorie K. McIntosh’s thesis that concern was greater in the period 1460–1539 than later: Controlling Misbehavior in England, 1370–1600 (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 13–14, and ch. 3, esp. pp. 73–4. 74 Miscellaneous Writings and Letters of Thomas Cranmer, ed. J. E. Cox (Parker Soc., 18, Cambridge, 1846), 15. 75 Diary of the Rev. John Ward, ed. C. Severn (1839), 111; Married Men’s Feast, 3. 76 S. Butler, Hudibras, ed. A. R. Waller (Cambridge, 1905). 322; K. V. Thomas, ‘The Double Standard’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 20 (1959); Capp, World of John Taylor, 116. 77 Sermons by Hugh Latimer, ed. G. E. Corrie (Parker Soc., 22, Cambridge, 1844), 252–3.

22

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William Whately of Banbury was equally shocked by women who showed neither fear nor respect for their husbands. He lamented that ‘the greater number of women’ were at fault, and complained that ‘some (instead of observing) have inverted the Apostle’s precept, causing their husbands to stand in fear of them’. Some households resembled ‘fencing-schools, where the two sexes seem to have met together for nothing, but to . . . try mastery’.78 Many writers accused women of longing to throw off their shackles and usurp men’s place, challenging patriarchy at least in the domestic sphere. As John Brinsley put it in 1645, ‘If their husbands wear the crown, yet they will sway the sceptre.’79 That was the central theme of numerous pamphlets and verses exposing an alleged female culture of manipulation, in which lessons on how to manage and deceive men were passed down from generation to generation.80 It is striking that few, if any, thought that women sought no more than equality. Contemporaries regarded hierarchy as the guiding principle throughout the natural world, and instinctively assumed that the subversion of male domination must be driven by a desire for female domination instead. A civil war pamphleteer who ‘revealed’ the shocking discovery of six women preachers explained they had usurped a male role ‘because they would have superiority’, not to assert female equality. Another attack on female preachers similarly condemned them for ‘presuming to advance themselves before, and over men’.81 Equality for women may only be a realistic goal in societies where the general concept of equality is recognized and valued in the culture as a whole. The civil wars reinforced fears that patriarchy was in crisis. The traditional association of family and commonwealth prompted a natural alarm that overturning the political and social order would trigger a parallel inversion of gender order, an alarm strengthened by the fact that women were playing a more public and visible role than ever before. The emergence of separatist women prophets and preachers in the early 1640s scandalized contemporaries, and the rise of the Quakers a decade later intensified their fears. Anti-Catholic alarms in the early 1640s found similar expression in the ‘discovery’ of seven young women ‘confessors’ at a house in ‘Coven-Garden’, where they allegedly offered both absolution and sexual services to penitential customers.82 Almost every new 78 Whately, Bride-Bush, 194; id., A Care-cloth: or, a Treatise of the Cumbers and Troubles of Marriage (1624), sig. A2v. 79 Brinsley, Looking-Glasse, 40. 80 e.g. Scole House of Women; see Ch. 2, below. 81 A Discoverie of Six Women Preachers (1641), 5; A Spirit Moving in the Women-Preachers (1646), 2 (my italics). 82 The Seven Women Confessors (1642) . ‘Coven’ for ‘Covent’ was probably a deliberate error.

Introduction

23

movement or radical threat prompted squibs linking it with sexual promiscuity and subversion. A Remonstrance of the Shee-Citizens of London (1647) adopted the rhetoric of the new Leveller movement, invoking Lilburne and Magna Charta to urge freeborn women’s natural right to ‘free trade’ in sex. The satirical tract Now or Never: or, a new Parliament of Women (1656) visualized a novel legal code with statutes ‘That women bear rule, and have power over their husbands’, ‘That a woman may call the man to account’, and so on.83 If all this belonged to the world of dystopian fantasy, readers understandably feared that women’s new visibility might well have wider repercussions. The interconnectedness of patriarchal arguments, previously a strength, became now a source of unease. A challenge at any point aroused fears over its potentially wider implications, a fear reflected in the horrified response of Zachary Crofton to the suggestion that pious and capable women might play some part in the life of religious congregations. This was a dangerous argument, he insisted. Many women possessed greater abilities and virtues than their husbands, and his opponent should consider whether such arguments ‘do not reason women into the domestic and politic, as well as ecclesiastic chair [of government]’.84 The same point was made a generation later by Robert Whitehall, an Oxford fellow, in his reply to the feminist treatise of Mary More. There were many women ‘more than ready to snatch at the reins of government’, he warned, who, were they admitted to co-equal sway in a domestic kingdom, would presently begin to aspire at absolute monarchy, then to challenge an equal authority in state, to make laws, bear offices, vote as members in Parliament, and afterwards presume to sit in Moses his chair pretending they have power to teach as well as rule.

The result, he warned, would be a world reduced to total confusion.85 We thus have the paradox of well-documented anxiety about gender relations in the absence of any significant feminist pressure. The explanation lies partly in the social and economic pressures triggered by the soaring levels of population, prices, poverty, and unemployment. These stresses were exacerbated by the upheavals of the Reformation, whose effects took several generations to work through. An unprecedented wave of riots and rebellions in the Tudor period was followed in the Stuart age by descent into civil war in 1642 and a narrow escape from 83 A Remonstrance of the Shee-Citizens, 1–3; Now or Never, 6; (Hey Hoe, for a Husband,) or the Parliament of Maides (1647), 2; A Parliament of Ladies: with their Lawes newly enacted (1647). 84 Crofton, Bethshemesh Clouded, 196. 85 R. Whitehall, ‘The Womans Right Proved False’ [1674–80], in Trill et al. (eds.), Lay By your Needles, 257–8.

24

Introduction

another a generation later. This was, then, an age when the political, religious, social, and economic order was indeed in periodic crisis. It is hardly surprising, given the belief in an intimate link between the commonwealth and the household, to find contemporaries highly sensitive to issues of order at every level, not least within the family and neighbourhood. When William Gouge condemned disobedient wives he characterized them as ‘stout and rebellious’, explaining that their ‘revolt’ came from ‘the evil counsel of wicked gossips’ and their own ‘proud humour’. Such pride was ‘the cause of all rebellion, disobedience, and disloyalty’, within and beyond the household.86 Gouge’s use of political terminology in such a context, however odd it sounds to us, came naturally to contemporaries. Another writer chose to describe an undutiful wife as ‘a home-rebel, a house-traitor’, while in 1635 neighbours accused a troublesome London woman of sowing ‘sedition’ between husbands and wives.87 Tensions within the family and in society at large mirrored and exacerbated one another. It is quite possible, moreover, that sermons and conduct-books generated unease and resentment rather than moulding domestic order and harmony. The more preachers and pamphleteers formalized rigid conventions of household order, the more obvious became the inevitable gap between ideal and social reality, a gap which had of course existed long before the rise of popular print. Most ordinary couples appear to have found a reasonably acceptable balance between male insistence on domestic superiority and the compromises essential when husbands and wives often depended on one another for economic survival. In such circumstances a reasonably harmonious working relationship was a necessity. Both preachers and pragmatism thus encouraged a spirit of cooperation and give and take within a hierarchical framework. But when a husband proved unwilling to compromise his authority or shoulder his responsibilities, or his wife demanded greater autonomy than he was prepared to concede, the stage was set for domestic strife. The anthropologist James Scott, outlining the strategies available to subordinate groups too weak to resist openly, has stressed the significance of hidden forms of defiance or subversion, such as grumbling, subversive jokes, and unauthorized meetings which create times, spaces, and networks beyond the control and knowledge of the 86

Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties, 336. F. Dolan, Dangerous Familiars: Representations of Domestic Crime in England 1550–1700 (Ithaca, NY, 1994), 21; LRO, 1D 41/4 Box 22/24, deposition of Mary Bushfield of Loddington, a carpenter’s wife, 1639; GL, MS 9065A/7, White v Hall, deposition of James Peade, 1634. The term ‘sedition’ may have been familiar in this context through the homily on marriage: Certain Sermons or Homilies, 547. 87

Introduction

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ruling elites.88 Exploring women’s lives in early modern England from such a perspective, we find a similar set of responses which throw valuable light on gender relations in the period. Without challenging the general principles of patriarchy, women frequently sought to negotiate the terms on which it operated within the home and neighbourhood, seeking an acceptable personal accommodation that would afford them some measure of autonomy and space, and a limited degree of authority. Men grossly exaggerated the threat posed by what they saw as a subversive female subculture of containment and resistance, but their fears and insecurity were to some extent rooted in social reality. We should think of gender relations in early modern England in terms of uneasy equilibrium rather than stasis. If patriarchy could survive and adapt, women proved equally adaptive in their ability to contain it or soften its edges. The shape of that contest, in the street as well as the home, is the subject of what follows. 88

J. C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance. Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, 1990).

2 Patriarchy and the World of Gossips

P authority rested more on custom than law, and its largely informal character proved a source of both strength and weakness. If that authority was too powerful to be challenged directly, its gaps and internal contradictions left plenty of scope for modifications in daily life. It was indeed the gulf between patriarchal ideals and social practice that prompted the writing of conduct-books. This chapter explores some of the loose ends and contradictions within patriarchy, and the opportunities they offered for women to exercise some agency over their lives, and the lives of others. The ways in which they did so are explored in subsequent chapters.

 :    Conduct-book writers, generally educated clergymen, set out an idealized code of gender relations aimed at an elite and ‘middling sort’ readership. Their assumptions and ideals, however, were often at variance with the social circumstances of ordinary people. Their first principle was that every woman should be under the authority of the appropriate male, normally her father, master, or husband. This ideal, shared almost universally by men, did not always reflect the demographic facts. As we will see, many households were headed by women, usually widows, over whom no male figure held authority, and the independence of younger and better-off widows attracted a mixture of ridicule, suspicion, and fear.1 Young women who were single and ‘living at their own hands’ aroused far greater concern. The 1563 Act of Artificers authorized magistrates to order any spinster between 12 and 40 to go into service, and local magistrates often made use of these powers.2 There was no law covering a third substantial group, married women obliged to manage the household because their menfolk were working elsewhere, or because the marriage 1

Mendelson and Crawford, Women, 174–84. 5 Eliz. c4, clause 17; P. Griffiths, Youth and Authority: Formative Experiences in England 1560–1640 (Oxford, 1996), ch. 7. 2

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had collapsed. Deserted wives often lived in extreme poverty, as did many widows and spinsters, and it would be misguided to view most of the women in any of these categories as enjoying ‘freedom’ from patriarchal government. At the same time, their position was clearly anomalous in the eyes of theorists and authorities alike. Conduct-book writers, addressing domestic ideals, had almost nothing to say on households without a male head. A second basic principle, the distinction between women’s narrowly domestic role and men’s role as providers, also ignored some unpalatable facts. It was clearly unrealistic, as writers accepted, to tie women literally to the home. A wife (or her maid) had to fetch water, visit the bakehouse, and buy or sell at the local market. She would also need to call on neighbours to borrow domestic items, ask advice for sick children, and attend women in labour. But while writers spelled out in detail women’s rights and responsibilities within the household, most touched only briefly on their proper role outside it. Conduct-books were of course explicitly domestic guides, but writers and preachers knew that most women could manage their homes and families only by drawing on a culture of neighbourly support, a culture which gave women an active role in the wider community. Contemporaries accepted ‘good neighbourliness’ as an important and praiseworthy quality, especially in women, and it was indeed one of the very few active virtues commended in the female sex. Gervase Markham, in The English House-wife, insisted that ‘our English hus-wife must be . . . full of good neighbourhood’, and one conduct-book acknowledged an unwritten ‘law of good neighbourhood’.3 Women who displayed this quality earned respect and admiration, like a humble clothworker’s wife described as ‘tender of her husband, . . . and loving to all her neighbours’.4 The minister Philip Henry remembered his mother as ‘a loving wife, a kind neighbour, and a good mother’, placing her neighbourly virtues before her maternal qualities, and Oliver Heywood recalled with pride his mother’s diligence in providing food and clothing for the poor, and finding them work in hard times.5 Most writers made no attempt to define the boundary between the virtue of good neighbourliness and the vice of ‘gadding’, and in practice it rested on little more than local convention. A few addressed the problem 3 G. Markham, The English House-wife (1649), 4; J. Dod and R. Cleaver, A Godly Forme of Householde Governement (1614), sig. F7. 4 The True Relation of two wonderfull Sleepers (1646), 3. 5 Diaries and Letters of Philip Henry MA of Broad Oak, ed. M. H. Lee (1882), 9; The Rev. Oliver Heywood BA 1630–1702: His Autobiography, Diaries, Anecdote and Event Books, ed. J. H. Turner (Brighouse and Bingley, 1881–5), i. 44; cf. A. Walker, The Holy Life of Mrs. Elizabeth Walker (1690), 173.

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by identifying occasions when married women might legitimately go out by themselves, to religious services, on household business, or for charitable visits to the sick. Daniel Rogers urged that a man should also allow his wife some time for recreation, and not pry too closely into how she spent it: ‘there is a general liberty to be permitted to a woman’s liberties, companies, merriments, toys and trinkets, which the gravity of an husband should shame itself in peering into.’ Robert Abbott even found a biblical text to endorse this view, observing that it must be legitimate for women to go ‘to friendly meetings, for visiting one another; so the blessed Virgin visited Elizabeth, and other neighbours visited her’. No one was likely to condemn the Virgin Mary for gadding. But few writers showed much interest in the subject, and none pursued it very far. Susanna Jesserson, who published an economy conduct-book ‘for a penny’, followed most male authors in fudging the issue, defining the good wife as one who was ‘courteous and sociable to her neighbours, but scorns to go a hunting for gossiping’.6 The distinction between male providers and women as domestic managers also ignored the crucial fact that many households depended on a family income rather than a single breadwinner. The conduct-book ideal, appropriate for mercantile and professional families, was largely irrelevant for small tradesmen, craftsmen, husbandmen, and labourers. Here we find wives assisting their husbands, often serving in the shop, or working for wages in a separate employment. Even in the countryside many women had access to part-time seasonal work, while many also worked at spinning or knitting. The authorities expected poor married women to take on waged work if available, and by the seventeenth century sometimes tried to find employment for them.7 Few writers touched on such issues. Thomas Gataker urged that a good wife should help her family by spinning and making clothing for them to wear, ‘or if no need of it in the house, to sell and make merchandise of it; and that no discredit or discommendation at all to her neither’.8 His defensive tone is striking: Gataker recognized that his point ran counter to patriarchal ideals, and to the views of his more affluent and leisured female 6 D. Rogers, Matrimoniall Honour (1642), 251; R. Abbott, A Christian Family, Builded by God (1653), 78 (citing Luke 1: 39– 40); cf. Dod and Cleaver, Godly Forme, sig. Pr–v; R. Pricke, The Doctrine of Superioritie, and of Subiection (1609), sig. L3v; S. Jesserson, A Bargain for Bachelors. Or: the Best Wife in the World for a Penny (1675), 8. 7 See e.g. J. F. Pound (ed.), The Norwich Census of the Poor 1570 (Norfolk Rec. Soc., 40, 1971); Bodleian, MS Tanner 73, fo. 390; LRO, BR II/18/18/131 (listing the poor of St Nicholas, Leicester, including married women, in and out of work, 1631; F. G. Emmison (ed.), Early Essex Town Meetings: Braintree, 1619–1636; Finchingfield, 1626–1634 (1970), 38. 8 T. Gataker, Marriage Duties Briefely Couched Together, in Certaine Sermons (1637), 195.

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parishioners. He did not acknowledge that for poorer women he was stating the obvious. Writers who addressed this subject realized that female employment posed more sensitive problems for the patriarchal model. Was a woman entitled to spend her earnings at her own discretion, or obliged to give them to her husband? The question raised complex moral issues, and had a significant bearing on women’s position within the family. The law gave a man control over his wife’s money, and patriarchal theory held it her duty to place it at his disposal. But she was also required to manage the household budget in the best interests of the family as a whole, and the scrupulous discharge of her obligation to a feckless spouse might easily result in their children going hungry and the family sinking into ruin. Even so, some commentators thought it unacceptable for a wife to prioritize the family’s needs over the husband’s legal rights. Thomas Hilder, addressing the plight of a woman married to a wastrel, observed: ‘whether in such a desperate case thou mayest make a purse for thyself (as we say) or not, I shall say very little, (and that under correction too, submitting to the judgement of learned and judicious divines) but I am fully satisfied in my own conscience, that thou mayest not (contrary to the husband’s allowance) lay by one penny . . . against a wet day.’ William Gouge took the opposite view in his influential treatise Of Domesticall Duties: ‘a faithful provident wife observing her husband to riot, and to spend all he can get in carding, dicing, and drinking, may without his consent lay up what goods she can for her husband’s, her own, her children’s, and whole household’s good. This is no part of disobedience, but a point wherein she may show herself a great good help unto her husband.’ It is clear that many women followed Gouge rather than Hilder.9 Daniel Rogers went further, declaring that a woman who went into business on her own account to save her family from ruin owed nothing to her feckless husband: ‘in such a case, if she share with him so far as to keep him from beggary, it’s enough, for she aims at the support of her family.’10 These disagreements underline the confusion and ambiguities surrounding the wider issue of married women’s right to property, and their legal position in general. The common law of coverture was complex, contradictory, and as bewildering to most contemporaries as to 9 T. Hilder, Conjugall Counsell (1653), 112; W. Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties (1622), 292. Gouge noted that many women who had heard him preach on the subject felt he had not gone far enough: sig. ¶3v. 10 Rogers, Matrimoniall Honour; 271; cf. U. Rublack, The Crimes of Women in Early Modern Germany (Oxford, 1999), 210.

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historians.11 While the law treated husband and wife as one person in civil concerns, that person being the man, the rule was not universally applicable. Some married women were able to sue in the equity courts, even if judges were often unhappy about their presence. In criminal matters a wife was usually held responsible for her own actions—though again, typically, with some exceptions.12 Women, whether single or married, could initiate criminal prosecutions, and local courts often allowed married women to bring complaints in their husbands’ names over issues concerning the family as a whole. While married women held no right to separate property in common law, there were again significant exceptions. Since medieval times the custom of London had allowed married women to trade independently, in trades different from their husbands’.13 It was also possible to circumvent a wife’s inability to own property by a contract made at the time of marriage, or by establishing a trust in which friends held property for her exclusive use.14 And though men could and did dispose of their wives’ money and moveables without their knowledge or consent, Amy Erickson and other scholars have amassed considerable evidence that women often regarded personal possessions as their own, especially money or items they had brought to the marriage, and that many husbands accepted this moral right. Some married women also made wills leaving personal items to friends and kin, usually but not always with their husbands’ consent.15 One London widow indicated her firm belief in separate property by bequeathing £5 to a female friend and 40s. to her husband, 10s. to a male friend and 5s. to his wife. These precise stipulations, meaningless in common law, evidently made good sense to those involved.16 The issue of women’s ‘right’ to property was thus far more complex than the common law or conductbooks would suggest, and affectionate husbands were unlikely to exploit their legal rights to the full. Moreover men’s views were naturally shaped by their roles as fathers and brothers as well as husbands, with ties of blood sometimes outweighing the claims of gender. John Howes of 11

T. Stretton, Women Waging Law in Elizabethan England (Cambridge, 1998), ch. 2. Ibid., passim; M. Dalton, The Countrey Justice (1677), 374–5; Sir M. Hale, Historia Placitorum Coronae (1736), i. 45–8, 516. 13 P. Earle, The Making of the English Middle Class (1989), 160. It is unclear how widely this right was exercised. 14 A. Erickson, Women and Property in Early Modern England (1993), chs. 6–8; Stretton, Women Waging Law, 26–8. 15 M. Prior, ‘Wives and Wills, 1558–1700’, in J. Chartres and D. Hey (eds.), English Rural Society, 1500–1800 (Cambridge, 1990), 201, 213; Stretton, Women Waging Law, 27, 36; G. Walker, ‘Women, Theft and the World of Stolen Goods’, in J. Kermode and G. Walker (eds.), Women, Crime and the Courts in Early Modern England (1994), 90. 16 GL, MS 9065A/8, fo. 268v. 12

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Stepney loved his daughter Katherine enough to pay for her child’s schooling for eight years because her husband was too ‘unthrifty’ to do so, but he was exasperated to find everything he gave his daughter ‘cast away’ by her feckless spouse. Like Gouge and Rogers, he recognized that total obedience to a wastrel threatened the interests of the family as a whole, and he eventually left her out of his will. As his widow recalled in 1602, he had often scolded Katherine ‘because that she was so much ruled by her husband’.17 Brushing aside patriarchal conventions, he was criticizing a woman for excessive obedience to her husband. Katherine’s dilemma exposed the most difficult issue facing all married women, the nature and proper extent of domestic authority. While patriarchal principles were broadly accepted, they threw up numerous problems. Even the conceptual framework posed some difficulties. Most commentators accepted the analogy between political and domestic authority but some recognized that it could offer only limited guidance. Unlike subjects, a wife had voluntarily placed herself under the authority of her ‘ruler’, and in certain circumstances could be released by judicial separation. A good marriage, moreover, was founded on a level of personal affection impossible and inappropriate in a political context. Familiarity might breed contempt in the state, William Thomas remarked, but not in the family, where the relationship between the father and those under him ‘is not like the head politic and the body, . . . but like the head natural, and its members’.18 Thomas’s plea for loving harmony ducked the more intractable problems of patriarchal authority. A wife owed obedience both to her husband and to a chain of local officers and magistrates, lay and ecclesiastical, reaching up to the crown itself. Where did her duty lie if her husband’s commands contradicted those of the magistrate or church? Within the family itself, she exercised a joint authority over the children and servants, which made her both a ruler and a subject within the domestic commonwealth. Such a position was inevitably fraught with difficulties. All conduct-books reveal a tension between the ideal of loving, companionate marriage and their insistence on authority and hierarchy. All taught that a husband must never yield his pre-eminence. Henry Smith’s plea for men to love their wives and overlook their faults rested, in part, on a conventional belief that women were inevitably frail creatures. A man should ‘entreat his wife with gentleness and softness; not expecting that wisdom, nor that faith, nor that patience, nor that strength in the weaker vessel, which should be in the stronger’. Dod and Cleaver 17 18

GL, MS 9065A/3, fo. 267r–v; cf. Stretton, Women Waging Law, 152. W. Thomas, Christian and Conjugal Counsell (1661), 62–3.

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similarly counselled the reader that he should ‘never set himself so far in love, that he forget that he is a man, the ruler and governor of the house, and of his wife’. Nathaniel Hardy could entitle his treatise Love and Fear the Inseparable Twins of a Blest Matrimony, and insist that ‘it is not love but fondness [foolishness] which makes a man forget himself, and the power that God hath given him over the wife’. Thomas Gataker put it more bluntly in a marriage sermon: ‘Love goeth downward: duty cometh upward.’19 Yet these writers, like the homily ‘Of Matrimony’, were equally concerned to limit the extent of male authority and soften its exercise. Edward Reyner insisted that it should ‘savour more of loving respect to [women] than of rigorous power’. A husband and wife ‘should be mutual darlings one to another’; he ‘must not trample upon her, and she is to be in a state but of collateral subjection to him. She is his yoke-fellow, that stands on even ground with him.’20 Writers insisted that a wife’s position differed fundamentally from that of children and servants, comparing it instead to that of junior officers in other chains of command. Wives were often described as lesser magistrates, associates, lieutenants, or master’s mates, images which defined their status quite well, especially in larger households.21 Henry Smith explained that a man’s wife ‘is an under officer in his commonwealth, and therefore she must be assisted and borne out, like his deputy, as the prince standeth with the magistrates for his own quiet, because they are the legs which bear him up’. A man should never undermine his wife’s authority over the other members of the household.22 As a corollary to their stress on partnership, writers increasingly condemned outright the use of physical violence by husbands. While some Tudor authorities had regarded it as an open question, most seventeenthcentury writers branded it unnatural and shameful, as demeaning for the husband as for his wife. The Tudor homily, progressive on this issue, likened wife-beaters to wild beasts and madmen, and several later writers repeated the image.23 Citing Ephesians 5: 31, which described husband and wife as one flesh, Gouge declared that ‘No man but a frantic, furious, 19 H. Smith, A Preparative to Marriage (1591), 68 (echoing the homily: Certain Sermons or Homilies (1851), 537 and passim); Dod and Cleaver, Godly Forme, sig. L6; N. Hardy, Love and Fear (1653), 6; Gataker, Marriage Duties, 187. 20 E. Reyner, Considerations concerning Marriage (1657), 11, 23. 21 W. Perkins, Christian Oeconomie (1609), 173; Dod and Cleaver, Godly Forme, sig. B2; M. Griffith, Bethel: or, a Forme for Families (1633), 318; A. Marsh, The Confession of the New Married Couple (1683), 118. 22 Smith, Preparative, 66–7; cf. Certain Sermons or Homilies, 545–6. 23 Certain Sermons or Homilies, 545; E. Foyster, ‘Male Honour, Social Control and Wife Beating in Late Stuart England’, TRHS, 6th ser., 6 (1996), 219–20. On earlier, harsher views see A. Wall, Power and Protest in England 1525–1640 (2000), 81–2.

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desperate wretch will beat himself.’ Even if assaulted by a ‘mannish, or rather mad’ wife, he must use only the minimum force necessary for selfdefence. Gouge supplemented his principled objections with the pragmatic observation that wife-beating undermined household order by weakening the woman’s domestic authority. Children and servants could have no respect for a mother or mistress ‘who is under correction as well as they’.24 Gouge’s views were typical of seventeenth-century writers. Matthew Griffith dismissed wife-beaters as ‘men-beasts’, worse than brute animals: ‘Did you ever see, or hear of a dog that would beat a bitch? Or a bull, that would beat a cow?’ William Whately, though more guarded, condoned physical ‘correction’ only in extreme circumstances. Even Moses à Vauts, an immigrant who published a lengthy defence of the practice in 1650, conceded that it lacked scriptural endorsement and was rejected by ‘most orthodox divines’, both in print and in the pulpit. His own views, he admitted, had been shaped by life with a domineering and quarrelsome wife.25 The principle that a husband should exercise his authority with love, respect, and moderation was sufficiently bland to win general acceptance. Difficulties arose more often over specific situations, and several writers therefore set out guidelines covering likely areas of contention. Most urged the husband to take a major family decision only after consulting his wife and securing her consent; if they disagreed, she might legitimately seek to dissuade him, though she was bound to accept his final decision.26 The most sensitive issue was the proper extent of the husband’s authority; in what circumstances, if any, might a wife legitimately refuse to obey? Thomas Taylor, in a marriage sermon, told the bride that she must obey ‘in all things which he commandeth in the Lord, that is, in whatsoever you cannot prove to be sin’. William Gouge elaborated this qualification, advising wives that they should disobey any commands that were illegal, irreligious, or immoral. A good wife would thus refuse to attend a popish religious service, steal, prostitute herself, or attend a stage play, and would attempt to wean her husband from all such vices. Obedience to God must override obedience to a husband. Daniel Rogers went a step further, discussing commands which were neither illegal nor immoral but carried substantial risks. If a man wished to uproot his 24 Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties, 391–3. The Homily similarly rejected violence even if the wife was ‘a wrathful woman, a drunkard, and beastly’: Certain Sermons or Homilies, 547. 25 Griffith, Bethel, 296; W. Whately, A Bride-Bush (1623), 123; M. à Vauts, The Husband’s Authority Unvail’d (1650), 55–7, 91–2; cf. Wall, Power and Protest, 81–4. 26 Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties, 261, 315–17; J. Brinsley, A Looking-Glasse for Good Women (1645), 33–4; Dod and Cleaver, Godly Forme, sig. F4; Thomas, Christian and Conjugall Counsell, 64–6.

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family to a distant place, for example, change his trade, borrow or lend large sums of money, or settle his children, Rogers urged him to allow his wife some time to consider and consult her friends and kinsfolk.27 A legal treatise on women’s rights ventured still further, arguing that a woman was not obliged to follow her husband if he changed his occupation and moved to a new area to pursue it. Gouge took the contrary view, but conceded that many wives vigorously disagreed with him.28 Several conduct-books addressed other areas of contention, especially the predicament of a woman whose sense of religious duty brought her into conflict with the authority of her husband or the state. Gouge had no doubt that she should disobey a profane husband who forbade her to attend church, read the Bible, or teach their children.29 The issue was more complex when a husband and wife held strong but incompatible beliefs. Gouge thought a good wife should disobey an ‘idolatrous’ husband, by which he meant a Catholic, but inevitably ministers of other denominations interpreted orthodoxy differently and endorsed the same principle to very different ends.30 In divided families, a devout wife of whatever faith was likely to heed the guidance of the ministers she favoured, not those of her spouse. Catholic priests advised recusant wives that they could mislead their husbands, and even siphon away money for ‘godly’ purposes, without sin. Margaret Clitheroe, the Catholic martyr, was assured that she was morally justified in deceiving her nonCatholic husband and ignoring his wishes, though according to the law it was he who was worshipping God in the correct way.31 Sixteenth-century Protestant writers admired women like Anne Askew who had defied the authority of both king and husband in the name of conscience, but as Protestantism fragmented in the mid-seventeenth century writers grew increasingly alarmed that the appeal to conscience might unleash religious anarchy in families and society at large.32 Equally problematic, though less often addressed, was the predicament of a woman married to a dishonest husband. Writers urged her to try to reform him, but avoided the issue of what to do if, as was likely, her 27 T. Taylor, A Good Husband and a Good Wife (1625), 26–7; Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties, 329; I. Bourne, A Gold Chain of Directions (1669), 72–4; Rogers, Matrimoniall Honour, 265. 28 T. E., The Laws Resolution of Women’s Rights (1632), 64; Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties, 315–17. See also Ch. 3, below. 29 Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties, 328–9. 30 Ibid. 327. 31 P. Crawford, Women and Religion in England 1500–1720 (1993), 62–3, 67, 90–1; see Ch. 8, below. 32 Crawford, Women and Religion, 30, 33, 52; ead., ‘Public Duty, Conscience, and Women in Early Modern England’, in J. Morrill, P. Slack, and D. Woolf (eds.), Public Duty and Private Conscience in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 1993), 70; T. Edwards, Gangraena (1646).

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advice was ignored. When Thomas Heath’s wife pleaded with him to stop stealing, in 1612, he called her a whore and bade her hold her tongue.33 Some women chose to stand by their man, however outrageous his behaviour. When Leicester magistrates asked Alice Greene in 1604 why she had remained steadfastly loyal to her husband, a notorious criminal rogue, the clerk noted with astonishment, ‘her answer was, she would whore and thieve both before she would see him starve’.34 The law recognized the wife’s conflict of interests and duties by forbidding her to give evidence against her husband. It also assumed that if they committed a crime together she had probably been acting by his direction, and should therefore be acquitted unless it could be proved otherwise. Similarly Sir Matthew Hale laid down that a wife could not become an accessory to felony after the fact by receiving her husband or concealing his crime. Even in something as grave as misprision (concealment) of treason, Hale was unsure whether she could be indicted for failing to reveal his crime, and left the matter unresolved.35 A far more common dilemma, in practice, was the wife’s predicament when bailiffs or officials arrived to distrain goods or arrest her husband over debts or unpaid taxes. Was her duty to protect her husband or submit to the superior authority of the law? Conduct-books and legal treatises said little on the subject, but it is abundantly clear from court records that women were often prepared to resist bailiffs and officials, by force if necessary, to protect their menfolk and their property. Contemporaries noted such incidents without surprise, probably seeing it as natural for women to identify with their families and homes against an external authority posing an immediate threat. Since many bailiffs indulged in violence, intimidation, and extortion, their claim to embody a higher authority must often have appeared questionable.36 Women’s exclusion from the world of government would have reinforced their tendency to identify with the domestic world they knew best in other contexts too. The point was well made in a satirical tract in 1648 on the abolition of Christmas, probably by John Taylor the water-poet, in which an old woman is asked if she intends to observe the festival ‘in spite of authority’. ‘What authority?’ she demands. ‘I am sure my father and mother had the greatest authority over me ever since I was born, and other authority I knew none before I was married.’ She resolves to follow her parents and husband, all of whom upheld the legitimacy of Christmas. ‘Then it seems you know no other authority?’ ‘No, by 33 35

LRO, BR IV/3/35. Hale, Historia Placitorum, i. 48.

34 36

LRO, BR II/18/8/572. See Chs. 5 and 7, below.

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our Lady, not I’, she replies. The authority of a parliament counted for nothing.37 Even at the theoretical level patriarchy was thus beset with difficulties and contradictions. Far more problematic was the gulf between ideals and social reality, exposed by the existence of numerous households without male heads, and the participation of many ordinary women in paid work.

   Peter Laslett has estimated that 12.9 per cent of households in early modern England were headed by widows, many living alone, others with dependent children or other members.38 Many other households were headed by married women whose husbands worked elsewhere, or had abandoned them. Their numbers are hard to gauge, not least because the men were absent for variable and unpredictable periods. The Norwich census of the poor in 1570 recorded 46 deserted wives, 183 widows, and 137 women whose marital status was unspecified. Some of these were probably women whose husbands had left them, while others belonged to a third major category, single women ‘living at their own hands’ in lodgings.39 Some women established all-female households, with widows or kin sharing on an equal basis, or an older or more established woman taking in lodgers or employees.40 Of these three groups, women ‘living at their own hands’ aroused the greatest concern, for it was generally assumed that young women living outside male control or protection were likely to be drawn into prostitution and crime. These were genuine dangers; the earning power of most young women was barely sufficient to maintain them, leaving many desperately poor and vulnerable. One London woman accused of fornication was sharing a single room with three fellow lodgers, all of them 37 Women will Have their Will: or, Give Christmas his Due (1648), 9–10. The piece contains numerous quotations and echoes of Taylor’s writings. Cf. B. Capp, ‘Separate Domains? Women and Separate Spheres in Early Modern England’, in P. Griffiths, A. Fox, and S. Hindle (eds.), The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England (1996), 139; Stretton, Women Waging Law, 220–1. 38 P. Laslett, ‘Mean Household Size in England since the Sixteenth Century’, in id. and R. Wall (eds.), Household and Family in Past Time (Cambridge, 1972), 147. 39 Pound (ed.), Norwich Census, 95; A. Froide, ‘Single Women, Work and Community in Southampton, 1550–1750’ (Ph.D. thesis, Duke University, 1996); J. M. Bennett and A. M. Froide (eds.), Singlewomen in the European Past 1250–1800 (Philadelphia, 1998); Griffiths, Youth and Authority, ch. 7. 40 Bennett and Froide (eds.), Singlewomen, 287; for examples of female households, BCB 5, fos. 223, 282v; Erickson, Women and Property, 191; Pound (ed.), Norwich Census, e.g. 39, 42, 44, 49 51.

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allegedly present during the act. Goodwife Centloe’s all-female household in an alley off Fleet Street, investigated in 1607, appeared equally suspicious. Mary Stephens, an inmate, claimed that Centloe employed her to card and spin wool, keeping half the profits, but admitted that she had come to London after bearing an illegitimate child, and had initially worked as a servant; the authorities suspected the establishment was a bawdy house.41 It was well known that young women coming up to London to seek a service could easily be tricked or coerced into prostitution, and the Bridewell court minutes record many such personal tragedies. Alice Sharpe came up to London by the Winchcombe carrier in 1598 to look for a service, without success, and within a few days had been lured into sex in the fields for 3s. Her landlady assured her ‘that it is better to do so than to steal and be hanged’. Once trapped in such a situation, escape was difficult.42 The Act of Artificers, which enabled single women to be forced into service, was implemented more energetically than most legislation. Magistrates faced considerable problems, however, both in towns and in large rural parishes with scattered populations. Local government was primarily concerned with households, not their subordinate members, and parish officers were often ignorant of servants’ names and status.43 Periodic urban surveys of ‘inmates’ uncovered many offenders, who were usually ordered to leave or find a service, but many others doubtless slipped through the net.44 Urban women living alone were only likely to attract notice if they practised a trade which threatened male interests, or lived scandalously. The Manchester court leet jury voiced both concerns in 1584 when it condemned the young single women who ‘do bake and brew and use other trades to the great hurt of the poor inhabitants having wife and children. As also in abusing themselves with young men and others having not any man to control them to the great dishonour of God and evil example of others.’ But the authorities made little attempt to enforce their ban on such practices.45 Women following humble occupations as cleaners or laundresses were much less likely to be noticed. Frances Headache, working as a charwoman, had lodged in Reading for 41

BCB 5, fos. 223, 333. BCB 4, fo. 342v; H. Peacham, The Art of Living in London (1642), sig. A4v; M. Parker, ‘A New Medley’, Roxburghe, ii. 244. 43 See e.g. LRO, 1D 41/13/53, fo. 123, 1D 41/13/58, fo. 157; 1D 41/13/59, fos. 228, 318. 44 Griffiths, Youth and Authority, 364–82; F. J. C. Hearnshaw (ed.), Southampton Court Leet Records, 1578–1602 (Southampton Rec. Soc., 1906), 186, 197, 236; HMC, Various Collections, I, (1901), 2; Emmison (ed.), Early Essex Town Meetings, 3, 23–4, 78, 108, 113, 115, 117, 118. 45 J. P. Earwaker (ed.), The Court Leet Records of the Manor of Manchester from 1552 to 1686 (Manchester, 1884–90), i. 241; ii. 37–8, 43, 51. 42

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two years before she came to the authorities’ notice in 1626.46 Quite often an individual’s status remained unclear. One Reading charmaid had claimed to be employed as a servant by the year, while another had genuinely worked as a domestic servant but had then stayed on as a lodger, providing for herself and paying 4d. a week rent to her former mistress. Such blurred categories made law enforcement difficult, and many cases probably came to magistrates’ attention only by chance.47 Poor widows were perceived as a much lesser threat.48 Many of the elderly, and those with small children, depended on the parish for at least part of their income, and most parish relief was channelled in their direction. Parish officials regarded them as the deserving poor, and their dependence on relief provided both a stick and carrot to ensure good behaviour. Many widows also relied on their neighbours to top up relief from the parish. Right up to her death in 1684, for example, Elizabeth Shatton (aged 94) had ‘got her living by gathering of rags’, supplemented by help from neighbours and a pension of 5s. a month.49 Women like her posed no threat. Younger widows were more problematic, and more difficult to place within the patriarchal order. It was assumed they would remarry, as most did. But prosperous widows increasingly chose to remain single, either from preference or because their economic rights had been made conditional on doing so.50 The young, lusty, and well-off widow was a popular target for satirists, who showed her weeping crocodile tears while she revelled in her new independence and idleness. Many saw her as a corrupting influence on married women and maids.51 Women with absent husbands, the third category outside male control, attracted surprisingly little contemporary comment, and modern scholars have given them little attention. They formed nonetheless a very substantial group, and their situation created social problems on a considerable scale, especially among the poor.52 Some had husbands whose work 46

J. M. Guilding (ed.), Reading Records: Diary of the Corporation (1886–96), ii. 314–15. Ibid. 491. Some suspected charmaids proved to be genuine servants: W. J. Connor (ed.), The Southampton Mayor’s Book of 1606–1608 (Southampton Records Series, 21, 1978), 106. 48 Thus Anne Hind, aged 54, explained in 1708 that she lived by knitting, sewing, and winding 49 silk: GL, MS 9731/101/13. GL, MS 9065A/8, fo. 377. 50 Mendelson and Crawford, Women, 182–4; B. J. Todd, ‘The Remarrying Widow: A Stereotype Reconsidered’, in M. Prior (ed.), Women in English Society (1985); V. Brodsky, ‘Widows in late Elizabethan London: Remarriage, Economic Opportunities and Family Orientations’, in L. Bonfield, R. M. Smith, and K. Wrightson (eds.), The World We Have Gained (Oxford, 1980); Erickson, Women and Property, 196–200. 51 Mendelson and Crawford, Women, 68–9. R. Copland, The Seven Sorowes that Women Have when theyr Husbands be Dead (c.1565) shows a widow assessing the benefits and disadvantages of her condition. 52 Ingram, Church Courts,147–9; Mendelson and Crawford, Women, 262. 47

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kept them away. Sailors might be absent for months or years at a time, with no guarantee they would ever return. Edward Coxere, a Kent sailor, went to sea in 1655 a few weeks after marrying, was captured by the Spaniards, and reached home nine months later to find himself already a father. On his next voyage he was captured and enslaved by the Barbary Moors, eventually returning penniless after a year and a half. ‘At this time my wife did begin to keep shop,’ he recalled laconically, ‘there being a necessity for something to be done for a livelihood.’ Elizabeth Remnant’s husband, who also went back to sea shortly after their marriage in 1639, did not return for fifteen years, by which time each had long since assumed the other was dead. Both had remarried bigamously.53 Though mariners generally made some provision before they sailed, most had limited resources, and their wives often endured long periods of poverty and loneliness, struggling to maintain themselves by spinning, or selling produce in the markets.54 Some understandably succumbed to loneliness and want, and formed new relationships. Nicholas Fries of Wapping had been away at sea for four years in 1620 when his wife bore an illegitimate child after a brief affair; the churchwardens, surprisingly sympathetic, stressed that hitherto she had been ‘very industrious and painful to maintain herself and her family and hath lived in a good name and fame’. Her lover, another sailor, was in the East Indies by the time of her court appearance.55 It was notorious that others supplemented their meagre earnings by casual prostitution, though their husbands were likely to repudiate them if they came home to find their wives already pregnant.56 Many abandoned the attempt to maintain an independent household. Elizabeth Sawis, whose husband had gone to sea with Francis Drake, returned to domestic service, while others lived with parents or kin, or became nurse-keepers.57 Sailors were by no means the only group whose work took them away for lengthy periods. The same applied to carriers, drovers, country chapmen, and many others less obvious. A Whitechapel woman explained in 53 E. Coxere, Adventures by Sea, ed. E. H. W. Meyerstein (Oxford, 1945), 32, 51, 80; CSPD 1655, 51–2, 394–5. 54 OBSP 14–17 Jan. 1687, 3; GL, MS 9731/101/6/13; BCB 4, fo. 261v; P. Earle, A City Full of People. Men and Women of London 1650–1750 (1994) 196, 201. On the problem of a long-lost husband reappearing after his wife had remarried in good faith see J. Hall, Resolutions and Decisions of Divers Practical Cases of Conscience (1654), 377–8. 55 GL, MS 9064/18, fo. 45v; cf. BCB 4, fo. 31v. 56 ‘The Seamans Wives Ranting Resolution’, Pepys Ballads, iv. 168; ibid., iv. 184; The Merry Wives of Wapping [?1674–9]; for an example, BCB 4, fo. 271. 57 GL, MS 9064/14, fo. 119v; MS 9065A/4, fos. 28v–29r; MS 9065A/8, fos. 2v, 190v–91r, 285; Earle, City Full of People, 196.

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1601 that ‘her husband being a gelder is gone into the country for to geld cattle this spring time and will not return speedily’; a painter was said ‘to work abroad in countries’; and a glazier was reported in 1612 as having been away for six months, working on Sir Robert Wroth’s grand house.58 Some men had opted to live apart to further their careers. Benjamin Crane, a Hertfordshire carpenter, chose to lodge in Hammersmith as work was far more plentiful in the capital, but assured a court in 1596 that he and his wife had not really separated, for ‘at convenient times’ they still visited one another.59 But many couples had been driven apart by necessity. Henry Smith of Wigston pleaded in 1609 that he was living apart from his wife because he had been forced to take a service, ‘and not for any dislike between him and his wife’. A Leicestershire shepherd charged with deserting his family explained that he too had been driven to accept a place in another village, with his wife’s consent.60 Some men in this position were able to maintain reasonable contact with their families; a Buckinghamshire woman whose husband was a live-in servant in another village insisted that he came to see her once or twice a week at her father’s house.61 But many wives were forced to maintain themselves wholly or in part, and inevitably some of these arrangements became more or less permanent. The Norwich census of the poor in 1570 revealed a wide variety of domestic circumstances. William Bettes, a tiler working at Buckenham, was at least still in touch with his wife, who earned something in the city by knitting and laundering. Richard Rich, a husbandman, was reported to be working elsewhere ‘and keep[s] not with his wife but at times and helpeth her little’; contact was minimal and it is unlikely he ever returned. Margaret Matheu received no support at all from her husband, a labourer, and had no idea of his whereabouts.62 Debt played an equally important role in breaking up families. In some cases men simply drove their wives away to reduce their charge. Ann Fenton of Southwold, Suffolk, explained in 1579 that when her husband Edward fell into debt he ‘beat her out of doors’ and told her to fend for herself; after drifting for several years, she made her way to London, like 58

GL, MS 9064/15, fos. 127, 130v; MS 9064/17, fo. 24. GL, MS 9064/14, fo. 99; cf. E. H. Bates (ed.), Quarter Sessions Records for the County of Somerset. i. 1607–1625 (1907), 254. 60 LRO, 1D 41/13/32, fo. 37v; 1D 41/13/53, fo. 146v; W. L. Sachse (ed.), Minutes of the Norwich Court of Mayoralty 1632–1635 (Norfolk Record Soc., 36, 1967), 47; Ingram, Church Courts, 148–9; M. K. McIntosh, A Community Transformed: The Manor and Liberty of Havering, 1500–1620 (Cambridge, 1991), 76–7. 61 E. C. R. Brinkworth (ed.), Episcopal Visitation Book for the Archdeaconry of Buckingham 1662 (Bucks. Record Soc., 7, 1947), 10–11; cf. Ingram, Church Courts, 148; Earle, City Full of People, 193–4. 62 Pound (ed.), Norwich Census, 23, 31. 59

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many other uprooted folk.63 Far more often a debtor would flee to avoid arrest, leaving his family behind, and might find himself a permanent exile. Anne Ellison, suspected of adultery when she became pregnant in 1610, two years after her husband had vanished, explained that he dared not live at home for fear of his creditors, but slipped back secretly for a few days from time to time.64 Men with no chance of ever paying off their debts often moved right away, losing all contact with their families. A man arrested in Reading in 1632 explained that he had once been a tailor in Worcestershire, but after fleeing his creditors now lived precariously as a travelling chapman, leaving his wife and children to fend for themselves.65 The Norwich census found several such cases. Thomas Lodesman, a hatmaker with eight children, had fled to London with his oldest boy, but his wife had stayed behind, and she and the three oldest girls supported the rest by spinning and knitting.66 Inevitably some women proved unable to cope, and became a burden on the parish rates. Others took to the road. Women wandering the country in search of lost husbands, living from hand to mouth, surface repeatedly in borough court records.67 Many other women lived alone because their marriages had broken down irretrievably. Some had been ended by a judicial separation in the church courts, or an informal arrangement between the warring couple. In 1595, for example, John and Margaret Mannyng signed a bond undertaking to live apart and cease molesting one another.68 In most cases, however, disaffected husbands—or, far more rarely, wives—appear to have simply abandoned their families.69 Some women tried hard to reclaim their errant spouse. When James Harper, a carpenter from Ashford in Kent, decamped to London, changed his name, and remarried bigamously, his first wife eventually tracked him down, and over a fraught breakfast at the Red Lion in Stratford-at-Bow one morning in 1595 the two women asserted their rival claims over him.70 Other women, hearing nothing for years, assumed their husbands were dead and married again. But most abandoned wives became, in effect, female householders, 63

BCB 3, 16 June 1579. GL, MS 9064/17, fo. 22. 65 Guilding (ed.), Reading Records, iii. 97–8; cf. GL, MS 9064/17, fo. 184v. 66 Pound (ed.), Norwich Census, 33. 67 Guilding (ed.), Reading Records, ii. 200–1; iii. 125, 152; LRO, BR II/18/15/367. 68 GL, MS 9065A/2, fo. 98r–v; Ingram, Church Courts, 146–9; Amussen, Ordered Society, 124–6; Gowing, Domestic Dangers, ch. 6. 69 See e.g. LRO, 1D 41/13/29, fo. 2 (a woman driven out without maintenance); Sachse (ed.), Norwich Court 1632–1635, 19 (a woman forced to sleep in a church porch). 70 GL, MS 9065A/2, fos. 90r–91v; for desertion by wives see Ch. 3, below. 64

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struggling like young widows to maintain their families by themselves. Some faced additional problems, with the absentee partner appearing at rare intervals to disrupt their lives and appropriate their savings. Thomasine Wharrowe of Bishopsgate, who ran a lodging house and ‘kept servants at work’, described in 1610 how her husband would ‘go away from her and so hath done for the space of twenty years last past and when he cometh to her he doth commonly spoil her of all that she hath’. She thought he had another wife and three children in Pembrokeshire.71 The civil wars created thousands more female households, as men were drawn into military service. In areas under enemy control, civilian men might be forced to flee, leaving their wives to face the additional dangers of plunder and violence. At Banbury, a puritan burgess’s wife was left behind to run their shop, care for their ten children, and fend off the cavalier soldiers billeted in their house.72 The establishment of a large standing army in the 1690s, and its deployment abroad by William and Mary and Anne created a new class of women often forced, like sailors’ wives, to maintain themselves for months or years on end. Elizabeth Holman, married to a soldier serving in Flanders, scraped a makeshift livelihood as a servant, housekeeper, nurse-keeper, alewife, glover, and charwoman.73

, ,   We have seen that the distinction between male providers and female managers had little meaning for most ordinary people. It was generally accepted that a tradesman’s wife would help in the business, usually in the shop, where her knowledge, reliability, and a friendly manner could prove a valuable asset. If she happened to be young and personable, so much the better. ‘What is the best sign for a tradesman new set up?’, asked a jestbook. ‘Answer: A handsome wife.’74 Many other wives worked for wages, alongside their domestic responsibilities, and their earnings played an important part in the family economy. In the countryside they might find seasonal labour, such as haymaking. Older women in town and country alike often earned small sums by charring, washing, nursing, or cooking 71 GL, MS 9064/16, fo. 241v; cf. The Autobiography of William Stout of Lancaster 1665–1752, ed. J. D. Marshall (Manchester, 1967), 125–6; and Ch. 3, below. 72 A Perfect Relation of the Cause and Manner of the Apprehending [of . . .] Mistris Phillips (1643), 2–3. 73 For examples see Earle, City Full of People, 191, 193–4. 74 E. Gayton, Wit Revived, or a New and Excellent Way of Divertisement (1655; 1674 edn.), 11. On coal-dealers’ wives’ skill in talking up prices see The Two Grand Ingrossers of Coles: viz. The Woodmonger and the Chandler (1652), 11–12.

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for better-off neighbours.75 Spinning and knitting provided plentiful work in many areas. Four thousand women were employed making bonelace in the Colyton area in the late seventeenth century, while two thousand found work in the Leicester knitting industry.76 In west Cornwall, women wove mats which were shipped to London and sold as floor and wall coverings.77 Large towns offered far wider opportunities at all levels. Some women ran lodging houses, victualling houses, or, most profitably of all, inns. In London, custom allowed married women to trade independently, and retail establishments run by women multiplied during the seventeenth century. Widows might also take over their husbands’ concerns, sometimes in very surprising areas; we find Widow Dent running a slaughterhouse in Southampton in 1616, and Katherine Byworth transporting ammunition from the Tower of London to the naval stores.78 Humbler women hawked small wares through the streets, traded in second-hand clothing, and ran pawnshops. Many followed multiple occupations. One London woman helped her husband make bricks in the summer months, and sold fish and fruit in the streets in winter. Margaret Stephenson of Whitechapel explained in 1687 that she would ‘wind silk in the day time when it was wet, and at night also, but in fair weather she went into Leadenhall market to carry home meat, or any provisions brought by others for their families’.79 Portering sounds an unlikely occupation for women, but cheaper rates could give them the edge for home deliveries and even on building sites.80 Wages were often pitifully small, and women’s work throughout the 75 For general surveys see Mendelson and Crawford, Women, ch. 5; L. Duffin and L. Charles (eds.), Women and Work in Pre-Industrial England (1985); M. Roberts, ‘Women and Work in Sixteenth Century English Towns’, in P. J. Corfield and D. Keene (eds.), Work in Towns 850–1850 (1990); M. Roberts, ‘Sickles and Scythes: Women’s Work and Men’s Work at Harvest Time’, History Workshop Journal, 7 (1979); S. Cahn, Industry of Devotion: The Transformation of Women’s Work in England, 1500–1660 (New York, 1987). For rural char-work see e.g. LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 18/56. 76 P. Sharpe, ‘Literally Spinsters; A New Interpretation of Local Economy and Demography in Colyton in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, EcHR, 2nd ser., 44 (1991), 52; LRO, BRII 18/33B/245. 77 Richard Carew, The Survey of Cornwall, ed. F. E. Halliday (1969), 101. 78 F. J. C. and D. M. Hearnshaw (eds.), Southampton Court Leet Records (Southampton Record Soc., 1905–8), iii. 510; CSPD 1659–1660, 404; cf. D. Woodward, Men at Work: Labourers and Building Craftsmen in the Towns of Northern England , 1450–1750 (Cambridge, 1995), 84–91. 79 Earle, City Full of People, 199 (cf. 196–201); The Account of the Behaviour and Confession of the Criminals Condemned [on 14–17 Jan. 1687], 3. On street sellers see S. Shesgreen (ed.), The Criers and Hawkers of London: Engravings and Drawings by Marcellus Laroon (1990). 80 Woodward, Men at Work, 108–14; W. H. Stevenson et al. (eds.), Records of the Borough of Nottingham (Nottingham, 1882–1956), iv. 144, 165; E. I. Fripp (ed.), Minutes and Accounts of the Corporation of Stratford-upon-Avon and other Records, 1553–1620 (Dugdale Soc., 1921–9), ii. 115–17; iii. 29.

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period was characterized by low status, low pay, and low skills.81 Farm work was mainly seasonal, and women were almost always paid less than men, even for the same tasks. Henry Best, a Yorkshire yeoman, paid men 8d. a day and women 6d. to harvest peas in 1641, while women hired to spread manure received only 3d.82 Street vendors earned very little too; a London joiner’s wife claimed in 1697 that she had sold a pastry-cook’s wares in the street for seven years, ‘to the value of a hundred pounds a year’, but she would have received only a small proportion of this sum.83 Pamela Sharpe has shown that at Colyton lace-makers might earn 7s. a week, as much as most men could earn, but that situation was exceptional.84 Nonetheless women’s earnings were often vitally important in keeping their families above the breadline.85 In some families, as we have seen, women were the sole breadwinners, and even in conventional households, a man’s age, sickness, or unemployment might leave his wife the main source of family income. Many such cases occur in the Norwich census, such as a woollen weaver ‘in no work but help[s] his wife in her wool’, and a blind cobbler, aged 67, living on the earnings of his wife and three daughters, all spinning white warp.86 Misfortune could strike more substantial men too. A freeman nominated to the governing body of Leicester in 1645, the year the town was sacked twice by opposing armies, declined the honour on the grounds that his business had been crippled by the war, ‘the chiefest means of his getting being [now] by his wife’s painful industry’.87 Other women became the main breadwinners because their husbands were idle or feckless. Richard Bush, an itinerant arrested at Reading in 1626, explained that he had been living in Southwark for the previous two years ‘by the means of his wife using to make bone laces’.88 Historians have paid much less attention to the social significance of 81 J. M. Bennett, ‘“History that stands still”: Women’s Work in the European Past’, Feminist Studies, 14 (1988), 278. 82 The Farming and Memorandum Books of Henry Best of Elmswell, 1642 , ed. D. Woodward (1984), 40, 146; cf. R. H. Tawney and E. Power (eds.), Tudor Economic Documents (1924), iii. 335–6. 83 GL, MS 9657/2, deposition of Elizabeth Garlington, 27 Feb. 1697; for street vendors as semi-destitute see e.g. ‘The old pudding-pye woman set forth in her colours’, Pepys Ballads, iii. 84 Sharpe, ‘Literally Spinsters’, 52. 121. 85 S. C. Ratcliff, H. C. Johnson, et al. (eds.), Warwick County Records (Warwick, 1935–64), i. 182. 86 Pound (ed.), Norwich Census, 34, 50. 87 LRO, BR II/18/22/342. 88 Guilding (ed.), Reading Records, ii. 296–7; cf. Pound (ed.), Norwich Census, 73; Stout, Autobiography, 125–6; R. Gough, The History of Myddle, ed. D. Hey (Harmondsworth, 1981), 216; The Autobiography of Henry Newcome, ed. R. Parkinson (Chetham Soc., 26–7, 1852), i. 82–4; Rogers, Matrimoniall Honour, 230.

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women’s work. But patriarchal authority was inevitably compromised when husbands and wives were economically interdependent, and the evidence suggests that even a small separate income could affect a woman’s sense of identity. In some circumstances it gave her the means and confidence to pursue her own, separate interests. Anne Toy, who lived with her husband in Caermarthen, felt able to take lodgings in London in the late 1620s to pursue a suit in Chancery for her patrimony, supporting herself by making silk flowers for gentlewomen.89 The language of court depositions, especially in London, indicates that many ordinary women saw themselves as economic agents in their own right, not as mere adjuncts or dependants. A gardener’s wife in Whitechapel deposed in 1623 that she earned her living as a laundress, and by selling her husband’s herbs in the summer. A drover’s wife said she lived by making and mending stockings, ‘which is her profession’, with no mention of her husband’s earnings. A carter’s wife said she lived partly by her husband, and partly by her own labour, winding silk and making buttons.90 Many others spoke in similar terms. ‘I am by trade a mantua maker and my husband is an upholsterer,’ one woman explained; ‘I get my livelihood by selling drinks and making pies and by my husband’s assistance,’ said another.91 Susan Bowreman said she earned her living selling ‘oysters and fish about the streets and other things as the season affordeth’, adding that her husband was a chandler; the clerk added a note that the couple ‘get their livings by their professions aforesaid’.92 The plural is surely significant, and the evidence suggests that many poor women in London regarded themselves, and were regarded, as at least partly self-supporting. And not only the poor. Anne Lane testified in 1708 that her husband worked as a gardener for Lady Russell, but that she herself kept a public house, paid taxes and rates, and was worth £100, ‘her debts paid’. She appears to have regarded herself as wholly independent in economic terms. Still more suggestive is a testamentary case in 1634, in which a key witness was dismissed as an idle gossip contributing nothing to her family’s income; as one female deponent complained, she ‘hath been and is a troublesome woman and liveth by her husband’s labour’. Economic dependence on a husband, regarded as entirely proper by the conduct-books, was thus viewed by the artisans’ wives of Barking as a badge of shame.93 Women in provincial towns sometimes spoke about 89 90 91 92 93

LMA, DL/C/231, fos. 35–7; cf. Burnam, Vindication, sig. Bv–2. GL, MS 9189/1, fos. 51, 52, 78v. Earle, City Full of People, 196. GL, MS 9065A/5, Craven v Baldwin, 1621. GL, MS 9065A/10, fo. 135; MS 9065A/7, White v Hall, 1634, deposition of Margery Rixon.

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their work in similar terms. Isabel Milbank of Cambridge told a court in 1601 that ‘she getteth her living by the labour of herself and of her husband, being a weaver’, placing her own labour first, while a chandler’s wife informed Leicester magistrates in 1613 that she lived by her work, ‘being a seamstress’.94 A woman’s independent earning power might also prove an important factor in attracting a husband, especially for poor women and widows of advancing years. The Norwich census of 1570 reveals many wives significantly older than their husbands, flouting a social convention as strong then as it is today, and suggests that individuals had agreed to pool their limited assets and marketable skills. Ralph Stevenson, for example, an unemployed tanner of 34, was listed with his wife Cicely, aged 60, who spun wool. In all, the census recorded sixty-six couples where the wife was estimated to be at least ten years older than her spouse, and in twentyone of these cases the gap was twenty years or more. They include the unusual ménage of William Pleasance, a blind man of 50, and his wife Alice, allegedly aged 96 and past work.95 Some categories of female labour affected gender relations in wider and more subtle ways. Market women, for example, needed a range of attributes very different from the modest virtues endorsed by moralists. They had to be streetwise and assertive. Robert Meeke, a Yorkshire clergyman, thought 3s. 6d. quite sufficient for the two pairs of stockings he had ordered, and was outraged when the knitter demanded 2d. more and refused to give way.96 The traveller Thomas Baskerville was equally dismayed by his encounter with the stocking-makers of Doncaster in 1681: the women of the town are so importunate for they go with baskets of the stockings on their arms from inn to inn where travellers are, that you can hardly evade laying out money with them, for they will follow you up into your chamber and will not be denied without a great deal of trouble.

At Harrogate he found women more subtly persistent, pushing into his chamber early in the morning and offering to fetch water for his ablutions, with wheedling gambits such as, ‘I am pretty Betty, let me serve you’.97 Market women developed a range of sharp practices to deceive the 94 CUL, EDR K20/24, depositions of Isabel Milbank, Parnella Wright, Ruth Wallis; LRO, BRIV 3/51; cf. 1D 41/4/27/9, deposition of Margaret Goadeby. 95 Pound (ed.), Norwich Census, 56, 90, and passim. 96 Extracts from the Diary of the Rev. Robert Meeke, ed. H. J. Morehouse and C. A. Hulbert (1874), 38. 97 ‘Thomas Baskerville’s Journeys in England, Temp. Car. II’, HMC, Portland  (1893), 310, 314.

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unwary, some using false scales and weights, or buying up produce before the market opened to drive up prices and resell it in the same market (‘forestalling’ and ‘regrating’).98 And of course ordinary women buying in the market place needed to be equally alert and assertive. Some devised tricks of their own, like three Whitby women prosecuted in 1678 for ‘conspiring together’ to force down the price of butter in the market. It took sharp wits to survive in the market place.99 Some employments also involved a considerable degree of physical mobility, expanding women’s social horizons and fostering their sense of self-reliance. Market women often had to travel some distance to obtain their supplies. The Lancashire squire Nicholas Blundell recorded ‘huckster’ women coming to buy his apple crop, to sell in the Liverpool markets. The ‘milk-wives’ of Jacobean Anglesey were said to ‘dwell over night in cottages that they have of their own, sometimes two or three together in a cottage’.100 Women trading in more distant markets would be away from home for several days at a time, like the two Nottingham widows ordered in 1631 to avoid Lincoln market because of an outbreak of sickness there.101 Pedlars and petty chapwomen, often widows or deserted wives forced to become wholly self-sufficient, were on the road far longer. One Hampshire widow explained in 1629 that ‘she hath lived by her travail and sale of small wares in the counties of Southampton and Berks these twenty years’. Margaret Eden of Brailes, Warwickshire, another widow, travelled round the county in the 1680s with her packhorse, selling wares from boxes and hampers.102 Other occupations, though not mobile, could provide an equally wide range of social contacts. Alewives and women running cook-shops, lodging houses, inns, and (later) coffee houses were at the hub of social interchange, and played a pivotal role in the life of their neighbourhoods. 98 GL, MS 4069/1, fo. 145; cf. fos. 60, 85, 157, 171v, 175v; W. L. Sachse (ed.), Minutes of the Norwich Court of Mayoralty 1630–1631 (Norfolk Rec. Soc., 15, 1942), 224; M. J. Hoad (ed.), Portsmouth Record Series: Borough Sessions Papers 1653–1688 (1971), 44; cf. Stevenson et al. (eds.), Records of Nottingham, iv. 98, 103, 111, 112, 153. 99 J. C. Atkinson (ed.), Quarter Sessions Records (North Riding Rec. Soc., 1884–90), vii. 15; Amussen, Ordered Society, 119–22; Capp, ‘Separate Domains?’, 126–7, 137. 100 The Great Diurnal of Nicholas Blundell of Great Crosby, Lancashire, i. 1702–1711, ed. J. J. Bagley (Record Soc. of Lancashire and Cheshire, 110, 1968), 53; J. O. Halliwell (ed.), A Minute Account of the Social Condition of the People of Anglesea in the Reign of James the First (1860), 19. 101 Stevenson et al. (eds.), Records of Nottingham, v. 149; cf. Guilding (ed.), Reading Records, ii. 190–1; on chapmen and -women see M. Spufford, The Great Reclothing of Rural England: Petty Chapmen and their Wares in the Seventeenth Century (1984). 102 Guilding (ed.), Reading Records, ii. 445; Ratcliff, Johnson et al. (eds.), Warwick County Records, ix. 5. In 1631 Norwich magistrates dealt with two married chapwomen who had come from London and Woodbridge: Sachse (ed.), Minutes of Norwich 1630–1631, 185, 196.

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So, in a different way, did women running pawnshops, an important and largely female occupation. Others played a role in the related and more respectable activity of moneylending, at many levels. Many better-off spinsters and widows found it the safest way to protect and enhance their savings, and one that allowed them to transact business on equal terms with men, or even public bodies.103 Finally, some women found an important social role through work in the medical field, most commonly as midwives and nurse-keepers but also as physicians, bone-setters, and even surgeons. They came from all levels of society, and so did their clients, who regarded skill, availability, and cost as more important than gender or formal qualifications. The Essex minister Ralph Josselin was quite happy for a Mrs Withers to set his daughter’s dislocated arm, while Henry Newcome ‘cheerfully paid’ a substantial fee of £4 to a female oculist for treating his wife.104 Some practitioners were undoubtedly very capable and operating on a considerable scale. Lady Springett, a widow, employed poor women throughout the year to procure herbs and other materials, sometimes treated twenty patients in a morning for burns, cuts, and broken limbs, and ‘never received a single penny for anything of that kind’.105 Such women saw their work as an expression of Christian charity and good neighbourliness. Humbler women might be equally busy. Walter Powell of Bishopsgate, suspected in 1592 of keeping a bawdy house because so many people were seen thronging to his home, explained that they had been coming for medical treatment, ‘for that his wife is a surgeon’.106 Some of these humbler figures, too, saw their practice in terms of good neighbourliness. Frances Jeffrey, a joiner’s wife, said she practised surgery ‘for them of the poorer sort but not for any lucre’, while Dorothy Moore, who supplied ointments for sore eyes and throats, and herbal remedies for the ague, insisted in 1618 that she did not charge her patients, though she would take what was offered.107 Inevitably some ran into difficulties 103 On women and moneylending see B. A. Holderness, ‘Widows in Pre-Industrial Society: An Essay upon their Economic Functions’, in R. M. Smith (ed.), Land, Kinship and Lifecycle (Cambridge, 1984). 104 The Diary of Ralph Josselin, 1616–1683, ed. A. Macfarlane (1976), 468; Newcome, Autobiography, ii. 262–3; cf. The Staffordshire Quarter Sessions Rolls (William Salt Arch. Soc., 1931–50), iii. 226–7; J. F. Williams (ed.), Bishop Redman’s Visitation 1597 (Norfolk Record. Soc., 18, 1946), 83, 89, 91. See further M. Pelling, The Common Lot: Sickness, Medical Occupations and the Urban Poor in Early Modern England (1998), esp. ch. 8; Mendelson and Crawford, Women, 314–21; H. Marland (ed.), The Art of Midwifery: Early Modern Midwives in Europe (1993); A. L. Wyman, ‘The Surgeoness: the Female Practitioner of Surgery, 1400–1800’, Medical History, 28 (1984). 105 Some Account of Circumstances in the Life of Mary Pennington (1821), 64–6. 106 GL, MS 9064/13, fo. 147v. 107 GL, MS 9064/17, fos. 215, 254v.

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with male practitioners or the local authorities. Mary Carrington of Market Harborough was presented in 1631 ‘for practising surgery upon men and women in their secret parts without licence’. A female specialist in venereal and gynaecological problems was clearly regarded as unacceptable.108 But medical care was one of the few fields in which a woman might also win public recognition and respect. Richard Gough of Myddle recalled that Elinor Mansell, once a servant in a gentleman’s family, had later become ‘very useful and indeed famous for her skill in surgery’ and ‘did much good in the country’.109 Treating the sick was far more than simply another category of paid work; it was an expression of good neighbourliness, a means of self-fulfilment, and a route through which women might win recognition and honour within the community.

   Female Times and Spaces In his humorous pamphlet Tis Merrie When Gossips Meet (1602), Samuel Rowlands tells the story of three London women, a widow, wife, and young spinster, who meet in the street one day and repair to a tavern to drink and catch up on their news. Beneath its light-hearted tone there runs a clear undertow of disapproval. The wife knows she should be minding the shop, and the spinster fears her parents will disapprove of her idleness. The widow, by contrast, relishes her social freedom, and offers tips from a lifetime’s experience on how to manage men. Rowlands revisited this theme a few years later in A Whole Crew of Kind Gossips (1609), where the tone is considerably darker. This time the women meet to drink and swap bitter complaints about their husbands. In a prefatory verse ‘To the Maids of London’, Rowlands condemns their flagrant betrayal of wifely responsibility, and urges the maids to reject such behaviour when they too are married. The Gossips Greeting (1620) offered a similar vignette with a still more hostile commentary: the women gossiping in alehouses are depicted as idle, irresponsible, spendthrift, bad neighbours, and treacherous wives.110 Social commentators were well aware that women’s daily routines took 108 LRO, 1D 41/13/60, fo. 83. Cf. a widowed surgeon at Romford who specialized in venereal diseases but was also accused of running a bawdy house: McIntosh, Community Transformed, 70. 109 Gough, Myddle, 152; cf. C. Kerry, ‘Leonard Wheatcroft of Ashover’, Journal of the Derbyshire Arch. and Natural History Soc., 18 (1896), 80. 110 Repr. in The Complete Works of Samuel Rowlands, ed. S. J. Herrtage (Glasgow, 1880), vols. i–ii; W.P., The Gossips Greeting: or, a New Discovery of Such Females Meeting (1620).

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them into the street and market place, and that a significant proportion lived outside direct male supervision. They knew that many did paid work which also brought them into contact with a world beyond the narrowly domestic. They were aware too that many enjoyed the company of other women, creating female spaces and times that men often found deeply troubling. The repeated attacks on ‘gossiping’, by preachers and satirists alike, reflected a widespread concern that unsupervised female sociability posed a threat to the order and values of patriarchal society. The most important female space was within the home itself. Social convention laid down very specific responsibilities for husbands and wives, excluding the husband from kitchen affairs and limiting his role in routine domestic management. It was as shameful for him to trespass on his wife’s domain as vice versa. As Patrick Hannay put it in 1619, ‘it’s unseemly, and doth both disgrace, | When either doth usurp the other’s place’.111 Though the houses of the poor did not have a separate kitchen, the principle of separate responsibilities was widely accepted. Men who meddled in their wives’ domestic concerns were derided as ‘cotqueans’, and numerous ballads showed the disasters that followed whenever men and women trespassed on one another’s territory. While the husband was working in the fields or his (work)shop, the home became, at least in part, primarily his wife’s domain. And this domain she often shared with her neighbours or gossips. Female social interaction within the home took many forms and had a multiple significance. Its most important and symbolic manifestation was the gathering of neighbours around the bedside of a woman in childbirth, providing the mother and midwife with both moral and practical support. Childbirth was a dangerous and frightening experience, and it is not surprising that close bonds often developed between a new mother and those who had provided help and comfort. Such occasions were of course repeated many times in different homes, creating reciprocal ties as each individual played the roles of helper and mother. Being invited to attend a neighbour’s delivery was a significant rite of passage in itself, signalling acceptance within a network or community. For the newly wed, it reflected too the responsibilities and privileges which accompanied their enhanced social status. And once the delivery was accomplished, the helpers usually celebrated with merrymaking and drinking at the new mother’s house, a traditionally ribald occasion from which men were 111 P. Hannay, A Happy Husband or, Directions for a Maide to choose her Mate (1619), sig. C3v; cf. A. Marsh, The Ten Pleasures of Marriage (1682), 69. On the issues discussed in this section see now A. Flather, ‘The Gendering of Space in Early Modern Essex, c.1580 to 1720’, (Ph.D. thesis, University of Essex, 2002).

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firmly excluded.112 The christening, normally within a few days of the baby’s birth, was another primarily female affair. As the mother would still be in childbed, her friends—not her husband—carried the infant to church on her behalf. An invitation to participate was another mark of friendship and trust. A London haberdasher’s wife recalled in 1594 how she and a woman who had helped at her child’s christening two years earlier had ever since ‘been of familiar acquaintance’.113 There was further merrymaking after the new mother’s churching, a ceremony held a month after her delivery to mark her return to normal life. The service came to be overshadowed by the celebrations afterwards at the mother’s house, an occasion once more dominated by women. When two Leicestershire villagers were prosecuted in 1610 for allowing an excommunicated Catholic to attend a churching, they pleaded that she had been invited by their wives, along with other women, without their knowledge or consent.114 For the wives, the authority of female custom outweighed the force of ecclesiastical excommunication. The combination of sociability, practical help, and emotional support in these rites of passage typified the wider patterns of female interaction. The term ‘gossip’ originally denoted a godparent of either sex, but came to apply almost exclusively to women, and to denote any close female friend. Women themselves sometimes used it to address or describe their friends.115 The evolution of the term reflects the fundamental importance of childbirth in women’s lives, and a recognition that the supportive networks manifested in the delivery room played an equally important part in their everyday lives. A circle of close friends, or ‘gossip network’, was almost essential for the smooth running of the household. Women turned constantly to their friends and neighbours for advice or assistance, making the home a social as well as domestic space, and would linger to exchange news whenever they met acquaintances in the street, shop, or market. Male commentators condemned women as idle and garrulous, 112 H. Parrot, Cures for the Itch. Characters (1626), sig. A7v; The Fifteen Plagues of a Maiden-head (1707), 8; on childbirth and baptismal customs and celebrations see D. Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death (Oxford, 1997), esp. chs. 4, 7; id., Travesties and Transgressions in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford, 2000), ch. 7. A. Wilson, ‘Participant or Patient? Seventeenth-Century Childbirth from the Mother’s Point of View’, in R. Porter (ed.), Patients and Practitioners: Lay Perceptions of Medicine in Pre-Industrial Society (Cambridge, 1985), 129–44. 113 GL, MS 9065A/2 , fo. 15r–v. 114 LRO, 1D 41/13/33, fo. 76; on churching see Cressy, Birth, Marriage and Death, ch. 9. 115 GL, MS 9065A/4, fo. 35v; WSRO, Ep1/11/15, fo. 177v; R. Snawsell, A Looking-Glasse for Married Folks (1631), 1, 21, 29, 50, 60, 71; W. Rowley, A New Wonder, A Woman never Vext (1632), in R. Dodsley (ed.), A Select Collection of Old English Plays, rev. ed. W. C. Hazlitt, xii (1875), 116, 117, 119, 126, 128; Rowlands, A Crew of Kind Gossips, 13, 16–18, 20; W.P., Gossips Greeting, sig. B3–C3.

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and disapproved of such practices. A Jacobean pamphleteer rounded on ‘tattling gossips’ who, at conduits, and such other places, The ale-house, bake-house, or the washing-block Meet daily, talking with your brazen faces, Of people’s matters which concern you not.

‘This wench will never hold her prattle,’ says a character in a Restoration comedy, ‘she’d out-talk ’em at a bake-house.’116 But it would be more accurate to see women as interdependent, and their work (whether domestic and waged) as closely integrated with their social lives. Thomas Baskerville, touring England in 1681, noted women at Winchcombe carrying their bread and puddings to the bakehouse early in the morning, knitting as they went. As they waited for their bread and pies to be baked, they would be chatting to their friends while still plying their needles.117 Though English women do not appear to have developed anything equivalent to the Continental ‘spinning-bee’, their patterns of work and sociability were similarly interrelated. In 1570 we find women gathered in a Durham churchyard to spin and bleach their cloth. A Leicester woman reporting an incident in 1640 testified that she had been knitting in the street near Bakehouse Lane at the time. Celia Fiennes, travelling through Norfolk half a century later, found ‘the country full of spinners’ and described rural lanes where ‘you meet the ordinary people knitting four or five in a company under the hedges’. And Shakespeare’s Orsino refers casually to ‘The spinsters and the knitters in the sun, | And the free maids that weave their thread with bones’, singing old songs as they work together.118 Monotonous work such as knitting and spinning devoured huge swathes of women’s lives, and company helped to relieve the tedium, just as for assembly-line workers centuries later. In several large towns, such as Nottingham, Southampton, and Winchester, the authorities unwittingly encouraged the fusion of work and sociability by designating official washing places, which became natural sites for women to gather and talk as they washed and dried their clothes.119 Many forms of female 116 R. West, The Court of Conscience, or Dick Whippers Sessions (1607), sig. F; E. Ravenscroft, The Careless Lovers and The Canterbury Guests, ed. E. S. Henry (1987), 60; W.P., The Gossips Greeting, sig. C. 117 ‘Baskerville’s Journeys’, 303. 118 J. Raine (ed.), Depositions and Other Ecclesiastical Proceedings from the Courts of Durham (Surtees Soc., 21, 1845), 295–7; LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 27/9, deposition of Margaret Goadeby; C. Morris (ed.), The Journeys of Celia Fiennes (1947), 150 (and 146); Shakespeare, Twelfth-Night, . ii. 44–6. 119 Stevenson et al. (eds.), Records of Nottingham, iv. 219, 223; Hearnshaw (eds.), Court Leet Records, iii. 421; A. J. Willis (ed.), Winchester Consistory Court Depositions 1561–1602 (Lyminge, 1960), 50.

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agricultural work were similarly sociable. Dorothy Osborne’s famous description in 1653 of ‘young wenches’ chatting and singing ballads as they tended sheep and cattle on the common throws light on their working culture as well as their innocent pleasures; if one maid ‘spies her cows going into the corn’, she noted, ‘then away they all run’ to fetch them back. They drove the cattle home together at milking time, or milked them at a communal site on the common itself.120 Women hired to reap corn, harvest peas, or weed the fields would similarly work together, and women working at home would very often choose to sit at the street door to spin or knit. That offered more light and space, but, equally important, also allowed them to participate in the social life of the street.121 Baskerville, a perceptive observer, viewed the sociability of women’s work as a distinctive feature of their lives. Reflecting on Suffolk ploughmen and their wives, he judged the women’s lives to be ‘more pleasant, for they can go with their work to good company, and the poor ploughman must do his work alone’.122 Women may often have been the more visible presence in the village or urban street in daylight hours, as the men worked on the land or in their workshops, and that pattern helps to explain their role in the informal politics of the parish. Market women enjoyed still more collective patterns of work and recreation.123 In Westward for Smelts (1620) we find a company of London fishwives returning home together by boat after a day’s trading, ‘their heads full of wine, and their purses full of coin’, telling tales to pass the time, and ending their day in an alehouse. A century later Richard Steele, writing in The Spectator, described travelling down from Richmond early one summer’s morning with a fleet of barges, all carrying women bringing fruit to sell in the London markets. Later that day he strolled through Covent Garden, watching the ‘crowds of agreeable young women’ buying the produce for their families.124 We find a rather similar, if less rosy picture in a news pamphlet of May 1680, which described how passengers on a ferry from Caerleon in south Wales to Bristol had narrowly escaped drowning when an overcrowded boat sank as it was bringing them ashore. The reporter found nothing worthy of comment in the fact that 120 The Letters of Dorothy Osborne to William Temple, ed. G. C. Moore Smith (Oxford, 1928), 51–2 (my italics); LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 6/81; The Autobiography of Mrs. Alice Thornton, ed. C. Jackson (Surtees Soc., 62, 1875), 32. 121 See e.g. CUL, EDR, K5/12; ‘Baskerville’s Journeys’, 303; T. Allein, Truths Manifest Revived (1659), 14; GL, MS 9065/A4, fo. 56v; see Ch. 8, below. 122 ‘Baskerville’s Journeys’, 266. 123 See Ch. 8, below. 124 J. O. Halliwell (ed.), Westward for Smelts (1620; Percy Soc., 32, 1848), 7 and passim; The Spectator, ed. D. F. Bond (Oxford, 1965) , iv. 98–9 (11 Aug. 1712).

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seventeen of the ferry’s twenty-three passengers were women, probably crossing the Bristol Channel together on their way to market.125 Much of the buying and selling of provisions was conducted by women, and local authorities sometimes assigned specific times and spaces for ‘women’s markets’, for the sale of eggs, butter, cheese, poultry, and similar items. Market women could be fiercely assertive in defending such spaces. Magistrates in Southampton, for example, responded to complaints in 1615 that male bakers had encroached on the covered market house assigned to the butter-women by ordering the bakers to move elsewhere.126 The women selling yarn in London’s Cornhill ward in the early 1590s had no formal right to trade there, and were presented for unruly behaviour and obstructing the highway, but by 1595 the wardmote jury had abandoned its attempts to expel them and recommended they be allocated a designated space in the market. For several years the jurors also presented women selling oranges and apples by the Exchange Gate, for ‘abusing themselves in cursing and swearing to the great annoyance and grief of the inhabitants and passers-by’, but again they eventually gave up their attempts to dislodge them.127 One other social space deserves brief mention here: the church. In many parish churches pewing arrangements segregated the sexes, a pattern that seems to have spread as the seventeenth century progressed.128 Historians have studied pewing mainly in the context of disputes over social precedence, but seating arrangements also provided another opportunity for women to consolidate friendships. In Jacobean England the word ‘pewfellow’ was occasionally used instead of ‘gossip’ for female friends.129 In practice the segregation of the sexes might begin before the service, and continue after it, for women quite often arrived later than their husbands, after staying to finish their domestic chores.130 In rural communities they might also gather outside the church before 125

A True Relation of the Sad and Deplorable Condition (1680), 4–5. Hearnshaw (ed.), Court Leet Records, iii. 489; cf. Stevenson et al. (eds.), Records of Nottingham, v. 111, 112, 135. 127 GL, MS 4069/1, fos. 44, 51v, 54, 56, 60, 65, 83. 128 M. Aston, ‘Segregation in Church’, in W. J. Sheils and D. Wood (eds.), Women in the Church (Studies in Church History, 27, 1990); A. Flather, The Politics of Place: A Study of Church Seating in Essex, c.1580–1640 (Leicester, 1999); Amussen, Ordered Society, 137–44; C. Wright, ‘The Spatial Ordering of Community in English Church Seating, c.1550–1700’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Warwick, 2002). 129 T. Dekker and J. Webster, West-ward Hoe, in The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, ed. F. Bowers (Cambridge, 1953–61), iii. 378; Halliwell (ed.), Westward for Smelts, 38. 130 N. Bownd, Sabbathum Veteris et Novi Testamenti (1606), 459; Dod and Cleaver, Godly Forme, sig. C2; LRO, 1D 41/13/64, fo. 172v; D. Underdown, Fire from Heaven: Life in an English Town in the Seventeenth Century (1992), 75–6. 126

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and after the service. In an Oxfordshire case in 1619, for example, it was explained that ‘many of the women of the parish of Bladon [had] come together unto Bladon green . . . an usual meeting place for the parishioners there upon Sundays and holy days in the afternoon before and after evening prayers’.131 Services such as christenings and churchings were largely female occasions, and, as we will see, some of the calendar customs associated with the church, such as rush-bearing, were also dominated by women. Gossiping We have surveyed some of the occasions that brought women together in the course of their daily lives; we must now explore the significance of this interaction. What role did gossip networks play in women’s lives, and their self-perception as wives and neighbours? What did they talk about in private? And were male commentators paranoid in claiming that women seized every opportunity to discuss the men in their lives, and how best to deceive or outwit them? At one level ‘gossiping’ was clearly functional. Women called on neighbours for help and advice, and to borrow kindling, food, utensils, or money. Families at all social levels had to cope with incomes that were often highly irregular: farmers had to wait for their crops to be harvested or their livestock ready for market; craftsmen’s and artisans’ work was often seasonal; and landlords and servants alike were paid quarterly at best. In addition the whole nation was plagued by a chronic shortage of coins in circulation.132 Even when money was to hand, villagers might have to wait for the next market day and travel miles to the nearest town to obtain an item they needed. One labourer’s wife described in 1600 how she had walked several miles to the women’s market in Leicester to buy a pennyworth of salt.133 A large part of the population therefore depended on an elaborate network of credit and debt, and the poor developed an equally elaborate culture of loans, barter, and small favours. Poor folk in need of ready money would generally pawn clothes or other items, either at a pawnshop or by informal arrangements which might see an item pawned several times over. Thus at Christmas 1613 a Leicester baker pawned his wife’s gown to Mary Foulds, a chandler’s wife, for 3s.; when Mary asked for her money again, the baker’s wife explained that she could 131

OAO, Archdeaconry Papers c118 , fo. 278v. C. Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (1998). 133 LRO, BR II/18/7/37. Even if she was lying, as suspected, she clearly thought her story plausible . 132

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not raise so much and that the gown in any case belonged to Thomas Heath’s wife, who had previously pawned it to her. Heath too proved unable to raise 3s., but recovered the gown by giving the chandler’s wife 4lb of wool, a sheepskin, a joint of mutton, and some tallow.134 This was an economy based on barter and favours as well as cash. The social economy of ordinary women depended on a network of reliable friends, and a culture of good neighbourliness that went far beyond informal barter. Friends were often ready to offer small loans or gifts, or perform acts of kindness for a neighbour. Such transactions were generally too trivial to be recorded, but what evidence survives confirms the importance of what we might call an ‘economy of mutual favours’. Thus Margery Dale described in 1562 how she had agreed to ‘dress’ some fish for a widowed friend who confessed that she herself ‘could not abide the smell of fish’.135 Magdalen Andrews, a smith’s wife in Cripplegate, recalled in 1593 how a friend had begged her for a chicken to cook for the invalid she was nursing; Magdalen did not have a chicken, but took the trouble to go ‘to a special friend of hers and got one’.136 Alice Dodridge, a shoemaker’s wife, turned to a neighbour ‘for a water for her child’s mouth’.137 Mary Hayes of Holborn felt able to leave her door key with two neighbours when she went on an errand.138 Such trivial acts of kindness, the small change of neighbourliness, constituted a culture of mutual support which played an important role in easing the lives of the poor. In some cases, women reached informal agreements over the exchange of goods and services of which their husbands remained wholly unaware.139 Neighbourly ties between women could also prove invaluable in times of crisis. When Simon Knight of Stepney lay dying at midnight in September 1714, his wife persuaded her next-door neighbour to go out with a maidservant to find someone able to take down his will, and the two women eventually located one Francis Warner, a vintner. Warner testified later that he had initially refused to turn out, because it was so late and he was feeling unwell, but ‘his wife desired him to go it being a neighbour and thereupon he went’. So one man eventually took down another man’s will—but only because female good neighbourliness had oiled the wheels at every stage.140 134

LRO, BR IV/3/90. GL, MS 9065A/1, fo. 10. 136 GL, MS 9585/2, fo. 217r–v. 137 GL, MS 9065A/2, fo. 10. 138 OBSP 14–16 Oct. 1685, 3. 139 G. Walker, ‘Women, Theft and the World of Stolen Goods’, in J. Kermode and G. Walker (eds.), Women, Crime and the Courts in Early Modern England (1994), 97. 140 GL, MS 9065A/10, fos. 6v–8r. 135

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Every small favour reinforced the bonds of friendship and trust, and made it more likely that help would also be forthcoming in a major crisis. A London court heard in 1613 how Joan Andrews, who had taken the desperate step of pawning the lease on her house, asked her neighbour to lend her the very substantial sum of £20 to redeem it; her friend said ‘she had it not herself to lend but she would borrow so much for her’.141 We find striking generosity of a different kind in the story of Katherine Welsh, a baker’s wife, who described in 1570 how she had gone almost daily to visit a friend lying desperately sick of the plague. On the night before the patient died, Katherine was at her bedside from 9 p.m. until 2–3 a.m., when she went home ‘to call up her husband to work’. Katherine had not neglected her domestic responsibilities, but she had honoured the ‘law of good neighbourhood’ to the full, at enormous personal risk.142 Elizabeth Fry appears to have done the same. Her neighbour Mrs Turner knocked on her door at six o’clock one morning in 1663, asking to hide some money which she said belonged to a friend whose business had collapsed, in order to save his wife and children from destitution. Fry allowed her to hide it in her kitchen and shop—a rash decision for it amounted to more than £1,000 and had in fact been stolen by Turner’s husband, which placed Fry herself in grave danger.143 In each of these three very different cases, the ‘good neighbour’ had performed a favour which might easily have led to her own ruin or even death. But gossiping possessed far more than a functional significance, and the item begged or borrowed might cover an essentially social visit. Company and the exchange of news, stories, or jokes helped to relieve the monotony of everyday toil.144 Even more important, gossiping was about bonding and belonging. As Melanie Tebbutt has shown in her study of modern gossip, the content of these verbal exchanges might be their least important aspect. If neighbours were willing to share their trivial news and concerns, and listen to her own, a woman knew she was accepted.145 Membership of local networks was not automatic, and any newcomer had to win and maintain acceptance. At a betrothal in Elizabethan Folkestone, parishioners asked, ‘Which is she that should be our neighbour?’ ‘I am she,’ Joan Harwood answered, and added pointedly that ‘she trusted to be entertained there as a neighbour among them’.146 141

GL, MS 9065A/4, fo. 132v. GL, MS 9065A/1, fo. 108v. 143 A true and Impartial Account of the . . . Tryal . . . of Col. James Turner (1663), 28–9. Turner’s booty 144 included jewels worth roughly £4,500. See Ch. 8, below. 145 M. Tebbutt, Women’s Talk? A Social History of ‘Gossip’ in Working-Class Neighbourhoods, 1880–1960 (1995). 146 P. Collinson, The Birthpangs of Protestant England (1988), 87. 142

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Exchanging friendly words at the well or street door was a first step towards such ‘entertainment’. Inclusion within a network of friendly neighbours gave the newcomer a social identity and status. It provided too some sense of security, for she now had friends who would listen to her problems and provide help and support in times of need. Some gossips became intimate and lifelong companions, matching or even substituting for the affective role of a husband. Honour Stokes, a spinster of 50, recalled in 1701 that she had known her late friend Ann Holly for twenty-four years, and ‘was almost daily with her and she would often impart to [me] her affairs and concerns and would advise with [me] thereupon’.147 Women might turn to their gossips for moral and practical support to the very end. Mary Campin, an Essex potter’s wife, recalled in 1674 how she had read from the Prayer Book at the bedside of a dying friend, to comfort her, while Elizabeth Bishop stayed overnight with a friend on her deathbed, and shared the bed at her request.148 Some of the dying, especially widows or spinsters, also looked to their friends to ensure a proper funeral. As Milcha Hewetson, a London victualler, lay dying in 1677, she laid a special charge on the friends gathered round her bedside: ‘Neighbours, as ye are women, see that Mr Dodd . . . bury me like a woman as I have lived’. Margery Hopes spoke in similar terms to her own friends a year later: ‘As I have lived like a woman, I desire to be buried like a woman.’149 Such phrases reflected the traditional concept of a Christian burial appropriate to the social status of the deceased, but the gendered language suggests the potential importance of the gossips’ role in this final rite of passage. The emotional and practical value of belonging to a network of friends or gossips is a theme that will recur throughout this book, in a wide variety of contexts. Here we need only list a few of the most obvious. Friends provided crucial help in childbirth and with family sickness. They might offer support, or a refuge, for women with abusive husbands. They might serve as ‘compurgators’, character witnesses whose support could clear a woman charged in the ecclesiastical courts with some moral offence; better still, their support might persuade the churchwardens not to report the alleged offence, unless the evidence was overwhelming. We can find cases where even serious allegations, such as witchcraft or keeping a bawdy house, were neutralized in court by friends swearing to the good character of the accused.150 When John Freeman, a London barber, 147

GL, MS 9065A/9, Andrews and Bury v King, 1701, deposition of H. Stokes. GL, MS 9065A/8, fo. 127v; MS 9065A/9, Parker and Taylor v Burroughes and Reynolds, 149 GL, MS 9065A/8, fos. 173, 253. 1700, deposition of E. Bishop. 150 LRO, 1D 41/13/16, fo. 46; 1D 41/13/21, fo. 53v. 148

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accused his wife Mary in 1578 of giving him the pox, she produced over twenty witnesses, ‘neighbours and women whom she kept in childbed’, to swear to her good behaviour and character. Their support turned the tables decisively: John, not Mary, was bound over by the court to be of honest behaviour.151 Contacts between women might also provide informal channels for negotiation and conciliation between warring families. When William Oliver’s daughter was accused of robbing William Turville and sent to Leicester gaol in 1631, for example, Oliver’s wife sent 25s. to Turville’s wife ‘that she might labour to make a peace’ between the two parties.152 A network of friends constituted a supportive framework which might play a significant role in women’s lives, in both family and neighbourhood. As this list suggests, solidarity within a gossip network could be accompanied by a far more aggressive stance towards outsiders. In some cases this might translate into collective harassment, used to pursue a personal feud or exert pressure on troublesome neighbours of either sex.153 Occasionally we find cooperation too between women living far apart. Several bigamists, for example, were prosecuted as a result of concerted action by women who had hitherto been complete strangers. Barbara Davison, a North Shields widow, married Capt. Dennis Seymour of the Strumbelow at Newcastle in 1707, only to hear rumours next day that he was already married. She promptly set out to trace his first wife, whom he had married at Harwich, and went on to launch a successful prosecution in London in which several women (including the first wife) from North Shields, Harwich, and various London suburbs gave evidence against him.154 Female networks were generally local, but could extend much further if need arose. Female networks also played a key role in policing the boundaries of acceptable behaviour, for gossip might generate a collective pressure forcing offenders to move out or conform. It is clear that local public opinion often developed initially among the women of a neighbourhood, especially in relation to other women. One Newcastle woman accused of slandering her neighbour in 1568 was alleged to have claimed that ‘the wives of the close’ all shared her view. A Leicestershire man who jeered in 1703 that an Anstey maidservant was pregnant similarly twisted the knife by adding that ‘most of the women of Anstey would say the same’.155 Such 151

BCB 3, 16 July 1578. LRO, BR II/18/18/101. 153 See Chs. 3, 5, 6, below. 154 GL, MS 9731/101/15; cf. CSPD 1655, 52. 155 J. Raine (ed.), Depositions and other Ecclesiastical Proceedings from the Courts of Durham (Surtees Soc., 21, 1845), 89; LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 48/55. 152

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remarks casually assumed the existence of a female public opinion. Servants and mobile workers such as charwomen and laundrywomen helped to carry gossip from the street and alehouse into the homes of respectable householders. And the sociability of most women’s working lives provided endless opportunities to circulate news and rumours and assess their significance.156 A damaging story retailed by a respected housewife and supported by strong circumstantial evidence might easily generate a collective disapproval too powerful for the subject to ignore. And in some circumstances, female public opinion might also be sufficient to push the parish authorities into taking action.157 Of course not every rumour was believed, as we will see. Neighbours were perfectly capable of weighing the evidence, and weighed a speaker’s word in the light of her (or his) previous character. Gossip judged to be idle or malicious bred deep resentment, and we frequently find men and women alike rebuking irresponsible gossip mongers for their loose talk. In other cases, perhaps inevitably, allegations were believed by some but not others. An angry London woman complained in 1594 that a labourer’s wife would ‘go abroad to work from house to house as many honest women use to do but she hath behaved herself very ill with her tongue and manners’, and had set her neighbours needlessly at odds.158 A Jacobean writer railed against the dairywomen of Anglesey who collected ‘milk from house to house, and know the humours of all men, especially the good wife of every house, and can tell and devise news from all people, and rip up the neighbours’ most secret faults’. They ‘sow so many strifes and dissensions between neighbours’, he complained, ‘that scarce shall you find three neighbours but two of them are at enmity among themselves’.159 While gossip served to reinforce moral boundaries, it could also prove divisive and disruptive. Male ambivalence towards women’s networks is thus not hard to explain. Men recognized good neighbourliness as a virtue, and accepted such networks as a necessary consequence. But they did so grudgingly, and many, probably most, regarded them as a potential threat. What were the women doing, and saying? Could they be trusted to behave responsibly without male supervision? We have no contemporary accounts by women to tell us what they talked about when alone with their friends, and the scenes imagined by male commentators were 156 One Loughborough baker recalled his female customers tarrying in the bakehouse to discuss the paternity of an illegitimate baby: LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 63/46. 157 See Ch. 7, below. 158 GL, MS 9065A/2, fo. 44. 159 Halliwell (ed.), Minute Account, 19.

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predictably alarmist or dismissive. Richard West offered a typical medley of female conversation in 1607, snatches of talk he condemned as trivial, meddling, defamatory, or inflammatory: Why truly Gossip, such a one doth this And William’s wife went forth with John the cooper: Simon called Susan whore: why truly Sisse: Francis and Marie’s gone abroad to supper. Were it my case, as it is mother Jones’ I’d tear the flesh from off the villain’s bones.160

The essayist John Stephens, far more restrained in his sketch of a ‘plain country bride’, remarked that ‘When the wedding dinner is ended, she hath a liberty from that day forward to talk of weaning calves and fatting poultry among the housewives to her life’s end.’161 Thomas Deloney’s picture of a ‘churching feast’ shows women discussing their husbands, maidservants, clothes, and neighbours, and others wrote in a similar vein.162 Such accounts, though usually patronizing in tone, are not implausible: we would expect women to discuss their families and neighbours, and the practical issues of managing their households.163 Much of the surviving evidence about women’s talk is drawn from defamation cases, which mostly focus on sexual allegations. Sexual ‘honesty’ was fundamental to female reputation, the essential prerequisite, but neighbours also assessed each other by many other criteria. To win respect a woman had to prove herself a good wife, mother, manager, and neighbour. Thomas Tusser’s hundred points of ‘good huswifery’ focused on the woman’s commitment to her duties, her abilities in the kitchen, her care of husband, children, and servants, and her role as a good hostess and neighbour.164 All these qualities were observed, discussed, and judged, and the diligent housewife may often have been striving to satisfy her neighbours and herself, as much as her husband. Daniel Rogers warned his readers that some might need to restrain a wife ‘addicted’ to her domestic duties, and setting excessively 160

West, Court of Conscience, sig. F; cf. W.P., Gossips Greeting, sig. B3r–4v. J. Stephens, New Essayes and Characters (1631), 358; cf. A Hundred Mery Talys (1526), in H. Osterley (ed.), Shakespeare’s Jest Books (1866), 52–3. 162 The Works of Thomas Deloney, ed. F. O. Mann (Oxford, 1912), 260; The Good-wives Vindication (1678), 6–7; E. Ward, The London Spy, ed. K. Fenwick (1955), 310. 163 There were exceptions. Elizabeth Bury was bored by most female conversation ‘and would often say, how happy would it be, if we might talk of things, rather than persons’: S. Bury, An Account of the Life and Death of Mrs. Elizabeth Bury (Bristol, 1720), 21–2. 164 T. Tusser, ‘The Points of Huswiferie’, in Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry, ed. G. Grigson (Oxford 1984); G. Markham, The English House-wife (1637), 4; G. Walker, ‘Expanding the Boundaries of Female Honour in Early Modern England’, TRHS, 6th ser., 6 (1996). 161

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high standards. Such women, he thought, had to be saved from themselves.165 Richard Baxter was puzzled and exasperated by his wife’s insistence on keeping their house always immaculate, and thought ‘so much ado about cleanliness’ a waste of time. But he acknowledged that ‘others much praised that which I was no judge of’, and that Margaret’s good housekeeping contributed to her public esteem. Margaret Baxter’s housewifery was clearly shaped by her genteel upbringing and her wish to impress neighbours with more demanding standards than her husband.166 How standards were set, and by whom, remains unclear. Middling-sort women probably set an example which poorer neighbours, who might have lived in such households as servants, sometimes sought to emulate. Character writers placed more stress on personality. ‘Not one woman in the parish shall commonly be accounted honest without her licence’, said John Stephens in his character of a domineering ‘gossip’, ‘which must be purchased by consenting to her motions [opinions]’. She appointed herself arbiter of domestic management as well as morals, boasting of her own skills and passing judgement on neighbours: ‘To talk of cookery, or cleanliness, and to tax others, is her best and only commendation.’ An older woman, he added, especially one who had buried a couple of husbands, ‘takes authority and experience . . . for granted’, and freely bestowed her expertise on every aspect of her neighbours’ lives.167 Female culture was judgmental as well as supportive. Men’s primary concern, of course, lay in what their wives might say or hear about themselves. They suspected that women gathered to criticize their husbands and betray family secrets, flouting the basic principle of confidentiality. William Gouge complained that ‘when tattling gossips meet, their usual prate is about their husbands, complaining of some vice or other in them: My husband, saith one, is covetous: I cannot get of him any thing almost: he maketh me go as nobody goeth. And my husband, replyeth another, is so furious as none can tell how to speak to him.’168 Rowlands’s A Crew of Kind Gossips shows six women in a London tavern grumbling about their husbands as miserly, drunkards, gamblers, unfaithful, and so on, and swapping notes on how to deceive, outwit, or master them. His pamphlet illustrates perfectly the gendered perception of gossip in early modern England: Rowlands expresses disgust at the women’s disloyalty in criticizing their husbands in public, but then depicts the six ‘honest husbands’ discussing 165

Rogers, Of Matrimoniall Honour, 247. R. Baxter, A Breviate of the Life of Margaret . . . Charlton (1681), 80. 167 Stephens, New Essayes, 368–70; cf. Rowlands, Tis Merrie when Gossips meete. 168 Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties, 251–2. Gouge goes on to denounce men for the same offence. 166

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and damning their wives’ behaviour, with no hint of disapproval.169 Women’s talk was stigmatized as gossip not because it differed in character from men’s, but because it was perceived as the subversive behaviour of subordinates. Satirists frequently showed women discussing tactics, with older women teaching young wives the arts of manipulation. The Scole House of Women, a mid-Tudor tract, shows young women receiving advice that flatly contradicted the guidance of preachers and conduct-books. When one complains about her husband as mean and jealous: Then saith the elder, do as I do, Be sharp and quick, with him again If that he chide, chide you also And for one word, give him twain Keep him short, and have disdain.

The Proud Wyves Pater Noster painted a similar scene. A woman is coached how to wheedle money out of her parsimonious husband, and if necessary to help herself to a third of his profits—‘so do we most part throughout the town’. The story ends with her stealing his cash and absconding.170 Ballads too showed women discussing their husbands’ faults, vowing to fight back and master them, and urging their friends to do the same.171 Male fears were compounded by the suspicion that women’s talk might include the exchange of embarrassing details about their husbands’ sexual performance. The Fifteen Plagues of a Maiden-Head (1707) shows a bored, lonely spinster complaining that she must toil at her wheel, Whilst those that married are, invited be To labours, christenings, where the jollitry Of women lies in telling, as some say, When ’twas they did at hoity-toity play, Whose husband’s yard is longest, whilst another Can’t in the least her great misfortune smother, So tells, her husband’s bauble is so short, That when he hunts, he never shows her sport.172 169

In Rowlands, Works, ii. 2 and passim. E. Gosynhill, The Scole House of Women (1541; 1560 edn.), sig. B; The Proud Wyves Pater Noster (1560;), sig. A4 and passim. Cf. W.P., Gossips Greeting, sig. C3; P. Hannay, A Happy Husband (1619), C5; Halliwell (ed.), Westward for Smelts, 37–47; J. Taylor, A Juniper Lecture (1639), 67–86. 171 ‘The Seven Merry Wives of London’, Pepys Ballads, v. 413; L. Price, ‘The Merry-conceited Lasse’, Roxburghe, ii. 111–13; (M. Parker), ‘A merry Dialogue betwixt a married man and his wife’, Roxburghe, ii. 159–63. 172 The Fifteen Plagues of a Maiden-Head (1707), 8; cf. A. Copley, Wits Fittes and Fancies (1595), 91–3. 170

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The preoccupation with penis size may indicate male anxieties rather than women’s actual talk, but other evidence suggests that many women as well as men enjoyed bawdy talk among themselves, and sometimes even in mixed company.173 Literary accounts of female conversation must be read with extreme caution, of course, and the picture of veterans in the war of the sexes cynically schooling the next generation in the arts of deceit and manipulation is obviously distorted. But we will see plentiful evidence to confirm that women discussed marital problems with their friends, and that some gossips chose to fan the flames rather than working for reconciliation. Some men worried too that their wives might be using ‘good neighbourliness’ as a cover for secret assignations. Satirists loved to rehearse the fictions women allegedly used to mislead their husbands, such as claiming to be going to a neighbour in labour; one of Rowlands’s aggrieved husbands complains that his wife arranged for a gossip to call with ‘news’ of a sick cousin, giving her an excuse to leave the house to meet her gallants.174 Such devices were plausible enough. Dorothy Welch of Earl Shilton, Leics., was presented in 1630 ‘for going in the night from her husband making her excuse to go to a sick woman, and she went to keep company at the alehouse’. Even Margaret Clitheroe, the Catholic martyr, felt no compunction in telling her husband she was going to a neighbour’s labour or a wedding feast when she was meeting a Catholic priest.175 Some gossip networks were also viewed as posing a wider threat to social order. The structures of friendship and informal exchange, invaluable in running a household, constituted a social and economic nexus outside male knowledge or control that might serve equally well as networks for petty crime. Garthine Walker has shown how female criminality possessed its own distinctive pattern, with women usually stealing goods they could dispose of without arousing suspicion, such as clothing and household items. Much of this booty they fenced through their gossips, or alewives and pawnshop-keepers, some of whom actively encouraged servants and neighbours to pilfer and steal.176 Many chose to keep their husbands in ignorance. When Reading magistrates uncovered an extensive network of female receivers in 1628, one admitted she 173

M. Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories (1981), 184. Rowlands, Crew of Kind Gossips, 27–8. 175 LRO, 1D 41/13/60, fo. 25; ‘Mr John Mush’s Life of Margaret Clitherow’, in J. Morris (ed.), The Troubles of our Catholic Forefathers, iii (1897), 396–7. 176 LRO, BR II/18/14/29; BR II/18/15/303; BR II/18/18/62; Walker, ‘Women, Theft, and the World of Stolen Goods’. 174

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concealed her booty under the bed ‘because her husband is not acquainted with the business’. A Leicester glover’s wife who bought three stolen sheepskins similarly hid them from her husband.177 Sarah Walker, who robbed her landlord in 1686, fled without even telling her husband what she had done, leaving him to be arrested on suspicion. At their subsequent trial at the Old Bailey, he insisted that he had been wholly ignorant of her design, while his wife, described as a ‘notorious thief’, admitted her guilt and apologized rather engagingly ‘for being high spirited and not so suitable a wife as she ought to have been’.178 Female criminality was for most offenders part of their economy of makeshifts, in which any passing opportunity was seized with little thought for its legality. Many of those buying, selling, or bartering second-hand clothes, a trade largely in the hands of women, probably knew little and cared less about their provenance.179 Women bought or bartered a wide variety of small items from neighbours, market women, pedlars, or vagrants, often with an eye to their resale value. In 1625 Widow Dorey of Reading admitted receiving stolen goods and pawning them to a waterman’s wife, adding that she had accepted other items from another woman as payment for victuals and had promptly sold them to a goldsmith’s wife.180 Such dealings were not restricted to urban folk. A Leicestershire villager confessed in 1592 that she and a friend had pulled wool from sheep grazing in the fields and taken it to a female receiver in Leicester, who promised 4d. a pound for as much as they could supply. Similarly in 1613 Jane Stapleford, a Leicester joiner’s wife, took some material she claimed to have found in the street outside a mercer’s shop, and carried it ten miles to Tilton, where she exchanged it for material less likely to arouse suspicion.181 Very often there seems to have been a tacit agreement not to ask about an item’s provenance, so that if questioned a woman could plead she had bought it in good faith. Some who did ask made only a token effort to establish the legality of the impending deal. When a stranger offered an apron to Elizabeth Grace, a widow, in 1690, saying that ‘she was very necessitous and wanted money to pay for her lodging’, Grace asked ‘whether she came honestly by it and she said yes she did or else she would not sell it’. For Grace that was assurance 177

Guilding (ed.), Reading Records, ii. 437–40; LRO, BR IV/3/30. OBSP 14–15 Jan. 1686, 3; The True Account of the Behaviour and Confessions [of felons executed on 20 Jan. 1686], 4. Walker was condemned to death but reprieved and transported; her husband was acquitted. 179 B. Lemire, ‘The Theft of Clothes and Popular Consumerism in Early Modern England’, Journal of Social History, 24 (1990). 180 Guilding (ed.), Reading Records, ii. 218. 181 LRO, BR II/18/3/79; BR IV/3/72. 178

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enough, though the apron was later proved to have been stolen.182 The profits from such transactions, however trifling, could make a critical short-term difference for individuals on the breadline. The stolen apron had bought a night’s lodging. A Leicester woman described in 1597 how she had bought some knitted hose for 16d. and then swapped it for a stolen handkerchief; needing some ready cash, she pawned the handkerchief to an innkeeper’s wife, later redeeming it and selling it for 20d. These manoeuvres had met her immediate need for money, and yielded a modest profit equivalent to at least half a day’s labour.183 Such deals were commonplace among the poor, part of the nexus of loans, barter, buying and selling, pawning, and petty crime which enabled them to survive. For a woman they were doubly important, providing a secret income that might be critical if her husband was unable to maintain her and commandeered her own legitimate earnings. One Leicester woman who admitted keeping stolen goods in a gossip’s house in 1603 explained frankly that she had done so to prevent her husband from finding and selling them for his own profit.184 In such cases we need to think not of a ‘family economy’ but of a parallel and hidden stream of getting and spending. By the end of the period we can also find, if only in London, a pattern of more professional female crime. Much of it was based on shoplifting. Some women used small children to filch for them, while others operated in pairs or small groups, one stealing while her companions distracted the shopkeeper. Three women sentenced to death at the Old Bailey in 1681 were described as ‘notorious shop-lifts’; and though only one had been caught stealing, ‘the jury believing them to be all of a gang, brought them [all] in Guilty’.185 Some robbers and burglars also operated in gangs, sometimes as ruthless as their male equivalents. Two women disguised as men burgled the house of an old man living alone at Feltham, Middlesex, in 1683, threatened to kill him, and robbed him of all he possessed.186 Another burglar savagely assaulted a woman she found in the house, and 182 G. A. Chinnery (ed.), Records of the Borough of Leicester, vii. Judicial and Allied Records 1689–1835 (Leicester, 1974), 24. 183 LRO, BR II/18/4/143; cf. Guilding (ed.), Reading Records, ii. 142–5; LRO, BR II/18/ 11/22, 36; BR II/18/12/5; BR II/18/14/25; BR II/18/18/154, 178. 184 LRO, BR II/18/6/96. 185 OBSP 6–9 July 1681, 2; cf. OBSP 16–17 Jan. 1683, 2, OBSP 9–10 Oct. 1689, 1, 4–5; for the use of children: Jeaffreson (ed.), Middlesex, iii. 319; OBSP 16 July 1679, 2. On alarm over women and shoplifting, see J. M. Beattie, Crime and the Courts in England 1660–1800 (Oxford, 1986), 178–80, 273–43; L. Davison et al. (eds.), Stilling the Grumbling Hive: The Response to Social and Economic Problems in England, 1689–1750 (Stroud, 1992), 63–9. 186 OBSP 12–14 Dec. 1683, 4; cf. OBSP 26–7 Aug. 1685, 2–3; OBSP 8–11 Dec. 1697, 3, 4; J. S. Cockburn (ed.), Calendar: Sussex: James I (1975), 4.

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inflicted fatal injuries.187 Other gangs attacked men or women they found alone in the street. Late one evening in 1688 a group of ‘notorious nightwalkers’ mugged an old man in Holborn they chanced upon ‘as he was making water against the wall’, and robbed him of over £21.188 The authorities were dismayed by what appeared to be an eruption of female crime, and Parliament responded in 1699 with an Act making shoplifting a capital offence without benefit of clergy. But juries and shopkeepers alike proved reluctant to see offenders hang, and the new law was little enforced. Instead juries made increasing use of ‘pious perjury’, finding thieves guilty of petty larceny whatever the real value of the stolen goods, and so ensuring the humiliating punishment of a public whipping.189 Respectable citizens were equally concerned about the links between prostitution and theft. Prostitutes frequently attempted to increase their earnings by picking their clients’ pockets. Christian Heartley, for example, a girl of 17 who had moved from Cumberland to live with her aunt in London, was prosecuted in 1687 for taking a client to an alehouse in Rosemary Lane and picking his pocket of 12s. 6d. The only unusual feature, a reporter observed, was that her victim had not been embarrassed to press charges.190 More significant here is that other prostitutes operated in groups, employing very different tactics. In 1698 John Pageter told how one night in Salisbury Court ‘he met with a gang of women, some of whom came before him, some behind him, desiring him to go along with them’. These initial exchanges appear to have been flirtatious, but the women then began to jostle him, picked his pocket, and refused to return their booty.191 Another prostitute took her client to a brandy house where she and four other women, part of a larger gang, assaulted and robbed him. Such incidents were sufficiently familiar for Congreve to introduce one into his London comedy The Old Batchelor.192 In the crowded streets of the capital, even respectable citizens could never wholly avoid the sordid world of the disorderly poor. Rich jostled with poor in the most wealthy and fashionable areas, and every citizen 187

Jeaffreson (ed.), Middlesex, ii. 184. OBSP 31 May–1 June 1688, 2; cf. OBSP 9–11 Dec. 1691, 2. On nightwalking see P. Griffiths, ‘Meanings of Nightwalking in Early Modern England’, Seventeenth Century, 13 (1998). 189 Beattie, Crime and the Courts, 424–6, 485–7; Davison, Stilling the Grumbling Hive, ch.3. 190 The True Account of the Behaviour and Confession of the Prisoners in Newgate . . . 4th of July 1687, 4. There are many cases in the Bridewell records, e.g. BCB 7, fo. 29v. 191 OBSP 20–5 July 1698, 2; cf. F. Dabhoiwala, ‘The Pattern of Sexual Immorality in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century London’, in P. Griffiths and M. S. R. Jenner (eds.), Londinopolis: Essays in the Cultural and Social History of Early Modern London (Manchester, 2000), 99–100. 192 N.B., A Compleat Collection of Remarkable Tryals (1718–21), iii. 376–8; W. Congreve, The Old Batchelor, in The Complete Plays of William Congreve, ed. H. Davis (1967), 46. 188

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was to some degree at risk. Servants pilfered from employers, tradesmen suffered at the hands of shoplifters, and pedestrians were liable to be accosted in the street by aggressive beggars of either sex. Five women whipped in 1621 were described as ‘incorrigible rogues that will take no warning but hang upon coaches’. Another was punished for ‘throwing dirt and railing’ at passers-by who refused to relieve her, while Elizabeth Perrin was whipped in 1628 for assaulting a gentlewoman who had refused her alms, and threatening to kill her.193 Moreover in London, if perhaps nowhere else, we also find a subculture in which bawds, prostitutes, and opportunists used sexual blackmail to extort money from respectable men who feared to lose their good names. One eminent target, Sir Edward Mosely, baronet, was acquitted of rape at the King’s Bench in 1648 after the court heard that his accuser had demanded £2,000 to drop her charge, and had extracted £300 from a doctor of divinity in similar circumstances.194 Campaigns for reform and repression by puritan zealots, and later the Societies for the Reformation of Manners, reflected the fact that the disorderly poor impinged directly on their own lives. Female crime, the ‘dark side’ of the world of gossips, aroused deep concern at the end of the seventeenth century, especially in the capital. But we should not imagine, of course, that most citizens lived in fear of sexual blackmail or mugging by female gangs. Male fears centred on the more insidious alleged effects of gossip networks: the undermining of control within the household, and the broadcasting of intimate family secrets to the world at large. If female networks were never the crude schoolhouses of subversion depicted by pamphleteers, they played a major and wide-ranging role in shaping women’s lives, and helped them negotiate rather than simply submit to a patriarchal world. In the chapters that follow we explore that role in the context of family, neighbours, and local communities. 193 BCB 6, 28 Apr. 1621; BCB7, fo. 41; BCB 7, fo. 60; cf. BCB 6, 26 Jan. 1622, 20 July 1622, 17 Aug. 1622; BCB 7, fo. 210v. For rich and poor living alongside, even in wealthy parishes, see J. Boulton, ‘The Poor among the Rich: Paupers and the Parish in the West End, 1600–1724’, in Griffiths and Jenner (eds.), Londinopolis. 194 The Arraignment and Acquittall of Sir Edward Mosely, Baronet (1648), 8 and passim; B. Capp, ‘The Double Standard Revisited: Plebeian Women and Male Sexual Reputation in Early Modern England’, Past and Present, 162 (1999); S. E. Whyman, Sociability and Power in Late-Stuart England: The Cultural World of the Verneys 1660–1720 (Oxford, 1999), 64.

3 Families and Gossips: The Experience of Marriage

R studies of early modern marriage have tended to focus, like Victorian novels, on the process of courtship and marriage formation. This chapter explores women’s experiences within marriage, and in particular the plight of those trapped in unhappy relationships. How did they respond to that predicament? How might they try to relieve or escape it? And how far were kin or friends, especially their ‘gossip networks’, able to provide effective help? The most detailed surviving evidence on marital relationships relates to dysfunctional marriages which had ended in court. We should resist any temptation to see these as normal, of course; affectionate, companionable marriages were both possible and commonplace. For ordinary people, personal attraction played a major part in the selection of a partner, and many couples appear to have found a reasonable degree of emotional content. Close cooperation was often essential for economic survival, and pragmatism held patriarchal demands in check.1 Contented families leave few records for posterity, and offer little scope for the dramatist or balladeer. So it is worth recalling that moralists often felt obliged to criticize what they saw as an improper intimacy, reflected in the widespread use of affectionate nicknames. William Whately was shocked to hear wives addressing their partners as Tom or Dick, instead of ‘Husband’, and though William Gouge did not mind men calling their wives ‘love’ and ‘dove’, he disapproved of familiar forms such as Sal, Bess, or Nan.2 Other sources confirm the prevalence of nicknames and affectionate forms of address. We find Edward Alleyn, the theatre manager, writing to his wife as ‘sweet mouse’, and the minister Philip Henry greeting his ‘dear heart’.3 Samuel Rowlands describes a shop1 For surveys see K. Wrightson, English Society 1580–1680 (1982), ch. 4; R. Houlbrooke, The English Family, 1450–1700 (1984); Mendelson and Crawford, Women, ch. 3; and A. Wall, Power and Protest in England 1525–1640 (2000), ch. 5. 2 W. Whately, A Bride-Bush. Or a Direction for Married Persons (1623), 200; W. Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties (1622), 372. 3 M. C. Pilkinton (ed.), Records of Early English Drama: Bristol (1997), 143–4; Diaries and Letters

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keeper’s tender solicitude whenever his wife feels even slightly unwell, ‘Asking what ails my sweetheart, tell me honey, | My love, my dove, my lamb, my pretty coney’.4 Ballads too show loving as well as warring couples. And if the Macbeths are not the happiest literary example of companionate marriage, we find even Macbeth addressing his wife as ‘love’ and ‘dearest chuck’.5 Successful marriages are not hard to find. Clerical biographies, though idealizing their subjects, offer many glimpses of happy and successful relationships. Thomas Cawton, middle-aged and in exile, could write in passionate vein to assure his wife, ‘Thou art mine, and I am thine; the great sea shall not quench our love.’ Anthony Walker, recalling his late wife Elizabeth, insisted they had ‘never disagreed, or once closed our eyes to sleep in thirty-nine years seven months in discontent, or under dissatisfaction on either part’. Diaries and letters provide similar evidence. Philip Henry, lamenting a neighbour’s failed relationship, thanked God for the twelve happy years he and his wife had so far enjoyed. Dorothy Shaw could even worry that she and her husband ‘do too much love one another, and take from God that which is his due’.6 Many layfolk found similar happiness. Martha Moulsworth, thrice widowed, looked back in 1632 on three successful marriages, to men ‘all lovely, loving all’.7 At Myddle, Richard Gough remembered many couples who had lived ‘very lovingly together’, remarking that in one case there had seemed ‘a sympathy in nature between them’. Many others he described as living ‘quietly’ together, a term widely used to denote a harmonious relationship.8 And if Ralph Josselin and his wife had their ups and downs, like most couples in every age, he could still confide in his diary, after forty years together, ‘sensible of the comfort of my wife, my love, seeing everything more pleasant because I have her’.9 What evidence we have of successful marriages, mainly among the of Philip Henry, ed. M. H. Lee (1882), 71–2; cf. GL, MS 9065A/3, fo. 19; Now or Never (1656), 6; W. Congreve, The Way of the World, . i, in The Complete Plays, ed. H. Davis (1967), 450. 4 Rowlands, Tis Merrie When Gossips Meete, (1602), in The Complete Works, ed. S. J. H. Herrtage (Glasgow, 1880), i. 25. 5 Shakespeare, Macbeth, . ii. 30, 45. 6 The Life and Death of Mr Thomas Cawton (1662), 47; A. Walker, The Holy Life of Mrs Elizabeth Walker (1690), 29, 53–5; Henry, Diaries and Letters, 249; J. Shaw, Mistris Shawe’s Tomb-stone (1658), 30. 7 ‘The Memorandum of Martha Moulsworth Widdowe’, in ‘My Name was Martha’: A Renaissance Woman’s Autobiographical Poem, ed. R. C. Evans and B. Wiedemann (West Cornwall, Conn., 1993), 6. 8 R. Gough, The History of Myddle, ed. D. Hey (Harmondsworth, 1981), 226, cf. 114. 9 The Diary of Ralph Josselin, 1616–1683, ed. A. Macfarlane (1976), 626.

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‘middling sorts’, suggests that couples accepted an appropriate division of responsibilities, discussed major decisions, and operated on the basis of mutual trust, in line with the conduct-books’ advice. Some couples were also business partners. Many tradesmen’s wives helped in the family shop, and some brought more particular skills. Samuel Pepys was impressed to hear Mrs Bland ‘talk like a merchant’ about her husband’s business, in which she was an active partner, and judged her ‘as good a merchant as her husband’.10 A generation later we find John Finch of Woodbridge, master of a small coastal vessel, relying on his wife for the clerical skills he lacked himself. A man of humble origins, Finch could neither read nor write, so his wife Anne kept the books and accounts and accompanied him on his voyages.11 Many families reached major decisions together, with the wife possessing at least a right of veto. Richard Baxter was happy for his wife Margaret to choose their house near London, and often sought her advice on pastoral problems. Philip Henry moved house in 1667 partly to please his wife, while John Shaw, offered a post in Devon, accepted only provisionally, until he could discuss it with his wife.12 In matters affecting children too, from infancy to adolescence, couples frequently acted together. Josselin and his wife decided jointly on the right time to wean their infant daughter in 1655, and both monitored her progress closely. Henry Newcome and his wife went together in 1668 to bind their son Daniel apprentice in London, and later decided jointly to find him a different master.13 Family finances among the middling sorts often reveal a similar spirit of cooperation. Philip Henry gave his wife £5 for household expenses in 1682, ‘for as long as it will last’, and could reflect, when she set off one day to settle some family debts and buy provisions, ‘my heart safely trusteth in her’.14 In well-to-do families, wives might receive a lump sum to cover housekeeping and personal needs for a period of weeks or months.15 John Sadler, a rich widowed merchant, gave his daughter the very substantial sum of £100 to run the household, leaving its management entirely to her.16 Similar patterns occur further down the social order. In the 1680s 10

Pepys, Diary, iii. 300; v. 266. GL, MS 9731/101/17. 12 R. Baxter, A Breviate of the Life of Margaret . . . Charlton (1681), 52, 67–8; Henry, Diaries and Letters, 202; ‘The Life of Master John Shaw’, ed. C. Jackson, in Yorkshire Diaries and Autobiographies in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Surtees Soc., 65, 1875), 126–7, 435. 13 Josselin, Diary, 354–5; The Autobiography of Henry Newcome, ed. R. Parkinson (Chetham Soc., 26–7, 1852), i. 171–8. 14 Henry, Diaries and Letters, 131, 318. 15 The Rev. Oliver Heywood BA 1630–1702: His Autobiography, Diaries, Anecdote and Event Books, ed. J. H. Turner (Brighouse and Bingley, 1881–5), ii. 184; N. Guy, Pieties Pillar (1626), 46–7. 16 Walker, Life of Elizabeth Walker, 15; Life of Cawton, 61. 11

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Henry Mitchell, a porter in the London dockyards, gave his wife 12s. a week for housekeeping, clothes, and other necessities, and ‘did not concern himself with the management of his domestic affairs but left it wholly to Lucy his wife’.17

  There was no single pattern, of course, in successful relationships. As ever, the dynamics varied widely according to individual temperament and circumstance. Some women were content to accept the subordinate role prescribed by society, and their marriages prospered more or less in accord with convention. Isaac Archer, a Suffolk minister, noted joyfully in his diary in 1668, soon after his marriage: ‘I found my wife perfectly devoted to please me; and I bless God for giving me one with a meek and quiet spirit.’ Thomas Jolly found an equally loving and deferential partner; ‘if she at any time offended me,’ he recalled complacently after her death, ‘she could not be quiet until she had acknowledged her offence and was reconciled’.18 Girls were brought up to accept their subordinate place, and this inevitably coloured women’s expectations and behaviour. William Secker, preaching a wedding sermon in 1658, urged bachelors to ‘choose such a one as will be subject to your dominion. Take heed’, he added ungraciously, ‘of yoking yourselves with untamed heifers’.19 But successful marriage depended on give and take, and it is clear that few women, not even Archer’s and Jolly’s wives, equated subordination with submissiveness. William Gouge, author of one of the most influential conduct-books, appears to have practised the moderation he urged in his writings. His funeral sermon depicted a man ‘truly meek in spirit. So amiable was the meekness of his carriage toward his wife, that for twenty two years (for so long they lived together) there was never heard any one word proceeding from him toward her, sounding like an angry one’. For her part, his wife Elizabeth sounds no cipher. Her own funeral sermon emphasized her piety and love, but said nothing of meekness; ‘well she knew’, the preacher recalled, ‘how to keep both children and servants in dutiful awe’.20 Clerical marriages, like any other, reflected 17

Bodleian MS Rawlinson B382, fo. 296. M. Storey (ed.), Two East Anglian Diaries 1641–1729: Isaac Archer and William Coe (Suffolk Record Soc., 36, 1994), 117; The Note Book of the Rev. Thomas Jolly AD 1671–1693, ed. H. Fishwick (Chetham Soc.,  33, 1894), 23. Henry Martindale’s wife was also remembered as ‘mild, peaceable and loving’: The Life of Adam Martindale, ed. R. Parkinson (Chetham Soc., 4, 1845), 17. 19 W. Secker, A Wedding Ring Fit for the Finger (1658), 53. 20 W. Jenkyn, A Shock of Corn Coming in its Season (1654), 37 (misprint for 39); Guy, Pieties Pillar, 45. 18

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individual circumstances and many deviated far from the prescribed models. Some ministers handed over almost all domestic responsibilities to their wives, freeing themselves for more congenial academic or pastoral activities. ‘As for temporals,’ it was said of Thomas Cawton and his wife, ‘he gave her the disposing of all, himself seldom meddling with any such affairs.’21 Though such an abdication was condemned in the conduct-books, biographers commented on these arrangements with approval, and a hint of envy. Some clergy were also happy to blur the conduct-books’ distinction between male providers and female managers, especially in hard times. As a struggling young minister in Taunton, Joseph Allein was greatly assisted by ‘his wife, [who] for divers years kept a boarding school, which did considerably enlarge his estate’. During the interregnum the Laudian Peter Heylyn found refuge among his books, leaving his wife to manage both ‘housewifery within doors, and the husbandry without; thereby freeing him from that care and trouble’. The dissenter Adam Martindale, ejected from his living in 1662, was grateful for the £10 his wife had ‘wrangled’ from his successor, and pleased at her readiness to keep ‘a little stock of kine’ to boost their income.22 We can find similar diversity among prosperous lay families, including the gentry, where wives sometimes played an active role in business affairs. When Isabel Milward of Eyton, Derbyshire, bought forty sheep in 1609 and then sold some to a butcher, her husband Robert knew nothing of these transactions. ‘You want my wife,’ he explained lamely when the butcher called to discuss the deal, ‘for I know not.’23 Marital relationships inevitably reflected an accommodation between social norms and a range of factors specific to each couple. Of these, by far the most important was the strength of individual personalities. Contemporaries were well aware of the political dimension of family life, with its shifting mixture of authority and compromise, and conductbooks stressed the importance of negotiation and consent. Men often had their way, predictably, though sometimes only after a lengthy process of compromise. Susanna Bell’s husband, a puritan minister, wanted the 21 Life of Cawton, 63. See also e.g. S. Clark, The Lives of Sundry Eminent Persons (1683), 132; id., The Marrow of Ecclesiastical History (1675), 449, 458; Gough, History of Myddle, 42; Heywood, Autobiography, i. 64; E. Bagshaw, Mr Boltons Last and Learned Work (1632), sig. b6v; Baxter, Breviate, 80; C. Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana (1702), iii. 157; W.G., The Life and Death of Mr Samuel Crook (1651), 15. 22 Clark, Lives of Sundry Eminent Persons, 141; J. Barnard, Theologo-Historicus, or the True Life of . . . Peter Heylyn (1683), 215; Martindale, Life, 172, 190. Josselin similarly regarded their sheep as part of his wife’s ‘stock’: Josselin, Diary, 455. 23 D. H. G. Salt (ed.), Staffordshire Quarter Sessions Rolls Easter 1608–Trinity 1609 (Staffordshire Record Soc., 62, 1950), 110–11.

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family to emigrate to New England in the 1630s, but gave way when she demurred on the grounds of having a very young child and expecting another. When the child died, Susanna in turn dropped her objections.24 In a surprising number of cases, however, we find a forceful wife prevailing. William Stout recalled that his brother Josias, a Lancashire farmer, ‘was a quiet and easy man, his wife being of a resolute disposition, and he was very condescending for peace sake’.25 Some men gave way even over major issues. Henry Newcome was eager to go into Derbyshire in 1659 to drum up support for Booth’s rebellion, but admitted that his wife was ‘so exceedingly unsatisfied in the thing . . . and was so hugely disturbed with it that I was forced to waive it’. He suspected that he was ‘of a weaker, poorer spirit’ than his spouse.26 James Yonge, a young Plymouth surgeon, found himself effectively disinherited when his mother persuaded his father in 1679 to leave most of his estate to a younger sibling, her favourite.27 In a far more sensational case, Elizabeth Pigeon allegedly plied her elderly, besotted husband with aphrodisiacs and endearments, while refusing sex, until he made a will leaving his entire estate to her instead of his children.28 A few women employed still more extreme tactics. Ralph Josselin was understandably astonished when a Londoner with some property in his Essex parish confided that his wife had tied him to the bed ‘to force him to sell his lands’.29 These were extraordinary episodes, of course, which is why contemporaries recorded them, but they illustrate the enormous diversity of domestic relations. Gough’s vivid account of Rowland Muckleston of Myddle, ‘a man of bold and daring spirit’, shows his three wives each responding very differently to their overbearing husband. The first, ‘a quiet, low-spirited woman’, accepted his total domination, but the second was of ‘a masculine spirit, and would not suffer him to intermeddle with her concerns within doors’. Her defiance triggered fierce quarrels, and Gough noted wryly, ‘I think she never boasted of the victory, for she had lost an eye in the battle.’ 24

S. Bell, The Legacy of a Dying Mother (1673), 45–7; cf. Mather, Magnalia, iii. 44; Jolly, Note Book,

4. 25 The Autobiography of William Stout of Lancaster 1665–1752, ed. J. D. Marshall (Manchester, 1967), 159. Cf. an Essex woman who ‘rules the roost’: J. A. Sharpe, Crime in Seventeenth-Century England: A County Study (Cambridge, 1983), 120. 26 Newcome, Autobiography, 111; for a parallel case see ‘The Diary of the Rev. John Thomlinson’, in J. C. Hodgson (ed.), Six North Country Diaries (Surtees Soc., 118, 1910), 117. Thomas Tanner and White Kennett were both allegedly ruled by their wives: Remarks and Collections of Thomas Hearne, ed. C. E. Doble et al. (Oxford Historical Soc., 1885–1921), ii. 9. 27 The Journal of James Yonge 1647–1721, ed. F. N. L. Poynter (1963), 160–1. 28 A Brief Relation of the Strange and Unnatural Practices of Wessel Goodwin (1654), 5–6, 9–10, and passim; see also The Trepan (1656). I hope to write on this case elsewhere. 29 Josselin, Diary, 416.

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Muckleston’s third wife, a widow, proved equally spirited, and this time the marriage ended in stalemate; the couple eventually separated, each going to live with grown-up children.30 Literary evidence presents a similar picture of diversity. Ballads show forceful husbands and wives alike domineering over weak-spirited partners, while other couples discuss their differences and look for compromise. Satirists often presented domestic politics as a perpetual struggle, with women using tears, endearments, deceit, and sometimes stronger weapons to have their way. When one woman complains that her husband will not allow her good clothes, her friend retorts, ‘If I were as thou art, I would have better things, or else the house would be too hot for him’. Some writers also hinted at sexual favours bestowed and withheld. ‘Let him not eat, | Nor lie with you, unless he pay the hire | Of a new gown, or petticoat,’ a young bride-to-be is counselled in a Caroline comedy.31 Diarists rarely mentioned such embarrassingly intimate episodes, but we should not dismiss them on that account. Most husbands wanted to maintain both the show and substance of superiority, while sometimes compromising for the sake of domestic harmony. Many recognized that domestic tyranny carried its own price; Isaac Archer had no difficulty in dominating his wife, but eventually realized that his overbearing manner had soured their marriage.32 The minister Henry Newcome, who quarrelled frequently with his wife Elizabeth, also found that his little victories could be pyrrhic. Setting off alone on a trip in August 1651, he noted ruefully that ‘I was sent out with a grievous clog on me, my wife laying it on me that she did not go with me.’ The following year he confided to his diary: I am exceedingly perplexed about my wife. God knows what I should do. These four years have I lived with her, and do not know how to humour her. When she is angry, I do aggravate her passion by saying anything . . . When she is patient, peace is so sweet to me that I dare not speak lest I should lose it.

He eventually persuaded himself that it was better to demonstrate his superiority by indulging the frailties of womankind, ‘a lamentable, weak creature’. Adam Eyre’s diary, charting the progress of another stormy marriage, ends with an extraordinary ‘peace treaty’, establishing a code of 30

Gough, History of Myddle, 200–1. R. Snawsell, A Looking-Glasse for Married Folks (1631), 34; S. Marmion, Hollands Leaguer (1632), sig. K2v; Rowlands, Tis Merrie, 25; id., A Whole Crew of Kind Gossips (1609), in Complete Works, ii. 23–5; G. Thoroughgood, Pray be not Angry: or, the Women’s New Law (1656), sig. A3. 32 Storey (ed.), Two East Anglian Diaries, 182; cf. 164. 31

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conduct for their future relations.33 Diaries often show compromises accepted, sometimes grudgingly, for the sake of peace. Most ordinary people kept no diaries, and the inner life of their marriages remains hidden. But contemporaries recognized that the balance of power within every family owed as much to the play of individual personalities as to social conventions. Gouge complained that some husbands were tyrannical, while others ‘put off all government to the wife’, washing their hands altogether of domestic responsibilities. Some gave way for the sake of domestic peace, even against their own best interests. Gouge claimed that men wanting to move house often met with fierce resistance from wives determined to remain close to family and friends, and were sometimes ‘forced to their great damage for peace sake to yield unto their wives, and so either to relinquish their calling, or to have two houses’.34 We can find cases to substantiate such claims. Robert Burnam, a London chandler whose business took him to Coventry for several years in the late 1630s, rented a house for his wife when she refused to go with him, and set her up with chandlery stock worth £140 ‘for her to trade with’. A London widow wooed by John Street in 1566 was willing to consider marriage but flatly rejected his house; Street grumbled that ‘if she loved him, she would love his house well enough’, but the match fell through. Elizabeth Strafford, a Yorkshire widow, did remarry but then refused to move to her husband’s home.35 Other women, by contrast, were determined to move house, and had their way. A Dorchester diarist noted lugubriously in 1635, ‘Bernard Toope overruled by his wife went hence to live at Chaldon against his will’, while one Cheshire man claimed to have moved eight times in a vain attempt to satisfy his wife’s whims.36 Women sometimes prevailed too in disputes over money. A Bristol minister jibed in 1684 that Morrice Williams, a Quaker facing prosecution over unpaid tithes, was too 33 Newcome, Autobiography, i. 32; ii. 296; The Diary of the Rev. Henry Newcome, ed. T. Heywood (Chetham Soc., 18, 1849), 56; Adam Eyre, ‘A Dyurnall, or Catalogue of all my Accions’, passim, in Yorkshire Diaries; see further Wrightson, English Society, 96–8. 34 Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties, 260, 317. 35 R. Burnam, A Remonstrance, a Necessitated Vindication (1645), sig. Bv–2r; GL, MS 9056, fo. 26r–v; MS 9065A/4, fos. 103v–104r; J. Lister (ed.), West Riding Sessions Records 1611–1642 (Yorkshire Archaeological Society, 53, 1915), 220. Another woman refused to accompany her husband to Norfolk, where he was seeking work, because she had no acquaintance there: E. J. Carlson, Marriage and the English Reformation (Oxford, 1994), 147. See also W. Hill, A New Yeares Gift for Women (1660), 41–52. 36 William Whiteway of Dorchester: His Diary 1618 to 1635 (Dorset Rec. Soc., 12, 1991), 144; G. Walker, ‘Crime, Gender and Social Order in Early Modern Cheshire’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Liverpool, 1994), 96. See also G. Parker, An Ephemeris of the Coelestiall Motions for . . . 1699, sig. B3.

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frightened to pay, ‘in regard of his wife’s unmanageable temper’.37 Some wives also had their own way over the disposal of children. One curious example comes from a report of mysterious lights in an empty house after the former occupants, a London brewer’s servant and his wife, both died in 1703. Neighbours feared it was haunted, and recalled that the wife, Elinor Norway, had sent her 11-year-old son away to sea against the express wishes of her husband, ‘who told her it was little better than kidnapping her own child’. Ghosts were associated with crimes left unpunished, and the rumours suggest that neighbours shared the husband’s strong but ineffective disapproval.38 Personality was only one of several key variables in domestic politics. Age mattered too. An older husband usually found his authority easier to maintain, but age could prove disadvantageous where the difference was too great. Balladeers and satirists focused on the sexual problems, with feeble, jealous husbands unable to satisfy their young wives. But advancing years might undermine the husband’s authority in other areas too. In one ballad, a young wife married at 17 to a cruel and miserly man of 63 eventually rebels and beats him with her ladle, ‘Crying, I am resolved to try | Who shall be master, you or I?’39 Stories like this reflect widespread fears about ‘unsuitable’ marriages. When Lawrence Ranew, a Cambridgeshire villager, married a much younger woman in 1604, one of his worried kinsfolk urged her to behave respectably: ‘Now you have married my uncle, and he is an old man, I would wish you to live uprightly.’40 Such anxieties were sometimes well founded. Thomas Downton of Myddle, ‘a sickly, aged man when he married’, found himself quite unable to curb his wife’s heavy drinking, which ran up huge debts at the alehouse and eventually forced him to sell all his lands.41 John Marshall of Warrington faced still greater problems, for his young wife ran her own alehouse, ‘contrary to his liking’, as he lamented, ‘and saith she will do it in spite of his nose’. One Sunday in February 1633 she stayed roistering with two men while he went to church, and when he asked them to leave at night they assaulted him. Asked why he had not summoned help earlier in the day, he explained sheepishly that ‘he durst not for his wife; he being an old man, and his wife a young manly huswife . . . If he but find fault with her for suffering such loose and disorderly 37

T. Godwyn, Phanaticall-Tenderness (1684), 12. A True and Strange Relation of the Apparition or Ghost of Elinor Norway (1703), 8 and passim. 39 See e.g. The Woman’s Victory: or the Conceited Cuckold Cudgel’d [1684–95]; ‘The Dyer Deceiv’d’, Pepys Ballads, iv. 126. 40 CUL, EDR, K6/105, deposition of Lucy Ranew. 41 Gough, History of Myddle, 198–9; cf. 222. 38

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company to remain drinking, she will presently revile and miscall him as base language as can be imagined or spoken; and that lately she struck him in the face, that the blow is yet extant to be seen.’42 Youthful vigour and a strong personality might also outweigh a substantial difference in social background. A wealthy man marrying his servant would normally dominate the relationship, but when one Twisse of Myddle, a rich old widower, married his young maid Bess, ‘a wanton gadding dame’, he proved quite unable to control her. Bess soon had a child by another man, and was later in trouble for threatening to kill her lover’s wife. Twisse was too frail to stand up when he was questioned in court over the matter.43 A third and more complex factor shaping domestic politics was the wife’s level of economic independence. A woman financially dependent was likely to be dependent in other respects too. Contemporaries were well aware of the link between economic and social power, and many ballads on the tribulations of married life show a strong-willed wife seizing control of the family finances and revelling in her new power and independence. Predictably, many associated financial control with the subversion of authority and sexual libertinism. One feeble husband, married to a scold, laments that ‘all the money that I get in a day | for to keep at quiet, I give her at night’. Another, kept penniless by his wife, grumbles at a world turned upside down, as he stays up till midnight washing his wife’s smock and the baby’s ‘shitten clouts’, while she spends his money on fine clothes, beats him, and dallies with her lover in the tavern.44 One Restoration narrative of married life devoted a whole chapter to the problems that ensued when the wife demanded control of the money chest. Men who agreed, the husband countered, ‘are deprived of all their superiority, and like men unmanned, have only the name but cannot obtain the effect’.45 Conduct-books generally recommended that wives should be trusted to manage day-to-day spending, while the husband controlled savings and assets. Among the middling sorts, as we have seen, such arrangements appear to have been common. Martha Moulsworth recalled that during her marriage to a customs officer, 42 G. T. O. Bridgeman (ed.), The History of the Church and Manor of Wigan (Chetham Soc., , 15–18, 1888–90), ii. 351; cf. Walker,‘Crime, Gender’, 96. 43 Gough, History of Myddle, 190–1. 44 ‘The Scoulding Wife’, Pepys Ballads, iv. 136; ‘The Cuckolds Complaint’, ibid. iv. 132; cf. ibid. 143, 146, 148, 153. But cf. the old wife on a bygone age before ‘men were purse-bearers’, when she could spend as she wished: Everie Woman in her Humour (1607), sig. B4v–C. 45 A. Marsh, The Confession of the New Married Couple (1683), 65.

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I led an easy darling’s life. I had my will in house, in purse, in store What would a woman old or young have more?46

Poorer couples too might dispose of their limited resources on the basis of agreed principles. One ballad shows a ‘careful wife’ and ‘comfortable husband’ discussing amicably who will take responsibility for which expenses.47 But in families living hand to mouth, where distinctions between housekeeping money and savings were meaningless, tensions inevitably surfaced when a woman needed all her husband’s earnings for basic necessities, leaving him nothing for a drink in the alehouse. Such tensions often resulted in bitter quarrels, and occasionally ended in tragedy. One involved a Yorkshire labourer who gave his wife the 6d. he had earned shearing one day in 1673 but then asked for it back to buy drink for his friends; when she refused, saying she needed it to buy food, he exploded with anger, pursued her across the fields, and assaulted her so savagely that she died from her injuries.48 Many men held on to some of their earnings, which avoided such confrontations but might leave their wives literally unable to feed their families. In that situation the wife’s ability to earn a separate income became crucial in the political economy of the household. Equally important was the wife’s ability to control the money she earned. If she worked at home and sold yarn or knitwear to a regular dealer, her husband would have a fairly accurate picture of her income. By contrast, street vendors, market women, and women running an alehouse or victualling house enjoyed far greater opportunities to conceal earnings and spend them at their own discretion.49 Men predictably feared that such independence might undermine their authority. Such fears were reflected in a ballad which tells of a young wife who opens an alehouse to supplement her husband’s small income, and soon revels in her new freedom, neglecting him and flirting openly with her customers.50 In some cases a separate income enabled a disgruntled wife to throw off her husband’s control altogether. Susan Wilson of Arundel, who appears to have run a victualling house, treated her husband with open contempt, refused to let him eat at the table, and made him pay for meals she 46

‘Memorandum of Martha Moulsworth’, 7. ‘A new Ballad, containing a communication between the careful wife’, Roxburghe, i. 124. 48 Heywood, Autobiography, iii. 204–5. For a detailed account of this case, based on the coroner’s inquest (PRO Assi45/10/3/88–94) see C. Chapman, ‘The Representation of Murder, c.1590–1695’ (D.Phil. thesis, University of Oxford, 2000), 198–201. 49 In a dispute over a brewhouse in Smithfield it was deposed that the husband ‘never concerns himself with the drinking trade and never draws any drink’: GL, MS 9731/101/6/21. 50 H. Crouch, ‘The Industrious Smith’, Roxburghe, i. 469–74. 47

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provided free for her lover, declaring ‘she would never lie with the broken-arsed knave her husband more as long as he lived’, and would ‘rather see a toad than him’.51 With no dependence on a husband she clearly loathed, Wilson felt able to repudiate his authority. In London some women used casual prostitution to achieve similar emancipation. When Katherine Poley and her husband were charged in 1577 with keeping a bawdy house, a lodger testified that Poley had no say in his wife’s activities, and that Katherine had shut him out while she entertained a gentleman from Gray’s Inn. Poley ‘did twenty times weep at the lewdness of his wife’, the lodger added, and had once tried to hang himself. The court cleared him of any responsibility for a house he clearly governed only in name.52 Other women simply moved out. When two London nightwalkers were arrested in 1642, the clerk noted baldly that ‘both have husbands but they live not with them’.53 A final variable in the politics of the household was the presence of conflicting loyalties or commitments, which posed another potential threat to male authority. Most were over personal concerns, especially the position of stepchildren. Men often worried that a widow might be remarrying to provide for her children, not for affection. One embittered husband claimed to have discovered the truth of the proverb ‘He that marries a widow with one child, marries two thieves.’54 With second marriages common for both sexes, people also worried how the new spouse would treat any stepchildren. A widow knew the new husband would possess ultimate authority over her children, while widowers were conscious that their own offspring would be largely under the new wife’s immediate control. The minister Robert Harris, making his will, urged his wife that if she decided to remarry, ‘take heed that you do no ill office in enticing your husband from his natural children or kindred’. Thomas Jolly, paying tribute to his late wife in 1675, recalled with deep gratitude that ‘she was cordially loving and very faithful to my children which I had by my former wife’.55 Inevitably, matters were not always so harmonious. Neighbours remarked that Anne Riddington, a Leicestershire villager, strongly disliked her young stepson, and that her cruelty had triggered bitter matrimonial wrangles. London neighbours testified in 1637 that young Susan Fisher was beaten so often and savagely by her stepmother that she had begged them to find her a place in domestic service. Such 51

WSRO, Ep1/11/9, fos. 186v–93r; see also the case of John Marshall, n. 42, above. BCB 3, fos. 262v, 265; cf. ibid., fos. 174, 176v, where a similar claim was disbelieved. 53 BCB 8, 7 Jan. 1642. 54 Parker, Ephemeris for 1699, sig. B4. 55 W. Durham, The Life and Death of . . . Robert Harris, DD (1660), 109; Jolly, Note Book, 23; cf. Clark, Lives of Sundry Eminent Persons, 171. 52

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tensions were among the many pressures that might push teenage girls into service, despite the hardships they would face.56 That was not an option for younger children, of course. William Gouge advised that a man should arrange to have his children raised elsewhere if his new wife’s hostility was threatening their welfare, and if that sounds alarmist, we should note a steady trickle of cases involving women accused of savage and even fatal beatings of young stepchildren.57 The descent of property might also become an issue. Henry Newcome, noting in 1663 that a neighbour had left most of his estate to his second wife, commented disapprovingly that ‘for peace sake he was forced to slight in some measure his own children’.58 A few couples separated because of irreconcilable differences over their stepchildren, or even between them.59 We find other couples clashing over matters of principle, usually religious. A Leicestershire villager admitted in 1591 that his wife often failed to attend the services in the parish church because she preferred to walk to Catthorpe to hear Mr Lee preach, and such puritan ‘gadding’ posed a problem for husbands as well as the authorities.60 The issues were not always ideological. When several women were prosecuted in 1627 at Great Eastern, Leics., for attending weekday gatherings in the parish church, where the schoolmaster and his pupils took turns to repeat the Sunday sermon, the authorities regarded their behaviour as conventicling. But the parishioners were more concerned by their neglect of domestic responsibilities, reporting plaintively that the ‘husbands coming home to supper and bed wanted [lacked] their wives to get and prepare their victuals and to bear them company at bed and board as they ought to do’, forcing them ‘to go supperless to bed alone’.61 In other cases we find men refusing to let their wives attend ordinary Sunday services, claiming their own authority was sovereign in such matters. Churchwardens presenting one villager ‘for keeping his wife from the church’ explained that ‘she would come but he would not let her’.62 Edmund 56 LRO 1D 41/4, Box 30/81; GL, MS 9065A/7, Wilson v Luckins et al., 1637 esp. depositions by Mary More and Mary Hudson. Cf. Mather, Magnalia, iii. 85. 57 Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties, 410; see e.g. Cockburn (ed.), Calendar: Essex: Elizabeth (1978), 61–2, 337; id. (ed.), Calendar: Kent: 1649–1659 (1989), 5; id. (ed.), Calendar: Sussex: Elizabeth (1975), 130. Most cases ended in acquittal, largely, one suspects, because juries were reluctant to see other children left orphans. 58 Newcome, Diary, 197; cf. Durham, Life of Robert Harris (1660), 109. 59 H. Johnstone (ed.), Churchwardens’ Presentments (17th Century) (Sussex Record Soc, 50, 1950), 120. 60 LRO, 1D 41/13/16, fo. 50v; cf. Newcome, Autobiography, i. 87. 61 LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 4/14–15. 62 LRO, 1D 41/13/46, fo. 11. The man later submitted, which may indicate that his objections were not based on issues of principle.

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Harding, an Essex villager, was still more insistent on his ‘rights’. In 1688, when his wife feared she was dying and asked to receive the sacrament, he drove the minister from the house, telling his wife and daughter that he was ‘master of their consciences’.63 The religious issue was naturally most acute when couples disagreed over faith itself, and particularly intense during the civil-war era, when women drawn to separatist movements often ignored their husbands’ protests. A few deserted them for godlier replacements, while others left to become travelling evangelists. Occasionally we find a husband and wife, both radicals, belonging to congregations which refused to recognize one another.64 Even when they worshipped together, an independent-minded wife might still assert her own spiritual autonomy. Mary Allein, who belonged to an Independent church in Exeter, refused to be guided by the minister, elders, or her husband, and went off to Taunton to consult some friends of her own choosing, without telling her husband. Dorothy Hazzard, a puritan minister’s wife in Bristol, followed her conscience to the extent of breaking away to establish a separatist congregation which would satisfy her own, stricter requirements.65 The divisions between puritans and separatists were replicated at the opposite end of the religious spectrum. When recusant Catholic women had conforming husbands, a quite common situation, we seldom know how far the men approved of their wives’ defiant stance, but some women certainly held out against sustained pressure. Richard Todd, ordered by the Northern High Commission in 1635 to instruct his wife and ‘dissuade her from popish religion’, did his best for over a year, reporting back on his efforts at regular intervals. But he was eventually forced to admit defeat, confessing that ‘he could not satisfy or prevail with her’.66 Andrew Ralphs’s wife proved still more tenacious, solving the problem by converting her husband to Rome.67 More significant is the story of the Elizabethan Catholic martyr Margaret Clitheroe of York. Reluctant to defy her husband openly, she tried to balance the demands of faith and marriage by elaborate deceptions, attending religious meetings under cover of going to fairs or visiting women in labour.68 Disagreements over 63

Bodleian MS Rawlinson B382, fos. 121–7. D. Brown, Two Conferences (1650), passim. 65 T. Allein, Truths Manifest Revived (1659), 15–17 and passim; E. B. Underhill (ed.), The Records of the Church of Christ meeting at Broadmead, Bristol, 1640–1687 (1847), 22–3—some predicted that Hazzard would desert her husband’s bed as well as church (ibid.). 66 W. H. D. Longstaffe (ed.), The Acts of the High Commission Court within the Diocese of Durham (Surtees Soc., 34, 1858), 140. The court dismissed him ‘in regard of his diligence’. 67 Gough, History of Myddle, 241. 68 For Clitheroe, see Ch. 2, above. 64

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faith or religious practice might thus occur at any point across the religious spectrum, and their resolution reflected the domestic politics of each household. At one extreme we have ‘a violent recusant’ in Acton, Middlesex, condemned to death in 1616 for killing her two children rather than submit to her husband’s command to conform and raise them as Protestants. At the other we find couples who refused to let religious differences disrupt their relationship. John Johnson of Lancaster, a firmly Anglican tradesman who died in 1694, had lived happily with first a Catholic and then a zealously Presbyterian wife.69 Though neither case was in any way typical, they indicate the variety of possible responses to an intractable problem. Marriage, then, was a highly flexible social institution, with husbands and wives generally left to find their own accommodation reflecting personality, age, and other variables. Strong-minded women enjoyed far greater autonomy than moralists approved. Historians have explored the cruel theatre of ‘rough music’ and the cucking-stool, but as Martin Ingram has pointed out, these were sanctions rarely employed.70 While neighbours watched and commented, they intervened only in extreme circumstances. And at the far end of the spectrum, court records offer a gallery of strong-willed or disorderly women whom neither husbands, neighbours, nor parish officers had been able to tame. Thomas Harmar of Brightling, Sussex, complained in 1575 that his wife was conducting an open affair with the minister, Thomas Cheyney. ‘My wife hath forsaken me,’ he lamented; ‘she loveth the parson better than she loveth me’, and had jeered that he ‘should be glad to take the parson’s leavings’. Harmar turned in despair to his neighbours and the constable, and finally to the local justice, but nothing was likely to turn such a woman into a faithful or obedient wife.71 Some men admitted they were unable to control their wives, despite the shame of such a confession, while others pleaded that scolding wives had made their home unbearable.72 And if ‘haunting’ alehouses was generally a male phenomenon, we can also find some men unable to control their wives’ hard drinking. Ballad stories of drunkards ready to sell their own clothes and steal from their husbands to fund their habit can be matched in court records. A Wapping man accused of living apart from his wife in 1640 explained that she was ‘given to drink and 69 The Letters of John Chamberlain, ed. N. E. McClure (Philadelphia, 1939), ii. 2; Stout, Autobiography, 110. 70 M. Ingram, ‘“Scolding women cucked or washed”: A Crisis in Gender Relations in Early Modern England?’, in J. Kermode and G. Walker (eds.), Women, Crime and the Courts (1994). 71 WSRO, Ep1/11/1, fos. 4v–5v. The justice recommended that the minister be prosecuted and the wife set in the stocks. 72 LRO, 1D 41/13/82, fo. 74v; Gough, History of Myddle, 195.

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strong waters and often overcome therewith so that he dare not keep her at home, but she is kept abroad at his charge’.73 Gough tells the story of a man who tried to drag his wife home from the alehouse one night, only to see her break free, dash back inside and bolt the door, and stay there till morning.74 Not surprisingly, such marriages often foundered. Alice Welton, a Londoner, confessed in 1629 that her husband ‘hath forsaken her because of her keeping ill company’.75 The Bridewell governors dealt with a steady stream of women who had turned to drink, petty crime, or prostitution, and were totally beyond their husbands’ control. By no means every ‘shrew’ was tamed. The challenge still facing historians is to establish the parameters within which couples were free to work out their own arrangements without attracting interference. Rough music and court records show us neighbours or parish officers taking action over behaviour they deemed unacceptable. They do not tell us when neighbours chose to condone or overlook such behaviour. And even prying neighbours might not always penetrate the dynamics of another couple’s marriage. When Thomas Smith, an Oxfordshire villager, was presented in 1630 for beating his wife, he explained sheepishly that in fact ‘his wife did beat him and break his pate and after, having his blood upon her hands . . . dissembled that it was her own blood’. If his story was true, he had presumably feared that to tell his neighbours would have exposed him to ridicule as a henpecked husband. Unlikely though it sounds, Smith was able to convince the court.76

  :    A culture that provided space for couples to work out their own marital accommodation enabled tough and capable women to establish a stronger position within the household than is often supposed. By the same token, however, it often enabled bad husbands to abuse their position without incurring the intervention of outsiders. Society as a whole was heavily weighted towards the protection of male interests, and it comes as no surprise to find far more evidence of abusive husbands than abusive wives. The rest of this chapter explores these dysfunctional marriages, and how women responded to their situation. Male abuses fell broadly into three overlapping categories—violence, adultery, and failing 73 74 75 76

‘Man’s Felicity and Misery’, Pepys Ballads, iv. 91; GL, MS 9064/21, fo. 157v. Gough, History of Myddle, 109. BCB 7, fo. 119. OAO, Diocesan papers, c2, fo. 65.

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to provide, often through squandering family resources on drink. Some wives faced all three problems and, as William Gouge observed, they enjoyed even less legal protection than servants.77 Contemporaries preferred marital problems to be resolved within the privacy of the household. Conduct-books accepted that an abused wife might seek help from her kinsfolk or the magistrates, but they advised such a course only in extremis, and one writer suggested it would be more tactful to turn to her husband’s parents rather than her own.78 Most felt that intervention would undermine the husband’s legitimate authority, and that his resentment would only exacerbate the problem. Injured wives reacted in very different ways, as we might expect, according to temperament and circumstance. Some suffered more or less passively. Others turned hopefully to fortune-tellers, asking if their husbands might soon die, and charlatans naturally exploited their vulnerability. In the early 1670s we find Peter Banks hawking a magical remedy at Newcastle guaranteed to make even the cruellest husband kind and loving; one woman gave him 10s. and two new shirts to buy a year’s domestic happiness.79 Many women undoubtedly endured miserable lives, trapped in unkind relationships. Michael MacDonald has shown that many of those consulting the astrological physician Richard Napier were distressed and sometimes suicidal wives, suffering nervous disorders triggered by violence, infidelity, or want.80 Some oppressed wives may have enjoyed a late Stuart ballad which told how an avenging angel appeared to a violent, drunken, profane Westmorland man, denounced his wickedness, and then looked on while Satan broke his neck. But even the credulous would have found only limited comfort in this tale, for the angel did not descend until after the man had beaten his wife to death in a drunken rage.81 Intervention by magistrates and neighbours might also come too late. Somerset justices ruled in 1623 that Anne Hannam’s nervous collapse had been triggered by her husband’s cruelty, while Thomas Jolly noted sadly in 1671 that his sister-in-law had committed suicide in similar circumstances.82 Neighbours sometimes suspected that a man’s sustained brutality had led to his wife’s death, but had no evidence 77

Gough, Of Domesticall Duties, 390. R. Snawsell, A Looking-Glasse for Married Folks (1631), 61; Whately, Bride-Bush, 213–14. 79 K. V. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971), 315–16; J. Raine (ed.), Depositions from the Castle of York (Surtees Soc., 40, 1861), 204–5. 80 M. MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1981), ch. 5, esp. pp. 99–103. 81 ‘Strange and true News from Westmorland’, Pepys Ballads, ii. 155. 82 E. H. Bates Harbin (ed.), Quarter Sessions Records for the County of Somerset (Somerset Record Soc., 23–4, 28, 34, 1907–19), ii. 212–13; Jolly, Note Book, 3. 78

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that would stand up in court.83 For women who survived such marriages, bereavement came as an undisguised relief. When John Burton of Earl’s Colne died in 1682 his widow refused to pay for his funeral or attend it. Dorothy Purslowe, who often asked fortune-tellers when her husband would die, declared that when the great day arrived she would summon company ‘and be merry and drink burnt claret and play cards for joy’.84 What strategies were available to women who were not content to suffer passively, or seek consolation in religion? Conduct-books recommended gentle persuasion and discreet manipulation as the most acceptable and effective means to reform bad husbands. Susanna Jesserson promised that ‘a flint that defies the anvil may easily be broken upon a feather-bed’, and other writers offered similar assurances. All agreed that wifely tactics must be non-threatening and private. Jesserson observed that a sensible wife would be ‘much ashamed to show herself wiser than her husband in company’, for any move would backfire if it failed to save male face.85 By definition, gentle persuasion behind closed doors rarely finds its way into the historical record, but contemporaries recognized its importance.86 Many of the ballads dealing with troubled marriages show a patient wife pleading, cajoling, and exhorting her wayward spouse. I tell you, John Jarret, you’l breake (1630) depicts a remarkably patient and loving wife pleading with a husband whose womanizing, drinking, and gambling have brought the family to the brink of destitution.87 Generally the husband eventually sees his folly and resolves to make a fresh start. Such ballads, some clearly aimed at female readers, offered the conservative and comforting message that almost any problem might be resolved without breaking domestic proprieties. In The Good Wives Humble Petition; or the Extravegant Spend-thrift’s thorough Reformation, the title itself disavows any challenge to gender hierarchy.88 The good wife pleaded, she did not scold. Another balladeer, purveying the same message, urged women ‘One penny on this ditty to bestow, | And carry it to your husbands for to show’.89 Some wives may well have handed over their pennies, hoping 83 One Hertfordshire man was charged in 1619 with the murder of his wife, seven years after her death: Cockburn (ed.), Calendar: Hertfordshire: James I (1975), 219; cf. Bridgeman (ed.), History of Wigan, ii. 354. 84 Josselin, Diary, 640; P. Earle, A City Full of People (1994), 237. 85 S. Jesserson, A Bargain for Bachelors (1675), 5; Snawsell, Looking-Glasse, 35, 70. 86 Imitation and Caution for Christian Women (1659), 4, commended Mary Bewley for ‘sometimes seasonably and discreetly’ admonishing her husband, but never defying him or complaining to 87 outsiders. Pepys Ballads, i. 170. 88 Ibid. iv. 75; cf. 77 and 260. 89 ‘A dainty new Dialogue between Henry and Elizabeth’, ibid. 76.

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their husbands would respond more positively to the ‘sophisticated’ language and arguments of a printed text than to their own simple pleas. In practice, of course, pleading and persuasion were by no means guaranteed to succeed, and some husbands viewed any sign of disagreement as outright rebellion. When a Dorchester blacksmith’s wife begged him to stop drinking, he beat her for questioning his authority.90 The dramatist Thomas Jevon depicted a similar scene in his hugely popular comedy The Devil of a Wife (1686). A cobbler’s wife pleads with her overbearing husband not to leave her behind while he goes out for an evening’s carousing: ‘you’ll go to the alehouse,’ she urges, ‘spend your money, and get drunk, and come home like Old Nick, and use one like a dog’. Jobson, the husband, interprets her plea as an insolent challenge to his authority: ‘How now Brazen-face, do you speak ill of the government? I am king in my own house, and this is treason against my Majesty.’91 Jobson, a comic monster, later gets his come-uppance, but this early scene is more convincing than anything that follows. Faced with an obdurate husband, many women soon crossed the undefined boundary that separated pleading from chiding and quarrelling. The scolding wife is a stock character in plays, satires, ballads, and sermons, and women railing at abusive or feckless husbands appear frequently in court records too. When husband and wife both possessed strong personalities, differences could quickly escalate into open conflict and violence. The Elizabethan homily ‘Of Matrimony’ lamented ‘how few matrimonies there be without chidings, brawlings, tauntings, repentings, bitter cursings, and fightings’.92 In many cases, as commentators warned, verbal abuse merely exacerbated the problem. A Stepney man who beat his wife in 1608 explained that he had been provoked by her ‘calling him rogue, drunkard, whoremonger and other filthy names’.93 Scolding was sometimes blamed for destroying the marriage altogether. A Leicestershire villager accused of deserting his wife explained that ‘he cannot live quietly at home with her by reason of her unquietness’. Ralph Josselin recalled a neighbour who had turned to drink and gambling, adding that ‘his wife being sharp to him, he got what he could together, and left her’.94 On other occasions, quarrels escalated into serious and even fatal violence. Charles Hughes told an Old Bailey jury in 1689 of a blazing row during which his wife Susannah ‘gave him very abusive 90 91 92 93 94

D. Underdown, Fire from Heaven: Life in an English Town in the Seventeenth Century (1992), 71. T. Jevon, The Devil of a Wife (1686), 1. Certain Sermons or Homilies (1851), 536. GL, MS 9064/16, fo. 144v. LRO, 1D 41/13/37, fo. 147; Josselin, Diary, 393–4.

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language, which he was not able to bear’. When he drew his pistol in a symbolic assertion of male power and authority, she mocked him as ‘highwayman’—whereupon he shot her dead.95 Similarly, neighbours reported that Sarah Elston of Southwark and her husband, a drunken and violent hatter, had ‘lived with much discord and frequent wrangling’, and their story too ended tragically. On 25 September 1677 she stabbed him with some scissors, explaining later that she had not intended to kill him, ‘only thought to do him some slight mischief in revenge of his cruelty in beating her’. The pamphleteer who told her story advised other women with drunken or violent husbands ‘to avoid their fury, by going out of the way for the present . . . rather than stay bandying of words, or teasing them with reproachful language; which she admitted had often been her own fault’.96 The advice was sound, but angry or desperate women did not always stop to calculate. Failing to Provide The first and probably most widespread dereliction of duty by married men was failing to provide for their families. Such ‘wretched, wicked husbands’, Matthew Griffith complained, were all too common.97 The problem was often associated with ‘haunting’ the alehouse, for contemporaries recognized that men worn down by poverty, toil, and overcrowding frequently sought escape in drink. Many ballads show embittered women complaining that drink had plunged the family into debt and destitution. One tells her husband bluntly, ‘You pissed all o’the wall, and came penniless home.’98 Court records depict similar scenes. When William Cotes, a Leicester butcher (and constable), reeled home late one night in 1613, his enraged wife scolded him in the street, ‘calling him drunken knave, saying he will make all away’. Another Leicester woman railed at her feckless husband as ‘dog-faced fool, scurvy knave and ass’.99 Moreover, alehouses might lead men further astray, through gambling or sex. Even in remote Anglesey a Jacobean observer could allege that ‘most of our alehouses have a punk [prostitute]’ to draw men and part them from their money.100 And when they staggered home, 95

OBSP 16 May 1689, 1. A Warning for bad Wives (1678), 2–3, 6; see also the sect. ‘Desperate Remedies’, below. 97 M. Griffith, Bethel: or, a Forme for Families (1633), 293. 98 ‘A Looking glass for all Good-fellows’, Pepys Ballads, iv. 79; cf. 83. The alewife was a figure of hate to drunkards’ families; see F. Lenton, Characterismi: or Lentons Leasures (1631), sig. D5; Roxburghe, iii. 379–82, 663–6. 99 LRO, BR IV/3/55; BR IV/3/98. 100 P. Clark, The English Alehouse: A Social History 1200–1830 (1983), 147–50, 155, 233–4; R. Head, Proteus Redivus: the Art of Wheedling and Insinuation (1684), 152–4, 256–64; A Scourge for Poor Robin 96

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drunk and quarrelsome, their wives faced the danger of violent abuse. Alehouses embodied all three of the wife’s major concerns: neglect, adultery, and domestic violence. Moralists advised women to wait until their husbands were sober and then employ persuasion and gentle reproaches. By then, of course, the money was gone, and it is hardly surprising that an angry wife would often pursue her spouse to the alehouse instead of waiting patiently at home. Alice Cover of Oxford, presented in 1584 for cursing and railing in an alehouse, explained that her husband ‘haunted’ the place, keeping bad company and neglecting his business. The charge was dropped.101 But such tactics exposed the husband to public humiliation, and could easily backfire. Commentators roundly condemned them; Daniel Rogers thought they shamed both parties, and would make the wife a ‘byword’.102 Thomas Hilder, a Kent minister, also condemned wives determined to ‘follow them with an enraged spirit to an ale-house, and there to rail, and foam, and tear, as if they would throw the house out of the window (as we say)’.103 Men hated to be shamed in front of their friends, and the wife’s arrival might easily trigger an angry confrontation. One pamphleteer claimed that ‘men are hardened when wives make known their misdoings in a clamorous manner to all the world’, while a balladeer warned wives bluntly: If you follow him, ‘base jade’ he’ll you call And in his fury knock your head against the wall.104

That might be no exaggeration. Eleanor Sackville, a brickmaker’s wife in Clerkenwell, paid dearly when she stormed into an alehouse to scold her husband for selling one of her pails for beer money. They quarrelled ferociously when they returned home and he gave her a black eye, whereupon she ‘grew more in passion, and gave him reviling language’, until finally he gave her a lethal wound with a fire-shovel.105 If the fatal (1678), passim; J. O. Halliwell (ed.), A Minute Account of the Social Condition of the People of Anglesea (1860), 36; Amussen, Ordered Society, 169. 101 E. R. Brinkworth (ed.), The Archdeacon’s Court: Liber Actorum, 1584 (Oxfordshire Record Soc., 23–4, 1942–6), i. 106–7. 102 D. Rogers, Matrimoniall Honour (1642), 215; Poor Robin’s True Character of a Scold (1675), 6. 103 T. Hilder, Conjugall Counsell (1653), 111; for one such see J. Melville, ‘The Use and Organization of Domestic Space in Late Seventeenth-Century London’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Cambridge, 1999), 246. 104 Rare and Good News for Wives in City and Country (1706), 8; ‘The Countrey Lasses Good Counsell’, Pepys Ballads, iv. 51. 105 The True Account of the Behaviour and Confession of the Criminals . . . Executed at Tyburn [on 16 Dec.] 1687, 3; OBSP 7–9 Dec. 1687, 3, gives the wife’s name as Elizabeth.

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denouement was rare, the violent anger of a husband shamed, drunk, and penniless was common enough. Other customers also resented the disruption when an angry wife arrived, for the alehouse was primarily a male social space. Some made their indignation plain. One Nottingham alehouse witnessed a ‘tumult’ in 1633 when male drinkers donned various frightening disguises ‘to scare certain women that came thither for their husbands’.106 And any woman who dared to scold the company at large was inviting retaliation. When Margaret Townsend, an Essex woman, rebuked some ‘lewd’ men for enticing her husband to squander his money in the alehouse, one hit back by fastening a defamatory notice to her door, as a result of which she was presented on a ‘fame’ of adultery.107 So what other remedies were available? The courts provided only limited help, and usually when a feckless husband had already brought the family to the brink of ruin. Dorchester magistrates ordered one man to be ‘advised’ by his wife and daughter, under threat of imprisonment. A Norfolk justice issued a warrant in 1665 to Margaret Martins against her husband Thomas, described contemptuously as ‘a man of no calling or residence but the bridewell’, after he had sold her goods and clothes and then abandoned her. The law could punish him, but by then could do little to assist his wife.108 So women married to a drunkard or wastrel had to rely mainly on their own resources, assuming the male’s traditional role as breadwinner to stave off destitution. When John Downton of Myddle entangled himself in ruinous debts, his wife, ‘a very discreet and provident woman . . . maintained them by selling ale’.109 Her story was commonplace. But so too was the story of Elizabeth Baynes, married to a Lancaster saddler and chandler. Ralph Baynes, drunken, violent, and profligate, treated her ‘not so well as a servant but rather as a slave’, and abandoned her when he ran into debt. Elizabeth borrowed £30 from a kinsman to set up her own business, making soap and candles, and was able in time to pay off most of his debts. But Ralph then reappeared and ran up crippling new debts before absconding once more, leaving her destitute a second time.110 Many women scraped by, with their children 106 W. H. Stevenson et al. (eds.), Records of the Borough of Nottingham (Nottingham, 1882–1956), v. 158; Poor Robin’s True Character, 6. 107 F. G. Emmison, Elizabethan Life: Morals and the Church Court (Chelmsford, 1973), 53. 108 Underdown, Fire from Heaven, 100; The Notebook of Robert Doughty 1662–1665, ed. J. M. Rosenheim (Norfolk Record Soc., 54, 1989), 53. 109 Gough, History of Myddle, 216. 110 Stout, Autobiography, 125–6; A Hellish Murder committed by a French Midwife (1688), passim; cf. BCB 6, fo. 75v, for the case of George Tully who abandoned his wife on several occasions ‘and sold all she had and misspent the same’.

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earning a few pennies to help, while others were forced to sell or pawn their clothes and other possessions to survive. Some pawned their husbands’ goods too, picked their pockets when they came home drunk, or stole from their chests.111 Others drifted into petty crime, pilfering in the markets or dealing in stolen goods. Female networks made such transactions relatively easy to conceal, which left the proceeds at their own disposal.112 These were strategies available to the poor as a whole, of course, and all the more tempting when a husband was failing to provide. Generating an income was only part of the challenge; holding on to it was equally crucial, for the law allowed a man to dispose of his wife’s earnings and any other moveable property. A wife would generally keep her money safe about her, or locked away, but she had no legal protection if the husband simply insisted on his rights, or broke open her chests. A prudent wife married to a wastrel kept her money well hidden, despite the view of some moralists that this was a breach of household order.113 While domestic financial arrangements remain largely unexplored, the evidence we have suggests that many women regarded their savings or earnings as their own. When Mary Ascue of Pepper Alley, Southwark, discovered that money had been taken from her closet in 1636 she turned to an astrologer for help, and after listening to his description of the likely culprit exclaimed that ‘it was her husband, and that now she was well satisfied, and therefore she would be more careful of him, and her money in the future’. Mary Gorse took a similar course when money disappeared from her pocket in 1637, and went home to confront her husband, who confessed and (significantly) returned it.114 Divorce proceedings also yield some suggestive glimpses of women protecting their financial position. Henry Mitchell, a porter in the London dockyards, claimed after his marriage collapsed that his wife had stolen from his chests, using a skeleton key, and had laid out £50 at interest without his knowledge, providing herself with a substantial safety net. Another man accused his wife of conveying her savings to a trusted servant for safe keeping.115 Criminal trials provide some further insights. In October 1684 Mrs Bent of Old 111 See e.g. A Sad and True Relation of a most Barbarous and Bloody Murder committed by one Thomas Watson, a Weaver (1686), 4. Watson, a crêpe-weaver, suspected that his wife Mary, sent out to deliver his wares, was diverting some for her own use, and murdered her when he found her pawning some to raise money for her own immediate needs. See also Fortune’s Bounty; or, an Everlasting Purse (1700), 19–20. 112 See Ch. 2, above. 113 See Ch. 2, above. 114 Bodleian, MS Ashmole 418, fos. 86, 107; for similar cases see fos. 24, 261. 115 Bodleian, MS Rawlinson B382, fos. 297, 299v–300r; T. Stretton, Women Waging Law in Elizabethan England (Cambridge, 1998), 131, 133.

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Palace Yard, Westminster, prosecuted her washerwoman at the Old Bailey for stealing £32 which she had kept hidden under her bed. The accused was facing the gallows until Mr Thomas Bent came forward sheepishly to confess that he was the real culprit: ‘he had found out his wife’s hoard’, he admitted, and had helped himself. His wife had never mentioned her secret hoard, and neither had he mentioned finding it. The charge was dropped.116 All these very disparate cases show women determined to safeguard their position by maintaining control over their own financial resources. Faced with a spendthrift or drunken husband, then, a sensible woman did not rely simply on her ability to shame him into reform. Family, friends, and neighbours would often provide short-term assistance, but for long-term survival she needed to develop a parallel domestic economy, securing a separate income and concealing its existence as best she could. Male Adultery The adulterous spouse posed a very different set of problems. Among the landed elite, where arranged marriages were the norm, wives were expected to turn a blind eye to marital infidelities. Ordinary women could rarely afford such indulgence. An adulterous husband threatened the family’s economic survival, and by channelling money to a mistress could easily reduce it to destitution. If Richard Wilson was cruder than most in promising his wife’s smock to another woman, everyone knew that when affections strayed, economic resources were likely to follow in their wake.117 Jane Whitefield of Cambridge, complaining that her husband had paid his mistress’s rent and given her money, lamented in 1634, ‘I am the worse for her by twenty marks’.118 Some husbands, moreover, compounded their betrayal with acts of deliberate cruelty and humiliation. One Sussex villager locked his wife out of the house while he had sex with their maid in the marital bed, and thereafter relegated his wife to a spare room. Jerome Tawley, a London cobbler, was charged in 1574 with ‘sending his wife to Bedlam saying she was mad being not mad, which he did to no other intent but to keep a harlot. And his wife saith he and his harlot tied her to the bedstake six weeks together and had almost famished her.’119 If cruelty on that scale was exceptional, adultery threatened both ruin and heartache. 116 117 118 119

OBSP 8–9 Oct. 1684, 2. LRO, BR II/18/329. CUL, EDR D2/19, fos. 77v–78r. WSRO, Ep1/11/15, fo. 95v; BCB 2, fo. 47; BCB 5, 10 Dec. 1608; BCB 6, fo. 124.

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Any wife determined to avoid such a fate would fight hard to save her marriage and break the new liaison, and could choose from a wide range of tactics. The higher she raised the stakes, however, the greater the risk of triggering developments she could neither anticipate nor control. No tactic, moreover, could guarantee success. When Robert Coleman’s wife turned to the authorities for help in 1618, accusing him of squandering their resources on his mistress, he flatly refused to give her up, declaring that ‘he loved the ground she went upon, and that he would go with her, to Bridewell, to the gallows, or any where’. It is unlikely the whipping they both received did much to rescue the marriage.120 Women in a state of anger, shock, or hurt were also likely, of course, to act impulsively rather than by sober calculation. Richard Wright, a philandering London cobbler, admitted in 1576 that while he was kissing a neighbour’s wife his own ‘wife came and took them and knocked their heads together’.121 That sounds a purely spontaneous response. The most vivid account we possess of a wife’s reactions comes from the pen of Samuel Pepys, after his wife Elizabeth found him in flagrante with their maid Deb Willett on 26 October 1668. His account of the weeks that followed gives an unforgettable picture of Elizabeth’s emotional turmoil, and the armoury of weapons she considered using in retaliation. She was initially ‘struck mute’ by the discovery. That first, largely sleepless night saw a flood of tears and reproaches, while she cast about for some way to inflict a comparable hurt on Samuel. She woke him at 2 a.m. to tell him she had been secretly received into the Catholic Church, a weapon that would be meaningless today (except in Northern Ireland) but which she knew would frighten and damage him professionally. Next day she confronted Deb, extracted the whole story, and resolved to turn her away. That night Elizabeth was ‘in a mighty rage’, Samuel recorded in his diary, ‘and did most part of the night in bed rant at me in most high terms, of threats of publishing my shame’. Within a few days Deb had left under a cloud, with Samuel pledged never to contact her again. Elizabeth’s strongest weapon, as she soon realized, was his deep sense of guilt and his continuing affection for her. These factors dramatically altered the political balance of the marriage. On 14 November Samuel noted that he was ‘troubled to see how my wife is by this means likely for ever to have her hand over me, that I shall be for ever a slave to her’—if ‘only in matters of pleasure’. He had been forced to promise never again to consort with several other women his wife suspected. Samuel recognized that she still cared for him, and was 120

BCB 6, 11 Apr. 1618.

121

BCB 3, fo. 86.

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confident that ‘in other things she will make her business . . . to please me and to keep me right to her’. He even noted with surprise that their lovemaking had taken on a new ardour in the weeks following the discovery. Unfortunately he proved unable to keep away from Deb Willett, and when Elizabeth discovered his renewed treachery on 19 November he faced another barrage of threats and curses. The crisis now reached a new pitch: she swore she would slit the girl’s nose as a badge of shame, vowed to leave Samuel that very day, and threatened that unless he paid her several hundred pounds ‘she would make all the world know of it’. The next day she renewed the onslaught, ‘and could not refrain to strike me and pull my hair’. Torn by guilt and shame, Samuel suffered the attack passively, and his own penitent tears eventually calmed her. Even so he had to accept a humiliating arrangement by which his assistant Will Hewer became a ‘gaoler’ or chaperon to make sure he never broke his word again. Elizabeth remained suspicious. On 12 January 1669 she heard that Samuel and Deb had been seen together in a hackney coach, and at 1 a.m. that night she suddenly pulled back the bed curtains and threatened him with a pair of red-hot tongs. Even now Samuel could not keep away, and the marital crisis was unresolved when the diary ends.122 Elizabeth Pepys’s story features most of the weapons employed by women in her predicament: tears, anger, assault, threats to leave, and threats to shame the erring spouse, the ‘other woman’, or both. Most women began with pleas and reproaches, and some men reacted with shame and penitence once their affair was discovered. John Ellis, who feared he had made another woman pregnant, begged his wife ‘to take it as patiently as she could’.123 Contemporaries recognized that the husband’s sense of guilt or fear might well alter the balance of domestic authority, as in Pepys’s household. One man, begging his wife to conceal his lapse, promised to ‘give her anything that he had’.124 If he proved defiant, however, the wife might raise the stakes by turning to her friends and neighbours, bringing additional pressure on the husband to end the liaison. Though conduct-books urged them to conceal family secrets, many wives recognized that men impervious to guilt might prove far more susceptible to public shame. When John Finch’s wife discovered him in bed with their landlady in Arundel in 1609, she ‘waked him and told him it was a great fault and that she would make his friends acquainted 122

Pepys, Diary, viii. 337–414: at 338, 339, 363, 367, 369. BCB 6, 9 May 1618. Alexander Hanckes, an Oxfordshire villager, abandoned an affair before he appeared in court, after his wife begged both him and his mistress to end it, and it had become public knowledge: OAO, c4, fo. 99v. 124 BCB 5, fo. 170; for ballads making this point see Pepys Ballads, iii. 280, 337. 123

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therewith to his shame’. The guilty pair would soon be facing abuse and jeers from their neighbours.125 Other women triggered pressure more directly. Some raged at their errant husbands in public. Neighbours recalled a Leicestershire villager shouting during one of many matrimonial brawls, ‘Thou art a rogue, go and be hanged to thy whore Dorothy Sprigge.’ Jane Whitefield turned on her husband at a Cambridge fair in 1594, crying, ‘A pox of God on thee villain, thou hast been amongst thy whores.’126 Such attacks carried the risk, of course, that the alleged ‘whore’ would sue for defamation, as happened in both these cases. There was a similar upset in 1599 when Joan Foster charged her husband Thomas, vicar of West Wittering, with adultery. When Foster summoned his alleged lover to confirm his innocence, she was naturally more concerned about her own reputation, and after a stormy public confrontation sued his wife for defamation.127 Angry women were sometimes oblivious to the consequences of their allegations, but others had clearly staged a confrontation for maximum public effect. Margaret Wastell placed herself outside the Cambridge alehouse where her husband was drinking, and shouted, ‘Come out thou base and beggarly rogue, thou hast been with thy whores’, meaning the alewife and her daughter.128 Such scenes made powerful street theatre, generating public pressure as tongues wagged, but they carried the risk of alienating the husband still further. Most wives wanted to win back their partners, not drive them away. Many wives therefore adopted more subtle tactics, directing their insults at the ‘other woman’ alone. By confronting her rival in the street and using more restrained language at home, the betrayed wife put less strain on the marital relationship. She might even persuade herself that her husband too was a victim, seduced by an unscrupulous temptress. That seems to have been the view of Rosamond Wilton, who burst into the kitchen of a Bishopsgate tavern in 1673 and berated its proprietor as a whore for leading her husband astray. Margaret Jarmin of Cambridge alleged that her rival had spent the whole night with her husband, ‘and when morning was come she let him out’, a formulation which pinned the blame very firmly on the other woman.129 If the lover had a husband of her own, he too could be publicly targeted as a cuckold. Thus in September 1589 we find Emmatt Pratt of Gilmorton, Leics., scolding 125 126 127 128 129

WSRO, Ep1/11/11, fo. 210; cf. Ep1/11/16, fo. 22v; CUL, EDR K6/158. LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 30/81; CUL, EDR D2/19, fo. 78; cf. LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 73/48. WSRO, Ep1/11/9, fos. 19v–20v. CUL, EDR K6/36. GL, MS 9065A/8, fos. 109v–110v; CUL, EDR K6/302

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outside the house of her neighbour Margaret Bradgate: ‘thou art a whore and an arrant whore to keep that whoremaster my husband in thy house at this time of day’. Turning her fire on Margaret’s feeble husband, she went on: ‘And thou mayest come out, Bradgate, cuckoldly knave as thou art, with horns on thy head as well as I.’130 ‘Cuckold’, a term usually applied to men, could refer to either sex, and Emmatt was advertising the fact that she and Bradgate were in the same predicament. Her strategy was to shame her rival into breaking off the liaison, shame the ‘other husband’ into making her, and encourage neighbours to exert pressure on them both until it was done. The strength and effectiveness of these shaming tactics naturally depended on the readiness of the wife’s friends and neighbours to rally to her support. The larger her circle of gossips, the more pressure she could bring to bear. Her rival, shunned and abused in the street, might soon find her position untenable. Her chance of withstanding such pressures depended on her own reputation, her husband’s response, and the size and loyalty of her own circle of friends. Unsupported allegations against a respected neighbour would simply rebound. No one believed Joan Armesonne when she accused not one but half-a-dozen neighbours of suspicious dealings with her husband; instead the churchwardens presented her as a scold, complaining that ‘neither scarce man or woman can be at quiet for her’.131 Equally important was the husband’s readiness to stand by his wife. When Alice Hopkins of Nailstone, Leics., alleged a liaison between her husband and Judith Rogers, Judith’s husband retaliated by securing a warrant against Hopkins and had her presented as a ‘railer and scolder’.132 In many other cases, however, neighbourhood talk undermined the husband’s trust and he stood aside, or turned against his wife.133 Single women and outsiders were still more vulnerable, for neighbours would generally side with a woman they knew and trusted. That was the reasoning of Mary Sadd, who stood outside a house in Aldgate one summer evening in 1632, denouncing a new lodger there as a ‘pocky whore’. She told the crowd that quickly assembled, and the landlady, that the lodger was having an affair with her husband, and that he had pawned most of their goods to squander on her. She was fighting to save her family, and having ‘rousted’ her rival from one place, was determined to break the liaison by driving her away altogether.134 Alewives, frequently the object of suspicion and abuse, made far tougher opponents, but they too could prove vulnerable to a determined 130 132 134

LRO, 1D 41/4/453. LRO, 1D 41/13/58, fo. 192. GL, MS 9057/1, fos. 10–13.

131 133

LRO, 1D 41/13/70, fo. 99v. See Ch. 6, below.

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campaign. A jealous Cambridgeshire woman stung one in 1620 with the taunt that she did ‘keep an alehouse and keep open shop and open hole’.135 Economic pressures could also prove effective. A Sussex villager who suspected her husband of an affair with one Susan Willet, stood outside her victualling house in May 1621 railing that she was ‘a filthy drunken whore’ and ‘that the stews was fitter for her than that place’. The scandal made customers fear for their own good names, and when Willet sued for defamation, one testified that ‘many of her neighbours and guests that were wont to frequent her house do now forbear and refrain to come hither, fearing lest some discredit may happen unto them thereby’. If Willet was indeed having an affair, she now realized it could jeopardize her livelihood.136 Far more drastic methods were required if an alehouse was thriving despite its bad reputation or, still worse, because of it. Parishioners in Norton, Staffs., begged magistrates in 1590 to suppress a disorderly alehouse there and denounced the alewife, Ellen Smythe, as ‘a most notorious harlot’ whose scandalous liaisons had made several women ‘ready to part company’ with their husbands, ‘whereupon she hath greatly rejoiced’.137 If abuse and public pressure failed to intimidate the ‘other woman’, betrayed wives might consider more direct action. Some threatened physical violence, often vowing to slit the rival’s nose as a symbolic and highly visible badge of shame. Nose-slitting was still occasionally ordered by the courts as a punishment for libel, but occurs far more commonly in the context of sexual promiscuity, both in ballads and court records.138 Thus in 1579 Elizabeth Taylor, a Leicestershire villager, denounced her husband’s alleged whore and swore she ‘would cut off her nose, wheresoever she met with her’. Anne Browne, an Oxfordshire villager, railed against a young woman accused of riding pillion behind her husband, and vowed to slit her nose if she did so again. Clare Wilcox told a rival to her face, ‘thou art my husband’s whore, and I will cut off thy nose’.139 Elizabeth Pepys’s outburst shows that the idea was firmly lodged in the culture of the middling sort too. Occasionally we find a suspicious 135

CUL, EDR K1/145. WSRO, Ep1/11/13, fos. 133v–134r; cf. GL, MS 9065A/8, fos. 109v–110v. 137 S. A. H. Burne (ed.), The Staffordshire Quarter Sessions Rolls (William Salt. Archaeological Soc., 1929–50), ii. 53. 138 V. Groebner, ‘Losing Face, Saving Face: Noses, Honour and Spite in the Late Medieval Town’, History Workshop Journal, 40 (1995); Gowing, Domestic Dangers, 103–4. Alexander Leighton’s nose was slit in 1630 for publishing a seditious libel on bishops. See also Whiteway, Diary, 59, 113. 139 LRO, 1D 41/4, 288; OAO, c118, fo. 264r–v; LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 20/1; cf. PRO, STAC 8/102/16; J. W. Willis Bund (ed.), Worcester County Records: Calendar of the Quarter Sessions Papers (Worcestershire Historical Soc., 1899–1900), i. 459; Gowing, Domestic Dangers, 80, 103. 136

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husband threatening to slit his wife’s nose, or a scandalized mother threatening her daughter.140 The association between the nose and genitalia was familiar throughout Europe, often featuring in obscene carnival masks, and was reinforced by the fact that a disfigured nose might well be the humiliating legacy of syphilis. Contemporary associations were spelt out graphically in a newspaper report from Kent in 1655, which told how a jealous wife invited home a woman she suspected was her husband’s mistress. After drinking together, the wife suddenly demanded of her if she would have her nose cut off, or her bearing part; immediately she and the maidservant did fall to work, and excised that part of her body which she thought had most offended. Not long after her husband came home, and demanding what there was to eat, she replied, she had got the best bit which he loved in the world, and did present him with that most ungrateful [loathsome] object.141

If the Freudian overtones of this macabre episode suggest the action of a woman deranged by jealousy, the principle of retribution through physical injury and ritual humiliation would have been familiar to readers. In another incident, in 1638, a jealous wife recruited her friends to help execute a still more carefully planned and elaborate ritual of revenge and intimidation. A baker’s wife in Drury Lane persuaded her gossips to help seize a woman she suspected of an affair with her husband, and together they tore off her clothes, beat her with birch rods, and attempted to shave her head, before ducking her under a pump in the street in a symbolic cleansing.142 Such incidents were rare and counter-productive, turning the injured wife into the wrongdoer. In practice, threats were far more common than actual assaults, most of which occurred in the heat of the moment. An Essex woman who discovered her husband’s liaison with a maidservant ‘would have killed the wench with a spit’, witnesses reported, had she not been forcibly restrained.143 When Phillis Moncke, an innkeeper’s wife in 140 LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 8/2; GL, MS 9189/1, fos. 115v–16r; for threats by men see The Casebook of Sir Francis Ashley JP, ed. J. H. Bettey (Dorset Record Soc., 7, 1981), 3; Underdown, Fire from Heaven, 97; S. Rowlands, Humors Looking Glasse (1608), in Complete Works, i. 23. For threats by women whose husbands or brothers had fathered illegitimate children, see L. Gowing, ‘Ordering the Body: Illegitimacy and Female Authority in Seventeenth-Century England’, in M. J. Braddick and J. Walter (eds.), Negotiating Power in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2001), 55. 141 The Weekly Intelligencer, 178 (16–23 Jan. 1655), 158. The reporter added that the woman was sent to Maidstone gaol, but as the victim was still alive had been bailed till the Assizes. For possibly similar behaviour by a jealous husband see the case of John Carter, labourer, tried in 1652 for killing his wife by thrusting his hands ‘through her bearing parts’ and pulling out her entrails: Cockburn (ed.), Calendar: Kent: 1649–1659, 96. 142 J. Taylor, Stripping, Whipping and Pumping (1638). 143 Emmison, Elizabethan Life, 19.

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Arundel, found her husband on a bed with a young servant girl one day in September 1634, she reacted with similar fury, ignoring the fact that the inn was crowded for the town’s fair. ‘Am not I sufficient for my husband but he must have a quean betwixt his legs?’, she demanded. ‘Then presently’, a witness recalled, ‘she swore by God’s life that she would be avenged of the rogue and the whore’, and assaulted the maid, hitting her in the face. It took the mayor and several other bystanders to pull her away.144 Moncke was clearly incandescent with rage, railing for an hour after the girl had fled, though we note that she had attacked only her rival; her husband escaped with only verbal abuse. Physical assault, though emotionally satisfying and sometimes effective, inevitably compromised the wife’s status as victim, and carried the risk of arrest and prosecution.145 Moreover, moral superiority could not guarantee victory in any physical bout, and it is as easy to find mistresses beating wives as vice versa. An observer in Jacobean Anglesey recalled seeing one woman ‘soundly beaten, and all imbrued with her blood’ after a fight with her husband’s mistress, and then suffering the indignity of being committed by the justices for disorderly behaviour.146 And some mistresses made dangerous rivals: one Southwark woman threatened to kill her lover’s wife, while Agnes Browne vowed to cut the wife’s throat and burn down her house.147 Physical retaliation, however satisfying, was thus a risky strategy. When threats and informal pressure failed to end a liaison, many women turned instead to the parish officers for support. Such figures could be drawn into marital disputes in a variety of ways, for any lengthy affair was likely to reach their ears in due course. Many prosecutions resulted from neighbours reporting suspicious incidents, or passing on the woman’s complaints.148 Once she aired her grievances, if only to friends, they entered the public domain, leaving her with no control over what might follow. If her allegations created or confirmed a ‘public fame’, and the liaison persisted, the churchwardens would eventually feel obliged to act, and were liable to prosecution themselves if they did not. A woman complaining to her friends may not always have realized that she might be setting in motion the wheels of ecclesiastical justice.149 144

WSRO, Ep1/11/15, fos. 226v–228r. BCB 7, fo. 134v. 146 Halliwell (ed.), Minute Account of Anglesea, 401; cf. BCB 5, fo. 387; BCB 7, fo. 336; BCB 8, fo. 219v; GL, MS 9731/101/17, deposition of Anne Finch. 147 BCB 7, fo. 146; BCB 5, fo. 8v; cf. n. 43, above. 148 BCB 3, fo. 86; BCB 3, 15 Aug. 1579. 149 For typically ambiguous cases see LRO, 1D 41/13/11, fo. 12v; 1D 41/13, fo. 9v; 1D 41/13/10, fos. 55a, 55d; Emmison, Elizabethan Life: Morals, 50. 145

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Very often, however, it is clear that angry wives had deliberately triggered official intervention. When a group of women petitioned the Bridewell magistrates in 1633 against an alleged bawdy house, one complained that her own husband had been led astray.150 When John Sills’s wife, of Bottesford, Leics., suspected her husband of an affair with their maid, she had her interrogated by the minister. Thomas Phillips’s wife went further. Hearing in 1607 that her husband had been with a whore, she and her mother tracked down the woman, made her confess, and then had husband, whore, and bawd prosecuted and whipped at Bridewell. Alice Wilson was prepared to testify in person that her husband had been found in bed with another woman, and brought two friends to testify to the same effect.151 Such cases show that some angry wives were determined to see their rivals punished, and sometimes their husbands too. Far more often, however, they turned to the law only after exhausting the full range of informal measures. Joan Hancks, an Oxfordshire villager, responded initially to her husband’s affair by pleading with him, his lover, and even his lover’s mother, to end it. Her efforts proved fruitless, and she faced cruel jibes about her own supposed sexual deprivation. ‘What! Does your old cunny mump?’, the lover’s mother jeered. ‘If she want heat I will provide some mallows for her’ (mallows being a popular remedy for gynaecological problems). So Joan turned to her neighbours for help, again without success, and only then to the local justices, who advised her to proceed through the church courts. Her story offers a typical scenario of progressive responses, culminating in recourse to the law, but it also shows how the law itself might prove a two-edged sword. The angry words Joan had flung at her rivals enabled them to turn the tables by suing her for defamation; and if she had hoped to spare her husband from humiliation she failed, for he too was presented and confessed to adultery.152 Turning to the law set in motion a train of events that were difficult to control or foresee. Why then did women sometimes take this step? Many did so as a last resort, when only the most drastic methods might still save the marriage. If a man was spending all his money on another woman, self-preservation became the overriding concern; his wife needed to keep a roof over her head, for the children’s sake as well as her own, whatever the damage to any prospect of genuine reconciliation. And after being humiliated for months, she might feel an understandable determination to see her 150

BCB 7, fo. 319v. LRO 1D41/13/53, fo. 75v; BCB 5, fo. 167; BCB 2, fo. 177v; cf. BCB 3, 11 Feb. 1579; BCB 8, fo. 195v. 152 OAO, c31, fos. 247, 249; c4, fo. 99v. 151

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rival suffer too, and view her husband’s own humiliation with greater equanimity. Goals could change as well as tactics, as justice and revenge became increasingly powerful drives. When friends warned Honor Franklin of Milton, near Adderbury, in 1629 that they had seen her husband Moses behaving suspiciously with one Dorcas Toms, she initially tried, like most wives, to solve her problems informally, confronting the pair and trying to shame them into ending their liaison. Instead it continued. Friends reported that Moses, far from showing any remorse, had called her ‘a black sow’, boasting that Dorcas ‘was a fairer woman and he could have her for a groat at his pleasure’. When Dorcas became pregnant both she and Moses were prosecuted and sentenced to perform public penance, with Honour herself testifying against them.153 By this stage she was perhaps looking for revenge against her rival, and possibly her husband too; equally, Dorcas’s pregnancy had raised the danger that Moses might abandon his wife to establish a new household unless she took drastic action. Most women probably turned to the law thirsting for revenge but still hoping to prevent the final disintegration of their marriage. These goals pulled in opposite directions, of course. The best hope of reconciling them lay in directing the law’s fire against the other woman, leaving the husband unscathed. After enduring a whipping, imprisonment, or shaming penance, the rival might well be cowed into ending the liaison, and if the husband had been spared he might prove willing to swallow his resentment and be reconciled. By claiming the other woman was primarily to blame, a wife could often persuade churchwardens or magistrates to overlook her husband’s own offence. Thus when William Bridge’s wife complained in 1630 that her husband had virtually abandoned her and their family, the churchwardens of Chithurst, Sussex, presented the mistress but ignored the errant husband. Parish officers wanted to keep families intact, and knew this course offered the best chance to achieve this.154 Even when they felt obliged to present both parties, everyone knew a householder was far more likely to clear himself by compurgation than a woman of ‘ill fame’, and would probably avoid the shame of public penance. Borough court records too show women adept at making the law serve their turn. An expectation that magistrates would prove willing to oblige may well have encouraged some women of very modest social status to pursue this course. Their most promising option was to ask for a ‘recognizance’, by which husbands, their lovers, or both, were bound over to 153

OAO, c2, fos. 61r–v, 64, 67v.

154

WSRO, Ep1/11/15, fo. 245r–v.

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keep the peace or be of good behaviour. Thus on 25 March 1633 we find Anne Oliver, a cooper’s wife, asking the mayor of Leicester to have her troublesome husband Robert and his alleged mistress bound over to the peace. Only a week earlier Robert had been examined by the mayor on suspicion of aiding and abetting a convicted felon, and Anne’s timing was impeccable; exasperated by this further lapse, the mayor promptly consigned him to gaol and his mistress to the house of correction. Anne left him there for four weeks before returning to request his release, assuring the mayor that henceforth ‘they shall live lovingly and quietly together’. Robert had clearly raised the flag of surrender. The mayor obliged, leaving the mistress still incarcerated. If he saw through Anne’s machinations, he was happy to facilitate them, for her personal agenda matched the public interest.155 Similarly, in 1615 we find Middlesex magistrates binding over a woman to appear in court to answer the complaint of Margery Bloudworth, a baker’s wife, that she was having an affair with her husband George. They took no action against George himself.156 Recognizances were granted in a wide range of other circumstances to protect women’s interests, for example by binding a man to support his wife, take her back if he had driven her away, or even to marry a pregnant girlfriend by a specified date.157 Magistrates proved accommodating in other ways too. Ralph Manners, a ‘lewd, pilfering’ fellow, was brought before the London Bridewell governors in 1603 at the suit of his ‘great bellied wife’ and her mother, but then released unpunished at his wife’s request; the two women had presumably felt he needed a short, sharp shock to prevent him going completely off the rails, and the court went along with their wishes.158 Magistrates possessed wide powers of discretion. They would decide their response to an adulterous husband by assessing his words and demeanour, and might decide that keeping the family intact should take priority over the punishment of sin. When a London woman reported finding her husband and one Anne Blythe ‘in the act of adultery’ in a house of ill repute, in 1633, magistrates responded by having only Anne 155 LRO, BR II/18/19/428, 430, 436. On the significance of recognizances see J. Samaha, ‘The Recognizance in Elizabethan Law Enforcement’, American Journal of Legal History, 251 (1981); S. Hindle, ‘The Keeping of the Public Peace’, in P. Griffiths, A. Fox, and S. Hindle (eds.), The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England (1996); R. B. Shoemaker, Prosecution and Punishment: Petty Crime and the Law in London and Rural Middlesex, c.1660–1725 (Cambridge, 1991), ch. 5 and passim. 156 W. Le Hardy (ed.), County of Middlesex: Calendar to the Sessions Records,  (1935–41), ii. 266. 157 See e.g. ibid. 299, 300, 339. 158 BCB 4, fo. 393v. But one man, whose wife begged the court to spare him if he would promise to stay away from his lover, opted for a whipping: BCB 5, fo. 232.

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whipped and set to work in Bridewell. Similarly when Judith Kiffener found her husband with another woman in a cellar ‘in a very uncivil posture’, only the woman was summoned before the Middlesex sessions of the peace. In both cases it suited all parties to overlook the husband’s offence.159 When magistrates dealt with a Preston woman in 1604 over an affair with William Hynde, the clerk noted that the offence had been committed ‘to the injury of Ellen, wife of William’. Their decision not to prosecute William himself may reflect a sense that the matter was a private injury as much as an offence against the state.160 Magistrates sensitive to the social dynamics of a situation might choose to place family cohesion above the demands of impersonal justice. Turning to the courts over an adulterous husband was a desperate remedy, as the conduct-books warned. In desperate circumstances it was nonetheless a strategy worth pursuing, for injured wives and magistrates shared a common goal. The fact that a wife could not expect much warmth in a marriage sustained only by court intervention mattered little to the courts or perhaps, by this stage, to the wife herself, more concerned to avert the threat of destitution and the break-up of her family. Churchwardens and magistrates no doubt recognized the self-serving flavour of narratives presenting the husband as an innocent led astray by a wicked temptress, but it was in their interests to give him a chance to resume his place in the family and community with at least a shred of outward dignity. ‘Pious perjury’ was a concept familiar in the early modern judicial system, and if it exposed here another double standard, the injured wife stood to benefit as well as her erring husband. Marital Violence Marital violence presented wives with yet another set of problems. Educated opinion was moving firmly against the right of husbands to administer physical ‘correction’, and most conduct-books condemned it outright. While this represented a major cultural shift, the practical gains may have been more limited. Violent husbands, at every level of society, paid little heed to polite opinion, and outsiders were reluctant to intervene unless their violence had been ‘unreasonable’, a term left undefined. And in this situation, unlike adultery, there was no third party at whom the wife could direct her fire. 159 BCB 7, fo. 343; J. C. Jeaffreson (ed.), Middlesex County Records (1886–92), iii. 236; cf. BCB 4, fo. 55v; BCB 7, fos. 102, 134; BCB 8, fo. 323. But magistrates sometimes proceeded against the husband though his wife had charged only the mistress. See e.g. Le Hardy (ed.), Middlesex: Calendar,  iii. 267. 160 J. Tait (ed.), Lancashire Quarter Sessions Records (Chetham Soc.,  77, 1917), 222.

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Contemporaries knew well that marital problems were often interconnected, and recognized the close links between alcohol and violence. As one poet pithily remarked, ‘drunk, at midnight, home the knave doth creep, | And beats his wife, and spews, and falls asleep’.161 But a later pamphleteer could observe, in 1706, that many men abused their wives in drink, ‘which otherwise they would for their own reputations abhor and abominate’, adding that their wives ‘to save their credit’ pretended their black eye or bruised nose had come from walking into a door.162 That offered at least a glimmer of hope. With a man susceptible to shame or remorse, a wife might follow the conduct-books’ advice and try to convince him that his behaviour was jeopardizing his own good name. Some women tried to awaken a sense of shame in more subtle ways. John Taylor told the intriguing story of a Southwark waterman who beat his wife with a rope’s end, and was then served broth for dinner made with pieces of rope instead of eels. She declared she was serving him as he had served her.163 Some men clearly did feel shame and remorse once their fit of rage or drunkenness had passed. Samuel Pepys, who gave his wife a black eye one day in 1664, was at once ‘vexed at my heart to think what I had done’. Already embarrassed by what his servants might say, Pepys looked desperately for some excuse for his wife to miss a Christmas dinner party which would expose his conduct to his friends and patrons. On another occasion he held his hand when Elizabeth mocked and abused him, unwilling to hit her in company despite his fear that such weakness might undermine his authority; in earlier days, he reflected, ‘less than that would have made me strike her’.164 The recognition that violence would diminish men’s own standing in respectable society marked an important shift in opinion, with obvious benefit to their wives.165 But Pepys moved in a very different world from artisans, labourers, and husbandmen, and among the poor domestic violence may have continued largely unchanged. A Restoration writer remarked that maidservants who rushed into marriage with labourers to escape a stern mistress might soon 161 W. Fennor, Pasquils Palinodia (1619), sig. B; on marital violence see Gowing, Domestic Dangers, 206–28; S. Amussen, ‘“Being stirred to much unquietness”: Violence and Domestic Violence in Early Modern England’, Journal of Women’s History, 6 (1994); E. Foyster, ‘Male Honour, Social Control and Wife-Beating in Late Stuart England’, TRHS, 6th ser., 6 (1996); M. Hunt, ‘Wife-Beating, Domesticity and Women’s Independence in Eighteenth-Century London’, Gender and History, 4 (1992). 162 Rare and Good News for Wives (1706), 8; cf. Scourge for Poor Robin, 8. 163 B. Capp, The World of John Taylor the Water-Poet (Oxford, 1994), 119. 164 Pepys, Diary, v. 349–50, 356; iv. 150. 165 Foyster, ‘Male Honour’, 219–22.

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find themselves ‘beaten like stockfish’ by their new husbands. Such men were unlikely to share Pepys’s qualms. Daniel Defoe thought marital violence was actually increasing, and we should not lightly dismiss his views.166 It may well be that changes among the middling sorts were outweighed by the growing reluctance of parish authorities and the ecclesiastical courts to meddle in domestic affairs. So what remedies were available to battered women whose pleas were simply brushed aside? In some cases parents or kin would intervene, trying to mediate or providing a temporary refuge.167 But the wife’s most common response was to turn to her friends, and broadcast her wrongs. Matthew Griffith described a violent husband who was surprised one day to find his wife weeping alone in a corner; ‘Is it not better to bewail my hard hap here in secret,’ she retorted, ‘than to run forth, and cry in the open streets as other women do?’168 Most women expected to find sympathy for their plight, at least from other women. Cecily Johnson, a Leicestershire villager, told friends in 1662 that her husband had beaten and threatened to kill her unless she admitted her adultery, knowing they would condemn her lapse but still expecting pity for her bruises.169 Most women were looking for practical as well as moral support. At the most basic level, friends could voice disapproval whenever they encountered the offending husband, and several ballads suggest how effective such gestures might be. Martin Parker’s Have among you! good women, written from a male perspective, shows Joan, a street vendor and drunken, abusive wife, manipulating local opinion with considerable skill to thwart her angry husband: If he should give her a check, She tells her friends how he doth cuff her And threatens to break her neck: So he, for fear she’ll cry out, Dares neither to strike nor chide her, For then she’ll give the word all about That his queans will not let him abide her. 166 A. Marsh, The Confession of the New Married Couple (1683), 194; P. Earle, The Making of the English Middle Class (1989), 201. 167 See E. Foyster, ‘Parenting was for Life, not just for Childhood: The Role of Parents in the Married Lives of their Children in Early Modern England’, History, 283 (2001), 317–18, 326; and cases cited in this chapter. 168 M. Griffith, Bethel: or, A Forme for Families (1633), 297; cf. GL, MS 9189/1, fos. 72v–73r; Gowing, Domestic Dangers, 217–18. The ‘Book of Homilies’ exclaimed, ‘what weepings and wailings be made in the open streets’: Certain Sermons and Homilies, 545. 169 LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 30/25.

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Joan exaggerates his violence to a level she knows will be judged unreasonable, and for good measure blames it on the influence of his alleged whores, placing him further in the wrong. Perhaps the most striking feature, however, is Parker’s assumption that a husband might be swayed by the neighbours’ protests.170 Several other ballads make the same point. One husband, cursed with a shrewish wife, laments that ‘if I chance to heave my hand, | straight-way she’ll “murder” cry’, and make such a stir ‘That all her mates, her part to take, | about me soon will throng’.171 Three Kent village women went much further, rallying to the support of a beaten wife in 1612 by going to the man’s house and assaulting him.172 At the end of the century Ned Ward described a rowdy ‘parliament of fishwives’ in a Billingsgate alehouse, sitting in judgement on the case of a waterman who had beaten his wife.173 More significant is to find an Elizabethan homily citing the angry disapproval of neighbours as a powerful argument to deter a wife-beater. They would rush to his house to restrain him as if he was mad, it warned, and make him ashamed to show his face in the market place.174 That probably exaggerates neighbours’ readiness to intervene, but is suggestive nonetheless. It was natural for an injured woman’s ‘mates’ to rally round, especially as compassion and self-interest pulled in the same direction. By signalling disapproval, they reinforced the boundaries of acceptable behaviour and sent a veiled warning to other men, including their own husbands. When Anne Dilke stormed into the house of a Leicester joiner in 1620 and railed at him for beating, betraying, and starving his wife, and threatening to abandon his family, she clearly wanted to help his long-suffering wife. But she also accused him of spending far too much time at her own house with her husband, and was probably trying to rid herself of an unwelcome guest she resented as a potentially dangerous influence.175 Neighbours drawn into a marital dispute would generally comfort the victim and remonstrate with the husband. Some offered shelter and protection too, or even a chaperone. At Syston, Leics., a curate’s wife too frightened to remain alone in the house with her drunk and violent husband, one night in 1626, begged neighbours to let their maidservant 170

Roxburghe, i. 437. A. Halliarg, ‘The Cruell Shrow’, Roxburghe, i. 96–7; The Merry Gossips Vindication [1672–95]; but cf. A. Copley, Wits Fittes and Fancies (1595), 85–6, for a defiant response. 172 Wall, Power and Protest, 93. 173 E. Ward, The London Spy, ed. K. Fenwick (1955), 30. 174 Certain Sermons and Homilies, 545. 175 LRO, BR II/18/13/483. Several months earlier Brooksby’s wife Agnes had craved the peace against him on the grounds of violence and spending too much time at Richard Dilke’s house: ibid. /425. 171

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come and sleep with her.176 When Judith Pollard’s husband beat her with a stick and threw her into the street in the middle of the night, in 1566, she found refuge with neighbours who had often rebuked him for his violent behaviour. In another case witnesses described how Mary Pollet, abused by her husband and his mother and sister, had knocked at a neighbour’s house at two in the morning, ‘with her bed curtains in her arms’, begging shelter.177 Neighbours would often also try to mediate in such circumstances. Mary Watson, a Southwark weaver’s wife too frightened to go home after a fierce row in 1686, found shelter overnight with neighbours who kept her angry husband at bay; next morning one went ahead to pacify him before she ventured to return home.178 Neighbours inevitably ran some risk themselves whenever they tried to intervene in such situations. In 1623 we find a Leicester widow craving the peace against a roughmason ‘for that he did break open her door about two of the clock in the morning and for beating and striking her, and saying that he will be revenged of her for receiving his wife’. Elizabeth Morris had her windows smashed by a man enraged that she was sheltering his wife.179 Neighbours knew the risks, and knew too that their help might goad the husband to still greater violence.180 But when desperate women turned to them for help, most obeyed the ‘law of good neighbourliness’.181 Of course, neighbours did not always wait to be asked before intervening. The right of men to discipline their wives and families was governed by an unwritten code which required punishment to be applied with moderation, for good cause, and in private. If marital violence flouted any of these rules, neighbours felt entitled to step in, to defend both the victim and public order. Wife-beating in public, or even at home in the presence of company, was generally unacceptable. When a Leicester haberdasher returned home with a friend after a day’s hard drinking in 1618 and ‘beat his wife about the face’, his drinking companion proved ready to testify against him.182 Bystanders were expected to urge restraint, and magistrates reacted angrily in 1619 when they heard 176

LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 3/56–9; Amussen, ‘Being stirred’, 79. GL, MS 9056, fos. 7v–8r, 16v–21v (both male and female neighbours had provided support); MS 9065A/9, Pollet v Worlick, 1700–1, deposition of Mary Bew; cf. Amussen, ‘Being stirred’, 78–81; Gowing, Domestic Dangers, 215–18. 178 Sad and True Relation of . . . Thomas Watson, 4–5. She returned too soon, for Watson stabbed her to death with a bayonet. 179 LRO, BR II/18/14/203; GL, MS 9056, fos. 7v, 17v; BCB 7, fo. 109v. 180 L. Price, Bloody Actions Performed (1654), 10–11; Sad and True Relation of . . . Thomas Watson, 4–5; The full and true Relation of all the Proceedings at the Assizes holden at Chelmsford [on 29 March–1 April] (1680), 2. 181 GL, MS 9065A/3, fo. 29; Heywood, Autobiography, iii. 89. 182 LRO, BR II/18/12/309. 177

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of a man who had instead pressed his friend, a shoemaker, to use violence.183 A man who beat his wife in public was quite likely to face charges, as another Leicester man discovered when he was presented for ‘misusing his wife in the open market’.184 Bystanders usually attempted to separate the parties, despite the risk to themselves. In one exceptional incident in 1677 a London tubman was killed on the spot when he attempted to protect a woman who was being chased through the street by her husband, brandishing a half-pike. But a man who beat his wife in public might equally find himself in danger from a crowd of disgusted onlookers. In one incident a man who assaulted and stripped his wife in an alehouse was chased down the street by the outraged customers.185 Elizabeth Foyster tells the story of William Bullocke, a sadistic Bristol husband so hated that in 1667 he had to hire a constable ‘to guard him from the fury of the people and especially the women’; his status as a gentleman afforded no protection, and on one occasion he was pelted with dirt and forced to flee. Such episodes were to become more frequent in later generations.186 In the most serious cases of domestic violence, neighbours were likely to inform the parish officers and urge them to intervene. The officers might initially respond with an informal warning, but if necessary would present offenders to the church court, manorial court, or quarter sessions. Churchwardens could present marital violence as an offence in itself, or for disrupting public order. Ely churchwardens presented William White in 1575 for living ‘evilly and disquietly’ with his wife, children, and neighbours. She lived in terror, they explained, ‘for he is of that opinion that it is as lawful to kill a woman with child as a bullock or other beast, and standeth so stiffly in that opinion that he cannot be reformed’.187 Attempts to reason with him had clearly failed. A Leicestershire villager similarly overstepped the mark in 1620 by ‘beating his wife upon Easter Day last when he received the communion with a fire stick’, behaviour which had profaned the holy festival and the sacrament.188 Churchwardens were also shocked when ministers broke the rules. The rector of Gloreston, Leics., presented in 1626, was charged among many other offences with beating his wife ‘to the evil example of the parishioners’, and another incumbent was presented in 1668 as a 183

LRO, BR II/18/13/376; cf. Rowlands, A Crew of kind Gossips, in Complete Works, ii. 33. LRO, 1D 41/13/46, fo. 58v. 185 OBSP 1–2 June 1677, 6; Amussen, ‘Being stirred’, 79–80; Foyster, ‘Male Honour’, 221. 186 Foyster, ‘Male Honour’, 222; Earle, City Full of People, 184; E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common (1991), 505–7. 187 CUL, EDR D2/9, fo. 150; cf. Earle, City Full of People, 236. 188 LRO, 1D 41/13/50, fo. 170v; 1D 41/13/51, fo. 11v; cf. Amussen, Ordered Society, 123. 184

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drunkard and wife-beater.189 Other parishioners looked to the secular courts to curb men whose violence they deemed unacceptable. At Prescot, Lancs., court-leet juries presented men when violence had drawn blood, while a Norwich man who broke his wife’s arm in 1633 was committed to the city bridewell.190 The London Bridewell governors heard numerous cases triggered by neighbours reporting outrageous offenders, including a drunkard alleged to have made his wife miscarry. Westminster magistrates dealt with another drunken wife-beater in 1611 by sentencing him to sit in the stocks for six hours, with two beer cans hanging round his neck.191 Neighbours who turned to the authorities were often looking to protect their own interests as well as the women in danger. Violent husbands generally made bad neighbours, and offenders were commonly accused on both counts. Indeed, in many cases it may have been the threat to public order that convinced neighbours and magistrates of their right and duty to intervene in domestic affairs. Richard Dilkes, a labourer, was committed to the Leicester bridewell in 1637 ‘for abusing of his wife and disturbing of his neighbours in the night time, . . . and for beating of his wife after Mr Mayor had warned him to the contrary’.192 George Clifford, accused of attempting to cut his wife’s throat, was described as ‘a fellow of outrageous behaviour’ towards his neighbours too. Henry Hill, it was reported in 1606, not only ‘beats his wife in drink and will not suffer her to be in any place to lodge’, but ‘will break open two doors on her to beat her’. Friends who had sheltered his wife clearly feared for their own safety.193 One wonders how many of these men would have been reported had they not also made themselves a public nuisance. In other cases neighbours feared that irresponsible and violent husbands, like adulterers, might simply abandon their families. When Robert Rothwood was prosecuted in 1658 ‘for beating and abusing his wife and endeavouring to leave his wife and children’, neighbours were acting to prevent an additional burden on the rates as well as to protect his wife.194 We should not underestimate the strength of genuine compassion, but it is clear that 189

LRO, 1D 41/13/58, fos. 159v–161r; cf. 1D 41/13/76, fo. 94v. J. G. de T. Mandley (ed.), The Portmote or Court Leet Records of . . . Salford (Chetham Soc., , 46, 48, 1902), i. 184, ii. 131; W. L. Sachse (ed.), Minutes of the Norwich Court of Mayoralty 1632–1635 (Norfolk Record Soc., 36, 1967), 51; cf. 183–4; Tait (ed.), Lancashire Quarter Sessions Records, 123. 191 e.g. BCB 7, fos. 29v, 30; W. H. Manchée, The Westminster City Fathers (the Burgess Court of Westminster 1585–1901 (1924), 100. 192 LRO, BR II/18/20/380. 193 BCB 6, fo. 196; BCB 5, fo. 113; cf. BCB 7, fo. 325; BCB 8, fo. 293v; GL, MS 9064/12, fo. 3v; Manchée, Westminster City Fathers, 101–2; LRO, 1D 41/13/59, fo. 283. 194 BCB 1657–9, fo. 45v; BCB 8, fo. 193v. 190

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the unwritten laws of good neighbourliness, especially for men, rested here on self-interest as well as altruism. The battered wife would hardly care what motives had prompted neighbours to step in. What mattered was how far the courts could relieve her situation. For some offenders, the shame of appearing before the London Bridewell governors or borough magistrates proved sufficient to curb their behaviour, at least for a time. A Norwich man who confessed in 1631 to beating his wife undertook to be publicly whipped by his own consent should he ever reoffend.195 Griffin Jones, a Blackfriars turner, pleaded abjectly in 1605 that ‘he never beat his wife but when he was in drink and he never will do the like again’. His wife, ‘a painful honest woman careful to keep both herself and children without charge to the parish’, begged the court to remit his punishment, ‘in hope of his amendment’, and the bench obliged.196 But in most respects prosecution was of limited value to women at risk. There could be a substantial delay before the case was heard at quarter sessions, during which they would remain vulnerable. Moreover the offender would almost certainly blame his wife for the public humiliation, and his resentment would poison the marital relationship still further, whatever action the court took. Such obvious problems explain why formal indictments for marital violence at quarter sessions and assizes remained very rare; James Sharpe found that not one of the 579 indictments for assault at Essex quarter sessions between 1620 and 1680 concerned marital violence.197 Violent husbands did appear before borough magistrates, who sat far more frequently, but their wives often begged for them to be released without punishment, probably afraid they would otherwise face another beating once the men returned home. The law offered another remedy, however, which solved the problem of delay and avoided the damage a court appearance would inflict on the couple’s future relationship. This was for a woman to go privately to a magistrate and ask for a recognizance binding her husband to appear at the next sessions, and in the mean time to keep the peace or be of good behaviour towards her. Such orders came into immediate effect. If tempers cooled, as usually happened, they could be discharged at the next sessions, or earlier; many justices acted on their own authority and never reported them to the courts. Recognizances had long been used to 195 W. L. Sachse (ed.), Minutes of the Norwich Court of Mayoralty, 1630–1631 (Norfolk Record Soc, 15, 1942), 187. 196 BCB 5, fo. 52v (he was back and whipped a month later for being drunk and disorderly: fo. 62); BCB 8, fo. 293v. 197 J. Sharpe, ‘Domestic Homicide in Early Modern England’, Historical Journal, 24 (1981), 31.

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contain or avert interpersonal violence, and grew rapidly in popularity in the early modern period. In the seventeenth century they came to play a significant role in matrimonial disputes too, especially in urban areas. Some individuals made regular use of them. Thomasine Wheeler of Hackney obtained five warrants in 1731–3 against her incorrigible spouse, John, who on two occasions spent lengthy periods in prison as a consequence.198 Anyone seeking the peace had to convince a magistrate that he or she stood in imminent danger of violence threatening life or limb. A few recognizances were issued on the strength of threats alone. Elizabeth Samuel of Reading, for example, secured one in 1626 by reporting her husband’s threat to kill her and ‘chop her as small as herbs to the pot’.199 But most women took this step only when they had already been assaulted, and feared worse to follow. The value of the recognizance lay partly in its speed; a Norfolk villager secured one in June 1665 on the same evening her husband had beaten her and thrown her down the stairs.200 A man who refused to be bound over, or failed to produce satisfactory sureties, could be immediately dispatched to gaol or bridewell.201 Binding over was equally attractive for its flexibility. Friends and neighbours could apply on the wife’s behalf if she was too hurt or frightened to come in person.202 Moreover she retained considerable control over the future course of events, with the right to decide when or if to ask for her husband to be released from his bonds. Marjorie Wilcox, whose husband was sent to gaol in 1656 for want of sureties, left him there for a week before asking the mayor to free him.203 Magistrates too made full use of their discretionary powers. When Mary Jackson, a Bradford butcher’s wife, complained in 1641 against her husband’s repeated drunken violence, West Riding justices directed three of their number to investigate and, if they saw fit, punish the husband and also suppress the disorderly alehouse she had accused him of frequenting.204 Leicester 198 R. Paley, Justice in Eighteenth-Century Hackney: The Justicing Notebook of Henry Norris and the Hackney Petty Sessions Book (London Record Soc., 28, 1991), 2, 12, 21, 26–7, 100, 114. As early as 1536 we find Alice Langham appealing successfully to the mayor of Leicester against the brutality of her husband Thomas, a physician: LRO, BR IV/3/5. 199 J. M. Guilding (ed.), Reading Records: Diary of the Corporation (1886–96), ii. 306. 200 Doughty, Notebook, 56; WRO, CR 103, fo. 6. 201 See e.g. BCB 9, fo. 458; Guilding (ed.), Reading Records, iii. 201; Le Hardy (ed.), Middlesex: Calendar,  ii. 119; Bates Harbin (ed.), Quarter Sessions Records for Somerset, iii. 305; Doughty, Notebook, 34, 56; S. A. Peyton (ed.), Minutes of Proceedings in Quarter-Sessions held . . . in the County of 202 Lincoln (Lincoln Record Soc., 25–6, 1931), ii. 252. BCB 7, fo. 29v. 203 LRO, BR II/18/28A/90; cf. Hindle, ‘Keeping of the Public Peace’, 235. 204 J. Lister (ed.), West Riding Sessions Records, 1611–1642 (Yorkshire Archaeological Society, 53, 1915), 278.

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magistrates had no hesitation in dispatching William Owen to the bridewell when he bit the officer sent to fetch him for questioning. Samuel Mason was also detained in 1624 when his wife swore the peace against him, ‘he having abused her and lived incontinently with another woman’. The magistrates clearly shared his wife’s view that his adultery was an aggravating factor.205 But magistrates anxious to save a troubled marriage were generally willing to be lenient whenever the husband appeared contrite and the couple were reconciled. Some men were dismissed with a warning, on the strength of apologies and promises. John Saunders, a Leicester baker who claimed to be sinned against as much as sinning, was released from custody in 1650 on engaging to live peaceably with his wife, pledging that ‘if she should offend him in any kind, he would acquaint Mr Mayor or some of the justices and refer himself and the matter to their determination’.206 Any strategy dependent on the law to resolve marital problems was unlikely to prove wholly satisfactory. The recognizance could offer immediate physical protection only in boroughs and rural areas which happened to have a justice within easy reach. And any woman who turned to the law knew that short-term protection had to be set against her husband’s deep and lasting resentment. While a recognizance was much less public than a court appearance, it was unlikely to remain secret, and the husband (and his kin) would know that his wife was the immediate author of his humiliation. Moreover if he was committed for want of sureties, the family was also deprived of its main breadwinner. Most women therefore turned to the law only when their sense of immediate danger outweighed every other consideration. For a woman facing simultaneous threats of violence, adultery, and desertion, with the marriage already on the point of collapse, the damage a recognizance might do to the couple’s long-term relationship became irrelevant.207 She was gambling that it offered a final chance to pull the situation back from the abyss and keep a roof over her family’s heads. When Isabel Rowe asked for a warrant in 1632, she told the mayor of Leicester that her husband had not only beaten her but ‘did refuse her bed and lay with his sister in law and hath resolved to lame her and to run away from her and leave her’. Joan Owen said her husband had done not a day’s work for weeks, and 205 LRO, BR II/20/384; BCB 6, 6 June 1624. For a parallel case involving failure to provide as well as violence, see Le Hardy (ed.), Middlesex: Calendar,  ii. 300. 206 LRO, BR II/18/25/532, 653; cf. Sachse (ed.), Minutes of the Norwich Court, 1630–1631, 187. 207 BCB 6, 6 June 1624; 2v; Bates Harbin (ed.), Quarter Sessions Records for Somerset, iii. 328; M. J. Hoad (ed.), Portsmouth Record Series: Borough Sessions Papers 1653–1688 (1971), 142.

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was threatening to sell all their household goods and abandon her. Mary Burges, a Shoreditch bricklayer’s wife, had already been blinded in one eye by her violent husband. Agnes Bagley of Reading had been turned out into the street at night, without money or food, and her husband had then burst into the house where she was sheltering, brandishing his sword, and threatened to kill her. Women in situations like these had nothing to lose in seeking the law’s protection. And they may have known that, even in desperate circumstances like these, judicial pressure did sometimes prove effective, at least in the short term. Even Bagley, despite his wild antics, later agreed to make peace with his wife, take her back, and support her.208 Other cases, predictably, ended less happily. When Elizabeth Parnell sought the peace in 1618 against her husband Henry, a Leicester chandler, the court treated him leniently, ‘in hopes of his amendment’; but a few weeks later he was in trouble again, after declaring ‘he would sell up his goods and leave his wife and family for the town to keep’.209 Elizabeth’s move may not have been wholly in vain, however, for if he did abandon her the magistrates would at least know she was the innocent party. Many of the women seeking legal protection were worried about their economic as well as physical security, and may have felt that magistrates would be more likely to provide relief if they were already familiar with the couple’s problems. Ursula Wilson of Knowle told Warwickshire magistrates in 1628 that her husband Thomas had beaten her and their children and driven her out, and was now living with a scandalous woman in an unlicensed alehouse. The chances of rescuing the marriage sound poor, but she had nothing to lose, for her husband had already broken every marital obligation. The court proved unable to salvage the relationship; Wilson broke an order to return to his wife and eventually fled the county. But though Ursula’s move had failed to save the marriage, the magistrates did their best to relieve her economic plight, ordering the rents from her husband’s lands to be paid to her to maintain her family.210 Magistrates showed similar concern in other cases, with circumstances sometimes even more extreme. When Mary Staples, a Limehouse butcher’s wife, complained in 1690 that her husband had manacled her and threatened to cut off her legs, he was bound over and ordered to pay her maintenance, so she could live apart. The magistrates were forced to 208 LRO, BR II/18/18/289; BR II/1820/384; Le Hardy (ed.), Middlesex: Calendar,  ii. 193; Guilding (ed.), Reading Records, ii. 259; cf. Doughty, Notebook, 53, 59; J. C. Atkinson (ed.), Quarter Sessions Records (North Riding Record Soc., 1884–92), vi. 224. 209 LRO, BR II/18/12/286, 294. 210 S. C. Ratcliff and H. C. Johnson (eds.), Warwick County Records (Warwick, 1935–64), i. 55, 77, 83–4, 95.

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return to the couple’s affairs on several further occasions, and always took care to provide for Mary’s material needs.211

 : , ,   The various strategies outlined so far were essentially attempts to hang on to a marriage in the face of violence, betrayal, or neglect. It is hardly surprising, however, that in extreme circumstances some women felt driven to abandon the marriage altogether. Some sought a separation, either informally or through the courts. Daniel Rogers, writing in 1642, was dismayed to see couples ‘of all sorts . . . abandoning each other by law or lawless divorce’, a practice he complained was common at all social levels. Richard Snawsell agreed, condemning wives who refused to work at problems that any couple might encounter: ‘if so be they cannot agree upon everything, then straight nothing but separation’.212 But in practice, formal separation was a difficult course for women, and offered only limited benefits. Divorce in its modern form was unavailable, and a wife who secured a judicial separation through the spiritual courts (divorce a mensa et thoro) had no right to remarry, lost custody of any children, and received no guarantee of financial provision. Alimony, when awarded, was often hard to enforce. She might also face harassment and intimidation, both during the judicial proceedings and later. In one case, probably not untypical, a court heard that Richard Massam, a London dyer, had continued to beat and abuse his wife after their separation, and refused to pay her bills for board and lodging. Relatives were generally reluctant to shoulder the burden of a runaway wife, and by offering shelter became liable to prosecution themselves for detaining a woman from her lawful husband. Kin usually pressed runaway wives to return to their husbands, whatever dangers might await them.213 The courts took a similar line. When Richard Dutton told the Leicester archdeaconry court in 1621 that his wife Lettice had left him for coming home drunk and hitting her, the court ordered her to return.214 The courts also shared the widespread 211 W. J. Hardy (ed.), Middlesex County Records: Calendar of the Sessions Books 1689 to 1709 (1905), 13, 157, 161, 170. A gunsmith who had kept his wife locked in a dark room without food was ordered to pay 4s. a week to the churchwardens to provide for her separate maintenance: ibid. 23; cf. 206. 212 Rogers, Matrimoniall Honour, 13, 218; R. Snawsell, Looking-Glasse, 77; Amussen, Ordered Society, 124–6, Gowing, Domestic Dangers, 180–4. 213 BCB 5, fo. 108v; Stretton, Women Waging Law, 143–5, 187–9. For attempts to enforce alimony see e.g. Tait (ed.), Lancashire Quarter Sessions Records, 129; Sachse (ed.), Minutes of the Norwich Court 1632–1635, 164. 214 LRO, 1D 41/13/54, fo. 73.

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view that male adultery constituted no proper ground for divorce. The letter of the law said otherwise, however, and we find some women insisting on their rights in the face of considerable pressure. When Anne Whitshall sued for divorce in 1591 on the grounds of her husband’s adultery, the judge urged her to reconsider, but Anne retorted that ‘if this judge would not divorce them another should do it’, and had her way. Ann Bethell, a stocking-maker’s wife from Wakefield, was similarly determined. When stopped and questioned at Leicester in June 1660 she explained that she was on her way to London ‘to ask law and saith that her husband is an harlot and hath committed fornication with several women’ she named. The church courts, abolished in the 1640s, had not yet been revived, and Bethell was seeking a friend’s advice on how best to proceed.215 Such cases suggest what a determined individual might achieve, though powerful economic, social, and cultural pressures kept many women trapped in deeply unhappy marriages. Divorce cases are often well documented, and some reveal in harrowing detail how much a wife might have to endure before the case even reached the courts. The wretched story of Anne Ashton of Hanging Highton, Northants., was by no means unique. John Ashton, of fringe gentry status, married Anne Sherman at St Mary’s Leicester in April 1627. The marriage proved disastrous from the start. He beat her on the third night, and frequently thereafter. Within a few months Anne had fled, taking shelter with relations in the same village. When her father and a minister arrived to investigate, Ashton barred them from the house and made wild allegations of adultery against his wife. When they questioned Anne, ‘she did piteously cry out and complained [that] her husband had stricken her upon the face and almost beaten out her eye’. Village women had examined her injuries and reported ‘that her body was almost black and blue all over with strokes and blows’. Anne and her father complained to a local justice, Sir Justinian Isham, and secured a warrant binding Ashton to the peace. Armed with this protection she was persuaded to return home, but within a week the beatings resumed and intensified. Anne turned again to Isham, who this time committed Ashton to prison. On his release the violence resumed once more, and he submitted Anne to cruel indignities such as forcing her into a swilling tub (used for pigfeed), and jeering that ‘he did it to wash her clogged tail’. Afraid she might run away again, he bound her to a bedpost for two days, naked and without food, and threatened her with a knife. Soon after he took her to a pit 215 GL, MS 9064/13, fos. 132v–133v (the surname appears in several forms); LRO, BR II/18/29B/930. For women separating or divorcing because of male adultery see e.g. LRO, 1D 41/4/1148; Gowing, Domestic Dangers, 188; Amussen, Ordered Society, 128.

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where he threatened to cut out her tongue, slit her nose, and kill her. Anne fled again at the first opportunity, in fear of her life, and sued for divorce in 1630. Her story was corroborated by numerous witnesses, including villagers and servants. One maidservant described how her terrified mistress would creep into her bed during the night for safety and comfort. Ashton admitted tying his wife to the bedpost and beating her, though protesting it was only with ‘a little small horse rod’. What makes the story significant is how long the justice, Anne’s father, and the minister persisted in seeking a reconciliation in the face of overwhelming evidence that Ashton was mentally unbalanced. After Anne’s first flight they took her back home, and though he met them brandishing a sword, they persuaded him to take her back. Equally striking is Ashton’s determination to fight the divorce. He insisted they had lived happily together, a claim contradicted by his own testimony, and on one occasion took her to Kettering to make her testify before the earl of Manchester that he was a loving husband. Though there were some financial issues at stake, his appalling behaviour seems to have been driven by a compound of loathing and refusal to face the public humiliation of a divorce. The parallels with Anne Bronte’s Tenant of Wildfell Hall are striking. Anne herself employed all the strategies available to a battered wife, turning to neighbours, relations, and the law for protection, and all three provided valuable support. But her kinsfolk clearly saw divorce as an unwelcome option, bringing shame and a financial burden, and only when she was facing the threat of mutilation and death did they accept that the marriage was beyond repair.216 Women of Anne’s status were less well integrated into parish life and may have been particularly vulnerable, for neighbours could exert less pressure. But women at all social levels knew the difficulties of suing a combative husband for divorce. How would they live while the case was pending, and where? Who would protect them from his vengeance? In most of the separation suits brought by women, the plaintiff had already found a refuge, and was looking to safeguard and regularize her position; divorce followed the marital split, rather than paving the way. And it generally became an option only when friends and kin had been forced to accept that reconciliation was now out of the question. Neighbours in Woodthorpe, Leics., had little choice but to recognize that William Burbadge’s marriage was beyond repair when he drove his wife Agnes out of the house, beat her in the street with a rope’s end, and hit her on the head with a hammer, threatening further violence if she returned. When 216

LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 8/1–11.

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she sued for divorce, in 1589, even William’s own brother was ready to testify against him.217 Many women remained sceptical that separation could solve their problems. If their husbands were likely to resist, perhaps violently, and friends were unwilling to protect them, it would solve nothing.218 Some preferred simply to run away, placing themselves beyond the reach of both husbands and courts, and occasionally leaving their children behind too.219 The most promising course was to head for the capital, which offered anonymity and plentiful job opportunities. Alice Millikin, for example, left her ‘froward’ husband, a Herefordshire glover, and found work in London as a cleaner and nurse. Mary Cale, who married in Gloucestershire in 1686 aged 21, ‘lived crossly’ with her new husband for only a few weeks before fleeing to the capital, where she went into service.220 Joan Huggins endured eight years with her husband before leaving in 1599 because of his ‘intolerable hard usage’; she too headed for London. Another runaway had come all the way from Cumberland.221 Such stories were commonplace. Sometimes runaways passed themselves off as widows or spinsters, and some remarried bigamously; Grace Adams, arrested in 1640 for consorting with married men, was ‘suspected to have two or three husbands’ already.222 For poor women trapped in a violent marriage, especially if childless, flight held many advantages over divorce, offering immediate release and the chance of a fresh start. The obvious downside was financial insecurity, especially for older women unwilling to return to domestic service, and those afraid to face London alone. A few older women found shelter with grown-up children, and some younger wives sought a temporary refuge with their parents, but these were solutions not often available.223 It took considerable courage to run away with little money and no guarantee of finding work or safety. If some women were prepared to 217

LRO, 1D 41/4/442; Amussen, ‘Being stirred’, 79. Hindle, ‘Keeping the Public Peace’, 232; Earle, City Full of People, 236. For rare examples of women apparently securing separation agreements on their own terms see Brief Relation of . . . Wessel Goodwin. 219 Sachse (ed.), Minutes of the Norwich Court 1632–1635, 160; Underdown, Fire from Heaven, 71, 163. 220 A True Account of the Behaviour and Confession of Alice Millikin (1686), 1–2; The True Account of the Behaviour and Confession of the Criminals Condemned [on 22 May 1686], 2–3; LRO, 1D 41/13/38, fo. 35v. 221 BCB 4, fo. 254; BCB 8, fo. 295v. 222 BCB 8, fo. 304v; Amussen, Ordered Society, 124–6. 223 Refuge with children: LRO, 1D 41/13/37, fo. 9; Gough, History of Myddle, 201. With parents: LRO, 1D 41/13/54, fo. 73; 1D 41/13/36, fo. 25v; 1D 41/13/50, fo. 67;1D41/4, Box 6/82–5. 218

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face the risks, others tarried in the hope of a more attractive ‘solution’, usually in the shape of another man who would promise to keep them if they went away together.224 Thomas Hunt, a merchant in South Moulton, Devon, appealed in the London newspapers in 1657 for word of his runaway wife Elizabeth, who had absconded with a young schoolmaster after embezzling her husband’s goods to the value of £200. She had left her six children behind. Running away with a lover carried risks too, of course. Promises often proved short-lived, and some were patently insincere. Thomas Hunt described his runaway wife as a fat woman of 40, with deep-set eyes, rotten teeth, and a shrivelled breast. If that unflattering account suggests he was primarily concerned to recover his money, it also raises questions about the motives of her young and impoverished rescuer.225 Alice Taylor, a runaway laundress, recalled in 1578 how she had complained about her husband one day to an employer who promptly offered to ‘help her to a friend that should maintain her’; Taylor swallowed her scruples and ran off to Essex with her saviour who, she discovered, was expecting to be kept by her rather than keep her.226 Some runaway wives were quickly abandoned. One man admitted beating his new partner when he tired of her, to drive her away; another turned out to be married already, a fact his companion discovered only after she had conveyed most of her husband’s goods to him.227 Such cautionary tales explain the brutal realism of Ellen Goulsborough, who ‘inveigled’ a man to go away with her in 1621 and ‘told him, that if he forsook her, she would cut his throat or poison him’.228 Flight was not the only desperate remedy when a relationship foundered. It had little attraction for a woman who had children to care for, or a lover close by with whom she dreamed of establishing a new and better home. And some women, driven by hatred, were looking for revenge as well as escape. Contemporaries were wearily familiar with marriages that had degenerated into a state of open warfare, like that of a couple presented at Ely in 1575 ‘for brawling, scolding, and fighting one with another, to the great disquietness of their neighbours’.229 Some women devised rather more subtle means of retaliation. The narratives in divorce suits were usually fiercely contested, but indicate the range of tactics available to a woman seeking revenge as well as liberty. A tradesman’s wife might inflict serious financial damage by selling her 224 225 226 227 228 229

LRO, 1D 41/13/35, fo. 116v; BCB 5, 4 Mar. 1609, fo. 381; Ashley, Casebook, 45–6. The Public Adviser, 16 (31 Aug.–7 Sept. 1657), 272. BCB 3, fos. 286–7. BCB 5, fo. 381, BCB 4, fo. 39v; cf. BCB 4, fo. 71v. BCB 6, 13 and 21 July 1621. CUL, EDR D2/9, fo. 150v; cf. GL, MS 9064/13, fo. 96; BCB 7, fo. 191.

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husband’s goods and disposing of the proceeds. She could run up large debts in his name without his knowledge, and spread damaging stories to undermine his credit, both moral and financial. Robert Burnam’s wife had libels scattered about the streets to blacken her husband’s reputation.230 George Parker, a late seventeenth-century cutler and astrologer, accused his wife of cynically engineering his ruin and bankruptcy, and the couple rehearsed their battles in the popular press in a manner familiar in our own times. Parker’s wife claimed he had beaten and imprisoned her and seduced their maid, and told her story to his arch-rival John Partridge, who published it with relish and withering scorn in his almanac.231 Such domestic wars of attrition were by no means rare, if rarely so public. Charles Pepys, a London tobacconist, accused his wife of running up ruinous debts in his name, arranging for his house to be burgled, threatening to burn it down, and telling him she would happily contract the pox if she could pass it on to him.232 Isabella Collens, a farm labourer’s wife, absconded after selling almost all his household goods, ‘leaving scarce a pair of sheets’; she reappeared thirteen years later, demanding money but still refusing to live with him.233 An embittered wife who had found a lover would often purloin her husband’s money and sell or pawn his goods, and then convey the proceeds to her new partner. Lettice Betts, an Essex labourer’s wife who ran away with another man in 1609, admitted giving him most of her husband’s goods, including bedding, brass, and pewter. A London woman was accused of running up large debts in her husband’s name and conspiring with her lover to have him pressed into the navy. John Bodgyard, a Cambridgeshire shepherd, claimed that his wife and her lover had systematically plotted his ruin, robbing his house while he was at church, and bribing the maid to accuse him of rape, a capital offence.234 The women in all these cases would have their own version of events, but we should not underestimate the ability of an embittered and determined wife to inflict serious injury on her partner. The ultimate weapon of revenge was of course murder. Homicidal wives, far rarer than murdering husbands, held a morbid fascination for contemporaries. The murder of Arden of Faversham in 1551 by his wife’s 230

Burnam, Remonstance, title-page, sig. B. Parker, Ephemeris for 1699, sig. B2v–4v; J. Partridge, Flagitiosus Mercurius Flagellatus (1697), passim; id., Merlinus Liberatus . . . for 1699, sig. C7v–8r; see also Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, forthcoming), s.v. Parker. 232 Bodleian, MS Rawlinson B382, fos. 168–71. 233 LRO, 1D 41/4/1169. 234 BCB 5, 4 Mar. 1609; Bodleian MS Rawlinson B382, fos. 274–93; CUL, EDR K5/127; cf. LRO, 1D 41/4/1169; Melville, ‘Use and Organization of Domestic Space’, 191. 231

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lover, and at her instigation, was remembered for decades, and inspired a popular play.235 Despite the gruesome penalty, burning at the stake, we can find a steady trickle of murderous wives throughout the period, usually employing poison to achieve their goal. Daniel Rogers claimed in 1642 that poisoning by both wives and husbands had become so common that such cases came before almost every assize.236 Despite the alarmist rhetoric such murders were in fact rare, and many ‘suspicious’ deaths from food poisoning were probably accidental. The strength of male fears and neighbours’ suspicions tells its own story, however, about the politics of failing marriages. Men suing for divorce on the grounds of adultery quite often also claimed that their wives had threatened or attempted to kill them. Such a claim, of course, enabled the plaintiff to appear as the victim of a female monster rather than a pitiful cuckold, and men (like women) certainly shaped their narratives to convey an image of injured innocence.237 But we should recognize that at least some of these threats may well have been real—if usually an expression of rage and frustration, ‘fantasy aggression’, rather than serious intent.238 The Bridewell records show several women accused of beating and threatening to kill their husbands, while Susan Poole, a gentleman’s wife, was committed in 1614 for conspiring with Dorothy Magick of Holborn to kill her husband and mother-in-law by witchcraft.239 And it was not unknown for men to have their own wives bound over to the peace, despite the humiliation in taking such a step. Henry Thornton of Leicester had his wife Elizabeth bound over on 20 October 1653 after swearing she had ‘this morning run at him with a naked sword three times’, vowing to kill him and making him fear for his life.240 235 F. E. Dolan, Dangerous Familiars: Representations of Domestic Crime in England 1550–1700 (1994), chs. 1–2; Sharpe, ‘Domestic Homicide’; J. Wiltenburg, Disorderly Women and Female Power in the Street Literature of Early Modern England and Germany (1992), 212, 214–20; L. B. Faller, Turned to Account: The Forms and Functions of Criminal Biography in Late Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1987); Chapman, ‘Representation of Murder’; M. L. Wine (ed.), The Tragedy of Master Arden of Faversham (1973) . 236 Rogers, Matrimoniall Honour, 67. In addition to the pamphlets listed by Faller and Chapman, see for poisoning cases e.g. Cockburn (ed.), Calendar: Essex: Elizabeth, 108, 502; id. (ed.), Calendar: Kent: Elizabeth (1979), 104, 326; id. (ed.), Calendar: Kent: James I (1980), 5; Jeaffreson (ed.), Middlesex County Records, ii. 48; iii. 42, 79; iv. 60, 322. 237 e.g. LRO, 1D 41/4/353; Bodleian MS Rawlinson B382, fo. 169. See Gowing, Domestic Dangers, 228–9; Stretton, Women Waging Law, 200; Sharpe, ‘Domestic Homicide’, 44. 238 D. LeVine, ‘Anthropology and the Study of Conflict: An Introduction’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 5 (1961). 239 BCB 1, fo. 121; BCB 7, fo. 73v; BCB 8, fo. 119v; Le Hardy (ed.), Middlesex: Calendar,  i. 376–7 (for Magick see also ibid. ii. 20). 240 LRO, BR II/18/27/573; cf. Jeaffreson (ed.), Middlesex County Records, ii. 185; LRO, BR II/18/25/762.

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Domestic homicides by women fall into three broad categories. In the first, most shocking to contemporaries, came women who had found a lover and sought to rid themselves of an unwanted husband. The second, almost equally scandalous, comprised wives who repaid an abusive husband in kind, locking the pair into a cycle of domestic brawls that could end in a fatality on either side. The third consisted of more passive women, subjected to years of brutality and neglect, who had finally struck back, either in self-defence or driven beyond endurance. These alone received a measure of sympathy. These categories often overlapped, of course, for a wife might turn to adultery and murder only after years of unbearable abuse. But it would be naïve to assume that every adulterous and homicidal wife was necessarily a victim. Some appear to have been cynically calculating, like Petronella Brightred of Chiddingstone, Kent, who conspired with Thomas Hayward to poison their respectivespouses in 1581, and then married each other.241 Alice Dorrell, who ran off with a Dutchman in 1618, had allegedly ‘called her husband cuckold and slave, and told him that she hated him and loved another, and that unless he would refrain her bed and company she would cut his throat’. Whatever her grievances, such words hardly suggest a downtrodden victim. There is no evidence that Dorrell tried to carry out her threat, and many other threats and alleged conspiracies may have been only half-serious.242 In other cases the tragedy unfolded. In 1665 Mary Dale, a London gentlewoman, persuaded her lover to murder her husband and then married him, while in 1686 Esther Ives, a Hampshire victualler’s wife, joined with her lover to strangle him one night.243 In other cases, suspicions triggered an indictment but failed to convince the jury. Joan Beaumont, tried in 1614 for poisoning her husband, had probably invited attention by her previous conduct and an overhasty remarriage to the blacksmith charged as her accessory; even so she was acquitted.244 The second category, long-standing marital feuds that ended fatally, is well represented by the story of Katherine Francis of Cow-cross, Middlesex, burned in 1629 for stabbing her husband after a quarrel. It was reported that both were inflamed by drink, and had lived together ‘like cat 241

Cockburn (ed.), Calendar: Kent: Elizabeth, 202. BCB 6, fo. 81; cf. BCB 4, fo. 71v. 243 Jeaffreson (ed.), Middlesex County Records, iv. 7; A Full and True Account of a Most Barbarous and Bloody Murder, Committed by Esther Ives (1686) cf. Heywood, Autobiography, iii. 205; Sharpe, ‘Domestic Homicide’, 42; Dolan, Dangerous Familiars, 38–41. 244 Cockburn (ed.), Calendar: Kent: James I, 129; The Diary of Henry Machyn, ed. J. G. Nichols (Camden Soc., 42, 1847), 22, 29–30; Cockburn (ed.), Calendar: Essex: Elizabeth, 502. 242

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and dog’, trading insults and blows.245 Prudence Lee was burned at Smithfield in 1652 after stabbing her husband when she found him in an alehouse with another woman. She confessed to being ‘a very lewd liver, and much given to cursing and swearing’, while her husband was described as equally wicked and habitually unfaithful.246 In a much earlier case, in 1556, a coroner’s inquest on a London cobbler stabbed to death by his wife found they had been brawling ‘on equal terms’ and ruled that his death was an accident, by ‘the mischance called chance medley’.247 Such even-handedness is rarely found in the later Tudor or Stuart period, when juries might recognize that the victim had been partly to blame, but had no hesitation in finding his wife guilty of petty treason. In 1698 however an Old Bailey jury took pity on Elizabeth Flower of Stepney, who had killed her husband by throwing a fire-poker at his head. The court heard there had been a fierce quarrel, that she had been greatly provoked, that her husband had first thrown a fire-shovel and -poker at her, and that previously they had lived amicably together. The jury found her guilty only of manslaughter, and Flower was burned in the hand rather than being burned at the stake, almost certainly her fate a generation earlier.248 The third category of homicide, most relevant here, comprises women with deep-rooted grievances. Contemporaries recognized that some were victims of prolonged abuse, and had snapped only after years of violence, often compounded by adultery and neglect.249 Elizabeth Spinkes, who tried but failed to kill her husband, told how he had beaten her with a horse-rod and consigned her to a lunatic asylum to make her sign over her property; in despair she had resorted to witches in an attempt to kill him by sorcery, declaring later that she would do anything, ‘so she might be revenged of him’.250 Some men aroused even more intense loathing. A Kent assize jury in 1665 found that John Davis of Betteshanger had been murdered by his daughter Susan, who had added rat poison to his beer, and that his wife, another daughter, and a maidservant were all complicit. All four women were sentenced to hang.251 245 M. Parker, ‘A Warning for Wives’, in Pepys Ballads, i. 118; Jeaffreson (ed.), Middlesex County Records, iii. 26; cf. Cockburn (ed.), Calendar: Kent: James, 5. 246 The Witch of Wapping (1652), 7–8; see also A Warning for Bad Wives: or, the Manner of the Burning of Sarah Elston (1678), 6–7, and below, n. 259. 247 Jeaffreson (ed.), Middlesex County Records, i. 27–8. 248 OBSP 4–9 May 1698, 2, 6. 249 Dolan, Dangerous Familiars, 32–8. 250 Hunt, ‘Wife Beating’, 20–2; P. Mack, Visionary Women (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1989), 30. 251 Cockburn (ed.), Calendar: Kent: Charles II, 1660–1675 (1995), 151.

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Margaret Pinchbeck of Pickering, Yorkshire, was equally desperate. Rising from her bed one night in October 1671, she fetched an axe from the cupboard and smashed her husband’s skull as he lay sleeping. Earlier that night he had beaten her with a stick, as probably on many other occasions, and she showed no sign of remorse; ‘he had done her a great injury and deserved it’, she told a neighbour.252 The case of Mary Hobry (or Aubry), a middle-aged French Huguenot midwife, revealed another history of abuse. Her marriage to Denis Hobry in 1684 proved disastrous from the start: for he beat and threatened to kill her, demanded money, and insisted on sexual practices she regarded as ‘villainies contrary to nature’. She left him for two years, but unwisely resumed cohabitation when he promised to reform. The murder occurred one night in 1688 when he reeled home at 5 a.m., drunk, abusive, and violent. A reporter who attended her trial observed with disgust that he had been ‘a libertine and debauchee of the highest order’.253 In cases like these contemporaries felt pity for the desperate wife, but generally accepted that the law must take its course. By contrast, commentators voiced outrage when they felt women had nurtured a murderous rage on what appeared to be trivial grounds, especially if they had fanned their grievances among their gossips. Libbeus Chamberlen told the mayor of Leicester in 1650 that lying in bed one day he heard his wife downstairs complaining to her mother, widow Norrice, who declared that ‘she would pull his heart out of his belly before she would live with him in this manner’. Norrice asked ‘whether she had never a fire pan nor nothing in the house to knock him on the head, and said if it were her case she would run a spit in his belly’. When he came downstairs they both roundly abused him, and his wife later tried to stab him with a knife. Chamberlen had his mother-in-law bound over to the peace, and when he died the following year the mayor examined the two women and called in a surgeon to see if there had been foul play.254 Reckless comments of this kind did occasionally end in disaster. Elizabeth Caldwell, who poisoned her husband in 1603, had been urged on by two friends, and all three women were subsequently executed. Anne Hamton of Westminster, described as a ‘light huswife’ who spent her time ‘gossiping with one young fellow or another, or else with such women as were like herself’, complained about her husband in 1641 to their landlady, who declared ‘it was her own fault, for letting such an abject villain to live’. 252

Raine (ed.), Depositions from York Castle, 185–7. A Hellish Murder committed by a French Midwife (1688), 30, 39, and passim; Jeaffreson (ed.), Middlesex County Records, iv. 322; Dolan, Dangerous Familiars, 34–5, 37. 254 LRO, BR II/18/25/762; BR II/18/26A/145 . 253

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Anne responded, allegedly, by poisoning him.255 Richard Gough of Myddle told the chilling tale of several women who had similarly discussed their grievances, and how three then agreed to poison their husbands on the same night; one man died, and ‘the other two escaped very hardly’.256 The stories of murderous wives were often reported in the press in considerable detail. Such accounts were essentially normative, stressing the wife’s rebellion against her husband’s authority and underlining women’s passionate and irresponsible nature. Ballad narratives were often placed in the mouths of the penitent offenders, who call on others to avoid such folly. ‘Then hasty harebrained wives take heed, | of me a warning take’, cries one murderess as she goes to the stake.257 In Anne Wallens Lamentation, a ballad of a joiner’s wife burned at Smithfield in 1616, the eponymous narrator accepts full responsibility for her husband’s death and her own fate, admitting how she had railed at him as a drunken sot and flung a chisel at him when he tried to silence her. The husband is patient and loving, even as he expires, his wife rash and vindictive.258 Pamphlet accounts similarly urged women to submit to domestic authority for their own good. The story of Sarah Elston, who stabbed her husband with a pair of scissors, was published under the title A Warning to Bad Wives, while another crime was narrated under the biblical injunction ‘Women love your husbands’. These pamphlets were also normative in a wider sense, emphasizing the disastrous consequences of an unsuitable marriage, and of irresponsible behaviour by either partner. The story of Margaret Osgood served to illustrate both themes. Unfaithful to her first husband, she then married his servant, half her age, within a month of being widowed. The failure of such a match would have been no surprise, and after many bitter quarrels she killed her husband with a rusty hatchet one summer evening in 1680. The published narrative described how the parish constable found her at home next morning sitting calmly at her work in a lower room, while blood dripped through the floorboards above ‘in great abundance’. This chilling scene (anticipating Hardy’s Tess) underlined the ‘unnaturalness’ of Margaret’s behaviour and her utter moral degradation.259 255 A True Discourse of the Practices of Elizabeth Caldwell (1604), passim; Murther, Murther. Or, a bloody Relation how Anne Hamton . . . murthered her deare Husband (1641). In the event she was acquitted: Jeaffreson (ed.), Middlesex County Records, iii. 79. 256 Gough, History of Myddle, 148. 257 ‘A Warning for all Desperate Women, by the example of Alice Davis’, Pepys Ballads, i. 120; Wiltenburg, Disorderly Women, 214–20; Dolan, Dangerous Familiars, chs. 1–2; Faller, Turned to 258 Pepys Ballads, i. 124. Account, ch. 2. 259 Dreadful News from Southwark: or, a true Account of . . . Margaret Osgood (1680).

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The message of these pamphlets was thus wholly in line with conventional wisdom: domestic harmony was likely only when a marriage was well advised and both partners adhered to the patterns of behaviour spelled out in sermons, conduct-books, ballads, and chapbooks. But the stress on marital reciprocity made their message more than a simple demand for female subordination. While rebellious wives had condemned themselves to a terrible death at the stake, many narratives carried an implicit warning that a tyrannical husband might provoke his own destruction. The pamphleteer reporting the case of Margaret Hobry, the French midwife, made it plain that her husband was a blackguard who had driven her beyond endurance and deserved no pity. Murderpamphlets, like conduct-books, taught that domestic authority was to be exercised with moderation and restraint. Moralists stressed that it was a mark of the man’s superior wisdom not always to insist on his rights; acceding to his wife’s wishes or fears demonstrated magnanimity, and preserved harmony without jeopardizing his authority. William Gouge argued that tyranny was inherently destabilizing, breeding hatred and rebellion.260 Murder-pamphlets conveyed the same broad message, showing that domestic authority rested ultimately on moderation and consent. Men were reminded of their vulnerability every time they ate or slept, and warned that domestic tyrants might invite their own nemesis. Some embittered women may have consciously played on such fears. If many alleged death threats were spontaneous outbursts of anger, others may represent a calculated if desperate defensive stratagem. And if the burning of a murdering wife sent a warning to other rebellious women, her terrible crime may have made some tyrannical husbands pause for thought. None of the strategies available to women trapped in bad marriages could guarantee success, and some carried heavy risks. It is clear that many women were nonetheless determined to play some part in shaping their own lives; they were agents as well as victims, and aware of several courses of action which held out at least some prospect of relief. While some turned to the law to curb a violent, wastrel, or philandering husband, they mostly relied on their own efforts and the support of their kinsfolk, friends, and neighbours. Much depended on the individual’s resourcefulness and her standing within the neighbourhood, for the ‘law of good neighbourliness’ was a complex and contradictory code; contemporaries believed in non-interference as well as neighbourly help. A woman’s best prospects generally lay in triggering the active support of 260

Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties, 396–7.

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her gossips by working with the grain of community opinion, appealing simultaneously to their compassion, solidarity, and self-interest. The same ground rules applied to women drawn into disputes with their neighbours, as we will see. But first we need to consider another important dimension of the politics of the household: the position of female servants, and their relations with their employers. And in this context the housewife appears in a very different guise as one of the rulers, not the ruled.

4 Maidservants and the Politics of the Household

E modern households, even of quite modest status, often contained at least one servant in addition to parents and children. The numbers involved were huge. Ann Kussmaul has estimated that 60 per cent of young people aged 15–24 were living as servants under an employer’s roof, making service part of the life cycle for most people, of both sexes. Young women in the country worked mainly as farm servants, while two-thirds of London’s spinsters in the period 1695–1725 were living as domestic servants. A significant number of older women, widows or lifelong single women, worked as live-in servants too.1 A much smaller number of girls were apprenticed, either to a trade or housework. Employers generally used these young women as they saw fit, setting domestics to spin or knit, and apprentices to domestic chores.2 Farm servants helped with domestic tasks too; a Leicestershire maid harvested peas and washed clothes on the same day, while Henry Best expected his maids to brew, bake, clean the house, and wash dishes as well as milk cows.3 Not all young women went into service, however. Many from more prosperous homes lived with their parents until they married, and a daughter was sometimes needed to manage the household if her mother was incapacitated or dead. Moreover, not all rural spinsters were able to 1 A. Kussmaul, Servants in Husbandry in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1981), 3 and passim; D. Woodward, ‘Early Modern Servants in Husbandry Revisited’, Agricultural History Review, 48 (2000); P. Earle, ‘The Female Labour Market in London in the Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries’, EcHR, 2nd ser., 42 (1989), 339–40, 344; P. Griffiths, Youth and Authority: Formative Experiences in England 1560–1640 (Oxford, 1996); I. Krausman Ben-Amos, Adolescence and Youth in Early Modern England (1994); A. Froide, ‘Single Women, Work, and Community in Southampton, 1550–1750’ (Ph.D. thesis, Duke University, 1996); Judith M. Bennett and Amy M. Froide (eds.), Singlewomen in the European Past, 1250–1800 (Pennsylvania, 1999); Mendelson and Crawford, Women, 92–108, 165–74; B. Hill, Servants: English Domestics in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1996); ead., Women, Work, and Sexual Politics in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford, 1989), chs. 5, 6, 8. 2 See e.g. GL, MS 9585, fo. 178; A True Relation of a Horrid Murder committed upon . . . Thomas Kidderminster (1688), 15; The Works of Thomas Deloney, ed. F. O. Mann (Oxford, 1912), 222–3; Froide, ‘Single Women, Work, and Community’, 250. 3 LRO, 1D 41/13/76, fo. 69; The Farming and Memorandum Books of Henry Best of Elmswell, 1642, ed. D. Woodward (1984), 141–2; The Autobiography of William Stout of Lancaster 1665–1752, ed. J. D. Marshall (Manchester, 1967), 192.

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find places in farm service, for in arable areas demand was limited. We find many spinsters living ‘at their own hands’, especially in towns, by spinning, knitting, or charring. But the state viewed service as the appropriate condition for ordinary young women, and service threw into starkest relief the gendered issues of authority, compliance, agency, and resistance with which this chapter is primarily concerned. How did maidservants experience service in this period? And how far might they hope to shape the conditions of their daily lives? The scale and diversity of service prevents any easy generalizations. There was no ‘typical’ experience of service, just as there was no ‘typical’ marriage, though both were clearly shaped by social and cultural expectations. Historians have only begun to explore the subject, and are far from agreed. Ilana Krausman Ben-Amos, drawing on memoirs and diaries, believes most servants of both sexes passed through this stage without much difficulty, and sees it as a process by which each generation acquired the skills and values of its elders. By contrast Paul Griffiths’s work, resting in part on the London Bridewell records, paints a much darker picture, while Tim Meldrum has stressed the sexual vulnerability of female servants.4 Eighteenth-century historians differ just as sharply. Some argue that market forces enabled domestic servants to secure far better wages and conditions than the poor could hope to find elsewhere. But Bridget Hill depicts a world of hardship, poverty, and sexual vulnerability, and echoes Cissie Fairchild’s bleak view of employers and servants as ‘domestic enemies’.5 These conflicting views arise partly from disparate source materials, but reflect too the immense variety of lived experience. It is not hard to find relationships based on mutual trust and affection, and sometimes continuing long after the servant had moved on. It is also true that in larger households a servant might aspire to a more comfortable and privileged position as a chambermaid or housekeeper. Contemporaries agreed, however, that the typical servant’s attributes placed her near the bottom of the social hierarchy: female, single, young, ill-paid, and of lowly birth. Over half of all the households with domestic servants in late seventeenth-century London employed only a single ‘maid-of-all-work’, burdened with a daily round of heavy and dirty chores.6 Servants could be beaten at their employers’ discretion, and faced many other hardships and dangers they were ill-placed to resist. 4 See n. 1, above, and T. Meldrum, Domestic Service and Gender 1660–1750: Life and Work in the London Household (Harlow, 2000), esp. ch. 4. 5 For a brief introduction to the debate see Hill, Servants, ch. 1, passim , esp. p. 6; cf. C. Fairchild, Domestic Enemies: Servants and their Masters in Old Regime France (Baltimore, 1984). 6 P. Earle, The Making of the English Middle Class (1989), 218–29; Hill, Servants, chs. 5–7.

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It would be easy to present the servant’s tale as a simple story of oppression and exploitation, and multiply examples. But court cases represent, by definition, relationships that had broken down, and tell us little about more general patterns. Narratives of exploitation, and counter-narratives of affection and trust, show us experiences at opposite ends of the spectrum, but the main focus of this chapter lies elsewhere. Given that service was characterized by low wages, restricted freedom, and subordination, we need to ask by what means servants might hope to improve their situation or vent their frustrations and resentment. Though they were vulnerable and frequently exploited, it does not follow that servants were necessarily passive or helpless. Indeed, their situation obliged them to develop survival skills, and like other subordinate groups, many also engaged in covert forms of resistance, an aspect of service that has been largely overlooked.7 Before we explore these themes, however, we need to sketch the legal framework of service.

    Servants, of either sex, entered into a contract which imposed obligations on both parties. Employers undertook to provide food, lodging, training, wages, and sometimes clothes. The servant undertook to be obedient, honest, and diligent, and to submit to appropriate discipline. Servants in agriculture and trades were required under the Act of Artificers (1563) to serve for at least a year.8 Farm servants usually took up a new position in the autumn, often at a Michaelmas hiring-fair, sometimes taking a few days’ holiday with family or friends before completing the move. One Yorkshire case, involving a maidservant hired at a fair at Rotherham in November 1641, shows that the constable had recorded the agreement in writing, which may have been common practice.9 The 1563 Act imposed quite severe penalties on servants who left before their year had expired, and employers who discharged them without good cause.10 Servants were required to give three months’ notice if they wished to leave at the end of the year, and to obtain a certificate of good character. Wage levels were to be determined by local justices. Domestic maidservants were not mentioned in the Act, creating some uncertainty over whether they were 7

J. C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance (New Haven, 1990). 5 Eliz. c.4. 9 Best, Farming Books, 141; GL, MS 9065A/1, fo. 81v; MS 9065A/8, fo. 144; J. Lister (ed.), West Riding Sessions Records, 1611–1642 (Yorkshire Archaeological Soc., 53, 1915), 362. 10 Most employers turned away pregnant or dishonest servants without seeking approval. 8

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covered by its terms.11 In practice annual contracts seem to have been normal for all maids in rural parishes, reflecting the fact that most were hired for a mixture of domestic and farm work. In towns, by contrast, periods were more variable, though service by the year, subject to three months’ notice on either side, seems to have been fairly standard outside London.12 The position of apprentices was very different: their families or friends had to pay a premium, they received no wages, at least initially, and were required to serve at least seven years. Many contemporary conduct-books spelled out the duties of servants, insisting they be honest, diligent, obedient, respectful, chaste, and, equally important, discreet. Servants ‘must preserve (by all good means) the reputation of their master and his family,’ wrote Samuel Cradock, ‘and not like idle tale-bearers, divulge everything done in the house, which is an unfaithfulness an honest servant should abhor’.13 Employers felt strongly on this issue, often with good reason (as we will see). William Gouge denounced tale-carriers as ‘treacherous spies, the most dangerous enemies that be’. One employer thought they should be banished, as in ancient Rome, while a London weaver’s wife warned a male servant in 1577 ‘that he must have his ears nailed if he bewrayed his master’s counsel except it were for felony, murder or treason’.14 While conduct-books were written for householders, guides appeared towards the end of the period aimed at servants themselves, offering advice on the problems and temptations they were likely to encounter. Richard Mayo’s A Present for Servants (1693) urged readers to show the ‘respectful honour that your place requireth’, however difficult. ‘It is hard to honour the fool, or reverence one that you frequently see in his vomit or drunkenness, or venom of malice and passion,’ Mayo conceded with startling frankness, but servants must remain ever discreet and respectful. And only ‘in case of the utmost extremity’ might they turn to the magistrate for redress.15 Hanna Wolley’s The Compleat Servant-Maid (1685) is particularly interesting as the first manual written by a woman. Its advice was largely conventional, urging diligence and obedience, and warning against the temptations of idle gossip, late-night ‘junketing’, and men 11 M. J. Hoad (ed.), Portsmouth Record Series: Borough Sessions Papers 1653–1688 (1971), 70 (where counsel advised that the Act did not cover domestic servants). Other magistrates took the opposite view: see n. 38, below. 12 See e.g. J. W. Horrocks (ed.), The Assembly Books of Southampton (Southampton Record Soc., 1917–25), ii. 3. 13 S. Cradock, Knowledge and Practice: or a Plain Discourse (1673), 29. 14 W. Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties (1622), 629; [Z. Crofton], Perjury the Proof of Forgery (1657), 5; BCB 3, fo. 268. 15 Mayo, A Present for Servants, 27–8, 36.

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trying to ‘court you to debauchery’. More striking are the assumptions that shaped her text, for Wolley presented service as a road to preferment, not an ordeal. By following her advice, she urged, the reader would increase her wages and vails (tips), and be well placed to secure a good position or a good husband: for ‘you will soon gain the title of a Complete Servant Maid, which may be the means of making you a good mistress’.16 We should remember, however, that she was addressing servants in large and comfortable households, not the illiterate maid-of-all-work hired by small tradesmen and tenant farmers. Conduct-books also listed the corresponding duties of employers, urging them to treat their servants fairly, pay wages promptly, provide for the sick, and allow time for recreation. Early modern conceptions of social order were rooted in the principle of reciprocal obligations, and many authors pulled no punches in condemning employers guilty of cruelty, exploitation, or neglect.17 Patrick Hannay reminded mistresses in 1619 that it was in their own interest to look after their servants, for neglect would inevitably breed treachery.18 Writers stressed too that discipline should be administered with restraint, and preferably by an employer of the same sex. An Elizabethan homily declared it shameful for a master to beat his maid, and Henry Smith explained in 1591 that ‘a man’s nature scorneth to be beaten of a woman, and a maid’s nature is corrupted with the stripes of a man’. Contemporaries were well aware of the sexual implications of men beating their maidservants, though it is debatable whose ‘nature’ was more likely to be corrupted. One pregnant servant accused her employer in 1605 of whipping her in the cellar and then forcing sex on her, and the Bridewell governors believed her story.19

 :    How far were these legal provisions and moral guidelines reflected in practice? Like most legislation of the period, the 1563 Act was patchily enforced. A memorandum of 1572 complained that servants often left before their year ended, and that many employers hired new ones without asking to see a certificate.20 North Yorkshire magistrates prosecuted 16

Wolley, Compleat Servant-Maid, sig. A4v, 9–12. Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties, 646–93; N. Bownde, The Doctrine of the Sabbath (1595), 91; T. Hilder, Conjugall Counsell (1653), 156–8. 18 P. Hannay, A Happy Husband or, Directions for a Maide (1619), sig. C4v. 19 Certain Sermons or Homilies (1851), 544–5; H. Smith, A Preparative to Marriage (1591), 97; Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties, 662; BCB 5, fo. 9r–v. 20 A. H. Bland, P. A. Brown, and R. H. Tawney (eds.), English Economic History: Select Documents (1914), 333–6. 17

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numerous servants and employers for various breaches of the statute in the early seventeenth century, but such zeal is rarely found elsewhere.21 Most employers appear to have hired servants on the strength of personal impressions and recommendations. Henry Best bargained directly with prospective servants at a hiring-fair, then checked with former employers to confirm their competence and character. Hiringfairs also enabled servants, of course, to swap notes on prospective employers.22 Women generally took charge of hiring domestic servants. In 1661 we find Elizabeth Pepys interviewing several applicants for a cook’s place, one of whom brought her mother along to advise; sometimes Elizabeth asked for references, sometimes not.23 In London we also find semi-professional brokers helping to place domestic servants, despite official disapproval. In 1580 a ward inquest jury in Cornhill presented among its abuses ‘the common women brokers for maidens as before’, a complaint it repeated for several years before giving up.24 The 1563 Act’s requirement for servants to produce a certificate from their previous employers was incorporated into Westminster’s by-laws, and repeated over a century later in A New Guide for Constables.25 Joyce Rower, who had moved from Uppingham to Leicester in 1650, was ordered to leave within a week when she was found without one.26 But it is unclear how often they were issued, and how often employers demanded to see them. They offered little protection, of course, if a servant had moved to a district where her former employers were unknown. Trials at the Old Bailey in the late seventeenth century suggest that many London employers did not bother to ask for references, or were easily deceived, for they show a procession of unscrupulous ‘servants’ accepting positions merely to rob their employers at the first opportunity. In 1684 21 J. C. Atkinson (ed.), Quarter Sessions Records (North Riding Record Soc., 1884–92), i. 33–4, 60–1, 180, 222; ii. 118; iii. 254; v. 205–6; J. Lister (ed.), West Riding Sessions Rolls, 1598–1602 (Yorkshire Archaeological Soc., 3, 1888), 87. 22 Best, Farming Books, 139–40; M. Roberts, ‘ “Waiting upon chance”: English Hiring Fairs and their Meanings from the 14th to the 20th Century’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 1 (1988). A servant who had hired herself to a Yorkshire master in 1641, concealing her pregnancy, was ordered by justices to be removed on the grounds that the constable had not asked to see a testimonial from her former employer; but this may have been merely opportunistic: Lister (ed.), West Riding Sessions Records, 362. 23 Pepys, Diary, ii. 196; cf. iii. 279; iv. 78–9, 131, 294, 320; vi. 40, 51; ix. 479, 481, 487. See also GL, MS 9065A/2, fos. 36v, 45; LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 18/56; Deloney, Works, 224. 24 GL, MS 4069/1, fos. 31, 36, 42, 44, 47, 49; BCB 6, 2 May 1618. On brokers see also ‘A Letter Sent by the Maydens of London (1567)’, ed. R. J. Fehrenbach, English Literary Renaissance, 14 (1984), 299, 303. 25 W. H. Manchée, The Westminster City Fathers (the Burgess Court of Westminster) 1585–1901 (1924), 214; J.P., A New Guide (1692), 47–8. 26 LRO, BR II/18/25/790.

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Margaret Paul robbed hers and fled after only three weeks, while they were attending their child’s funeral.27 Another waited only a week before stealing £130. Mary Stanley waited only two days, robbing the house she had been left to guard while her employers went to church. The certificate she had produced turned out to be forged.28 Mary Cary, who went by several aliases, was even more impatient; she had robbed her employers and fled within two hours of arriving.29 The backgrounds of such women, when revealed in court, suggest that employers had made little effort to investigate them. Ann Parker had allegedly made a living using false references to secure a position and rob each house the first night she was there. Elizabeth Gary, convicted in 1689, was found to be a ‘nightwalker’ and former inmate of Bridewell. Martha Hodskins, who stole silverware and fled after only two days, admitted she was married with a husband in gaol and three small children to maintain.30 Respectable householders would never have hired such people intentionally. In the countryside, however, the Elizabethan legislation seems to have been reasonably effective. Servants were hired by the year and very few were prosecuted for leaving early, suggesting this was not a significant problem. Offenders were generally sent back to complete their contracts.31 Employers felt able to dismiss servants on their own authority for serious misconduct, such as theft or pregnancy, but in less straightforward circumstances they might ask a magistrate’s permission, as the law required. A Leicestershire farmer whose maid kept suspicious company in defiance of his orders carried her before two justices in 1626 for permission to turn her away.32 In the case of apprentices, who were covered by formal indentures, employers generally sought authority from the courts to cancel their bonds. A Wiltshire weaver and his wife, who asked leave to dismiss their apprentice in 1636, complained that she was incorrigibly idle and had run away eighteen times.33 Domestic service appears to have been much less rigidly controlled. The diary of the clergyman Ralph Josselin in the 1640s indicates that he too hired his servants by the year, but the periods they actually served were two and five weeks; 27

OBSP 17–18 Jan. 1685, 2. OBSP 14–17 Jan. 1687, 3; OBSP 1, 3, 10 Sept. 1686, 1; cf. OBSP 31 May–1 June 1688, 1; OBSP 23–8 Feb. 1698, 1. 29 OBSP 17–18 July 1690, 1. 30 OBSP 8–9 Oct. 1684, 1–2; OBSP 28–9 Aug. 1689, 2; OBSP 27–8 Feb. 1684, 2. 31 WRO, CR103, p. 87; LRO, BR II/18/17/404; S. A. Peyton (ed.), Minutes of Proceedings in Quarter Sessions held for . . . Lincoln, 1674–1695 (Lincoln Record Soc., 1931), i. 356; W. L. Sachse (ed.), Minutes of the Norwich Court of Mayoralty 1632–1635 (Norfolk Record Soc., 36, 1967), 31. 32 LRO, 1D 41/13/58, fo. 113. 33 B. H. Cunnington (ed.), Records of the County of Wilts. (Devizes, 1932), 117; cf. Griffiths, Youth and Authority, 327–9. 28

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two, five and six months; one year (two individuals); and a year and threequarters. Two fell sick and returned home, one left to marry, and another moved to a better position at the squire’s house, by mutual consent.34 In London things were more flexible still. Samuel Pepys found it droll when a cookmaid asked for a contract for at least six months, and another insisted on a month’s trial before committing herself. His diary suggests, though, that employers and servants alike respected the obligation to give notice.35 If relations broke down altogether, the servant would usually leave forthwith, with wages in hand for the notice she should have worked. After a row in August 1663 Pepys’s cookmaid, Hannah, had packed and gone within fifteen minutes.36 We find a similar pattern in the regulation of wages, with magistrates able to enforce the Elizabethan legislation in the provinces but not the capital. Somerset justices held wages for agricultural maidservants at 40s. a year throughout the 1640s and 1650s, and we find one maid paid at that rate for eleven years.37 In North Yorkshire, magistrates fixed wages in 1658 at 40s. for cooks and dairymaids, with 30s. for ‘ordinary’ maids, and 20s. for those aged 14–21; a generation later, Hertfordshire justices awarded £2. 10s. for dairymaids and most domestic servants, and reminded employers and servants of the penalties for exceeding these rates.38 In practice, wages for the young gradually increased according to age and experience. Henry Best, writing in the 1650s, complained that he was unable to secure ‘a good lusty maid’ for less than 24s.–28s., whereas 18s. had once sufficed. He paid Priscilla Browne 18s. in 1638–9, her first year with him, increased this to 24s. and 28s. over the next two years, and offered 38s. if she would stay for a fourth, testifying to the value of experience. Yorkshire magistrates prosecuted several farmers in 1681 for promising excessive wages to dairymaids, but in most cases farm servants’ wages probably reached an early ceiling.39 Market forces proved far stronger in London, where the demand for domestic servants 34

The Diary of Ralph Josselin, 1616–1683, ed. A. Macfarlane (1976), passim. Pepys, Diary, ii. 196; v. 270, 318; vi. 4. 36 Ibid. ii. 220–1; iv. 279; vi. 26, 28–9, 30–1, 296; P. Earle, A City Full of People (1994), 128–9. 37 E. H. Bates Harbin (ed.), Quarter Sessions Records for the County of Somerset (Somerset Record Soc., 23–4, 28, 34, 1907–19), iii. 67, 151, 171, 179–80, 236, 263. There were complaints in Yorkshire in 1641, on the eve of the civil wars, that servants were taking advantage of the troubles by refusing to work for reasonable wages, but this probably applied mainly to men: Lister (ed.), West Riding Sessions Records, 333. 38 Atkinson (ed.), Quarter Sessions Records, vi. 4–5; W. J. Hardy and W. Le Hardy (eds.), Hertfordshire County Records (Hertford, 1905–57), vi. 400–7. 39 Best, Farm Books, 138–9; Atkinson (ed.), Quarter Sessions Records, vii. 47, 48, 50. For a young Norfolk woman hired for 16s. and a pair of shoes see Sachse (ed.), Minutes of the Norwich Court 1632–1635, 27. 35

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consistently outstripped supply. A Hackney alewife could find a maid for 22s. a year in 1593, but Pepys was forced to pay two cookmaids £3 and £4 in the early 1660s, and grumbled that another had demanded £5.40 Defoe complained that maidservants’ wages had soared within living memory from 30s.–40s. to £6–£8, and Peter Earle’s study found a smaller but still striking rise from an average £3–£3. 10s. in the 1670s to £5. 10s. in the 1710s.41 Servants with special skills or responsibilities might command considerably more; Jane Wolfe, serving a semi-crippled mistress in the 1670s, earned £9 a year.42 While service inevitably carried risks for both parties, servants were far more exposed than their employers. Employers did not have a completely free hand, however. The courts tried to uphold servants’ basic rights, and servants did sometimes turn to them in extremis over such issues as wages, personal belongings, diet, working conditions, and discipline. If only a tiny proportion felt able to seek redress through the courts, the law was not always hostile to their interests. The courts were least likely to intervene in matters of discipline, but even here we find some sense of acceptable limits to employers’ rights. In one case, which had triggered a fierce dispute between an apprentice’s mother and her employers, magistrates ordered them in future to use only ‘due and orderly correction’ on the girl, not exceeding six strokes with a birch.43 In cases of serious abuse magistrates generally tried to relieve the victim without undermining the employers’ authority, ordering them to pay her wages and then discharge her. That was the judgement in 1560 against a London couple who had flogged their maid and rubbed salt in her wounds, and against a Middlesex yeoman who brought his servant to court with her leg in a horse-lock; though appalled by such behaviour, the courts did not punish the employers.44 Runaway servants too sometimes won their freedom once magistrates had listened to their stories of beatings and abuse. Margery Harding explained in 1576 that her master had attempted to rape her, and when he admitted as much the Bridewell 40 GL, MS 9065A/2, fo. 36v; Pepys, Diary, iii. 53, iv. 86, v. 158. In the provinces note a (?young) Southampton maid working for 20s. a year in 1609, and two Norwich servants hired at 26s. 8d. in 1631: Horrocks (ed.), Southampton Assembly Books, ii. 3; W. L. Sachse (ed.), Minutes of the Norwich Court of Mayoralty, 1630–1631 (Norfolk Record Soc., 15, 1942), 146, 185. 41 Earle, Making of the Middle Class, 219, 376 n. 26. 42 GL, MS 9065A/8, fo. 144v. 43 W. Le Hardy, County of Middlesex: Calendar to the Sessions Records,  (1935–41), ii. 238. 44 BCB 1, fo. 75; D. Underdown, Fire from Heaven: Life in an English Town in the Seventeenth Century (1992), 102; J. C. Jeaffreson (ed.), Middlesex County Records (1886–92), ii. 39; cf. BCB 8, fo. 46v. Joan Akerley was discharged in 1614 after complaining that her employers had used unreasonable violence and thrown a knife at her, and falsely accused her of theft. She asked, most unusually, to have them both bound over: Le Hardy, Middlesex Calendar,  ii. 64.

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governors ordered him to pay her wages and discharge her.45 They sympathized too with a maid who fled in 1606 when she found crucifixes and beads in her employers’ house, and realized they were papists.46 Norwich magistrates varied the pattern in 1630 by sending a runaway back to her master but directing him to refer any future problems to them, and not to punish her himself.47 Many of the cases that came before the courts involved apprentices rather than domestic or farm servants, probably because their contracts were much longer. The mother and stepfather of Anne Ragge, a Warwickshire girl bound apprentice to a husbandman for eleven years, secured her discharge in 1635 after complaining that he treated her in a ‘barbarous’ manner and had tried to poison her.48 In 1690 two London widows won the discharge of their 14year-old daughters, both apprentices, after complaining they were neglected and ill-treated, while three female apprentices successfully petitioned the Middlesex bench on similar grounds.49 Only in extreme circumstances did magistrates decide to punish employers for such offences. In the mid-Tudor period they would occasionally impose a punishment to fit the crime, as in the case of a London woman publicly whipped in 1552 after brutally flogging her servant.50 Such a sentence was unlikely later in the period, when sadistic employers were more likely to face a substantial fine. Dorothy Preist, a milliner’s wife prosecuted in 1677 for beating her maid until her life was in danger, was fined 26s. 8d.51 But even fines were rare. If a servant died in suspicious circumstances a coroner’s inquest might be established to investigate, but inquest juries generally gave employers the benefit of any possible doubt. Most accepted assurances that the servant had been punished for negligence, with no intention of causing any serious injury.52 In the few cases which reached the assize courts, trial juries proved similarly reluctant to see householders hanged for the overzealous exercise of their legitimate rights, and to deprive a family of its mistress or master. If there had been even a short delay before the victim died, they usually judged death to have been from natural causes. 45

BCB 2, fo. 251v; cf. BCB 3, 20 May 1579; BCB 4, fo. 439; BCB 6, 26 Apr. 1623. BCB 5, fo. 109. 47 Sachse (ed.), Minutes of the Norwich Court 1630–1631, 90. 48 S. C. Ratcliff and H. C. Johnson (eds.), Warwick County Records (Warwick, 1935–64), i. 212–13, 218. 49 W. J. Hardy (ed.), Middlesex County Records: Calendar of the Sessions Books 1689 to 1709 (1905), 19, 24–5, 348. 50 J. G. Nichols (ed.), Chronicle of the Grey Friars of London (Camden Soc., 53, 1852), 74; cf. The Diary of Henry Machyn, ed. J. G. Nichols (Camden Soc., 42, 1847), 17. 51 Jeaffreson (ed.), Middlesex County Records, iv. 71–2. 52 Cockburn (ed.), Calendar: Kent: Elizabeth (1979), 348. 46

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Joan Law, a Kent labourer’s wife indicted in 1684 for killing her maidservant by kicking, punching, and starving her, was cleared by a jury which decided the maid had died by divine visitation.53 If death was unmistakably from violent causes, juries might return a verdict of homicide against some fictitious personage. Joan Bunche of Tower Wharf, accused of killing her 10-year-old maid in 1589 by repeatedly beating and kicking her, was acquitted by a jury which found that ‘John Deathe’ had killed her.54 This indulgence was not absolute, and juries presented with overwhelming evidence did sometimes return a verdict of murder or manslaughter.55 But even then, the offender might secure a pardon. When Elizabeth Redgway, a Chatham widow, was sentenced to hang for beating her maid to death in 1659, the parish officers and almost thirty neighbours petitioned for her to be spared on the pragmatic grounds that her four young and sickly children would become a burden on local ratepayers.56 Only in a handful of cases do we find public opinion veering to the opposite extreme, inflamed by an employer’s behaviour perceived as literally unnatural. A Restoration balladeer damned one woman who had tortured and murdered her maid as ‘a barbarous dame: | As fierce as a fury of hell, | her sex’s eternal shame’.57 Defoe reported the later case of a Somerset widow and her daughter who had flogged their young maid for seven hours until she died, a crime he claimed had shocked the nation. Thousands converged on Taunton to see them hang, and the authorities executed the pair before dawn to prevent a lynching.58 The courts intervened far more readily over property rights. We find magistrates helping servants who had been turned away unfairly, and directing employers to hand over their wages and clothes.59 Margaret Blackstone, a London maid, brought a warrant in 1629 against her employers for unfair dismissal, and though her mistress countered by accusing her of pilfering, the Bridewell governors rejected the charge as 53 Id. (ed.), Calendar: Kent: 1676–1688 (1997), 182; cf. id. (ed.), Calendar: Surrey: Elizabeth (1980), 86, 93; id. (ed.), Calendar: Essex: Elizabeth (1978), 212; id. (ed.), Calendar: Kent: 1649–1659 (1989), 317–18, 319; id. (ed.), Calendar: Kent: Charles II 1660–1675 (1995), 11, 335; OBSP 20–2 May 1686, 1. 54 Cockburn (ed.), Calendar: Surrey: Elizabeth, 337. 55 CSPD 1660–1, 566; Jeaffreson (ed.), Middlesex County Records, ii. 56; W. Le Hardy (ed.), Middlesex: Calendar,  i. 182. 56 Cockburn (ed.), Calendar: Kent: 1649–1659, 317–18, 322; cf. id. (ed.), Calendar: Essex: Elizabeth, 84. 57 ‘The Whipster of Woodstreet’, Pepys Ballads ii. 190; cf. 168. 58 Defoe, A Tour Thro’ Great Britain (1742), ii. 26; J. L. Rayner and G. T. Crook (eds.), The Complete Newgate Calendar (1926), iii. 108–10. 59 G. Leveson-Gower (ed.), ‘Notebook of a Surrey Justice’, Surrey Archaeological Collections, 9 (1888), 175; Peyton (ed.), Minutes of Proceedings for Lincoln , i. 62; ii. 230.

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malicious, and upheld the servant’s claim to her wages and clothes.60 Wages were a particularly sensitive matter. Employers would often retain them by mutual consent until the servant left, and some then found an excuse not to pay them at all. Amy Stibbes, a Somerset maid who had served for eleven years, turned to the courts in 1652 to secure £5 in back wages which her master was refusing to pay. Dorcas Trevor, whose employers sent her to Bridewell in 1689 over a trivial matter, fought back by prosecuting them for her wages and clothes, and secured an order for £7. 10s. to cover her losses and charges. Such cases were by no means rare.61 Clothes could prove equally contentious. A London maid, tried at the Old Bailey in 1678 for stealing a hood, insisted that she had often worn it in public and had never been questioned ‘till she came to demand her wages’. The jury decided her employers had framed the charge merely to cheat her. Sarah Castle, a Somerset clergyman’s servant, turned to the courts over a gown and other garments which her master’s former wife had given her, but which he and his new wife now refused to hand over.62 The courts thus offered some measure of protection. It is likely, though, that most employers were constrained more by social convention, and the conduct-books probably reflected a fairly general sense of good practice. While these were only prescriptive guides, we should not see the violent employers and dysfunctional relationships found in court records as typical. Satisfactory relationships would generally leave no trace. Moreover, there were obviously bad servants as well as bad employers. When Henry Newcome’s maid departed in August 1692, his only regret was that as a minister he had not tried harder to rescue her from damnation: ‘For certainly the poor wench hath an ill tongue, but a worse heart; full of ignorance, pride, envy, and malice, and lying. It is sad the devil should carry one off from under my nose, and I make no resistance’.63 The very ubiquity of service must have encouraged some sense of communal norms, and such evidence as we have suggests that in most cases the parties reached at least a tolerable accommodation. This conclusion is impossible to verify, let alone quantify, of course, and a substantial minority of households saw one or both parties flouting the conventions. The remainder of this chapter therefore explores the character of service relationships at each end of the spectrum, and then focuses on the options available to servants who felt dissatisfied. 60

BCB 7, fo. 150. Bates Harbin (ed.), Quarter Sessions Records for Somerset, iii. 179–80; Hardy (ed.), Middlesex: Calendar 1689 to 1709, 4–5. 62 OBSP 16–18 Jan. 1678, 7, and MS note on the Union Theological Seminary copy, New York; Bates Harbin (ed.), Quarter Sessions Records for Somerset , iii. 207; BCB 5, fo. 350v. 63 The Autobiography of Henry Newcome, ed. R. Parkinson (Chetham Soc., 26–7, 1852), ii. 276. 61

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   Responsible employers ensured their servants were properly fed and clothed, took care of them when sick, and allowed time for them to see their friends and family. Some were conscious of their psychological needs too. We find Winifred Blundell, a Lancashire gentlewoman, reflecting that even servants had feelings. They ‘must be dealt with (now and then) by giving some little sweet encouragement, and not always by severity,’ she observed in 1666; ‘they will commonly, for a great fault, endure a sound check courageously, but not for every small one, and sometimes they must know it if they do well’.64 Some employers also took their spiritual responsibilities seriously. Elizabeth Walker, a minister’s wife, taught illiterate servants to read, and offered them small bribes to learn the catechism.65 Far more striking is to find employers and servants sometimes establishing affectionate relationships which lasted for many years. Jane Woods, who died in 1667, had served her employer for forty years. Jane Hetherington, a widowed grandmother, served her master for over twenty, entrusted him with her savings, and chose him rather than any kinsman as executor.66 Nor were such relationships confined to the elderly. Elizabeth Beech of Acton, Shropshire, an orphan apprenticed by the parish, remained happily in the same family for over twenty years until she left to marry. The minister Oliver Heywood developed a still warmer relationship with Martha Bairstow, who came as a 10-year-old orphan, and remained for sixteen years. When his first wife died in 1661, leaving two small children, Martha became their surrogate mother and held the family together. Heywood fully acknowledged his enormous debt, calling her ‘a great mercy to me in this solitary condition’, ‘my child as well as my servant’.67 As in this case, a servant living for years in the same family was likely to be accepted as an integral member, and to perceive herself as such. We find striking confirmation when a servant died young leaving her small estate to her mistress rather than to kin. Elizabeth Thomson, who died in 1587, told those gathered at her bedside that she would give 64

Cavalier: Letters of William Blundell to his Friends 1620–1698 , ed. M. Blundell (1933), 62–3. A. Walker, The Holy Life of Mrs Elizabeth Walker (1690), 40; cf. S. Bury, An Account of the Life and Death of Mrs Elizabeth Bury (1721), 23–5. 66 Diaries and Letters of Philip Henry, ed. M. H. Lee (1882), 195); GL, MS 9065A8, fo. 327; cf. MS 9065A, fo. 107. Awards to deserving maids at Reading, paid under a bequest, show many serving the same family for a decade: J. M. Guilding (ed.), Reading Records: Diary of the Corporation (1886–96), e.g. ii. 123; iii. 60, 107. 67 R. Gough, The History of Myddle, ed. D. Hey (Harmondsworth, 1981), 244; The Rev. Oliver Heywood BA 1630–1702: His Autobiography, Diaries, Anecdote and Event Books, ed. J. H. Turner (Brighouse and Bingley, 1881–5), i. 177, iii. 175. 65

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nothing to her father (‘for she had nothing from him’) or other kinsfolk. Jane Penard of Hackney, who died in 1699, also cut out her family, ‘because they cared not for her and would never come at her’, and left her possessions to the mistress she had served for seven years. A friend explained that Jane had ‘had a very great love and affection’ for her employer, who ‘was more like a mother than a mistress to her’.68 Court records inevitably give a rather solemn impression of human relationships, and we need to remember that people living under the same roof might also find time for laughter and fun. We find such occasions recorded in Pepys’s diary, and sometimes in far more unlikely sources. A Kent woman, sharing a bed with her maid, was reported to have remarked that she wished the miller’s man was with them too, for he ‘would make us to laugh’. An Essex coroner’s inquest in 1603 on the body of Jane Kendall heard how she and her master had been dipping sheep one day, and how she had tried in jest to push him into the creek; instead Jane herself had slipped on the muddy bank, fallen in, and drowned. The jury apparently found nothing unusual in her frolic, and such an incident would never have been recorded but for its tragic outcome.69 Friendly ties sometimes continued long after a servant had married or moved on. Susan Slanning, a Plymouth servant, invited her previous master’s family to her wedding in 1670; his son happened to meet his own future bride at the reception, and two years later we find Susan acting as wet-nurse for their first child.70 Suzanne Huxley deposed in 1609 that she had been ‘familiarly acquainted’ with her former mistress for thirty or forty years, initially as a servant, and then as a friend and neighbour. Elizabeth Atkinson, a sailor’s wife, testified similarly in 1702 that she had known her former mistress for thirty years; they would often visit one another, and her old mistress would ‘sometimes carry her abroad with her to see friends’.71 Such enduring ties were by no means unusual. Isabel Short told a London court in 1589 that ‘bearing a good will to John Harrison . . . (because he had been sometime her master) she would at all times when she went to and from the market and since she was married out of his house go and see how he did and to comfort him, being a weak, sickly and old man’.72 Former servants might also return to tide an old employer over a domestic crisis. When Ralph Josselin’s maid fell sick in 68

GL, MS 9585, fos. 86–8; MS 9065A/9, Kirby v Penard, 1699, deposition of Sara Rowden. D. O’Hara, Courtship and Constraint: Rethinking the Making of Marriage in Tudor England (Manchester, 2000), 217; Cockburn (ed.), Calendar: Essex: James I (1982), 11; see also Ch. 7, below. 70 The Journal of James Yonge, ed. F. N. L. Poynter (1963),123–4, 141. 71 GL, MS 9065A/4, fo. 2; MS 9065A/9, Huddie v Page, 1702, deposition of Eliz. Atkinson. 72 GL, MS 9585, fos. 150v–151r; cf. MS 9065A/8, fo. 144v; The Official Papers of Sir Nathaniel Bacon of Stiffkey, ed. H. W. Saunders (Camden, 3rd ser., 26, 1915), 168. 69

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October 1645, his former maid Sarah came back for three months while he sought a replacement. Similarly, when he and his wife went away for a few days in August 1646, their old maid Lydia stepped in to nurse their young daughter during their absence.73 Servants who had left to marry sometimes returned on a more permanent basis if they were later widowed. Bridget Niccolls, aged 67, deposed in 1633 that she had lived with her late mistress for thirty-four years in all, some before her marriage, the rest after her husband’s death. Thomasine Lockwood, a sailor’s wife, returned to her former mistress while her husband was away at sea.74 Such relationships demonstrate that good employers could win their servants’ lasting affection and trust. Many would also try to advance their interests, especially when they were looking to marry, by allowing respectable young men to visit the house, and assisting a match that looked suitable. When neighbours told Anthony Young, a London skinner, that they often saw a young man calling at his house to visit his maid, in 1566, he questioned the couple and finding their intentions honourable, told the young man he was welcome. Employers often gave generous presents when their servants married, or left them bequests.75 Some also provided valuable support if servants ran into personal difficulties. When a maid told Margery Draper, a London brewer’s wife, that her suitor had abandoned her because of a neighbour’s slanders, in 1567, Draper supported her in bringing a defamation suit against the culprit. Dorothy Whittaker, a Leicestershire maid accused on a ‘fame’ of fornication in 1615, was able to produce her mistress as one of her compurgators.76 Some employers, moreover, continued to offer such help and protection long after their servants had left. Margaret Jones, a widow, attended her maid Judith’s wedding, and when the marriage turned sour intervened to rebuke the husband for his violent behaviour. She provided a refuge when Judith eventually left him, in 1566, and testified on her behalf in the subsequent divorce proceedings, remarking that by then she had known her former maid for nineteen years.77 Pepys’s diary provides by far the richest picture we have of relationships between employers and domestic servants in the seventeenth century. Despite his amorous proclivities, Pepys was in many respects a 73

Josselin, Diary, 47–8, 68. GL, MS 9065A/6, Miller v Harke; MS 9065A8, fos. 1r–2v. 75 GL, MS 9056, fos. 27r–v; O’Hara, Courtship and Constraint; Mendelson and Crawford, Women, 105–6. 76 GL, MS 9056, fos. 74v–75r, 76v, 77v; LRO, 1D 41/13/39, fos. 9v–10r (though the ‘fame’ also threatened the good name of the household itself; see Ch. 5, below). 77 GL, MS 9056, fos. 7v–8r, 16v–21v. 74

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good employer, genuinely fond of his servants, sorry to see them leave, and concerned when they felt ill-treated. He and his wife looked to their material needs, often included them in family merrymaking, and allowed them time for recreation.78 Jane Birch, their first and favourite maid, accompanied them to a Twelfth Night party in January 1660, and a few weeks later Pepys notes his wife dressing Jane’s hair prettily. Jane cried when she left in 1661 and Pepys himself was close to tears; he was pleased when she returned a year later, and tearful when she left again in 1663.79 Jane spent three equally happy years with her next employer, but in 1666 Pepys and his wife tracked her down and coaxed her back, despite her current mistress ‘having used all the stratagems she could to keep her’. In July 1667 Jane and Elizabeth Pepys called on her old mistress, who spoke so kindly that Jane was in tears once more when they came away.80 When she later fell in love with Pepys’s assistant, Pepys did his best to help their courtship, and when they married in 1669 he and his wife gave them a massive wedding present of £80, as well as paying for their wedding dinner. A few days later the two couples dined together in Whitehall and went on to an entertainment at the Bear-Garden, and the following week we find Elizabeth Pepys at Jane’s new home, helping her sort her linen. Jane named her first-born after her master, and when she was widowed after twelve years of marriage she returned to live in his household.81 Though Jane was a particular favourite, Pepys cared for all his servants. He was scrupulous in looking after their health. When his ‘little girl Su’, an undermaid, fell seriously ill in 1666, he looked urgently for a nurse and offered 20s. a week plus whatever clothes, bedding, and medicines were needed. To put that in context, Su’s medical expenses would have cost him more in two weeks than her wages for the whole year.82 When Sarah, a chambermaid, fell ill in 1662, Pepys persuaded his wife to take her into the country ‘to cure her ague by change of air’. He valued Sarah so highly that he even toyed with the idea of her as a wife for his younger brother Tom. Sarah too cried when she left the family, and Pepys confessed that he ‘was ready to cry too’. He continued to follow her fortunes, and in 1666, as the city was engulfed in flames, found time to worry whether she was safe with her new family on London Bridge.83 Life in Pepys’s household was often stormy, but the sense of care and mutual affection is 78

On Pepys’s household see also Earle, Making of the Middle Class, 220–9, and below, Ch. 7. Pepys, Diary, i. 10, 26; ii. 162; iii. 51, 53; iv. 31–2. 80 Ibid. vii. 42, 84–5; viii. 315. 81 Ibid. ix., 499–500, 526; x. 121. 82 Ibid. vii. 115–16. We should note, however, that Pepys wanted to see Su cared for elsewhere, fearing she might have the plague. 83 Ibid. iii. 65, 274–5, 285; vii. 268. 79

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unmistakable. Pepys was a prosperous figure with a relatively large domestic staff, and things were very different in poorer families with only a single maid-of-all-work. But there is no reason to think his household differed significantly from many others in his own milieu.

   Abusive employers are far easier to document, especially in cases involving brutality or sexual harassment. Allegations of physical cruelty were levelled mainly at female employers, a surprising discovery until we remember that mistresses were primarily responsible for disciplining their maids. One character writer pilloried the harsh mistress as pitiless towards her young maidservants, ‘Ready to beat out silly children’s brains, | (If they offend but little) for their pains’.84 Though only the most serious cases reached the courts, some record appalling stories of abuse. Margaret Holbrooke, a gentlewoman, was indicted at Maidstone assizes in 1573 for assaulting her maid with a firebrand, so that she lost the use of her left hand.85 Juries were naturally inclined to prefer the employer’s version of events, but the evidence was sometimes too powerful to be brushed aside. A jury in 1571 convicted Constance Clark of Maidstone of beating to death a maid aged 10. Four years later another convicted a pinner’s wife of a similar offence against a girl of 16.86 Elizabeth Elliott of Southwark was condemned to death in 1605 for pinning her maid to a stool over a blazing kiln, resulting in fatal burns. A news-writer reported the equally barbarous case of a woman in Whitefriars who thrust her maid’s head in a tub of water until she drowned, two days before Christmas 1618.87 Outsiders were often slow to intervene, and sometimes too late. On Christmas Eve 1680 a London seamstress decided to punish her 13-year-old apprentice for some trivial misdemeanour, and she and a male lodger tied and gagged the girl and flogged her for several hours, so brutally that she too died of her injuries. Neighbours observed that her cruelty had been notorious, but they had not seen fit to report her.88 We can be sure that such cases represent only the tip of an iceberg of brutality, though we can only guess its size. Very few women were 84

R. West, The Court of Conscience, or Dick Whippers Sessions (1657), sig. F4. Cockburn (ed.), Calendar: Kent: Elizabeth, 122. The case was removed to Queen’s Bench. 86 Ibid. 100, 135. 87 Cockburn (ed.), Calendar: Surrey: James I (1982), 4; id. (ed.), Calendar: Kent: Charles I (1995), 132; id. (ed.), Calendar: Surrey: Elizabeth, 86, 93, 96, 100, 337; id. (ed.), Calendar: Surrey: James I, 290–1; id. (ed.), Calendar: Sussex: James I, 74; The Letters of John Chamberlain, ed. N. E. McClure (Philadelphia, 1939), ii. 198. 88 OBSP 17–18 Jan. 1681, 2; OBSP, [Feb.] 1681, 1. Both were condemned to death. 85

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indicted for killing male servants, who were mainly answerable to their masters.89 Similarly, fewer men than women were indicted for killing maidservants.90 Male employers posed a different threat: sexual harassment. Such a threat might come from any male member of the household, but resistance was particularly difficult against a master, who held authority over his maid and could easily engineer occasions to be alone with her. We find men forcing sex on their maids while their wives were at the bakehouse, on errands, out of town, attending a delivery, even lying in childbed in another room or being churched. One man slipped away early from church to seduce a maidservant left to guard the house.91 It is not surprising that many servants eventually succumbed to a relentless combination of blandishments, pressure, threats, and brute force. Elizabeth Kemp of Leicester said her master had never left her in peace, professing to love her better than his wife, though he spoke roughly whenever her mistress was present to avert suspicion.92 We can find other members of the household employing similar tactics of flattery, pressure, and violence. Sara Adams of Waltham, Essex, who admitted a liaison with her master’s gentleman lodger, explained that ‘he followed her importunately to that purpose and some times would beat her because she would not yield to his lust in so much as she hired a woman to lie with her for fear of him’. Eventually she yielded, telling no one ‘for shame’ until she became pregnant in 1606.93 Some employers seduced their servants with false promises. Alice Stretton, servant to a Leicester butcher, consented only because he promised to marry her, and ran away when he went back on his word.94 Other men employed a combination of sexual violence and endearments that seems puzzling today but was characteristic of the period. Shortly before Christmas 1581, for example, Francis Jarrold, a Leicestershire villager, dragged his servant Elizabeth Ryse into a privy in the orchard and raped her, tearing her clothes and blocking her mouth to silence her 89 Cockburn (ed.), Calendar: Essex: Elizabeth, 254; id. (ed.), Calendar: Surrey: Elizabeth, 86; id. (ed.), Calendar: Kent: Elizabeth, 226, 237; id. (ed.), Calendar: Kent: Charles I, 352; id. (ed.), Calendar: Kent: Charles II, 1660–1675, 11. 90 Cockburn (ed.), Calendar: Essex: Elizabeth, 423, id. (ed.), Calendar: Kent: Charles I, 238–9; idem, Calendar: Kent: 1649–1659, 253; id. (ed.), Calendar: Surrey: Elizabeth, 86. See Le Hardy (ed.), Middlesex: Calendar,  i. 182 for a husband and wife condemned to death for a joint fatal assault. 91 For examples of each see BCB 4, fos. 187r, 187v, 459; LRO, 41/13/6, fo. 57; LRO, BR II/18/11/202; GL, MS 9064/18, fo. 197v; MS 9064/21, fo. 53. See also Meldrum, Domestic Service, 92 100–110. LRO, 1D 41/4/467. 93 GL, MS 9064/16, fo. 131v; OBSP 9–11 Dec. 1685, 3; LRO, BR II/18/11/202; BCB 8, fo. 210; Ingram, Church Courts, 266–7. 94 LRO, BR II/18/12/292; cf. BR II/18/13/324.

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screams. But Jarrold later assured her of his deep affection, offered her money, told her he liked her much better than his wife, and said they could enjoy an affair for years if she would agree to be discreet. The act of rape had initiated a relationship in which Elizabeth then acquiesced, however reluctantly, perhaps because the alternative options appeared even less appealing.95 The worst employers regarded their servants as mere sexual chattels. Alice Ashemore’s master, a London cook, told her bluntly one day in 1605, ‘Thou art my servant and I may do with thee what I please.’96 We can find similar attitudes at all social levels. John Jebbitt made his maid Margaret Pepper pregnant in the mid-1660s, and told a court that ‘he was as well able to keep a whore in his house as his neighbours and that it was the fashion now a days and that the best sort of gentlemen now in the country [Leicestershire] keep a whore in their houses’. The label ‘whore’ was unkind, to say the least, for Pepper testified that he had beaten her until she submitted. She was still his servant four years later, trapped by her situation; Jebbitt was paying for their child, and as a single mother she was unlikely to find another service.97 Even elderly and seemingly respectable employers did not always keep their hands to themselves. A master with an ageing wife might indeed be all the more tempted to exploit his authority over an attractive young girl. Thomas Rownde of Northall, Middlesex, told a court in 1606 that it was ‘his hard misfortune’ to beget his maid with child, and pleaded the fact that his wife was 60 and had never borne a child as extenuating circumstances. Robert Tailford, a London carpenter, was 70 when he made his servant pregnant in 1603, and then ordered her to break the news to his wife.98 A handful of rogue clergymen proved equally manipulative. Jervis Scarborough, vexed when his young maid Elizabeth Evans ran away in 1603 to escape him, had her tracked down and arrested, and told her he could now have her hanged if she refused to yield, while promising to find her a good new position if she would consent.99 Some frustrated employers apparently tried to carry out such threats. One servant tried at the Old Bailey in 1690 pleaded that her master had brought a malicious charge against her ‘because she would not suffer him to debauch her’.100 95

LRO, 1D 41/4/358; Meldrum, Domestic Service, 100–2. BCB 5, fos. 23v–24r; cf. L. Gowing, ‘Ordering the Body: Illegitimacy and Female Authority in Seventeenth-Century England’, in M. J. Braddick and J. Walter (eds.), Negotiating Power in Early Modern Society (Cambridge, 2001), 46; Hoad (ed.), Portsmouth Sessions Papers, 53; Mendelson and Crawford, Women, 107; Meldrum, Domestic Service, 107–8. 97 LRO, 1D 41/13/78, fo. 23. 98 GL, MS 9064/16, fo. 74v; BCB 4, fos. 389v–90r. 99 BCB 4, fo. 439. The court believed her account, not his. 100 OBSP 10–13, 17 Dec. 1690, 3. The jury appear to have thought both allegations probably true. 96

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There were no easy options for a servant facing harassment. In London, where places were easy to find, the best course was to give notice, but this was less easy in the provinces, when servants were expected to remain for the year. Moreover, an obstructive master could easily stop her leaving by detaining her wages or clothes, or threatening to charge her with theft. There was usually little point in appealing to her mistress, who would almost certainly hold her to blame, as the ‘other woman’ in this context. Once she had excited her master’s sexual interest, however innocently, her mistress would inevitably view her as a threat. When a London tailor took his servant Elizabeth Greene by force in 1604, she tried to alert her mistress tactfully by confiding that he ‘had put her in fear’, but her mistress rounded on her angrily, crying, ‘What, is he fallen to his old wont to follow whores?’101 Agnes Fyddy, a 15-year-old tailor’s servant, fared no better when two fellow servants assaulted her in 1562: her mistress blamed her and threatened to beat her. One of the assailants was her master’s kinsman, and apprentices were in any case valued far more highly than a teenage maid. In despair, Agnes ran away.102 When an employer’s eye strayed, his wife wanted to prevent a liaison developing or break it before it became public, and her easiest option was to beat the maid and turn her out of the house, even if she had been in no way to blame. Alice Ashemore’s mistress threatened to kill her if she named her master as father of her unborn child, though once she promised to conceal his identity her mistress offered to pay for her lodging until she was delivered.103 Elizabeth Orson, pregnant by her mistress’s brother, was told to father it on the apprentice, and packed off to her family in the country when she refused.104 It was almost impossible for a servant to bring charges of rape or sexual assault against her master while still living under his roof, and few had the means to do so once they had left.105 Very few rape allegations against employers reached the assize courts, and almost none succeeded. Ralph Smyth, a Sussex miner, was accused by two of his former servants, but still acquitted at his trial in 1568.106 101

BCB 4, fo. 459; cf. fo. 439, BCB 5, fo. 150; Meldrum, Domestic Service, 104–5. BCB 1, fo. 53. 103 BCB 5, fo. 23v; cf. Gowing, ‘Ordering the Body’, 55. 104 LRO, 1D 41/13/64, fo. 161v–162r. 105 Mary Penn, a Portsmouth victualler’s servant allegedly raped by her master in 1673, was one exception. She said nothing for six weeks, mollified by his promise to marry her, but left when he reneged on it, found shelter with her married sister, and denounced him. He was bound over, but probably bribed or intimidated her into dropping the charge, for it appears to have proceeded no further: Hoad (ed.), Portsmouth Sessions Papers, 53. 106 Cockburn (ed.), Calendar: Sussex: Elizabeth, 53. 102

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A pregnant servant usually fled or was driven away as soon as her employers realized her condition. They knew her presence would jeopardize their own good name, with neighbours assuming a family member was to blame, and legal and financial troubles would almost certainly follow. A reasonably affluent master who had fathered a child would often arrange somewhere for his maid to lie in and pay her charges, provided she concealed his identity, though inevitably such promises were not always honoured.107 There was no prospect of such help when the father was an outsider. When Alice Pole of Leicester gave birth suddenly in the late afternoon of 25 April 1593, her mistress was taken totally by surprise (as was Alice, or so she claimed), and sent a peremptory message for Alice’s father to fetch her away immediately, warning that otherwise, ‘I will throw her into the street’. Alice was carried out of the house at 10 o’clock that same evening.108 Servants who fled or were turned out sometimes managed to find shelter with their families. Elizabeth Pallate’s father, a soft-hearted man, allowed her to lie-in at his house in Sapcote, Leics., and then undertook to keep her child while Elizabeth fled to avoid prosecution and start a new life elsewhere.109 Some women headed for London, hoping to give birth and dispose of their infants privately, and re-enter the labour market. As one cynic remarked, ‘an ounce of London deliverance’ provided a cheap and simple cure for a lost maidenhead. Some, already delivered, abandoned their babies and followed the same course.110 Other women tried to arrange a hasty marriage to someone ignorant of their condition, or willing to overlook it for a financial consideration. Alice Newton was already eight months pregnant in 1596 when she found a man to marry her. Another villager repudiated his wife only two days after their wedding in 1611, when he realized she was already pregnant; brazen or desperate, she told him that ‘whosoever had got it, he should father it’.111 But many young women had neither friends nor family to shelter them, and were left to fend entirely for themselves, facing the threat of public penance, a 107 LRO, 1D 41/4/381; 1D 41/4, Box 9/1; B. Capp, ‘The Double Standard Revisited. Plebeian Women and Male Sexual Reputation in Early Modern England’, Past and Present, 162 (1999), 80–2. 108 LRO, BR II/18/3, fo. 173r–v. 109 LRO 1D 41/13/64, fo. 91; 1D 41/13/8, fo. 32a; 1D 41/13/11, fo. 37v; 1D 41/13/28, fo. 37; 1D 41/13/37, fo. 116v; 1D 41/13/64, fos. 198v–199r; GL, MS 9064, fo. 50; MS 9064/14, fos. 24, 55; MS 9064/16, fo. 62v; BCB 5, 4 Feb. 1609, fo. 405; LRO, BR II/18/10/339. See also Ch.7, below. 110 D.N., Figure of Six (1652), sig. A8v; see e.g. LRO, 1D 41/4, Boxes 13/20 and 16/47; BCB 5, fos. 238v; BCB 7, fos. 334v, 335r, 335v. 111 LRO, 1D 41/13/21, fo. 102v; 1D 41/13/35, fo. 78; 1D 41/13/37, fo. 61; 1D 41/13/47, fo. 17; 1D 41/13/56, fo. 30v; Saunders, Papers of Sir Nathaniel Bacon, 22–3.

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whipping, possible imprisonment, or destitution. Janet Spence of Hurworth, Durham, turned out in 1575 by the master who had fathered her child, came back when the baby was due and sat crying hopelessly in the street outside his door. There were many such stories.112 Some, inevitably, ended in tragedy. Oliver Heywood heard of a former servant forced to give birth in the snowy fields in the winter of 1664–5, leaving the baby dead and its mother ‘distracted’.113 A few men, determined to avoid public shame whatever the price, unleashed still greater tragedies. An Essex tailor, appalled when Anne Webb revealed she was pregnant, crushed her belly to induce an abortion with the result that she died from internal injuries.114 It is hardly surprising that frightened young women often concealed their pregnancy, sometimes even from themselves. Some gave birth in secret, smothering or drowning the infant as soon as it was born. One Lancashire servant fell into labour while washing clothes in a yard in 1680, walked into an adjacent garden where she gave birth, smothered and buried the baby, and then returned to her washtub. Infanticide was made a separate felony by an Act of 1624, and most of those subsequently hanged were young, unmarried servants.115 Other single mothers abandoned their infants in the street, a common practice in London throughout the period.116 Servants might suffer almost equal misery from the common but poorly documented abuses of overwork, malnutrition, and neglect. Many who fell seriously ill were turned away to fend for themselves, facing total destitution if they had no family to relieve them. The pitiful story of Susan Mathew, who had moved from Nottinghamshire to serve a London carpenter’s family, was captured in a laconic parish minute in 1598: ‘she being sick was put away and died in the street in Hogg Lane’.117 Other employers found excuses to detain their servants’ wages, as we have seen, and a few stooped still lower, like the labourer’s wife bound over in 1660 112 J. Raine (ed.), Depositions and Other Ecclesiastical Proceedings from the Courts of Durham (Surtees Soc., 21, 1845), 303. Margaret Jackson, given 15s. to take her home to Yorkshire, was tricked out of the money and left stranded at Leicester: LRO, 1D 41/13/28, fo. 37. 113 Heywood, Autobiography, iii. 89; cf. Jeaffreson (ed.), Middlesex Quarter Sessions, ii. 49. 114 Cockburn (ed.), Calendar: Essex: Elizabeth, 510. A news-pamphlet reported the story of a wealthy widower near Durham who told his servant he was sending her to his aunt’s house to liein, but ordered the guide to kill her on the way: S.S., A Faithful and True Account of an Apparition or Ghost (1693), 3–8. 115 Heywood, Autobiography, ii. 273. See further L. Gowing, ‘Secret Births and Infanticide in Seventeenth-Century England’, Past and Present, 156 (1997), 87–115. 116 See e.g. BCB 4, fo. 397; BCB 7, fos. 112, 120,121, 137, 173, 191v, 192, 198, 230, 241v, 242v, 244v, 250v. 117 GL, MS 9234/7, fo. 44.

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‘for selling her servant Ann Parker for a slave to Virginia’.118 It is hardly surprising that servants sometimes buckled under the strain of neglect, abuse, and exploitation. Michael MacDonald notes that maidservants were by far the largest group of ‘disturbed patients’ consulting the astrological physician and clergyman Richard Napier.119 Frances Hill of Wellington, so desperate that she ran away repeatedly from her master, threatened in 1623 to kill herself if sent back to him again.120 Nor should we be surprised that many of the chapbooks and ballads aimed at young women were fantasies of courtship and marriage, feeding their dreams of a home of their own, and a loving husband instead of demanding employers.121

 :      Jane Birch, who wept on leaving Pepys, and Frances Hill, who threatened suicide if sent back to her master, underline the futility of seeking the ‘typical’ experience of service. Relationships varied as widely as individual characters and circumstances. Many servants appear to have passed through this stage in their lives without great difficulty. Some from poor or broken families preferred the basic security it offered to the perils of trying to survive alone, despite the drudgery and hardship. Mary Hurll, orphaned at 8, endured a harsh apprenticeship to a bone-lace weaver until the age of 16, but nonetheless looked for a second apprenticeship as soon as it ended. ‘I was afraid of liberty’, she recalled years later.122 The very ubiquity of service may have helped to mitigate its harshness. Many ordinary householders had been servants themselves, and might expect their own daughters to go into service in a good home at an appropriate stage. It seems plausible to suppose that such parents would try to behave responsibly towards servants they employed themselves. Neighbours were aware when employers broke the unwritten conventions, and though they were reluctant to complain to the authorities, we should not underestimate the importance of informal pressure. Even under good employers, however, servants faced a life of penury, subordination, and inevitable frustrations. Some found such constraints 118

Jeaffreson (ed.), Middlesex Quarter Sessions, iii. 306. M. MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety, and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1981), 50, 87–8. 120 Bates Harbin (ed.), Quarter Sessions Records for Somerset, i. 336. 121 M. Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories (1981), ch. 7. 122 An Account of the Remarkable Conversion . . . of Mary Hurll (1708), 15. 119

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unbearable. Pepys’s young undercook Mary left in 1667, declaring she must have an employment where she could work one day and spend her money and play the next. Pepys thought her ‘a good civil wench’ and was baffled by her decision, though to us it looks perfectly understandable.123 Mary was presumably intending to live ‘at her own hands’, like many others. Young women who remained in service generally tried to improve their circumstances as best they could, by shifting from place to place until they found congenial employers, and then staying put. But the politics of service had many other dimensions, and servants exploited a wide range of tactics to improve their lot, or vent their frustrations. Several categories of service held out the promise of more favourable conditions. First, a servant might find a place with a close blood relation or family friend, a pattern quite common.124 William Stout, a bachelor Lancaster tradesman, employed his sister Ellen as housekeeper for many years, and after her a succession of nieces and a granddaughter, an arrangement that generally worked well.125 A relationship that rested on both kinship and service contained obvious tensions, however, and their resolution depended on individual personality and circumstance. Ralph Josselin gave consciously preferential treatment to his sister Mary when she came to live as a servant in 1644: ‘my respect is and shall be towards her as a sister,’ he noted in his diary, adding that ‘God might have made me a waiter upon others’. Pepys adopted a very different approach towards his sister Pall, telling her she would ‘come not as a sister in any respect but as a servant’, and refused to let her eat at his table. Though Pall was grateful to be taken in, the arrangement soon soured, and within a year he had turned her away.126 Bridget Hill has argued that kin as servants in the eighteenth century were an exploited group, regarded as little better than pauper servants.127 We can find earlier examples of such exploitation too.128 But we find as many cases where ties of kinship created a warmer relationship, and clearly no single pattern prevailed. Much depended on age, status, and the balance of needs in each case. A young orphan, taken in for charity by kin 123

Pepys, Diary, viii. 328. GL, MS 9585, fo. 52v; MS 9064/17, fo. 90; MS 9065A/1, fo. 43v; Horrocks (ed.), Southampton Assembly Books, i. 96–7, ii. 2; LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 11/49; 1D 41/13/28, fo. 11; 1D 41/64, fo. 192; BCB 7, fo. 369; Hurll, Account of the Conversion, 27; WSRO, Ep1/11/1, fos. 28v–29r; A. L. Rowse, The Case Books of Simon Forman (1976), 276. 125 In his later years, however, Stout found it difficult to control two young nieces: Stout, Autobiography, 142, 192, 203, 215–16, 232–3. 126 Josselin, Diary, 15; Pepys, Diary, i. 288, 2901; ii. 4, 139, 153, 161–2. 127 Hill, Servants, ch. 6. 128 LRO, 1D 41/13/78, fo. 76. 124

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of modest means themselves, was far more likely to be exploited than a woman who came under an arrangement agreed as of mutual benefit. At one extreme we have a remark by the Lancashire squire Nicholas Blundell in 1709 that a cousin living with his family did so ‘partly as a servant’ and partly as a guest.129 The arrangement between William Stout and his sister clearly suited them both, with Ellen enjoying a status close to that of a wife.130 Much younger kin might also achieve a warm and trusting relationship. Mary Towres, whose story reflects a pattern quite common, served her aunt in the early 1600s until she left to marry a sailor, and came back to live with her aunt again when he went to sea. Mary Carer became a still more intimate family member. When her mistress-kinswoman died Mary remained with her master, John Knight, and ‘did . . . manage and transact all his affairs for him’, as an acquaintance recalled in 1708. When she married Robert Kelly, a builder and carpenter, the couple continued to live in Knight’s house for over a year, with Knight becoming very fond of the young man and channelling work in his direction.131 It seems likely that many servants viewed kinship as a positive factor, and with some justification. A second group with preferential treatment were those enjoying superior positions in larger and more affluent households. Contemporaries recognized that a housekeeper serving an easygoing, prosperous widower had achieved both status and comfort.132 Similarly, the life of a chambermaid, attending her mistress’s personal needs, was far removed from the ordinary servant’s drudgery. She often became a trusted confidante, sometimes dressing so well (often in hand-downs) that strangers failed to realize she was a servant at all.133 William Gouge complained that whenever servants were left to their own discretion, ‘all shall be laid out upon apparel’.134 Gouge saw this as sinful vanity, but chambermaids knew that a genteel appearance and manner would underline their status, and impress potential employers and suitors. Male employers, though also proud of the reflected glory, worried that they 129 The Great Diurnal of Nicholas Blundell, ed. J. J. Bagley (Record Soc. of Lancashire and Cheshire, 1968), i. 220. 130 Stout, Autobiography, 87, 96, 102, 122, 142. 131 GL, MS 9065A/4, fos. 26v, 29; MS 9065A/10, fos. 133, 135, 136. 132 A. Marsh, The Confession of the New Married Couple (1683), 185–6. 133 W. Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties (1622), 600–3; D. Defoe, ‘Everybody’s Business is Nobody’s Business’, in Works, ed. W. Scott et al.; (1881), 505–6; G. Miège, The New State of England (3rd edn., 1699), 18; cf. Hill, Servants, 66–9. 134 Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties, 603. Henry Peacham noted maidservants buying cheap cosmetics, and a journalist railed at a ‘bedlam world’ where ‘every greasy kitchen maid, with gold and silver lace is overlaid’: H. Peacham, The Worth of a Peny (1647), 22; Mercurius Fumigosus, or the Smoking Nocturnall (21–8 June 1654), 26.

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might forget their place altogether, and prosperous householders sometimes employed a more suitable ‘companion’ for their wives, a young woman of good birth and breeding in reduced circumstances. But this merely relocated the problem, for companions occupied a still more ambiguous position. They expected to be treated with politeness and respect, and were unlikely to display the deference and humility that might still be required. Pepys became well acquainted with such problems. Mary Ashwell, an Exchequer official’s daughter who became his wife’s companion in 1663, proved highly accomplished in music, dancing, and conversation, turning Elizabeth Pepys’s initial delight to jealousy and resentment. Before long they were quarrelling openly, and when Elizabeth boxed her ear one day Ashwell promptly hit her back.135 Her successor Mary Mercer, the 17-year-old daughter of a merchant’s widow, combined charm with a still more independent spirit, culminating in a similar row when she visited her mother in defiance of Elizabeth’s express orders. Her mother declared indignantly that ‘she was not a prentice girl, to ask leave every time she goes abroad’, and Mercer left her position rather than surrender her freedom, though she retained links with Pepys and his wife as a frequent dinner guest and companion on family outings.136 Her story underlines the inherent contradictions of the position, an unstable compound of friend and servant, and her successors found it equally fraught. Barker, who came next, had none of Mercer’s looks, breeding, or assurance. This created a different set of problems, for she was so intimidated by the social demands of the position that she declared she ‘had rather be put to drudgery and to wash the house than to live as she did, like a gentlewoman’.137 Deb Willett, the last companion of the diary period, was by contrast ‘extraordinary handsome’, ‘exceeding well-bred’, and probably, Pepys feared, ‘a little too good for my family’.138 He anticipated problems from the start, foreseeing his wife’s jealousy and his own sexual attraction. Within a few months he had begun a relationship with Deb that almost destroyed his marriage. Most servants lived in much humbler circumstances, of course, facing 135 Pepys, Diary, iv. 262; cf. 72, 74–5, 93, 106, 133, 165. Ashwell had attended a boarding school which taught such accomplishments. Some allowed freedoms employers would find alarming; Richard Flecknoe claimed they attracted swarms of apprentices and gentlemen’s sons, ‘No sweet-meat shops being ever so haunted with wasps and flies as these schools are by all the wild youth about the town’: Flecknoe, Fifty five Enigmaticall Characters (1665), 45. Pepys worried about Ashwell’s enthusiasm for balls and masques, Diary, iv. 107, 112. 136 Pepys, Diary, vii. 273; cf. 298, 300, 360, 374, 403, 412, 419, 421; and viii and ix, passim. 137 Ibid. viii. 212. 138 Ibid. 448, 451, 456–7.

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very different problems and developing different strategies. An astute servant in London would try to exploit the massive demand for domestic labour, which gave the well-qualified considerable leverage over pay and conditions. Some readily gave notice rather than back down in domestic disputes, using it as an effective bargaining chip and confident of finding another place should their bluff be called. Employers generally preferred to hold on to their experienced staff, with good reason. A new girl would have to be trained, and might turn out to be idle, insolent, dishonest, or coarse. The veteran minister Immanuel Bourne remarked sadly in 1669, ‘How difficult a thing is it to hire a servant amongst the common sort of people, but they are swearers or cursers, or both.’139 A simple country girl, newly arrived, might lack even the most basic rudiments of urban politeness. ‘Choose no country wench,’ a pamphleteer advised bluntly in 1683, ‘for she’ll want a whole year’s learning, before she’ll know how to shit upon a house of office, and two years to learn to make a curtsy.’140 It was safer to keep someone familiar, whatever her shortcomings. Pepys recognized that his cookmaid Jane ‘hath faults and is cunning [and] apt to scold’, but still valued her highly and was sorry when she left after a tiff.141 Good domestics knew their worth. When Jane Birch returned to him in March 1662, she insisted on £3 a year and the right to leave whenever she ‘could be better provided’.142 Unscrupulous neighbours would sometimes try to lure good servants away, in breach of their contracts. Sir John Holles declared in 1618 that ‘he that treats, and thereby inveigles away another man’s servants, robs him as well as he that steals his goods,’ adding tartly, ‘neither does the commonness of the fault make it less’.143 Such behaviour sometimes generated considerable heat. Ann Olding of Portsmouth quarrelled with her mistress, Mrs St John Steventon, after only a fortnight in 1678 and decamped to live with the mayor and his wife. The Steventons, indignant, had her returned for breach of contract, whereupon Anne gave three months’ notice and arranged to go back to the mayoress when it expired; in the event, Mrs Steventon refused to let her go, insisting the contract had been for a year, locked her in a chamber for a week, and threatened to burn her clothes. The magistrates had to step in to adjudicate.144 Late Stuart writers complained that servants were exploiting market forces to great effect. Wages in London rose dramatically, as we have 139 140 141 142 143 144

I. Bourne, A Gold Chaine of Directions (1669), 14. Marsh, Confession, 131. Pepys, Diary, vi. 4 . Ibid. iii. 53. Letters of John Holles 1587–1637, ed. P. R. Seddon (Thoroton Soc., 1975–86), ii. 206. Hoad (ed.), Portsmouth Sessions Papers, 68–70.

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seen, and Defoe grumbled that servants now dictated their own terms, demanding vails as of right and driving a hard bargain over their duties, clothes, and conditions. Worst of all, he complained, ‘they hire themselves to you by their own rule. That is, a month’s wages, or a month’s warning; if they don’t like you they will go away the next day, help yourself how you can; if you don’t like them, you must give them a month’s wages to get rid of them.’ Defoe complained that high wages had left many small tradesmen no longer able to afford a servant, forcing their wives to perform the domestic drudgery themselves instead of helping in the shop.145 But such complaints, we should remember, applied only to conditions in the capital, especially among the middling sort. Market forces were far less favourable in the countryside, which of course helped to fuel the large-scale migration of young women to London throughout the period. Servants in London frequently changed employers, and even in the countryside many moved on at the end of the year. Money was not the only consideration, or necessarily the most important. Servants in small villages sometimes moved in the hope of finding new friends or partners. A Sussex villager explained in 1620 that she had moved away after five years with one family partly because they refused to increase her wages, but equally because she felt ‘a desire to go further off to dwell’. Within a year she had met and married her husband.146 It is likely that many servants, in town and country alike, were mainly concerned to find employers who were fair and considerate; easier conditions would improve their lives far more than a few extra shillings. Gouge made a similar point, rather sourly, when he remarked on ‘a common complaint, that profane, worldly masters shall have more service than religious and godly masters, yea though these give better wages, diet and lodging than those’, a paradox he explained by ‘the corrupt disposition of servants, that esteem pleasure in sin and liberty thereunto more than wages, diet and lodging’.147 Women serving a harsh employer would look round for a new opening long before their contracts expired. Anne Woodhouse admitted approaching a neighbour in1603 ‘to th’end she might provide her a place for that both her master and mistress dealt cruel with her’.148 Some devised stratagems to escape early. A London pamphleteer grumbled in 1683 that a disgruntled servant would often find a new place through a broker, and then invent a tale of a relation dying in the country as an excuse to leave her current post. Elizabeth Gibson, whipped at Bridewell 145 147

Defoe, Works, 499–510: at 503. Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties, 611.

146 148

WSRO, Ep1/11/13, fo. 90v. BCB 4, fo. 423.

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in 1619, was described as a ‘shifter from service to service’. Others simply ran away.149 Outside London, servants usually had to wait for their contract to expire before they could move. In the mean time, they sought to make the best of their current position, by any means available. Employers grumbled repeatedly about their idleness and pilfering, but equally important were their attempts to forge tactical alliances within the household to improve their position. The micro-politics of the household, a subject little explored, opened up a range of opportunities—and some corresponding dangers.

    Conduct-books dealt primarily with simple, bilateral relationships between husband and wife, parent and child, employer and servant. But once we examine the politics of the household, we find a shifting pattern of multilateral relationships, alliances, and feuds. John Oliver observed in 1688 that a husband and wife sometimes had different favourites among their children, ‘from whence arises as perfect animosities, factions, and formal designs one amongst another in these little societies as are in princes’ courts, or in the whole kingdom’.150 His point applied equally to servants. A servant favoured by one employer could anticipate substantial benefits, offset by the resentment of other servants and perhaps the employer’s spouse. In larger households we find friendships and rivalries developing among the servants themselves. Many urban households contained lodgers too, some with servants of their own, making domestic politics tangled indeed.151 Relations between male servants and the mistress of the house were particularly sensitive, for her authority disrupted the usual patterns of gender hierarchy. Simon Forman, apprenticed in Elizabethan Salisbury, liked his master well enough but clashed repeatedly with his mistress. That was also the predicament of Roger Lowe, the Lancashire diarist, who hired himself to a new master for three years but ‘found his wife of such a pestilential nature that I was weary in a few weeks’. Peter Moore, a London apprentice trapped in a similar situation, escaped only by the desperate remedy of poisoning his employers. His mistress’s cruelty had driven him to it, he explained, though he had liked and respected his 149

Marsh, Confession, 186; BCB 6, fo. 106. J. Oliver, A Present to be given to Teeming Women, by their Husbands or Friends (1688), 16. 151 For a case study see B. Capp, ‘The Poet and the Bawdy Court: Michael Drayton and the Lodging-House World in Early Stuart London’, Seventeenth Century, 10 (1995). 150

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master.152 Servants worked mainly with an employer of the same sex, and friction might also arise when personal loyalty was construed as treachery by the employer’s spouse. One London apprentice faced an obvious conflict of loyalties in 1676 when he discovered his mistress consorting with other men in suspicious circumstances. When he eventually told his master, his mistress punished such ‘treachery’ by hiring two ruffians to kill him, triggering a riot by angry apprentices who threatened to demolish the house in protest.153 It was an unusually dramatic outcome to a situation by no means uncommon. An ambitious maidservant was most likely to see the politics of the household in terms of an alliance with one of its more influential members. For a chambermaid this would normally be her mistress. The very nature of her duties encouraged familiarity, and commentators often warned of the dangers, especially with a weak mistress inclined to a life of self-indulgence. ‘Mistresses oft lose their authority by conspiring with their servants to go abroad, take them among friends, gossip, and do such other like things privily without their husbands’ consent,’ Gouge complained; ‘they make themselves thereby slaves to their servants, not daring to do anything which may offend their servants, lest they should discover to their masters such lewd pranks as their mistresses did.’ Further dangers ensued, he warned, when relations between master and mistress were strained. If a disgruntled mistress employed her maid to purloin goods or money from the master, she left herself highly vulnerable to exposure.154 A later writer warned against ‘a cunning slut of a maid, that knows best how to serve and flatter her mistress well, getting her by that means upon her side’. By persuading her mistress to hire another servant or charwoman to do the heavy work, she could free them both to go ‘a gadding’. And if the master complained about the state of the house, mistress and maids would close ranks against him, or the servants would drive a wedge between the couple: ‘the maids behind his back, that their mistress may more than overhear it, do call him Tom Peep in the Pot, or Goodman Busy-body’.155 A close alliance between maid and mistress had repercussions for the politics of the whole household. Pepys again knew something of such problems at first hand. His wife Elizabeth, childless, bored, and lonely, often tried to make friends of her servants, only to turn against them when she found her authority 152 Rowse, Case Books of Simon Forman, 276–81; The Diary of Roger Lowe, ed. W. Notestein (1938), 119; The Apprentices Warning-Piece (1641), sig. A2v–3r. 153 Cruel and Barbarous News from Cheapside (1676). 154 Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties, 313, 651; cf. n. 232, below. 155 A. Marsh, The Ten Pleasures of Marriage (1682), 67–71.

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compromised. Elizabeth herself recognized that ‘her familiarity with her other servants is it that spoils them all, and other company she hath none’, and Pepys agreed to employ a ‘companion’ to fill the gap. But that brought other difficulties, as we have seen. The new companion, he complained a few months later, had drawn his wife into the delights of ‘dancing and other pleasure, whereby her mind is taken up from her business and finds other sweets besides pleasing of me’. The companion was undermining household management and the marital relationship itself.156 An alliance with her mistress would bring a servant several benefits, not least protection against other members of the household. Matthew Commin’s wife always sided with her maids when they quarrelled with the young apprentice Simon Forman, and would beat him, Forman complained, even when he was the innocent party.157 A mistress might also be able to protect her maid against the master, and maids could sometimes reciprocate. We glimpse something of the bond between Alice Thornton, a Yorkshire gentlewoman, and her maid Jane Flower when we find Jane promising to protect her mistress during a period of domestic crisis.158 When marriages broke down, it was not unusual for distressed wives to turn to their maids for comfort and protection. A Sussex villager recalled in 1616 how her former mistress had often poured out her marital woes, and how they would sit up together in the maid’s room at night until the violent husband was safely asleep.159 The mistress was only one of several potential allies. A servant might decide that her master could offer more protection against other members of the household, while a good relationship with both employers would be better still. When Robert Starke, an unruly London servant, made repeated attempts to rape his employer’s maid, in 1638, his master sided firmly with the victim. Similarly Martha King, a Leicestershire farmer’s servant, felt able to complain to both her employers in 1702 against a fellow servant who was sexually pestering her, and succeeded in having him dismissed.160 In other situations we find servants trying to play off one employer against the other. When Alice Thornton forbade her maidservants to take her small daughter to a show in 1660, they wheedled permission from her husband instead.161 That was a trivial issue, but when a servant was chafing under her mistress’s discipline and 156 157 158 159 160 161

Pepys, Diary, iv. 9, 150. Rowse, Case Books of Simon Forman, 276–81. The Autobiography of Alice Thornton, ed. C. Jackson (Surtees Soc., 62, 1873), 137. WSRO, Ep1/11/12, fo. 189v. BCB 8, fo. 210; LRO, 1D41/4, Box 48/104. Thornton, Autobiography, 128–9.

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turned to the master for comfort or protection, the stage was set for a more complex and dangerous domestic politics. Pepys, who often found himself in this situation, usually tried to mediate without undermining his wife’s authority. In August 1663 he listened as Mary Ashwell and his wife recited their complaints against each other, and then, judging his wife in the wrong, chided her severely in private.162 Any servant who turned to her master for help knew she would antagonize her mistress still further, and had to weigh up the benefits and risks. A harsh mistress might beat her, find an excuse to turn her away, or take some more drastic revenge. A Jacobean murder-pamphlet reported the lurid story of a maid in Egham, Surrey, who had accused her mistress of cruelty and cheating her of money and clothes. Her master scolded his wife and ordered her to restore the maid’s belongings, but next day she exacted a bloody revenge by cutting the maid’s throat and decapitating her with a hatchet. However inaccurate the details, the story carried an uncomfortable moral for servants tempted to complain.163 Turning to a master for protection and comfort might also bring a very different set of problems. ‘Comfort’ could easily grow into physical or emotional intimacy, leading to further tensions if the wife became suspicious, and major upheavals if the maid fell pregnant. Such triangular relationships usually ended disastrously for the maid. The Whipster of Woodstreet, a news-ballad, told the macabre tale of a tradesman’s wife, insanely jealous of their maid, who attacked her with hot irons and killed her while her husband was away on business.164 Pepys’s diary contains no such melodramas, but shows several of his servants steering a difficult course between the demands of their petulant mistress and the attentions of their protective but philandering master. Pepys often took advantage of his position, though he did not press them further than they were willing to allow, and appears to have been looking for no more than heavy petting. He too was conscious of steering a dangerous course, nervous whenever Elizabeth became suspicious and frightened of what she might discover. In 1662 he was very tempted to seduce the young Jane Birch but, as he confessed, ‘I dare not, for fear she should prove honest and then tell my wife.’ He did try, some years later, but with little success until the autumn of 1668, when Jane was already in love with the young man she was shortly to marry. Pepys was surprised to find her now willing to 162

Pepys, Diary, iii. 135; iv. 276, 337, 361; vi. 26; vii. 60; ix. 119, 145, 559. Three Bloodie Murders (1613), sig. C–2v. The brief assize record states only that Elizabeth James was convicted in 1613 of murdering Elizabeth Wellome by pushing her downstairs and breaking her neck. She was still in prison in 1614: Cockburn (ed.), Calendar: Surrey: James I, 101, 104, 109. 164 Pepys Ballads, iii. 390. 163

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let him fondle her breasts, and promptly settled on ‘a design to try more what I can bring it to’.165 His wife, growing suspicious, insisted Jane must leave, and the huge wedding present Pepys gave the young couple may have owed something to guilt as well as genuine affection. Jane’s own behaviour is intriguing. While she was undoubtedly fond of Pepys, it is hard to avoid concluding that her new compliance reflected a calculation that sexual favours, carefully rationed, would produce material rewards—as they did. Doubtless some other servants who yielded to their employers, with varying degrees of reluctance, nourished similar hopes. Partial compliance might well appear a sensible tactical choice, especially if the maid believed she could control its progress and extent. Alice Melton, a Leicestershire servant prosecuted in 1570 for fornication with her master and a fellow servant, admitted sharing her bed with them, sometimes together, but insisted she had always refused intercourse, and the two men told the same story. As in Pepys’s household, the master was the driving force in their relationship, but the maid appears to have been able to contain it within the limits she found acceptable.166 Contemporaries were convinced that servants sometimes took the initiative in such liaisons, flirting with their masters, or seducing them, in the hope of commensurate rewards. Such rewards could be psychological as well as material, for an ill-treated maid might well take satisfaction in displacing her master’s wife in his affections. A maid might even dream of marriage, if her master was single or had an ailing spouse. A libel circulating in Gloucestershire in 1610 jeered cruelly at a yeoman’s sick wife and added, ‘The maids at the farm are all at strife | which of them shall be his wife’. One satirist described a scheming servant using every trick she could devise to catch her master’s eye, wearing a short coat, finding excuses to bend over provocatively, and climbing a ladder to clean the windows when he was sitting close by.167 Anne Cole allegedly employed still bolder tactics, walking stark naked into her bachelor master’s chamber one summer night in 1617, climbing into his bed, and inviting him to do what he would.168 Susan, the heroine of a Restoration ballad, found herself in the more typical situation of being pursued by her master, an elderly, widowed baker. But she too seizes the initiative, and after firmly resisting his advances eventually agrees to his offer of marriage. ‘He is aged, and therefore he cannot live long’, she reasons, resolving to marry ‘a jolly young man’ when he dies, confident her 165 166 167 168

Pepys, Diary, iii. 152; ix. 307, 439; cf. vi. 185. LRO, 1D 41/13/6, fo. 58. PRO, STAC 8/145/28; Marsh, Confession, 187. GL, MS 9064/17, fo. 239.

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inheritance will attract many suitors. The ballad passes no judgement on her behaviour, leaving readers to decide its morality.169 Sexual liaisons with a married employer carried enormous risks, of course, and usually ended with the servant being bundled out of the house. But we should not assume that every liaison was based on cynical exploitation. Some developed from a genuine, mutual affection, and it would be surprising if employers and servants, living in close proximity, had not sometimes felt an emotional and sexual attraction. Dorothy Jackson’s affair with her master lasted for several years, and when she eventually became pregnant he paid for her lying-in; the child was put to nurse, and the relationship appears to have resumed.170 Some liaisons appear to have been tacitly condoned. Though divorce and remarriage were forbidden, couples sometimes established a new domestic ménage in defiance of the law, while others married when the employer’s wife died, perhaps several years after the relationship had begun. A few men ventured to contract bigamous marriages.171 Contemporaries disapproved of matches between masters and servants, even lawful ones, and Gouge pointed out that masters often continued to treat their new wives more like servants.172 Remarriages arranged with undue haste sometimes aroused far deeper concerns. Margery Forde, who married her master soon after his wife died, was charged in 1601 with poisoning her, with her new husband indicted as accessory. This trial ended in acquittal, but a jury in 1684 found that John Cupper of Bittersley, Shropshire, and his pregnant servant Judith Brown had sealed their affair by poisoning his wife with arsenic, presumably to clear the path for their own marriage. Cupper was hanged in chains and Brown burned for petty treason.173 Neighbours might also voice disapproval, however, if a master failed to regularize a long-standing liaison when his wife died, especially if he had made promises and a child was on the way. The courts too sometimes pressed reluctant masters to honour their word.174 Margery Trayford sued her late master in 1589 for breach of promise, and won her case. He had promised to marry her and provide for their baby on 169

‘The West Country Wedding’, Pepys Ballads, iv. 113. BCB 6, 22 Apr. 1618; cf. LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 48/102–4. 171 WSRO, Ep1/11/15, fo. 95v; V. Brodsky Elliott, ‘Single Women in the London Marriage Market: Age, Status and Mobility’, in B. Outhwaite (ed.), Marriage and Society (1981), 89; A Royalist’s Notebook: The Commonplace Book of Sir John Oglander, ed. F. Bamford (1936), 184; Jeaffreson (ed.), Middlesex County Records, i. 286; Meldrum, Domestic Service, 111–12. 172 Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties, 402. 173 Cockburn (ed.), Calendar: Essex: Elizabeth, 525–6; W. Smith, A Just Account of the Horrid Contrivance of John Cupper, and Judith Brown his Servant (1684); Henry, Diaries and Letters, 304. 174 LRO, 1D 41/4/444; 1D 41/13/12, fo. 45v. 170

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condition she moved to Lichfield until after the delivery, but she returned to find him already married to another. Brian Marrow, a Market Harborough widower, reneged on his promise when neighbours reported that his servant was also sleeping with other men, but the fact that he was then presented for fornication may suggest some disapproval of his attempt to wriggle out of his commitment.175 In many cases the threat of legal sanctions and pressure from neighbours proved effective. Forging a close bond with her master or mistress was clearly the most promising option for a servant seeking to protect her position. But larger households might offer several other possibilities, such as allying with one of the family’s children. A prosperous household might well contain offspring close to the servants in age and tastes, and perhaps sharing their frustrations. Daughters and maidservants were often intimate; Henry Parrott indeed remarked that one of the first changes noticeable in a young bride was her much stiffer demeanour, ‘having been so childishly familiar with servants before her marriage’.176 Several contemporaries remarked on the potential dangers of such alliances. William Stout abandoned thoughts of marrying Bethia Greene, daughter of an indulgent tradesman and his wife, when he saw how she had been spoiled by her frivolous ‘companion’; Bethia too had become a disruptive presence, he noted, for ‘solely affected with light and airy company’ she ‘drew off the servants from their necessary business to lightness and vanity’.177 In any clash of wills between parents and offspring, the daughter’s intimacy with her maid could become a subversive alliance, a theme familiar in Renaissance drama. Mary Rolf, a Kent servant, was publicly whipped for assisting a clandestine marriage between her employers’ daughter and a man of whom they disapproved. Still worse, a strong-minded servant might achieve a dangerous influence over a younger or suggestible girl. Mary Hutton, a disorderly London servant, was sent to the House of Correction in 1700 for running away and, far more serious, persuading her employers’ daughter to go with her.178 Close relationships between a maid and the son of the family were far less common and usually rested, predictably, on a sexual foundation. Normally the son initiated such affairs, with the servant yielding through fear or flattery, though parents were always wary of a maid snaring a susceptible young man into a wholly unsuitable marriage. They generally 175

LRO, 1D 41/13/24, fos. 22v–23r; 1D 41/13/58, fo. 263. H. Parrot, Characters (1626), sig. A7v. 177 Stout, Autobiography, 141–2. 178 O’Hara, Courtship and Constraint, 116; W. J. Hardy (ed.), Middlesex County Records: Calendar of the Sessions Books 1689 to 1709 (1905), 218. 176

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succeeded in blocking such an outcome, whatever promises he had made.179 Some maids doubtless nurtured such dreams, while others might see their employers’ son as a protector or provider. If they could maintain the relationship at the level of camaraderie or flirtation, such a strategy offered a reasonable chance of success, but any liaison that went further was likely to end in disaster. The final dimension of domestic politics is found among the servants themselves, for larger households might generate a complex web of friendships and rivalries. Friendships between servants of the same sex were of little interest to employers and are therefore poorly documented, but they provided valuable support both in emotional and practical terms. At a trivial level, we find Joan Kirk borrowing a hood and scarf from a fellow servant in Old Fish Street, one Sunday in May 1684, to appear at her best on a social visit.180 Employers were more concerned by the possibility of sexual liaisons between male and female servants, and did their best to prevent them. Inevitably, they sometimes failed. Two London servants, left to watch the house at Christmas 1606 while their employers were in the country, seized their chance to sleep together, and pursued a clandestine affair whenever an opportunity arose.181 We can find relationships of every kind between fellow servants, from serious courtship to casual couplings and naïve semi-prostitution. Alice Coxe, a Leicester woollendraper’s servant, confessed in 1616 that she had agreed to sleep with a fellow servant in return for 22d., some material for a waistcoat, and bay to line her gown. It proved a poor exchange, as she realized when she found herself pregnant.182 The presence of other servants brought welcome companionship, but also additional problems. Servants were highly conscious of distinctions of age, status, and gender, and in larger households such issues might loom as large as relations with employers. A character writer, commenting on the tedium of a chambermaid’s life, remarked that her only satisfaction lay in her sense of status, and ‘the best [title] she can acquire is but Master of the Maids’.183 Pepys’s servants frequently voiced concerns over status, and sometimes left if they were not resolved. Mary, a cookmaid, enjoyed a good relationship with both him and his wife but left in 1661 after only a month, saying she wanted ‘to live in a tradesman’s house where there was only one maid’; though the work would be far more 179 180 181 182 183

Marsh, Confession, 177–9. OBSP 2–3 July 1684, 1–2. BCB 5, fo. 206v. LRO, BR II/18/12/33. F. Lenton, Characterismi: or Lentons Leasures (1631), sig. C.

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onerous she would have no other servants above her. Jane, another cook, left in 1665, jealous of her mistress’s favouritism towards a young male servant.184 Sarah, a chambermaid, left when Pepys decided to employ a companion for his wife, which would inevitably diminish her own status. Predictably, when another chambermaid left late in 1665, the companion was similarly ‘troubled that she hath not one under her’, which would reduce her own status and probably increase her chores. She and her mistress both felt it essential to restore the missing link in the domestic hierarchy, despite the risk of hiring staff in the middle of a plague epidemic.185 The servant hierarchy, ostensibly clear and orderly, was subject in practice to a variety of disruptive pressures. Favouritism generated inevitable tensions, and the favourite was likely to find herself resented and perhaps the target of a whispering campaign.186 A maid flirting with her master aroused predictable hostility, especially if other servants felt a sense of loyalty to his deceived wife. One London pewterer, cuddling his maid in 1597, was rudely interrupted when two other maidservants burst in, and one told him bluntly, ‘I would to God my mistress would come up and cut off your nose.’187 Other factors might also upset the domestic order, such as an inferior servant stronger or more assertive than those above her. Pepys worried in 1666 that a new girl hired to assist his cookmaid Susan, ‘though young, is taller and bigger than Su, and will not I fear be under her command’.188 Tensions occasionally exploded in serious violence. Joan Vaughan, an apothecary’s servant, was prosecuted in 1619 for ‘misusing and beating her fellow servants’, and a few days later a maid in Fleet Street was charged with ‘threatening to run a knife in one of her fellows’. Fights between maidservants were by no means uncommon.189 Maidsmightfaceadditional risks of sexual harassment too if the household included male servants. Such pressures could be persistent and sometimes shamelessly opportunist; two Leicestershire servants, targeting two maids in 1614, allegedly drew lots to decide who would have which.190 Maids often found it difficult, moreover, to secure protection or redress from their employers. Most tradesmen valued a skilled apprentice far more than a lowly maid, and farmers too would be reluctant to turn 184 185 186 187 188 189 190

Pepys, Diary, ii. 196; vi. 26. Ibid. iii. 258; vi. 340. The Autobiography of Thomas Whythorne, ed. J. M. Osborn (1962), 36. BCB 3, fos. 268v–9r. She later claimed to have spoken only ‘merrily’. Pepys, Diary, vii. 108. BCB 6, 18, and 31 Dec. 1619; cf. fo. 126v. LRO, 1D 41/13/39, fos. 9v–10r.

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away a male servant hired for the year and impossible to replace until the next hiring-fair. The maid’s best protection, as we have seen, lay in cultivating a trusting relationship with her employers, to deter a potential molester and secure a sympathetic hearing if he persisted. An alliance with other servants might also offer some protection. The maidservants in a Hammersmith family, pestered by a male servant in 1598, joined together to beat him and then complained to their master.191 A maidservant struggling alone to fend off a predatory male servant was extremely vulnerable, for he could find many opportunities to be alone with her and might be ready to use threats or force. Some men refused to accept denial, and a handful, when thwarted, exacted a terrible revenge. Two embittered servants of a Warrington haberdasher invited his maid out one night, and stabbed her to death for spurning their earlier advances.192 A few years later, in 1677, a besotted servant at Enfield, Middlesex, devised a still more horrific revenge on a maid who had rejected him. His brother and sister called at the house one night after the householders had retired to bed and savagely assaulted her, stabbing her in the face, neck, and arms, slitting her nose, and gouging out an eye. The jilted suitor then roused his employers and blamed the attack on burglars.193 Though such an episode was wholly exceptional, it underlines the physical as well as sexual dangers a maid might face from her fellow servants. Tensions between male and female servants were not always about sex. Clashes of personality also generated fierce rivalries, exacerbated by living in such close proximity.194 Tensions were further inflamed when the normal gender hierarchy was reversed in a domestic hierarchy based on age and seniority. Older maidservants felt entitled to command young male apprentices, breeding resentments which sometimes spilled over into violence. Such trivial incidents were seldom recorded, and the squabbles recalled by Simon Forman provide a rare glimpse of a common problem. We find another in The Fair Maid of the Exchange, a Jacobean citycomedy, which shows a shop girl in the London Exchange trying to dominate and beat a much younger shop boy, claiming to be his mistress 191

BCB 4, fo. 20. Four Great and Horrible Murders (1674), 5–6. 193 OBSP 25–6 Apr. 1677, 6–8; Jeaffreson (ed.), Middlesex County Records, iv. 76. All three were executed under the act of 1670 against facial mutilation (22–23 Car. II, c.1). 194 One ballad tells of a chamberlain and cookmaid whose perpetual quarrels ended in homicide: ‘The Chamberlain’s Tragedy’, Pepys Ballads, iii. 178. For a similar case in 1717, when a butler murdered a cook, see N.B., A Compleat Collection of Remarkable Tryals (1718–21), iii. 54–7. See also OBSP 9 Sept. 1674, 4, for an ex-butler who returned to the house and murdered the housekeeper, though his motive may have been robbery. 192

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in the absence of their real mistress, and provoking similar resentment.195 Most of the surviving evidence deals with much rarer incidents when resentment had triggered serious violence. One Jacobean Star Chamber case originated with a Bristol soap-boiler’s maidservant locking out some disorderly male servants, who allegedly retaliated by trying to poison her.196 Tensions in a London vintner’s household exploded still more dramatically in 1668. Thomas Savage, an apprentice, grew so vexed by a maidservant calling him ‘boy’ and ‘sirrah’, and scolding him for his addiction to drink and prostitutes, that when they were alone in the house one Sunday he beat her to death with a hammer.197 Domestic politics became still more volatile when rivalries between servants became entangled with tensions between servant and employer, or master and mistress. Jane Mare was so frightened of her fellow servant William Gibbon that she cowered upstairs when they were left at home together one Sunday in 1629, afraid he would sexually assault her. But when she emerged to find him having sex with another woman, her discovery instantly transformed the situation; terrified she would tell their employers, Gibbon knelt down before her, begged her to say nothing, and vowed to kill himself if she refused.198 A far more common scenario featured a mistress fawning on her favourites and persecuting those her husband liked (or vice versa). William Gouge warned that the victims would not long endure such a situation, and his view is borne out by Simon Forman’s narrative of his youth in Elizabethan Salisbury. As a young apprentice, he was frequently beaten and humiliated by the kitchenmaid, Mary Roberts, who was older, stronger, and favoured by their mistress. ‘Oftentimes she would knock him that the blood should run about his ears’, he recalled. Forman became increasingly reluctant to submit as he grew older, and one day when both employers were out he thrashed Mary into submission. But they both realized that final victory depended on whether the master or mistress returned home first, for their mistress always sided with Mary and the master with Simon. Forman was also aware that his master enjoyed at best a precarious authority over his wife, making the politics of the household still more unstable. Forman emerged triumphant from this encounter, but his position remained precarious.199 195 The Fair Maid of the Exchange (1607; Malone Society repr., 1963), sig. E4v. The play is sometimes ascribed to Thomas Heywood. 196 PRO, STAC 8/49/11. 197 N.B., Compleat Collection, i. 298–317 (misprinted as 417); Rayner and Crook (ed.), Newgate Calendar, i. 202–8. 198 GL, MS 9064/18, fos. 197v, 203v–4r. 199 Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties, 313; Rowse, Case Books of Simon Forman, 276–8, 80–1.

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In the sometimes claustrophobic world of the household, many servants thus looked for any means to strengthen their position and protect themselves. Most sought to win their employers’ confidence and trust, while the more ambitious might aspire to a privileged position by forging an intimate alliance with a mistress or master. The disgruntled or desperate looked for other ways to relieve their situation, and to these we turn next.

 : , ,   Many servants, perhaps most, eventually secured a position they found at least tolerable. Those who did not, and were unwilling to suffer passively, had three basic options: they could look for illicit ways to improve their situation, employ covert or overt means of retaliation, or simply run away. Many servants—not only the disaffected—naturally seized any opportunity for idleness or petty pilfering. Commentators repeatedly condemned such practices, while recognizing they were endemic. Thomas Hilder grumbled in 1653 that ‘there was never worse servants in an age than now; they must have great wages, but do little work for it; . . . they will filch, pilfer, and steal, waste, and consume the estates of their masters’, and he acknowledged that this miserable situation was far from new.200 Employers and servants inevitably held different views on work discipline and honesty, and commentators pressed the need for perpetual vigilance. Gouge condemned the ubiquitous practice he dubbed ‘eye-service’, working hard only as long as an employer was watching. ‘The world is full of such eye-serving servants,’ he complained, ‘who while their masters are present, will be busy as bees; but if he be away, then either idling at home, or gadding abroad.’201 A pamphleteer remarked that servants with a mistress who was weak, idle, or sick would ‘lie simpering, giggling, and laughing at one another, doing just what they list’, and ‘when they come among their tattling gossips, brag that they can bend their mistress to their bow; and if their mistress bids them do anything, they do it when it pleases them’.202 Many servants clearly found ways to enjoy at least some measure of freedom. The number who became pregnant after trysts with lovers on 200

T. Hilder, Conjugall Counsell, 90–1. Gouge, Of Domesticall Relations, 617. For another attack on ‘eye-service’ see P. Goodwin, Religio Domestica Rediviva: or, Family-Religion Revived (1655), 491–2; cf. Certain Sermons or Homilies (1851), 541. 202 Marsh, Ten Pleasures, 67; id., Confession, 184. 201

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their employers’ premises, in kitchens, stairways, barns, and stables as well as bedchambers, testifies to the opportunities available to the resourceful. Most were allowed some liberty on Sundays, and many loitered over errands. A woman in Temple Bar complained in 1576 that she had been quite unable to stop her maid dallying with serving-men, for ‘she could not send her for a tub of water, but she would be amongst them’.203 Emm Docker, a bricklayer’s servant sent on an errand in 1575, stayed out till night, smuggled a man into the house, and hid him in her chamber until morning.204 If that was unusual, loitering was almost universal. Many servants were equally determined to supplement their wages. A few entrepreneurial spirits earned some extra money hawking goods through the streets; we find an Elizabethan fishmonger’s maid selling brushes on her own account alongside her master’s fish. A London collier’s servant in 1602 was selling cheap rings and pins in the street and sharing the proceeds with her master, whom she paid 6d. a week for board and lodging; her position was a hybrid of servant and lodger.205 No doubt there were other such arrangements. But most servants preferred to boost their income by pilfering from their employers and fellow servants, and living under the same roof, enjoyed plentiful opportunities.206 Moralists complained that many regarded pilfering as a perquisite, and felt no qualms over stealing to fund their ‘junkets’ or to supply their relations. In 1687 Mary Peirce, in St Clement Dane’s, admitted stealing 17s. from her master and buying clothes and fruit to send to her mother in the country. Mary Cadman, who worked for a puritan minister, would invite her mother and sister on the sabbath and give them coal, cheese, and other goods from his store. Anne Crompton of Leicester sold her master’s ale to neighbours in return for clothes.207 There were thousands like them. Employers usually dealt with pilfering informally, punishing the culprits or turning them away, and those brought before the courts represent only the most serious or persistent cases. Some had exhausted their employers’ patience, like Cisley Marshall, who, it was alleged, ‘doth nothing but filch and steal from her mistress’.208 Most pilfering was clearly opportunistic, and the more naïve simply hid their booty under the bed or 203

BCB 2, fo. 213; cf. Stout, Autobiography, 204–5, 25–16; Marsh, Confession, 190–3; BCB 4, fo.

36. 204 205 206 207 208

BCB 2, fo. 75v. BCB 1, fo. 202; BCB 4, 321v. Best, Farming Books, 140. OBSP 6–8 Apr. 1687, 2; [Crofton], Perjury the Proof of Forgery, 16; LRO, BR II/18/18/9. BCB 7, fo. 230.

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in their chests.209 Their usual targets, apart from food, were items small enough to hide, easy to sell, and unlikely to arouse suspicion, such as petty cash, clothes, and small household items. Pilferers also needed a receiver nearby who would ask no questions. Kin made ideal fences, and Henry Best advised employers ‘never to hire such as are too near their friends [i.e. relations], for occasion is said to make a thief’.210 Kin might also instigate theft; Dionys Reynolds, a 17-year-old London servant, admitted stealing from her mistress in 1560 at her stepmother’s suggestion.211 But there were many other willing receivers, including London brokers like Helen Waters, described in 1618 as ‘a common placer of maid servants and suspected to have confederated with them to rob their masters’.212 Friends working in different households, women living out of service, and married neighbours might prove equally obliging.213 Among some of the poor, such deals formed part of the familiar economy of makeshifts. Sarah Dekyn of Leicester, who stole money from her employer on several occasions, was encouraged by a neighbour who remarked ‘that her master had money enough, and if she would help her[self] to some she would keep it for her’.214 In 1591 twenty Staffordshire villagers accused a neighbour of establishing a pernicious network of such contacts. She would go from house to house on Sundays in service time, they complained, persuading the servants left at home to pass her bread, corn, and malt; her daughter would later hide money under flowerpots for them to retrieve when no one was looking.215 Not all pilfering servants had yielded to sudden temptation, or been led astray. Some were clearly calculating and unscrupulous.216 A few, like Elizabeth Ellis of Leicester, had turned pilfering into an entrepreneurial enterprise. In 1629 Ellis admitted stealing 30s. at various times from her master’s bedchamber, and hiding it in his stable. She also confessed that while living with a previous employer she had found 36s. wrapped in a kerchief on top of a cupboard, which she hid under a cushion for two days to see if it was missed, and then appropriated. Some of her booty she 209 G. A. Chinnery (ed.), Records of the Borough of Leicester, vii (Leicester, 1974), 28–9; BCB 5, fo. 207v; BCB 7, fo. 235; BCB 8, fo. 259v; Cockburn (ed.), Calendar: Essex: Elizabeth, 118. 210 Best, Farming Books, 140. 211 BCB 1, fo. 60v. 212 BCB 6, 2 May 1618; cf. BCB 5, 23 Nov. 1608, 8 Mar. 1609; BCB 6, 4 July 1618, 4 May 1622; LRO, BR II/18/14/29. 213 Marsh, Confession, 195; BCB 6, 13 July 1622; LRO, BR II/18/4/228; BR II/18/18/9. 214 LRO, BR II/18/18/150–5. 215 S. A. H. Burne (ed.), The Staffordshire Quarter Sessions Rolls (William Salt. Archaeological Soc., 1929–50), ii. 136–7. 216 LRO, BR II/18/16/100.

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spent on a rich gown, three ruffs, and other clothes, claiming to have used money saved while working in London. Other sums she lent out to neighbours, both men and women, for safety and probably at interest. Elizabeth also acted as a receiver of stolen goods, including lace, stuff, and a book from a tailor’s apprentice. She insisted they were all presents, but a business arrangement sounds more likely.217 Pilfering was both a means of self-help and a form of covert retaliation. Given their low wages and status it was natural for resentful servants to cultivate the ‘hidden arts of resistance’, of which this was perhaps the most inviting.218 A servant remaining in post might steal small items on a regular basis without arousing suspicion. Those willing to play for higher stakes would wait for the right moment to break open an employer’s chest and run off with more substantial booty.219 Employers also worried that servants might let thieves into the house and guide them to money or valuables, a scenario by no means uncommon. In a dramatic case of this kind, Alice Grumboulde was burned at Leicester in 1605 for complicity in the murder of her widowed mistress, stabbed to death during a robbery which Alice had assisted and possibly instigated. She had told two strangers at the Blue Boar that her mistress had large sums of money concealed in the house, and later assisted their entry and directed them to the booty. Though she had not wielded the knife, one of the men insisted the robbery had been her idea.220 We can find several other forms of covert retaliation, some of them more subtle. William Gouge complained that resentful servants sometimes struck back at employers through their young children, and were often ‘very hoggish and churlish to their master’s children when their parents are out of sight’. Others set out to corrupt them, ‘teaching them to swear, blaspheme, and use all manner of unclean speeches’, so that often parents ‘may curse the day that ever such servants came into their house’.221 As with pilfering, this covert resistance might eventually become overt. Mary Beazly of Islington hurt a wealthy employer in 1683 by spoiling his only child, a 13-year-old girl, ‘debauching her mind with . . . songs, swearing and drinking’, and then inveigled her into a ruinous clandestine marriage with a penniless manservant. Elizabeth Fynch of Harrow went much further, adding poison to a cake she gave her master’s 217

LRO, BR II/18/17/308–9. J. C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance (1990). 219 The Casebook of Sir Francis Ashley J.P., Recorder of Dorchester 1614–1635, ed. J. H. Bettey (Dorset Record Soc., 7, 1989), 54, 72–3, 108; BCB 5, fo. 394v, 394r; BCB 6, 6 June 1622, 31 May and 6 Sept. 1623; BCB 7, fos. 51, 54; OBSP 15–16 Jan.1690, 1. 220 LRO, BR II/18/8/625–38, 656; OBSP 15–16 Jan. 1690, 3; Ashley, Casebook, 12. 221 Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties, 631. 218

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children. And John Chamberlain, the news-writer, reported in 1623 the horrific case of a male apprentice in Lombard Street who cut the throats of his employers’ two little girls and then hanged himself, ‘in some devilish revenge for ill usage’.222 Probably the most effective form of covert resistance, however, was to hit back at employers by spreading malicious stories. Servants were always interested in their employers’ lives and discussed them with friends. Employers detested this practice, even when it was no more than idle chat. ‘When servants of divers houses, men or maids, meet together,’ Gouge complained, ‘all their talk for the most part is of their masters and mistresses, whereby it cometh to pass that all the secrets of an house are soon known about the whole town.’223 Like many others, Pepys worried about his servants’ gossip networks, and was deeply embarrassed when remarks he had made about some neighbours came to their ears through the servants’ grapevine. He was amused when his favourite servant Jane mimicked and mocked their neighbour Lady Batten, in 1662, but recognized that her irritation was justified.224 He and his wife were both concerned when a former chambermaid went to work for his colleague and rival, Sir William Penn, and was soon revealing family affairs. Pepys thought the Penns wrong to hire her without consulting him, and the Penns may have agreed, for they soon turned her away to restore peace.225 It was far more alarming when a disgruntled servant, or ex-servant, spread deliberately damaging reports as a form of revenge. Such retaliation might be either overt or covert, though any serious allegation was likely to be traced back to its source. We can sometimes find employers standing together in the face of such treachery. Margaret Green, a merchant’s wife in Newcastle, dismissed a servant who accused her previous mistress of a series of thefts, and also informed the victim, who sued her former maid for defamation.226 But many worried, as a pamphleteer remarked, that neighbours would prove all too ready to believe ‘what is told them by a tale-carrying, long-tongued slut of a maid’.227 Pepys had deep misgivings about hiring ‘a neighbour’s child’ in 1664, reflecting that she would be ‘able to spread any report of our family 222 Jeaffreson (ed.), Middlesex County Records, iv. 164; W. Le Hardy (ed.), County of Middlesex: Calendar to the Sessions Records  (1935–41), iii. 28 (and for another possible case, ii. 204); Letters of John Chamberlain, ii. 492; cf. Cockburn (ed.), Calendar: Kent: Elizabeth, 179; G. Walker, ‘Crime, Gender and Social Order in Early Modern Cheshire’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Liverpool, 223 Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties, 628. 1994), 105. 224 Pepys, Diary, iii. 249–50; vii. 236–8. 225 Ibid., iii. 302; iv. 7, 92. 226 Raine (ed.), Depositions from Durham, 76–7. 227 Marsh, Confession, 196; Defoe, Works, 503.

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upon any discontent among the heart of our neighbours’.228 Knowledge of the family’s private concerns gave servants a powerful weapon, and employers’ fears sometimes proved well founded. One Leicestershire maid allegedly slandered her mistress in 1627 by reporting ‘that she was an idle huswife and would do nothing but sit by the fire and prick on a clout [darn clothes]’.229 Others went much further. Helen Loddenham and William Glen, servants in Goadby, Leics., devised an elaborate revenge about 1568 when their employers checked their budding romance: they smuggled another man into the bedchamber when the master was away and his wife in bed, locked them in together, and broadcast the scandal, inflicting considerable damage before their fraud was exposed.230 Matthew Randall, a yeoman of the guard, faced similar embarrassment when a former servant left her baby outside his door in 1612, claiming he was its father. Vigorously denying the accusation, Randall explained that he had turned her out for her abusive and malicious behaviour, whereupon she ‘in her malice and choler did give out in words and threaten . . . that she would be even with him’.231 Many servants recognized the damage they could inflict by revealing family secrets, whether to other members of the household or outsiders. Such knowledge also provided them with valuable leverage; Samuel Rowlands spoke of mistresses forced to overlook pilfering and secret trysts in return for silence about their own illicit liaisons. A Leicester maidservant, aware that a man came to lie with her mistress whenever her husband was away, warned bluntly that ‘if she saw any more such dealings she would tell her master of it’. Whether motivated by loyalty or malice, she knew the storm she could unleash.232 Some servants clearly used such ‘revelations’ to damage one employer and curry favour with the other. Bridget Fixall, described as ‘an unruly quean’, beat her mistress and stirred up marital tensions in 1622 by telling her master (falsely) that his wife ‘was naught with some young men’.233 Such accusations were almost guaranteed to breed dissension. Elizabeth Pepys was in tears one morning in 1663 when she found her chambermaid had been telling Samuel ‘stories’ about her. When Ashwell, one of her companions, left after repeated tiffs, she told him that Elizabeth would no doubt prefer some222

Pepys, Diary, v. 229. LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 3/58. 230 LRO, 1D 41/4/45; cf. BCB 4, fo. 36 and BCB 5, 225v. 231 GL, MS 9064/17, fos. 25v–26r. Men in this situation sometimes lied, of course, but Randall was cleared when a bargeman was identified as the likely father. 232 S. Rowlands, The Night-Raven (1620), 17–18, and A Paire of Spy-Knaves [?1620), 18, in The Complete Works, ed. S. J. H. Herrtage (Glasgow, 1880), ii; LRO, BR II/18/6/54. 233 BCB 6, 20 Apr. 1622. See also Meldrum, Domestic Service, 118–21. 229

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one ‘not be so liable to give me information of things as she takes her to be’.234 Pepys noted several upsets triggered by such ‘information’ during the diary period, including a fierce quarrel between his wife and her chambermaid Mary, who ‘to her teeth told her that she could tell me of something that should stop her mouth’; a jealous husband, Pepys immediately suspected a liaison between his wife and her painting master.235 Family secrets broadcast to a wider audience could inflict far greater damage. When a maid in Petworth, Sussex, stormed out of the house, declaring that her mistress was in bed with another man and ‘that she would be no more her bawd’, neighbours promptly summoned a constable. Another Sussex maid alleged that her mistress slept with a lover whenever her husband was away, and brought a friend one day to catch them in bed together and corroborate her story.236 A London haberdasher’s servant, scandalized by similarly blatant infidelities, remarked in 1575 that ‘there be those that sit at the door whilst their wives do make them cuckolds, and so did my master’; she too eventually denounced her mistress.237 While the motives that led servants to speak out are usually impossible to establish, well-founded allegations could prove highly damaging. Alice Brabant, who denounced her mistress in 1560 as a whore and bawd, had the satisfaction of seeing her carted through the streets.238 Employers were well aware of their vulnerability, for they enjoyed little more privacy than their servants, and neither threats nor blandishments could guarantee silence. Elizabeth Bradbourne, a shoemaker’s wife who slept with her maid in 1562 while her husband was away, rashly invited her servant William into the bed too, and then realized that the maid could now expose and ruin her. She urged the maid to have sex with William as well, to ensure her silence, but the maid declined and her decision to report the scandal led to her mistress being prosecuted and whipped.239 Any servant privy to an employer’s wrongdoing possessed a power which could throw domestic order into turmoil. The majority of damaging ‘revelations’, especially against women, were sexual in nature. But disgruntled servants also accused their employers of a wide range of other offences, including theft and homicide. One claimed that her master had murdered his servant, and another 234 235 236 237 238 239

Pepys, Diary, iv. 9, 279. Ibid. vi. 246. WSRO, Ep1/11/6, fo. 27; Ep1/11/3, fos. 5v–6v (2nd foliation). BCB 2, fos. 195v–197v, 199v–200r. BCB 1, fos. 84v–85r; cf. fos. 21r–23v; BCB 2, fo. 29. BCB 1, fo. .200r–v; cf. fo. 172.

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said her mistress had made away her previous husband.240 Such allegations might have disastrous consequences, both for those accused and others caught up in a web of suspicion and jealousies. The potential repercussions were spelled out in a lurid report in 1707, which described a domestic tragedy in a gentleman’s family in Sittingbourne, Kent. A chambermaid had allegedly taken revenge on the butler for blocking her romance by forging a letter to suggest he was having an affair with the mistress of the house, and showing it to their master. Mad with rage, the gentleman murdered both his wife and the butler, and the maid too when she confessed her treachery, before killing himself in a scene of Shakespearian carnage.241 The story may have been wholly fictitious, but it played effectively on widespread fears about the destructive powers of an embittered servant. Slander was thus a weapon to be used with care, for it had a tendency to rebound on the perpetrator. Though stories might be spread anonymously, any serious allegation was likely to be traced to its source, and would often result in instant dismissal. Dismissal was itself a twoedged weapon, of course, for it left the servant free to speak out more openly. One chambermaid who left Pepys’s family after a quarrel took revenge by telling him about his wife’s secret financial dealings, while a former cookmaid hired someone to write a letter accusing Elizabeth of intimacy with a young male servant.242 Another London servant, Mary Betts, confessed in 1608 to slandering no fewer than four of her former employers, accusing them all of keeping ‘houses of lewdness’.243 Embittered former servants occasionally succeeded in inflicting serious damage. One striking example is the story of Mary Cadman, who had served the well-known London Presbyterian minister Zachary Crofton until dismissed in 1657 for pilfering and other offences. Cadman thereupon spread damaging reports that he had flogged her for his sexual gratification, under the cover of discipline, and her allegations were taken up and widely publicized by a rival faction in the parish, led by the Baptist minister John Simpson. One of them broadcast the scandal to passers-by on Tower Hill. Cadman made sworn depositions to a master in Chancery and Sir Robert Tichborne, a London Alderman, and the affair eventually reached the ears of Oliver Cromwell, the Lord Protector. Crofton denied everything, and was eventually able to prove Cadman an habitual liar, but the damage had been immense. The episode 240 241 242 243

BCB 5, fo. 271v; Raine (ed.), Depositions from Durham, 76–7; BCB7, fos. 107v, 149, 225, 262. The Horrors of Jealousie. Or, the Fatal Mistake (1707). Pepys, Diary, iii. 285; vi. 29. BCB 5, 4 Jan. 1609; cf. Gowing, Domestic Dangers, 68.

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even inspired a comic playlet, published several years later after the Restoration.244 The more calculating servant held on to her knowledge, using the threat of exposure for leverage. A servant pregnant by her master knew that exposing him would hurt them both, and was often willing to conceal his identity in return for help and protection. If he reneged on his promises, both knew she could reveal his name and expose him to shame and perhaps punishment.245 In other situations too a servant might conceal secrets until it suited her to speak out. Mary Heyricke was sent for trial for infanticide at Leicester Assizes in 1614 after her former servant, Mary Grocock, accused her of bearing and killing an illegitimate child, claiming they had buried it together in the garden. Asked why she had waited a year and a half before revealing this terrible crime, Grocock replied frankly that it was ‘because Mary Heyricke oweth her father money and will not pay it, she thinks the revealing of this child’s death will be a means to get her father’s money’.246 Whatever the facts, her story underlines the damage a servant could inflict on her former employer, and her belief in the leverage her knowledge might provide. In other cases we find a servant belatedly revealing secrets for her own selfpreservation. Mary Kendall strongly suspected that her master, an innkeeper, had robbed and murdered a wealthy traveller, but bribes and beatings persuaded her to remain silent for several years until the net closed in. Frightened now of being charged as an accomplice, she revealed all she knew, and her testimony proved crucial in one of the most extraordinary murder trials of the century.247 Some employers came to the understandable conclusion that dismissal alone was an insufficient response to slander. Only prosecution would provide an adequate retribution and repair the damage. A steady succession of such cases came before the London Bridewell, with employers confident the governors would prefer their word unless there was compelling evidence to the contrary. When Anne Deane, a linen-draper’s servant, was charged in 1562 with spreading tales that her mistress had borne a child before her marriage, the clerk noted baldly that she ‘utterly denied that ever she said it and therefore was well whipped’, underlining how little credit a servant’s word enjoyed.248 In most cases the offender 244 [Crofton], Perjury the Proof of Forgery; An Attest of the Householders within the Parish of Buttolphs Aldgate London (1657); [F. Kirkman], The Presbyterian Lash (1661). 245 Capp, ‘Double Standard Revisited’, 80–3; cf. Horrocks (ed.), Southampton Assembly Books, ii. 70, 80, 86, 95; Guilding (ed.), Reading Records, ii. 476; iii. 64–5. 246 LRO, BR II/18/11/232–6. 247 A True Relation of the Horrid Murder committed upon the Person of Thomas Kidderminster (1688), 248 esp. 14–17. BCB 1, fo. 217v (my italics).

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was made to retract her allegations and then whipped or made to beg publicly for pardon. In 1610 Westminster magistrates sentenced Ann Baynham to kneel down and beg forgiveness for calling her mistress a whore, in the place where she had committed the offence and before the same audience.249 Agnes Rice was whipped in 1622 after admitting she had slandered her mistress ‘in her anger’, while a locksmith’s servant was gaoled for claiming her mistress had conspired to poison him. Jane Stitch escaped only after begging forgiveness and agreeing to be bound over in £10 to live honestly towards her master and mistress ‘in word and deed’.250 Other employers took matters into their own hands. Johanna Johnson, who claimed to have left her place in Holborn when she realized her employers were running a bawdy house, said they had assaulted her in the street and ‘if their neighbours had not come they had killed her’. A Flintshire woman whose maid reported that she was a thief took a different form of revenge by kneeling down and cursing her; sadly for her, the move backfired when neighbours suspected she might be a witch.251

  Idleness, pilfering, and slander all offered effective forms of retaliation. But it is hardly surprising to find disgruntled servants sometimes defying their employers openly and directly, despite the risks. At the most mundane level, defiance might take the form of ‘sauciness’, ranging from sullen demeanour, through a readiness ‘to answer back, and to chop word for word’, to virulent abuse. One servant was prosecuted after solemnly ‘cursing her mistress on her knees’.252 Though most employers found little difficulty in curbing insolence, they were well aware that domestic order rested ultimately on consent. What if a wayward servant—or indeed child—refused to submit to discipline? Gouge condemned truculent servants who refused to accept a beating and used force to prevent it. Simon Forman was one such, recalling how at the age of 17 he had wrested a stick from his mistress’s hands and thrust her out of the room. Forman felt he had done nothing to deserve a beating, but recognized that after such defiance he could no longer remain in the household.253 249

Manchée, Westminster City Fathers, 124. BCB 6, 28 Sept. 1622; Le Hardy (ed.), Middlesex: Calendar,  iii. 87; BCB 5, f.216v; cf. BCB 1, fos. 6, 9, 20v; BCB 5, fos. 225v, 271v; BCB 6, 15 June 1622. 251 BCB 2, fo. 107r–v; Henry, Diaries, 152. 252 Marsh, Confession, 193; Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties, 599, 613; BCB 8, 14 Jan. 1642. 253 Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties, 613; Rowse, Case Books of Simon Forman, 280–1; cf. BCB 6, 4 Sept. 1619. 250

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Though male servants were more likely to offer physical resistance, it was by no means rare to find young women doing likewise, while spinsters living at home were sometimes prepared to assault their own parents. Agnes Wilkes was whipped in 1561 for ‘railing and fighting’ with her father, while Mary English, a seriously disturbed girl, was charged in 1635 with stabbing both her mother and grandmother.254 We can find some maidservants turning on employers with similar venom, such as Margaret Fernell, punished in 1627 ‘for throwing down her mistress, [and] stamping upon her’.255 The circumstances behind such assaults are rarely recorded, and we should not assume that every assailant had been driven to desperation by a harsh employer. Some young people, of either sex, found the constraints of service intolerable whatever the character of their employers. One master explained in 1629 that when he rebuked his maid for her insolence, ‘she fell upon him in disordered manner and tore his band from his neck’.256 Other servants were quick to exploit employers who were weak, sick, or elderly. Anne Wilford, for example, was punished in 1633 ‘for abusing her mistress and threatening her, she being a very aged woman’.257 In such circumstances an assertive servant could sometimes achieve almost total liberty. A button-maker’s widow complained in 1707 that her apprentice, Jane Best, had beaten and robbed her, stayed out late at night drinking and whoring, and had threatened to kill her.258 A testamentary case revealed the even more extraordinary story of Hannah Bookey (or Booker), an elderly spinster who ran a chandler’s shop in Shadwell until her death in 1699. For thirty years Rebecca Lucas had lived with her as a servant, at 50s. a year, helping to run the shop. Towards the end of her life Bookey developed a taste for the bottle and became bedridden, and Lucas allegedly exploited the situation by persuading her mistress to make a will in her favour, and then refused to let her change it. Neighbours described her abusing and beating her mistress, trampling over her, and simply ignoring attempts to dismiss her. The story reached its bizarre conclusion when Lucas told a neighbour early one morning that her mistress was dead, and the two proceeded to Doctors’ Commons to have the will proved forthwith, leaving the body unattended. On their return the neighbour went to pay her last respects, and was astonished to discover that Bookey was in fact still, just, alive.259 254

BCB 1, fo. 164v, BCB 8, fo. 28; cf. BCB 4, fo. 424; BCB 7, fo. 46. BCB 7, fo. 48; cf. BCB 5, fos. 187, 214v; BCB 6, 20 Apr. 1622; BCB 7, fo. 65; BCB 8, fos. 19v, 222. 256 BCB 7, fo. 118. 257 BCB 7, fo. 326v; Walker, ‘Crime, Gender’, 105. 258 Hardy (ed.), Middlesex: Calendar 1689 to 1709, 318; BCB 8, fo. 113. 259 GL, MS 9065A/9, Bookey v Lucas, 1699–1700. 255

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This macabre episode, with a will proved before the testator was dead, may be unique. But every householder was uncomfortably aware that an employer unable to enforce discipline faced endless humiliations and danger. Paradoxically, the employers most at risk were the weak and the tyrannical. We can trace a steady trickle of embittered servants plotting lethal revenge against oppressive employers, and acting out their fantasies. This was a crime to chill the blood, for householders were well aware that any servant, however lowly, could find plentiful opportunities to destroy them. Poison such as ratsbane (arsenic) was readily available, and could easily be added to the family’s food or drink. Mary Spenser, aged 14, ran away from a silkweaver’s family in Grub Street in 1605 after putting poison in their pottage, explaining later that her employers were cruel, and that a boy had told her that if she poisoned them ‘they should never beat her more’.260 In another case three servants combined to poison their widowed mistress, and other cases of actual or suspected poisoning can be found throughout the period.261 Killing an employer constituted petty treason, for which a female servant could be burned at the stake, so the risks were appallingly high.262 Even when death did not result, the penalties could be savage: early in Elizabeth’s reign several maidservants had their hands or ears cut off for poisoning their employers, though in the seventeenth century they were more likely to face a heavy fine and imprisonment. A maid who poisoned Lady Bugges in 1621 was fined 400 marks and sentenced to indefinite imprisonment. In a sensational case in 1672 Mary Naylor was convicted of adding arsenic to a spiced cake with the intention of killing her employers, the earl and countess of Thanet, their guests the earl and countess of Burlington and Charles lord Clifford, and a fellow maidservant. She was lucky to suffer no more than the pillory for attempting a crime that would have shocked the nation.263 Embittered servants without the courage to kill could pursue an 260

BCB 5, fo. 63. BCB 5, fo. 275; cf. BCB 1, fo. 77, Jeaffreson (ed.), Middlesex County Records, i. 196; Le Hardy (ed.), Middlesex: Calendar, ns iii. 28 (and cf. ii. 337 for the case of a maid who only pretended to have poisoned her employers); Cockburn (ed.), Calendar: Kent: James I, 39; id. (ed.), Calendar: Surrey: Elizabeth, 341–2; Lister (ed.), West Riding Sessions Records, 265, 301, 302, where the maid may have intended to kill herself as well as her employers. Agnes Bagworth, who drew a knife on her pregnant former mistress when they met in the street, was untypical: BCB 8, fo. 118. 262 Cockburn (ed.), Calendar: Kent: Elizabeth, 307; Jeaffreson (ed.), Middlesex County Records, ii. 9. Offenders in Henry VIII’s time might be boiled alive: J. G. Nichols (ed.), Chronicle of the Grey Friars of London (Camden Soc., 53, 1852), 35, 45, 103. 263 Machyn, Diary, 196–7, 235–6; Cockburn (ed.), Calendar: Kent: Charles II, 1660–1675, 277; Jeaffreson (ed.), Middlesex County Records, ii. 151–2; iii. 281. 261

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alternative means of revenge: arson. Setting fire to an employer’s house was an ideal weapon of the weak, for fires were a natural hazard and no one might realize that any crime had been committed. Arson attacks could easily have fatal consequences, of course, and in some cases an element of homicidal intent is unmistakable, with servants starting a fire in the middle of the night and running away, leaving the sleeping family to its fate.264 Though arson was a crime very hard to prove, contemporaries lived in understandable fear.

 Any act of open defiance carried inevitable risks, and even surliness might well invite a beating. Many servants understandably saw flight as the simplest response to an insufferable position, and though we do not know how many ran away, flight was certainly common in the capital, where there was a good chance of escaping detection. London was also a magnet for provincial runaways, attracted by its anonymity and plentiful job opportunities. Flight carried its own risks, of course. In rural areas and small towns it was much harder to avoid discovery, and a runaway sent back to her employers knew her plight would be worse than before. A Yorkshire maid who ran away with some of her mistress’s clothes in 1598 was sent back and ordered to be whipped and set in the stocks.265 Even if she avoided detection, a runaway might prove unable to find another place, or any other means of livelihood. But many naturally did not stop to consider the dangers, and fled with only the vaguest idea of what to do or where to go. Runaways fell into several categories. At one end of the spectrum were servants who had loitered too long on an errand or stayed out late and were frightened to return home. Others fled over trifling domestic upsets. One ran away in 1621 after dropping her mistress’s small child, afraid she would be angry. A young apprentice fled because she was afraid of being questioned over 3d. she had found when sweeping the floor.266 But many others absconded after enduring months of misery, able to bear it no longer. A grocer’s apprentice in Bread Street who fled in 1607, after six months, explained that she could never please her mistress. A tailor’s servant said she had run away ‘because her dame used her hardly and 264 B. Capp, ‘Arson, Threats of Arson, and Incivility in Early Modern England’, in P. Burke, B. Harrison, and P. Slack (eds.), Civil Histories: Essays Presented to Sir Keith Thomas (Oxford, 2000), 201–2; Leveson-Gower (ed.), ‘Notebook of a Surrey Justice’, 202. 265 Lister (ed.), West Riding Sessions Rolls, 104–5. 266 BCB 5, fo. 280; BCB 6, 10 Apr. 1621.

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pinched her and kicked her’.267 Many runaways were fleeing physical cruelty, sexual harassment, or serious neglect and starvation. Other servants fled because they could not stomach the restrictions of service, even under good employers. Some were poor orphans apprenticed by the parish, often to employers who were also poor and regarded them simply as cheap labour. A parish orphan might feel equally unhappy in a regimented, bourgeois household, a totally alien environment. Pepys was understandably annoyed in 1663 when ‘a parish-child’ named Jinny ran away on the same day she arrived, after his wife had carefully deloused her and fitted her with new clothes.268 Plenty of other young women rebelled against the constraints of domestic service. Dorothy Roberts was punished as ‘an idle drab and will not remain with any honest person or service’, while another runaway, it was said, ‘will abide no service’.269 Some found parental control equally suffocating. Elizabeth Curtis stole from her parents and ran away in 1623, while the court noted that another offender ‘will not be ruled by her father but pilfereth and goeth about like a vagrant’.270 Some servants ran away repeatedly, insubordinate by nature or driven by the sheer misery of their position. The Bridewell governors described Elizabeth Cundall as ‘a notorious rogue, she would not be ruled by her father nor tarry with him nor in any service where he hath placed her to his great charge’.271 Alice Carter, whipped at Bridewell in 1637 and sent back to her mistress, had run away on fourteen previous occasions. It seems unlikely they ever established a satisfactory working relationship.272 More calculating runaways often took some of their employers’ money or goods to cover the first days or weeks of freedom. Anne Seal, prosecuted in 1684, had the effrontery to claim that her master, as an excommunicate, had no legal title to his goods!273 Some had made prior arrangements with confederates, who agreed to shelter them and dispose of their booty. This was often no more than a temporary solution, however. One Londoner who enticed a servant to steal from her master and come and live with her, in 1609, was already sharing a single room with her landlady, and clearly in no position to offer much. In such 267

BCB 5, fo. 177; BCB 7, fo. 34. Pepys, Diary, iv. 282–3. 269 BCB 1, fo. 67v; BCB 6, 12 Jan. 1622. 270 BCB 6, 6 Dec. 1623; BCB 7, fo. 199; BCB 8, fo. 80v; cf. BCB 7, fo. 226v; BCB 8, 20 Jan. 1642; Sachse (ed.), Minutes of the Norwich Court, 1632–1635, 28, 56, 86. 271 BCB 6, fo. 346, 31 May 1623; cf. BCB 1, fo. 1v; BCB 6, 7 July 1621; BCB 8, 1 July 1642, f.139v. 272 BCB 8, fo. 139v; cf. BCB 6, 4 Aug. 1621. 273 OBSP 2–3 July 1684, 4. 268

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circumstances runaways were soon likely to find themselves drawn into a life of prostitution or crime.274 The fate of most runaways remains hidden from us. The only ones we know about are those eventually detected and brought before the courts. Young women living ‘out of service’ and unable to give a satisfactory account of themselves stood in perpetual danger of arrest, and the ‘success rate’ of runaways in the provinces may have been quite low.275 But runaway servants living in London, or taking refuge there, enjoyed far better prospects. Some found new services, while others maintained themselves by sewing, knitting, charring, or crying wares in the street. Such employments offered only a frugal livelihood, of course, and inevitably some were tempted by other possibilities, most of which involved ‘keeping company’ with men. An attractive young woman who was ready to flirt in alehouses and taverns could often find someone to support her, at least for a time. Anne Hill, whipped in 1622, was described as ‘a wench out of service . . . keeping company in ill manner with one Roger Kent who hath impoverished himself, wife and child by her means’.276 Predictably, such liaisons often proved short-lived. John Todd, a London apprentice rich enough to rent separate lodgings for his mistress and spend £40–£50 a year on her in clothes, was understandably vexed to discover her one day in bed with another man; he took back all her clothes, leaving her ‘stark naked’, and abandoned her to her fate— possibly a rapid descent into prostitution.277 That was one common fate of runaway servants, some of them lured away by bawds promising an easy and pampered life.278 And prostitution might well lead to a further downward spiral, summed up in a Bridewell note on one Anne Willis in 1628: ‘a poor wench heretofore put forth apprentice by this Hospital and having run away from her master hath been lewd and gotten the foul disease for which she is punished and to be sent to St. Thomas’ hospital to be cured’. It is unlikely that Anne Willis ever found a respectable niche in society.279 Another option for the runaway was to live by her wits. Pilfering from market stalls and shops offered a life of freedom and excitement, 274 BCB 6, 20 Nov. 1619; cf. BCB 5, 8 Mar. 1609; BCB 5, fo. 440; BCB 6, 13 July 1622; BCB 7, fo. 298. 275 Griffiths, Youth and Authority, ch. 7; id., ‘The Structure of Prostitution in Elizabethan London’, Continuity and Change, 8 (1993); id., ‘Meanings of Nightwalking in Early Modern England’, Seventeenth Century, 13 (1998). 276 BCB 7, fo. 271; cf. BCB 6, 6 June 1618. 277 Corporation of London RO, MC6/358; Earle, Making of the Middle Class, 102–3. 278 BCB 7, fo. 286. 279 BCB 7, fo. 100.

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tempered by the strong probability of eventual arrest and a whipping or worse.280 Runaways, like the poor as a whole, rarely looked beyond the immediate future, and some were drawn into this world whether by choice or circumstance. And some then dangled the same course before other servants as an easy escape route, offering their services as receivers and drawing a veil over its likely conclusion.281 Many runaways fled with no clear idea how they would live. Some sank into total destitution, and were discovered by the nightwatch sheltering under market stalls or in cellars. Anne Attoway, dressed in rags, hungry, and sleeping rough in the February cold of 1629, was ready to concede defeat: she approached the watch of her own accord and ‘entreated them to help her to labour where she might get victuals’.282 Others were reduced to still more desperate expedients. Elizabeth Fawkener, an habitual runaway, raised a pittance by selling her own clothes, a strategy with limited prospects.283 Some ended among the dehumanized dregs of London street life, prosecuted for aggressive begging, or for seizing and stripping small children to sell their clothes. Susan Kendall, pregnant, destitute, and wandering the streets in December 1631, was arrested while attempting to rob another poor woman who had fallen into labour in the street.284 Flight could lead to a bleakly Hobbesian world where the poor fought each other to survive. It is worth emphasizing, however, that the records tell us only of the runaways who failed. The majority simply vanished, and most had probably found a satisfactory niche ‘living at their own hands’, or had re-entered service with more palatable employers.

 Much of the material surveyed in this chapter provides a salutary warning against glamorizing the lives of servants. Early studies were based on the comfortable households of the landed elites, far removed from life with a tenant farmer or humble artisan.285 Young women were brought up to obey, of course, and many living with decent employers probably adjusted without too much difficulty. They received free board and lodging, and their wages, though small, represented disposable income to 280

BCB 6, 10 Nov. 1621; BCB 7, fo. 239. BCB 6, 13 July 1622; BCB 7, fo. 227v. 282 BCB 8, fo. 226, cf. BCB 7, fos. 34, 97. 283 BCB 6, 6 June 1618. 284 BCB 7, fo. 254; begging: BCB 6, 28 Apr. 1621, 17 Aug. 1622; BCB 7, fo. 211; stripping: BCB 7, fo. 212v; BCB 8, fos. 255, 259v, 279v. 285 J. J. Hecht, The Domestic Servant in Eighteenth-Century England (1956). 281

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be spent at pleasure or saved towards setting up their own home one day. Joan Camper, who served a London dyer for seven years, had accumulated by 1623 the quite impressive sum of £10.286 At the same time, service generally meant a life of drudgery and dependence, with the risk of far worse at the hands of a cruel mistress or lecherous master. Outside London it was very difficult for a maidservant to extricate herself, and a year’s contract must often have felt like a life sentence. As this survey has demonstrated, however, service covered a huge range of situations and relationships, reflecting individual personalities and circumstances, and it was rarely synonymous with passive submission. For generations, servants had developed ways to ease their lot, whether by loitering and pilfering, or by forging an alliance within the household. We also find a striking contrast between conditions in London and in the provinces. Contemporaries had no difficulty in explaining the capital’s attraction, and if they exaggerated the extent to which market forces enabled servants to negotiate better wages and conditions, there was clearly some foundation for their claims. Adam Martindale’s sister was determined to leave her native Lancashire and seek her fortune in the capital, prompted by dreams of social advancement, and she pursued her dream despite fierce opposition from her family.287 For many others like her, London spelled more money, greater freedom, adventure, and better marriage prospects. Service as a category was also more fluid and flexible than is often supposed. Even in small rural communities its character was modified by social ties between servants and young people still living with their parents, a theme explored in Chapter 8, below. Many young women appear to have alternated service with periods living at home. Mary Robins of Wapping, aged 17, deposed in 1702 that over the preceding four years she had spent three periods in service and three living at home.288 Alice Jenkinson, a Leicestershire shepherd’s daughter, similarly divided her time between home and service, while Pepys’s Jane Birch also returned to her mother in the country in 1662, and remained there several months.289 Others moved between service and working ‘at their own hands’, which offered a measure of personal autonomy to compensate for 286 GL, MS 9065A/5, Wilson v Blackthorne, 1623. Elizabeth Hitchen, a single servant aged 40, said she was worth £20, debts paid, in 1637, though some of that may have been inherited: MS 9065A/7, Dunkin v Smyth; cf. Froide, ‘Single Women, Work, and Community’, 256–8. 287 The Life of Adam Martindale, ed. R. Parkinson (Chetham Soc., 4, 1845), 6; H. Peacham, The Art of Living in London (1642), sig. A4v. 288 GL, MS 9065A/9, Huddie v Page, 31 Mar. 1702; BCB 5, fo. 370v. 289 LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 7/98, deposition of Richard Jenkinson; Box 50/47; Pepys, Diary, ii. 162.

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the low wages.290 Many were willing to accept such an exchange, and those blessed with good looks and winning manners might find other ways to supplement their wages. Richard Head’s The Art of Wheedling devoted a whole chapter to the devices of a free-spirited young woman who comes to London ‘in hopes that her face would prefer her’, and being ‘too stout [independent] for a chambermaid’ works as a seamstress, using the position to wheedle treats from her male customers.291 The alternation of service and other forms of livelihood might have several explanations. In many areas, employment for women in the agricultural sector was limited. Elizabeth Bradshaw, a Leicestershire villager who deposed in 1705 that ‘she maintains herself upon wages being at service, and when out of service her father maintains her’, may not have had many options.292 Towns offered far greater choice. Agnes Smith worked in Reading initially as a hired servant and then ‘at her own hands’. Mary Stephens had moved to London as a servant, like thousands of others, but after a bout of illness found a new livelihood carding and spinning wool, in an all-female household (which the parish officers suspected was a bawdy house).293 Defoe spoke scathingly of the ‘amphibious life’ of young servants in London, ‘chopping and changing’ between service and the bawdy house.294 The Bridewell records reveal numerous servants who had dropped out to become ‘nightwalkers’, and it is likely that some of them later moved back into service. Though movement in that direction is rarely documented, a moralistic newspamphlet of 1684 provides one intriguing glimpse. Telling the story of a gentleman who died of a heart attack in the middle of a sexual romp, it noted that the scrivener’s servant he had picked up in an alehouse ‘sometimes was at service, and at other times loitered at her own hands, taking evil courses past doubt to support her necessities’.295 She sounds like one of Defoe’s amphibians. The position of a ‘town miss’, maintained in her own lodgings by a gentleman or prosperous tradesman, was far more comfortable and might well look an attractive alternative to service, at least for a time. Whatever means of livelihood they adopted, young spinsters saw off repeated campaigns by the authorities in London and other urban centres to stop them ‘living at their own hands’. 290 See e.g. Eliz. Cheyney of Shadwell, a spinster of 27, living with her mother and buying produce at markets to resell through the streets: GL, MS 9065A/9, 19 Apr. 1702. 291 R. Head, Proteus Redivivus. The Art of Wheedling (1684), 278–85. 292 LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 50/47. 293 Guilding (ed.), Reading Records, ii. 491; BCB 5, fo. 223. 294 Defoe, Works, 501. 295 Strange and Dreadful News from Queen-street (1684), 1–2; for a typical drop-out see BCB 4, fo. 320.

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The early modern maidservant tried to optimize her situation by seeking out decent and preferably easygoing employers, and establishing a position of trust within their household. The fact that a significant minority remained with the same family for years suggests this was by no means an impossible dream. Other servants, less loyal or less well treated, snatched any opportunity that presented itself to ease their lot. If exploited or abused, they resorted to covert or overt forms of retaliation. And in London, and other areas with plentiful work, servants could move on to another place, or intersperse the security of domestic service with periods of independence, living by their own hands or wits.296 We should not underestimate the dangers and hardships of life in service, and many undoubtedly endured lives of misery. But those blessed with some spirit and initiative could hope to play a significant role in shaping the circumstances of their lives. 296 Cf. P. Saleski, ‘Women, Work and Cultural Change in Eighteenth- and Early NineteenthCentury London’, in T. Harris (ed.), Popular Culture in England, c.1500–1850 (1995), 150–1.

5 Women and Neighbours: Female Disputes

C harmony was an ideal universally admired in early modern England. The reality, of course, fell far short, and the next two chapters explore the world of personal disputes between women and their neighbours. Disagreements were unavoidable when people often lived cheek by jowl, and conflicts of interest frequently outweighed any sense of communal solidarity. Social identity was, in any case, a complex matter. Women generally identified primarily with their families and a small circle of close friends and neighbours, or gossips. Every parish, neighbourhood, and street concealed a patchwork of such networks based on factors such as occupation, kinship, status, age, and values. We have seen how such networks provided women with both moral and practical support in the context of marital disputes, and if two neighbours fell out, both parties would similarly look to their gossips. The level of support that was forthcoming often proved critical in determining the course and outcome of the dispute. At the same time we should recognize that these local networks were fluid and overlapping, and a neighbour might well be on friendly terms with both parties. Moreover, neighbours had to balance the personal cause of their friends against the blessings of peace and good order, and sometimes chose to express their friendship through conciliation and mediation rather than by partisan support. Friends often played a key role in resolving disputes.1 We usually know only about quarrels which reached the courts, and we depend heavily on court records to reconstruct everyday patterns of social behaviour. Inevitably this skews the picture, for most disputes were settled informally, and court records themselves present many problems. The ecclesiastical courts handled huge numbers of suits brought by ordinary individuals in the face of alleged defamation, an aspect of their business which grew dramatically in the Elizabethan and early Stuart period. The rich and circumstantial evidence provided by surviving depositions takes us to the very heart of parish life, but much of this 1 For recent surveys see A. Shepard and P. Withington (eds.), Communities in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2000), esp. introd.; Daniel Beaver, Parish Communities and Religious Conflict in the Vale of Gloucester, 1590–1690 (Cambridge, Mass., 1998).

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evidence was fiercely disputed. Even when both sides acknowledged that the words alleged had indeed been spoken, we may be no nearer to understanding the issues at stake. We can usually assume that a larceny case was about stolen goods, but defamation suits reflected a far more complex set of issues. The offensive words had often been hurled in the course of a dispute over a quite different issue, and it often remains unclear whether the plaintiff (or ‘producent’) had felt genuinely hurt or was grasping the opportunity to pursue their dispute in the courts. A further problem is that the evidence provided by plaintiffs and witnesses and recorded by officials was tailored to match the scope of the ecclesiastical courts’ jurisdiction. Restricted to moral and spiritual offences, the courts could only hear cases where the defamatory allegations referred to offences of this nature. If a woman called her neighbour a thief and whore, for example, only the latter insult belonged properly to the church courts. The words reported in court might thus represent only a small and selective part of their altercation, and miss the underlying issues that had provoked it. Nevertheless, court records can throw considerable light on disputes between women and their neighbours in early modern England.2 If they seldom provide the full story, they show us the most popular strategies of attack and defence, offer insights into the complex issue of conflict resolution, and yield clues to the underlying cultural values of the age. Why did some quarrels trigger litigation, while most were settled informally? Why did many ordinary women and men think it worth spending time and money to defend their reputations in court, when libel suits today are associated mainly with rich and vain celebrities? And how did neighbours react on seeing their friends embark on litigation which might last months or years, and draw them in as witnesses? Occasions for conflict were legion with people living in cramped conditions and meeting constantly in the street, market place, or alehouse. There was little of the privacy we value today, and neighbours often spoke bluntly, regardless of time or place. Defamation suits might be 2 There is now an extensive literature on defamation; see esp. Ingram, Church Courts; Gowing, Domestic Dangers; Sharpe, Defamation; Amussen, Ordered Society; R. M. Helmholz (ed.), Select Cases on Defamation to 1600 (Selden Soc., 101, 1985); F. Dabhoiwala, ‘The Construction of Honour, Reputation and Status in Late Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century England’; E. Foyster, ‘Male Honour, Social Control and Wife Beating in Late Stuart England’; L. Gowing, ‘Women, Status and the Popular Culture of Dishonour’; and G. Walker, ‘Expanding the Boundaries of Female Honour in Early Modern England’, all in TRHS, 6th ser., 6 (1996); the theses by Elizabeth Foyster ‘The Concept of Male Honour in Seventeenth-Century England’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Durham, 1996)) and Dinah Winch, (‘Sexual Slander and it Social Context in England c.1660–1700, with special reference to Sussex and Cheshire 1660–1700’ (D.Phil. thesis, University of Oxford, 2000)—esp. good on issues of jurisdiction).

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triggered by quarrels over property or access, alleged theft, stray animals, loans refused or not repaid, and even dirty laundry.3 Quarrels erupted in churches and churchyards, even at funerals or the bedside of a woman in labour.4 Quarrels between women were quite often triggered by rude or squabbling children. When one girl struck another in a Leicestershire village street in 1620, the victim’s outraged mother, ‘seeing her child’s face bloody’, turned on the offender exclaiming, ‘What a carrion whore this is, like her mother’, prompting a furious row between the two mothers. And when a Sussex villager boxed the ear of Mary Adams’s small daughter one day in 1632, Adams rounded on her furiously: ‘Thou quean, why didst thou strike my child in the street? . . . Thou whore, I will strike thee if thou strikest my child.’ Both incidents ended in court.5 Servants too could embroil their employers in disputes. A fierce brawl between two Sussex villagers in 1680 was triggered by a fight in the street between their maidservants; their mistresses, hearing the commotion, joined in instead of trying to part them.6 It is also clear that many quarrels were exacerbated by rivalries over status. When one neighbour regarded another as an upstart or intruder, any trivial tiff was likely to be inflamed by the underlying social tensions. Thus when Christian Austen quarrelled with a neighbour in the churchyard of Eastergate, near Arundel, in 1633, mocking Anne Young with the taunt that her husband had slaughtered one of his pigs to cheat the parson of his tithe, Anne hit back with the dismissive remark that ‘it was never good since such upstarts came into the parish’.7 Women cared as much as men about their precise standing within the local social hierarchy, and were highly sensitive to any change or challenge. Older families naturally resented the newly rich or respectable, especially if they themselves were no longer so flourishing. Anne Ley, wife of the vicar of Humberstone, Leics., was deeply stung in 1632 to be called ‘a beggarly quean’ by a woman who boasted, ‘I had many and good clothes when thou hadst none to put on’. Newcomers were always vulnerable to jibes about their shadowy past. When Cecily Goodman brought her husband his sword and cloak on Palm Sunday 1574, a neighbour unimpressed by such trappings cried out, ‘Look where the naughty pack standeth, for naught she was before she came to the town, and naught she is still.’8 The 3 4 5 6 7 8

Gowing, Domestic Dangers, esp. 115–19; WSRO, Ep1/11/9, fos. 130r–132v (laundry). See e.g. WSRO, Ep1/11/7, fo. 115 (a funeral); LRO, 1D 41/4/652 (woman in labour). LRO, 1D 41/4/1211; WSRO, Ep1/11/15, fos. 147r–149v; Amussen, Ordered Society, 96–7. WSRO, Ep1/11/19, fos. 31v–33v. WSRO, Ep1/11/15, fos. 145–7. LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 11/87; 1D 41/4/127.

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numerous pew disputes heard by the ecclesiastical courts, in both disciplinary and ‘instance’ causes, underline the passion with which parishioners of both sexes defended their rights.9 Social order within the parish was often hotly contested, for this was an age of rapid social mobility. Moreover, a woman marrying a partner of higher or lower status than her father or former husband posed genuine problems for a society anxious to replicate the parish’s social hierarchy in the church’s seating arrangements. Churchwardens at Thurmaston, Leics., presented Elizabeth Swetnam in 1621 for refusing to sit in the seat her husband’s first wife had occupied, complaining that she forced her way into better pews and ‘climbeth higher to the dislike and disturbance of the parishioners’.10 Newcomers posed similar problems, especially when they claimed precedence over established residents who saw themselves among the ‘better sort’. Pew disputes were a manifestation of the social rivalries that underlay many other local disputes. The strategies available in interpersonal disputes were broadly similar for both sexes: verbal abuse, physical assault, and recourse to the law. In practice, men and women followed significantly different paths. Contemporaries regarded physical violence as generally inappropriate, even ‘unnatural’, in women, a deep-rooted attitude that has survived to the present day. Though women resorted to force more readily than is often assumed, as we will see, their most common weapons were words, deployed in railing, scolding, cursing, and slander. The fact that they did not carry weapons reflected and reinforced these cultural norms, and sometimes they fought with words simply faute de mieux. A witness recalled how a Leicestershire villager, drawn into a fierce quarrel while milking her cows one December morning in 1629, had ‘looked about her and said if she had anything she would have thrown it at Mary Trigge, and thereupon having nothing she called Trigge scurvy drab’.11 Men too made frequent use of insults, slander, and threats, but behavioural patterns clearly differed according to gender and were judged accordingly. An exchange of insults between two men generally prompted an immediate challenge or fight.12 A prolonged verbal brawl was regarded as an essentially female form of conflict, and similar behaviour by men appears to have been viewed as unmanly and shameful. A Newcastle craftsman 9 M. Aston, ‘Segregation in Church’, in W. J. Sheils and D. Wood (eds.), Women in the Church: Studies in Church History, 27 (Oxford, 1990); A. Flather, The Politics of Place: A Study of Church Seating in Essex, c.1580–1640 (Leicester, 1999). 10 LRO, 1D 41/13/54, fo. 13. 11 LRO, 1D41/4, Box 6/81, deposition of Mabel Marshall. 12 Cockburn (ed.), Calendar: Kent: Elizabeth (1979), 78, 361; see also Ch. 6, below.

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recalled with obvious disgust, around 1560, how two men had ‘chid and brawled like wives’ in the street. Equally suggestive is the presentment of two men at Croft, Leics., in 1620 ‘for shameful railing and scolding like women in the street, besides blows and bloodshed’. The wording of the presentment suggests that the churchwardens found their ‘effeminate’ verbal spat more offensive than the violence, even though blood had been spilled.13

:     Heated exchanges between women were a familiar part of life in early modern England. As we have seen, the insults and allegations they hurled might be far removed from the real issues at stake. Women like men usually chose to attack a female adversary where she was most vulnerable, in her sexual reputation or ‘honesty’. Their behaviour underlines the extent to which male values had been internalized by women, and their quarrels reinforced the pressure for female chastity.14 At the same time, of course, they show that individual women were ready to appropriate contemporary values for their own ends. ‘Whore’ was everywhere the most common insult. Sexual ‘honesty’ was so fundamental to female reputation that its language was often transferred to other forms of misconduct, plausibly enough in a culture that saw women’s sexual and non-sexual honesty as indivisible. Thus a woman accusing her neighbour of lying might brand her ‘a whore of her tongue’, ‘a whore in her sayings’, or ‘lewd in her speaking’.15 Offensive behaviour of any kind could be dismissed with the catch-all phrase ‘whorish tricks’.16 Massive overuse inevitably weakened the impact of ‘whore’ as a term of abuse, but speakers were able to draw on a rich lexicon of synonyms, such as jade, quean, baggage, harlot, drab, filth, flirt, gill, trull, dirtyheels, draggletail, flap, naughty-pack, slut, squirt, and strumpet, generally heightened by adjectives such as arrant, base, brazen-faced, or scurvy.17 Often run together for effect, such insults constituted a formidable armoury. Many suggested physical as well as moral uncleanness, an 13 J. Raine (ed.), Depositions and other Ecclesiastical Proceedings from the Courts of Durham (Surtees Soc., 21, 1845), 65; LRO, 1D 41/13/51, fo. 45v. 14 See further Gowing, Domestic Dangers, 59–62, 115–19; P. Rushton, ‘Women, Witchcraft, and Slander in Early Modern England: Cases from the Church Courts of Durham, 1560–1675’, Northern History, 18 (1982), 131. 15 See e.g. LRO, 1D 41/4/88; 1D 41/4, Box 6/41; WSRO, Ep1/11/1, fos. 1, 44v; Ep1/11/ 13, fo. 34v. 16 CUL, EDR D2/11, fo. 170; LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 17/83. 17 Most terms are common. For draggletail and dirtyheels see CUL, EDR D2/19, fo. 72.

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association explicit in such expressions as telling an opponent to ‘go home and wash her . . . dirty tail’.18 ‘Tail’ served as a common derogatory euphemism for the genitalia and buttocks of either sex, and its animal associations were frequently exploited to dehumanize an adversary. Speakers quite often sought to depict an opponent as in thrall to her animal lusts. ‘Hang her, she is like a salted bitch [a bitch in heat] and not like a woman,’ cried an Oxfordshire villager in 1616; ‘a woman would do as a woman should do, but she doth like a bitch and dogs fight for her.’ ‘Bitch’ (or ‘bitch-whore’) was easily the most common animal allusion,19 but by no means unique. One villager was said to have ‘had more bulls following her [than] her cows had’, while a Leicestershire woman was compared to a mare casting a new foal every year. ‘Jade’, always a derogatory term, was applied to women and horses alike.20 Imagery relating to pigs played on their association with filth, with phrases such as ‘dungbellied drunken sow’ and ‘swillbelly sow’ clearly designed to deny the target any place in respectable society.21 Mary Iliffe used a different image to the same end in 1596, berating her neighbour as ‘lousy quean, filthy quean’, and crying: ‘stand further off lest thou fill me full of lice, thou art fit to carry Jack an Apes and for nothing else’.22 Contemporaries used the word ‘whore’ to denote any form of sexual immorality, and sometimes as a generic term of abuse. The target would often try to expose its emptiness by demanding to know whose whore she had been, and to inflict significant damage the speaker needed to identify one or more alleged partners, and provide details of times and places. Many did, and thereby signalled that they were throwing down a gauntlet rather than venting some momentary irritation. Contemporaries recognized, of course, that different forms of immorality carried different degrees of shame, and speakers determined to convey a sense of total depravity coined more extravagant expressions to make their point. Joan Easton, a Sussex villager, was dubbed ‘the arrantest whore that ever had shoone [shoes] of leather’, and more succinctly, ‘an arrant whore as ever pissed’.23 Alice Richardson was ‘as common as the highway’, Alice North ‘kept open shop and open hole’, while Anne Gibbons was branded an 18

WSRO, Ep1/11/15, fo. 149r–v. See e.g. OAO, archdeaconry papers, c118, fo. 50r–v; c33, fo. 92; WSRO, Ep1/11/15, fos. 4, 110v; LRO, 1D 41/4/53; cf. ‘spaniel whore’: Raine (ed.), Depositions from Durham, 89. See also Gowing, Domestic Dangers, 66–7. 20 CUL, EDR K5/20; LRO, 1D 41/4/162; D. Underdown, Fire from Heaven: Life in an English Town in the Seventeenth Century (1992), 78. 21 WSRO, Ep1/11/16, fo. 62v; CUL, EDR K7/266. 22 LRO, 1D 41/4/652. 23 WSRO, Ep1/11/15, fos. 256v–257r. 19

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insatiable ‘jumping jade’, accused of a marathon session with a ‘rogue that occupied thee nine times and bade thee lie still’.24 A Loughborough woman was charged with being ‘naught with three several men in one night for three groats’.25 Joan Webb of Wittlesford, Cambs., was rumoured in 1596 to be worse than any whore, for she allegedly paid men to have sex with her, giving them some cheeses, venison, and a shirt. The stories prompted a man who had been planning to marry her to break off the match, giving her £5 ‘to be rid of her’.26 Speakers often pushed their verbal attack a stage further, claiming their adversary was not only a common whore but had been prosecuted as such. ‘Bridewell whore’ and ‘carted whore’ (one who had been carried away to a bridewell in a cart or whipped behind one) were powerful and common jibes. ‘Go to thy cart, whore, go, carted whore’, an angry Leicester woman shouted at her rival in a heated exchange in 1598.27 The language of sexual insult naturally extended to the effects of promiscuity, such as bastard-bearing. Some speakers took the slur back to the preceding generation, taunting rivals with their base origins. ‘You are a bastard and your mother is a whore’, a neighbour told Mary Howsdon.28 Newcomers were particularly vulnerable to such smears, as was any woman who had moved away for a time. In 1601 a Loughborough woman told Margery Burton, ‘thou hast been at London and hast had one bastard there and thou art likely to have another’, claiming that Margery’s husband was not the father of the child she was carrying.29 The fact that pregnant spinsters did quite often flee to the capital for anonymity gave force to such allegations, which were sometimes remembered for years and reused in later quarrels. In 1691 a Leicestershire neighbour accused Anne Burdett of abandoning a bastard infant at London some twenty years earlier. Burdett was a widow who had recently remarried, and the attack was reported to have left her ‘extremely much dejected and impaired in her health’.30 Venereal disease, especially syphilis or ‘the pox’, also featured prominently in the language of abuse. Taunts such as ‘burnt-arsed whore’ and 24 CUL, EDR K6/207; LRO, 1D 41/4/292; GL, MS 9189/1, fo. 69v; cf. OAO, archdeaconry papers, c33, fo. 70. 25 LRO, 1D 41/4/1250. A groat was 4d. 26 CUL, EDR D2, fos. 213v, 217r–220v. 27 LRO, 1D 41/4/725; 1D 41/4/1170; CUL, EDR D2/19, fo. 71; EDR K6/9; GL, MS 9056/ 5, fos. 103–4; LMA, DL/C 231, fo. 27v; Underdown, Fire from Heaven, 78; M. K. McIntosh, A Community Transformed: The Manor and Liberty of Havering, 1500–1620 (Cambridge, 1991), 68. 28 CUL, EDR K6/97. 29 LRO, 1D 41/4/881; cf. BRO, D/A2 c 46, fo. 135. 30 LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 46, fos. 90–2; Box 47, fo. 129.

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‘pocky whore’ were familiar throughout the country.31 In 1668 a Leicester woman mocked Theophany Styrke, a clergyman’s wife, as a common whore, and told her to stand further off, ‘for she was afraid to catch that which Mrs Styrke so lately had’.32 Women were sometimes accused of ‘burning’ their husbands or other men.33 In London the label ‘hospital whore’ might be hurled at someone who had allegedly been sent to St Thomas’s to be treated for the pox, and provincial women were occasionally given scornful advice to go to London for a cure.34 The horrific symptoms of syphilis similarly found their way into the discourse of insult. At Bury St Edmunds Faith Wilson told her neighbour in 1619 to ‘pull up your muffler higher and hide your pocky face, and go home and scrape your mangy arse’. Sarah Ward jibed that a neighbour’s lover now stayed away in disgust because she ‘had no thatch upon her house’, meaning, a court was informed, that she ‘had not any hair upon her privy parts . . . by her lewdness and folly’.35 The imagery of rotting disease and decay sometimes assumed still crueller forms, in insults such as ‘carrion whore’. Alice Jarman, of Pampisford near Ely, jeered that her adversary had once been pregnant, and that ‘the child did rot from her in pieces’.36 Some speakers used ‘whore’ in its more precise sense of a woman who traded sex for money or material benefits, intensifying both the moral and social impact of the slur. Prostitution was viewed as far worse than mere fornication, and the charge undermined an adversary’s social as well as moral standing. A speaker might jeer that her opponent’s fine clothes were merely the wages of sin, deserving neither respect nor admiration. One ferocious dispute in Cambridge turned on a fine new holland waistcoat worn by a woman whose husband had recently deserted her; how could she have acquired it, an adversary demanded, if not by prostituting herself.37 A Sussex villager railed in 1608 that her opponent was dressed like a gentlewoman although her husband could not pay his debts; no marvel, she added, for the woman was a common whore kept by the two gentlemen she proceeded to name.38 A villager in Wymeswold, Leics., similarly dismissed her adversary in 1680 as Lord Beaumont’s whore, and 31 LRO, 1D 41/4/1287; WSRO, Ep1/11/3, fo. 1v; OAO, archdeaconry papers, c33, fo. 194; Gowing, Domestic Dangers, 81–2. 32 LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 32/103. 33 CUL, EDR K6/54, K6/360; LRO, 1D 41/4/109. 34 LMA, DL/C/231, fo. 27v; CUL, EDR K4/114. 35 CUL, EDR K7/266; LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 19/151; Gowing, Domestic Dangers, 82. 36 LRO, 1D 41/4/1211; CUL, EDR K4/135. 37 CUL, EDR K10/6–10; cf. Gowing, Domestic Dangers, 82–4. 38 WSRO, Ep1/11/11, fo. 93.

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‘bid her get her gone to the lords who brought half crowns to her bedside’.39 The smear of prostitution, a powerful weapon against outwardly respectable adversaries, proved equally effective against those of much humbler status. A speaker could underline her opponent’s depravity by accusing her of sex with men of base degree, for paltry rewards, and in squalid places such as barns, under hedges, or the open fields. Calling her a ‘beggar’s whore’ or ‘pedlar’s trull’ branded her a social as well as moral outcast. One Sussex villager, dismissed as a pedlar herself, was mocked for selling both trinkets and sex.40 A censorious neighbour told Isabel Yaxley of Barnwell, Cambs., that ‘she would scorn to be fucked for a pennyworth of fish, as thou wert’. An equally dismissive Londoner told her neighbour in 1627, ‘Thou art a poor conditioned whore, thou wilt lie with a man upon a truss of straw.’ Another woman was accused of fornicating with a miller’s assistant ‘on a bundle of beans’, and we find others ridiculed as ‘hollow-tree whore’ and ‘hedge-whore’.41 Even more hurtful were allegations of a sexual liaison between a woman and her own male servant, all the more troublesome because they might well originate in the malice or fantasy of the servant himself.42 For their part, poor women occasionally used sexual smears to puncture the pretensions of more wealthy neighbours. In 1718 Elizabeth Finney of Markfield, Leics., summoned a neighbour from her house with shouts of ‘wriggletail’, and greeted her with the ringing challenge, ‘Here’s my bastard to show, where’s your bastard, rot you?’43 Any woman branding her adversary a whore could also expose the cuckolded husband to public ridicule, if she so wished, for failing to control his wife. ‘Cuckold’ was an insult frequently hurled at men, and sometimes surfaced in exchanges between women themselves. By making jibes about an opponent’s husband, a speaker knew she would almost certainly breed domestic recriminations. One woman jested that her rival’s husband carried horns too wide for him to pass through the door, and posed a danger to passers-by. Another jeered that the husband 39 LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 39/53–8; cf. a woman called the ‘patched whore’ of George, Lord Brooke in 1722: Box 63/122. 40 LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 22/20; WSRO, Ep1/11/16, fo. 243; Ep1/11/19, fo. 31v. 41 CUL, EDR K5/27; EDR K6/199; GL, MS 9189/2, fo. 84v; WSRO, Ep1/11/13, fo. 66v; Ingram, Church Courts, 313. 42 See e.g. LRO, 1D 41/4/162; cf. T. Meldrum, ‘London Domestic Servants from Depositional Evidence, 1660–1750: Servant-Employer Sexuality in the Patriarchal Household’, in T. Hitchcock, P. King, and P. Sharpe (eds.), Chronicling Poverty: The Voices and Strategies of the English Poor, 1640–1840 (Basingstoke, 1997), 57–60. 43 LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 60/108.

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wore horns ‘so big that I am afraid my husband should come near him’.44 Mockery could be as damaging as invective, and linking whoredom with cuckoldry enabled speakers to combine the two. And as cuckolds were viewed as feeble men, dominated and humiliated by their shrewish wives, the speaker could accuse her opponent of flouting every convention of respectable female behaviour.45 Sexual insults were the most common weapons in disputes between women, and by far the most effective.46 The nature of the surviving evidence gives a somewhat distorted picture, however, for it reflects the limited jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts. A plaintiff who had been subjected to a torrent of abuse might only report insults falling within the court’s jurisdiction, or the clerk might decide that these alone were worth recording. Fortunately some clerks copied down entire phrases or sentences, enabling us to glimpse the wider language of insult. Accusations relating to theft were predictably among the most common, and sometimes triggered actions in the secular courts.47 The ambiguous meaning of the term ‘dishonesty’ in this period was often reflected in insults that combined its sexual and non-sexual elements, such as ‘pilfering quean’ and ‘thievish baggage’. Such phrases brought disputes which had centred on the allegation of theft within the remit of the ecclesiastical courts.48 Allegations of theft, like those of sexual immorality, might also become entangled with social rivalries and tensions. When Sibyl Edwards told her neighbour Margaret Stone that she ought to pay for the ‘proud’ apparel she was wearing, implying it was stolen, Stone riposted that Edwards had no reason to be proud, for her kindred was ‘beggarly’ and her father a ‘thievish knave’. A sharp-tongued Reading woman alleged in 1633 that her adversary had stolen the clothes she was wearing, and jeered that they would make a fine show on the gallows.49 Accusations of lying feature too in the rhetoric of female insult. Truthfulness was generally recognized as central to male honour and credit, especially for tradesmen and artisans; when one villager called his 44

GL, MS 9189/1, fos. 32v–33v; CUL, EDR D2/19, fos. 30–1. WSRO, Ep1/11/7, fo. 89v; Amussen, Ordered Society, 118. 46 Gowing, Domestic Dangers, 64; Ingram, Church Courts, 300–2; Sharpe, Defamation, 10. 47 LRO, 1D 41/4/260, 724, 1211; Raine (ed.), Depositions from Durham, 70, 80, 104, 112; CUL, EDR K4/86; WSRO, Ep1/11/1, fo. 35v. Men slandered as thieves often sued in secular courts; women less often, probably because any slander would almost always include a sexual component; see Ingram, Church Courts, 298. But for examples see J. M. Guilding (ed.), Reading Records: Diary of the Corporation (1886–96), iii. 184, 185; B. H. Cunnington (ed.), Some Annals of the Borough of Devizes (Devizes, 1925), pt. i, p. 82. 48 LMA, DLC/231, fo. 3; WSRO, Ep1/11/10, fo. 106; LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 30/123. 49 WSRO, Ep1/11/16, fos. 43r–v, 66r–v; Guilding (ed.), Reading Records, iii. 185. 45

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opponent a ‘foresworn rogue’ in 1679 and added, ‘no man will take your word for a farthing’, the victim replied that he would rather be beaten than so abused.50 But ‘honesty’ in its modern sense also mattered for women, and allegations of lying occasionally formed the mainspring of defamation or civil proceedings. In 1629, for example, Mary Trigge railed at her opponent as ‘a common liar all the town over’, and declared that one day ‘the devil would fetch her bodily’.51 Allegations of drunkenness provided another effective weapon, for a double standard applied as much here as to sexual behaviour. The female drunkard was a figure of particular contempt. In 1637 Grace Hogsflesh claimed that her adversary had been set in the stocks in Newgate Market for drunkenness. Mary Crookes called her neighbour a ‘drunken beast’, jeering she had been brought home drunk in a coach, and added pointedly, ‘I never pissed in a man’s hat and flung it out of the window, as thou didst.’52 Female drunkenness was commonly associated with images of filth, animality, and prostitution. One London woman was mocked as a ‘pissabed quean’, while Joan Allan of Midhurst, damned as a ‘drunken bitch whore’, was alleged in 1634 to ‘entice all the young men about town to lie drinking and idling there with her’ whenever her husband was away.53 Many other insults occurred less frequently, ranging from scolding through ethnicity (‘Welsh whore’) to attempted murder.54 A few speakers added religious epithets to their vocabulary of abuse. One Elizabethan woman accused of adultery was said to have been pinned against a stall ‘like a rood’, with arms outstretched like Christ on the cross, a striking and blasphemous image.55 ‘Priest’s whore’, common before the Reformation, could still surface generations later.56 Religious change generated new insults too, and in 1668 we find a curate’s wife taunting her opponent as ‘slut, jade, presbyterian dog’.57 Witchcraft featured far more often, and with more potentially damaging consequences. While most accusations of witchcraft emerged from a lengthy period of suspicion and resentment, words spoken in the heat of a quarrel provided one context 50 WSRO, Ep1/11/19, fo. 21v; cf. C. Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, 1998). 51 LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 6/81; CUL, EDR K13/51; Cunnington (ed.), Some Annals of Devizes, pt. ii, p. 2. 52 GL, MS 9057/1, fos. 68v, 152v–153r; cf. Sharpe, Defamation, 12; Ingram, Church Courts, 300. 53 GL, MS 9189/2, fo. 113; WSRO, Ep1/11/15, fos. 147r–149v; GL, MS 9065A/7, Dunkin v Smyth, 1637, depositions of Ellen Bayley and Alice Barnett. 54 Raine (ed.), Depositions from Durham, 80, 89; Cunnington (ed.), Some Annals of Devizes, pt. ii, 55 p. 12. LRO, 1D 41/4/162. 56 LRO, 1D 41/4/766; Cunnington (ed.), Some Annals of Devizes, pt. ii, p. 12; cf. GL, MS 9064/11, fos. 30v, 147v, 205 for pre-Reformation slurs as priest’s or friar’s whore. 57 LRO, 1D41/4, Box 32/105.

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in which long-standing suspicions might enter the public domain. ‘Thou art a witch and a bitch’, Elizabeth Mason shouted at a hapless neighbour near Chichester in 1597, while at Leicester an angry woman denounced Anne Shilton in 1691 as a ‘black-mouthed witch and whore’.58 The popular association of witch and bitch offered a pleasing assonance, and branded the target a pariah who had spurned God as well as the values of the community. Joan Apthorpe of Fen Drayton sued in 1638 when a neighbour called her ‘a devil’. Another woman, puzzled and hurt to be labelled a bigamist, was told she had married the devil as well as her husband.59 Finally we should note that just as men often sought to wound an adversary by defaming his wife, women sometimes attacked a female opponent through her husband, and not only through the taunt of cuckoldry. One effective tactic was to allege sexual harassment by the opponent’s husband. Many such claims doubtless reflected genuine resentment, but the fact that some surfaced long after the alleged events suggests that women were happy to exploit them in disputes over quite different issues. Sexual allegations were always hard to disprove, whether against men or women, and almost guaranteed to breed domestic discord. During a fierce quarrel between two neighbours at Barnwell, Northants., in 1593, Audrey Morley alleged that her opponent’s husband James had tried to force sex on her, both in the village and elsewhere. The charge proved effective: James was forced to sue for defamation to prevent the churchwardens from presenting him.60 In another incident, in Leicestershire, Frances Briggs allegedly claimed that her last child had been fathered by a neighbour, Thomas Hose. When asked why she would make such an astonishing admission, she had answered that it was ‘to vex and disturb Thomas Hose his wife’.61 Disputants might also exploit other shameful lapses by their opponents’ husbands long ago. ‘My husband did never run away for having a bastard laid to his charge, nor ever had a bastard laid to him’, a Cambridge woman jibed at her neighbour in 1637.62 In the same way, insults flung at a spinster might be sharpened by slurs about the sort of men with whom she allegedly consorted. A woman who accused a Northumberland spinster in 1564 of bearing two bastards 58 WSRO, Ep1/11/8, fo. 55v; LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 47/20; cf. WSRO, Ep1/11/2, fos. 27v–28v; Ep1/11/9, fos. 84v–86r; Raine (ed.), Depositions from Durham, 84, 91, 247, 313; PRO, STAC 8/151/7; Underdown, Fire from Heaven, 78; Sharpe, Defamation, 12–14; Rushton, ‘Women, Witchcraft, and Slander’, passim; Gowing, Domestic Dangers, 64, 104. 59 CUL, EDR K6/307; WSRO, Ep1/11/16, fo. 61v. 60 CUL, EDR D2/19, fos. 23v–25r. 61 LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 46/4–5. 62 CUL, EDR K7/193 (my italics).

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twisted the knife by jeering that the fathers had both been hanged, implying that she associated with the very dregs of society.63 Lesser offences might also furnish useful insults in disputes between women. One Sussex villager declared that her adversary’s husband was a shameful drunkard, and once so drunk ‘that he did spew sitting at his master’s table’.64

    The form and setting of confrontations signified almost as much as the insults employed. Most disputes resulting in litigation had occurred in a public place—hardly surprising, of course, for public insults were more likely to damage the victim’s reputation, and a plaintiff would be unlikely to sue unless she had witnesses to support her allegations. But it is clear that many confrontations possessed something of the flavour of street theatre, and were deliberately staged to inflict a public and dramatic humiliation. An assailant might stand outside the target’s house, shouting for her to come out, and perhaps reinforcing her challenge with a show of symbolic violence. In 1627 Elizabeth Andrews planted herself outside a house in Maiden Alley in London, shouting, ‘Come out you whore and show your face, you base whore’, and proceeded to smash the windows with her fist, a traditional form of symbolic violence against prostitutes.65 Speakers generally delivered their insults and taunts in a loud voice, as much to attract spectators as to intimidate the victim. Witnesses remarked of one such outburst that ‘all which were within a furlong of her might well hear’, and that ‘she hath made the street to ring’.66 Speakers would also clap their hands to attract attention, like Judith Middleton, ‘clapping her hands and saying to her neighbours that if they did not hear they should hear’. One Londoner even had a horn sounded to summon a crowd, perhaps imitating the methods by which the public were notified of more conventional theatrical performances.67 Once it began, the confrontation took on more of the attributes of a verbal prizefight, with the assailant attempting quite literally to ‘outface’ her opponent. ‘Thou art an arrant whore, look in my face if thou darest’, Joan Stratton challenged her rival at Broadwater, Sussex, in 1576.68 Though only a minority of quarrels involved physical violence, 63 64 65 66 67 68

Raine (ed.), Depositions from Durham, 81. WSRO, Ep1/11/13, fos. 171r–172v. GL, MS 9189/2, fo. 80v . WSRO, Ep1/11/16, fos. 232v, 244; cf. Underdown, Fire from Heaven, 78. LRO, 1D 41/4/1250; LMA, DL/C 231, fos. 47v–49r. WSRO, Ep1/11/3, Parker v Stretton, 20 July 1576.

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participants and spectators alike recognized them as a form of combat. After one spectacular brawl in Cambridge, the assailant was allegedly heard to boast how ‘she had gored’ her adversary.69 The metaphor captured precisely the spirit of such encounters. Combatants would often reinforce their harsh words with equally aggressive or mocking gestures. Winifred Coe of Cambridge derided the social pretensions of her rival in 1595 by ‘clapping her hand upon her tail’ and jeering, ‘this is as meet to wear a taffeta hat as that old face of thine’.70 Some went further, threatening physical and often symbolic violence. A Sussex villager told her adversary ‘that she would have her ears from her head, and wished that the Devil might break her neck’. Elizabeth Welsh, a Londoner, threatened to drag her lodger ‘by the hairs of her head’ and duck her under the pump, to wash away the filth of a whore. ‘Get thee gone, thou whore,’ cried Agnes Cowper to her neighbour at Leicester in 1598, ‘or else I will throw scalding water in thy face.’71 To the modern reader, these encounters are striking mainly for their blunt language and, in some cases at least, for the verbal dexterity of the combatants. In this period, of course, women were still commonly identified with unruly passions and tongues, not politeness and decorum. Nor should the verbal agility of the semi-literate surprise us. The sharp wit and repartee of Shakespeare’s comic heroines reflected and sanitised countless exchanges in the street between more ordinary folk, and represented the apotheosis of an oral culture that would have been familiar to all. Sexual banter, the jocular or waspish exchange of taunts, puns, and innuendo, was part of everyday life, and developed skills that could be readily employed in more threatening situations. So when Mary Goates told Alice Flavell to kiss her arse, Alice promptly flung back, ‘Nay, I will leave that for John Carre’—Mary’s alleged adulterous lover.72 The scenes recalled in depositions often combine such repartee with a self-conscious theatricality. One of the most memorable occurred in Cambridge late one summer’s evening in 1637, as several neighbours were sitting at their doors. When John Gibbons remarked that he had bought his wife a laced smock, a stranger walking by offered the crude suggestion ‘that he had more need give her a good prick’, whereupon one of the women present, Frances Balam, riposted that Gibbons’s wife already had half-a-dozen good ‘skewers’. The blatant sexual innuendo of this remark triggered a fierce quarrel which soon had the street ‘full of people’. Though tempers 69 70 71 72

CUL, EDR K10/10. CUL, EDR D2/19, fo. 74v. WSRO, Ep1/11/15, fo. 250; LMA, DL/C 231, fos. 150v–151r; LRO, 1D 41/4/724. LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 6/40.

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rose high, actors and spectators alike were aware of the theatricality of the scene. One witness described Balam ‘making as it were a May Game of it’, shouting jests to bystanders in between trading insults with her opponents.73 Many disputants also showed considerable skill in formulating taunts that would hurt their opponents while minimizing the risk of legal action. By far the most popular device was heavy innuendo, which enabled them to deliver a clear insult without uttering any explicitly defamatory words. Their tone of voice might convey a message very different from the grammatical sense of the words they had spoken. When Margaret Grovett, a Sussex villager, said in 1614, ‘Now John Locke you are no cuckold and your wife is no whore’, it was obvious to bystanders, as one later testified, that she meant ‘the contrary to what she spake [as] did appear by her gesture and manner of speaking’.74 Very often a speaker achieved the same goal by remarking pointedly that she was not guilty of various specific acts, with a tone of voice and gestures that made the implications plain. ‘I never had a bastard under Horningsea hedge,’ said Anne Painter at Cambridge in 1637, ‘and I was never whipped with a bunch of nettles, she that is a whore will be a whore, and she that hath a bastard will have a bastard.’75 ‘I am a better woman than Mrs Dugress,’ cried another assailant, ‘I never showed my arse in an alehouse, nor pawned my muff for drink.’ Lucy Draycott, a Leicestershire villager, denied defaming Barbara Brown, but remarked archly that she ‘had neither butcher nor pedlar following of her’.76 The context and company made the insinuation plain, but if the victim threatened to sue the speaker could declare that she had accused no one, and stood a good chance of escaping should the matter end in court. Witnesses frequently described hearing sexually abusive words but felt unable to swear they had been explicitly directed at the plaintiff. The popularity of such devices suggests that many ordinary folk possessed a good understanding of how the law of defamation operated. But they also underline the competitive nature of honour and reputation, and many suggest too that speakers enjoyed goading their victims as an end in itself. ‘Thou art a rascally huswife, I would not call you a rascally quean’, Mary Allam of Ely told her opponent judiciously in 1637, before adding pointedly that ‘she had never lain on her back and broken her elbows’. Who had?, demanded the hapless victim, 73

CUL, EDR K10/5–10; EDR K6/225–7. WSRO, Ep1/11/12, fos. 142–3; Gowing, Domestic Dangers, 66. 75 CUL, EDR K10/5 (my italics in this and the following quotations); Raine (ed.), Depositions from Durham, 104; Gowing, Domestic Dangers, 76. 76 CUL, EDR K7/267; LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 22/4. 74

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‘You did, huswife, and like a rascally quean’, came the immediate response.77 Allam had been unable to resist delivering the coup de grâce, even though it meant throwing away her legal defence.

    While many quarrels were sudden outbursts, quickly forgotten, public insults might also form part of a calculated attack. Speakers often went out of their way, or so it was alleged, to signal the deliberate intent behind their allegations by adding a phrase such as ‘and I will prove it’, and calling on bystanders to take note. In many cases they had clearly sought out the other party to provoke a confrontation, making sure it took place before witnesses. The aim was not simply to demoralize their adversary, but to trigger damaging gossip throughout the neighbourhood and turn local public opinion against the alleged offender. Others used malicious gossip to thrust their allegations into the public domain. Gossip, the circulation of stories about a third party, is explored in Chapter 7, but it also functioned as an alternative method of pursuing personal quarrels. The originators generally intended their slander to reach the victim’s ears, and sometimes left nothing to chance. Catherine Porter, on her way to Oxford market in August 1696, was overtaken by a neighbour who called her mistress a whore, and told her to pass on the message.78 Some gossips even sent their own messengers. ‘Go tell her that I say that she is a whore in town and country’, a Leicester carpenter’s wife instructed her visitors in 1687, adding that otherwise she would do so herself. A Berkshire woman sent her servant to Stanford-in-the-Vale in 1600 to deliver the ‘broad message’ that her adversary was a cuckold and his wife a whore.79 Men behaved very similarly. A Sussex villager told his friends that Elizabeth Best was a ‘bitched whore’, and offered a shilling to anyone who would drive his cart to her door and say, ‘Dame, here is a cart load of whores’.80 Gossip of this kind was quarrelling by proxy, and usually culminated in a personal confrontation. What did speakers hope to achieve by hurling calculated insults, or circulating malicious gossip about an adversary? As we have seen, the original dispute was often about something other than the sexual immorality they alleged. Verbal assaults were a form of intimidation, and 77

CUL, EDR K1/254. BRO, D/A2c40, fos. 83v–84r; LRO, 1D41/4, Box 23/15; OAO, archdeaconry papers, c33, fo. 439. 79 LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 47/33; BRO, D/A2 c40, fo. 183v. 80 WSRO, Ep1/11/15, fos. 109–111, 121; cf. Ep1/11/15, fo. 247v. 78

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might be designed to force concessions over the issue in dispute. Some were simply the latest blow in a long-running feud. A Sussex case in 1601 revealed a web of resentments in which allegations of pilfering, immorality, and witchcraft were entangled with underlying tensions over status. One woman, whose daughter had previously served the other as a maidservant, declared that at the summer fair the girl would now rather wait on her black ewe than on ‘my Lady Stowell’, as she sarcastically styled her opponent. Whatever the origins of their quarrel, the two women were locked in a personal battle and grasping every weapon that came to hand.81 In many other cases, we can probably take the speaker’s words at something closer to face value, an expression of genuine anger and disgust at the scandalous behaviour alleged. No doubt the two categories frequently overlapped, with the speaker vexed to find herself thwarted by a neighbour she regarded as her inferior both socially and morally. The familiar taunt that the speaker herself would never stoop to the base actions of her adversary personalized each breach of communal values, and it is not hard to see how easily the defence of moral values could become enmeshed, perhaps deliberately, in rivalries over social status and personal or family disputes. The immediate goal of a public confrontation was to crush and humiliate the adversary by securing a victory that would be obvious to bystanders. Delivering a barrage of insults would not in itself destroy the opponent’s good name. The speaker needed to demonstrate that her adversary was unable to withstand or refute the verbal onslaught, and force her into some kind of symbolic submission—a demand expressed bluntly by one woman who told her opponent to kiss her arse.82 Submission was most likely be manifested by flight, and a speaker would often employ both words and gestures to drive her victim from the scene, shouting ‘Get thee gone’ or ‘Go thy ways’, and clapping her hands in contemptuous dismissal.83 Agnes Aydon of Newcastle delivered a more elaborate coup de grâce in 1562, crying ‘Go thy way, like naught as thou art, and cut a purse as thou hast done before time, and thou may be ducked in Tyne.’84 The adversary was to be driven away, crushed and humiliated, in a flight that would symbolize her expulsion from the community itself and might well foreshadow it. ‘Get thee to thy bastard at London, thou whore’, cried Christian Frances of North Hinksey, Oxon., in 1604, clapping her hands to dismiss her adversary from both the scene and 81 82 83 84

WSRO, Ep1/11/9, fos. 87v–90v. LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 6/40. LRO, 1D 41/4/1211; 1D 41/4, Box 11/150; BRO, D/A2 c46, fo. 246. Raine (ed.), Depositions from Durham, 70–1.

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the community.85 A few speakers used a still fiercer rhetoric of intimidation, like the angry woman who stood outside a neighbour’s house in Elizabethan Chichester, shouting ‘arrant bitch’ and ‘whore’, and declaring ‘that it were a good turn if the house were set on fire over her head’.86 A clear and public victory might well force an adversary to back down over the issue in dispute, or abandon an improper sexual relationship. The demoralizing effects of public humiliation would certainly intensify as reports fed into neighbourhood gossip, and with the charges now firmly in the public domain, local opinion might trigger an investigation by the parish officers. Some assailants openly declared their intention to push the parish officers into action, and taunted their victims with the consequences. A Durham woman railed in 1568 that her opponent was a whore who deserved to be whipped, carted, and hanged. In the course of a ferocious row at Lutterworth in 1629, Alice Flavell told her adversary that ‘she would hunt her up as dog would hunt a hare before she would leave her, and that she would have her whipped at a cart’s arse’.87 Both clearly hoped that insults hurled in the street would trigger a range of formal and informal sanctions against their adversary. Speakers sometimes went further still, dredging up older and more serious allegations and threatening to inform the authorities. It was probably stale news in 1688 when an angry woman called Eleanor Tompson of Portsmouth a ‘bastard bearing whore’, but she now alleged that Tompson’s mother, long since dead, had murdered the newborn infant by smashing it against the bedroom wall, and threatened ‘that she would go before the Mayor and swear to it’.88 Such a step might trigger a charge of infanticide, a capital offence. Any dark rumour from the past could be turned to tactical advantage at any time—another reminder of the importance of preserving and defending a good name. The setting of premeditated confrontations was thus central to their purpose. In staging a quarrel in public the speaker was deliberately blurring the ill-defined boundaries between private and public, and could easily present her adversary as a threat to the moral order and good name of the neighbourhood as a whole. The link was sometimes explicit. ‘Thou art a thieving, cozening jade,’ Margery Brent told her opponent in 1639, ‘and thou livest by cozening and cheating of thy neighbours.’89 At a 85 86 87 88 89

BRO, D/A2 c46, fo. 135. WSRO, Ep1/11/1, fo. 27v. Raine (ed.), Depositions from Durham, 89; LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 6/40–1. M. J. Hoad (ed.), Portsmouth Record Series: Borough Sessions Papers 1653–1688 (1971), 142. CUL, EDR K4/87.

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stroke, she had turned their dispute into an issue for the whole community. A speaker denouncing an alleged whore could play on similar concerns, frightening neighbours with the possibility of their own husbands being led astray. Neighbours reacted with fear as well as repugnance to the scandalous behaviour of Mary Brasbridge of Maidenhead in 1603. ‘I never did as thou hast done,’ one exclaimed, ‘take up my clothes to my navel saying [to any man] come and occupy me, and if thou once did occupy me, thou wouldest never care for thy wife.’90 Brasbridge was exceptional if she had really made such a boast, but almost any allegation of promiscuity carried an implicit warning that it threatened the welfare of the entire neighbourhood.

  This chapter has focused thus far on strategies of attack in personal disputes. Public insults presented the victim with a stark choice: she could either yield, or attempt to clear her name by defying her assailant. What forms of defence were available? And what led victims to select a particular response? By no means all attacks succeeded, and the threats of communal action or prosecution materialized in only a small proportion of cases. The outcome of any particular assault depended on a range of factors, notably the standing and prior reputations of the two parties, the strength of the evidence, and, just as important, the response of the person targeted. Most women reacted to insults by brushing the allegations aside, and retaliating in kind. Hardly ever do we hear of anyone reduced to tears by a verbal attack, however savage; though words could and did inflict serious hurt, women were more likely to fight back than submit. ‘If I be a whore, thou art a whore’, an angry woman riposted in 1608. ‘Hear how the jade calleth me jade’, a Leicestershire woman urged bystanders during a quarrel in 1590. A Sussex villager denounced her assailant as ‘a jade to call her jade, and a whore to call her whore’.91 A male witness recalled how two women had scolded each other as ‘baggage’, ending wearily, ‘and so there was baggage and baggage betwixt them both’.92 Such encounters occasionally resulted in each party suing the other for defamation. Far more often, the quarrel was resolved informally, with the help of mediation by bystanders, neighbours, kin, or the local minister. If a 90

BRO, D/A2 c46, fos. 106v–108r. CUL, EDR K5/11; LRO, 1D 41/4/507; WSRO, Ep1/11/15, fo. 149; cf. LRO, 1D 41/4/ 1211; OAO, Archdeaconry papers, c11, fos. 15v, 19. 92 WSRO, Ep1/11/10, fo. 111. 91

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confrontation ended with no clear winner, it usually made sense for the parties to patch up their quarrel. An innocent person abused or defamed sometimes felt no need for any defensive action, for the impact of allegations depended to a considerable extent on the standing and reputation of the two parties involved.93 Neighbours did not relish the disruption of social harmony, and we often find bystanders warning assailants to hold their tongues, or simply turning away in disgust. If a woman enjoyed a good reputation and the allegations appeared ill-founded or malicious, she might have little to fear. As Susan Amussen has remarked, ‘good reputation was almost selfperpetuating’.94 In such circumstances the speaker herself was more likely to be blamed for making trouble, and might even be presented for scolding. Women insulted in public sometimes capitalized on this reaction, urging bystanders to dismiss abuse as malicious and attempting to turn the tables. ‘Get thee in at the doors, thou scold,’ cried Lucretia Fleming to her assailant at Cambridge in 1595, ‘a cucking stool were more fit for thee than to stand scolding there.’95 It was often the bystanders who awarded victory in these verbal prizefights. Of course very few women were prepared to endure repeated abuse or sustained and malicious gossip. If the perpetrators ignored pressure from neighbours to make peace or hold their tongues, the ecclesiastical courts offered the most effective remedy if—an important if—the complainant had friends willing to testify on her behalf. One option was to have the accuser presented as a scold, though the victim had first to persuade the churchwardens to act on a matter they were more likely to dismiss as a private squabble. Even then, she might have to wait months before the next visitation when presentments would be due. A private (or ‘instance’) defamation suit offered a far more satisfactory course, and one pursued by large and increasing numbers in the Elizabethan and early Stuart period. Laura Gowing counted 2,224 defamation cases in and around London in her sample years between 1572 and 1640, and James Sharpe found 1,638 new defamation suits entering the consistory court at York in the 1590s alone. At Chester, cases quadrupled over the period 1544–94.96 These impressive figures confirm that defamation suits were by no 93 For the view that early modern insults were always seen as damaging, whether true or false, see R. Shoemaker, ‘The Decline of Public Insult in London 1660–1800’, Past and Present, 169 (2000), 109–11; cf. Sharpe, Defamation, 24. 94 See e.g. WSRO, Ep1/11/15, fos. 177v, 256v–257r; Ep1/11/16, fos. 53v, 68, 144; LRO, 1D 41/4/37; cf. Amussen, Ordered Society, 99. 95 CUL, EDR D2/19, fo. 74v; LRO, 1D 41/4/188, 652b. 96 Gowing, Domestic Dangers, 35; Sharpe, Defamation, 27; Ingram, Church Courts, 299–300. These figures cover suits brought by men as well as women.

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means the preserve of the wealthy. Nonetheless, litigation was often a last resort. Most quarrels never reached the courts, and if two neighbours failed to reconcile their differences, their friends and neighbours would usually try to mediate. Conciliation was an important part of the parish clergyman’s function, and a local gentleman might step in too. Our ancestors, though easily roused to anger, were committed to the ideal of ‘good neighbourliness’ and expected harmony to be restored once tempers had cooled.97 Moreover, while the victim of abuse might well relish the idea of legal action, and dream of seeing her tormentor humiliated in turn, her family and friends would be conscious of powerful factors pulling the other way. Litigation would spell time and trouble, and give further publicity to the allegations while the suit was progressing, a process that might take many months. Litigation could also be expensive. The cost of pursuing a defamation suit to conclusion could be in the order of £8–£10, with the loser often ordered to pay the costs of both parties. In addition, many litigants had to cover the expenses of their witnesses.98 All this would impose a heavy burden on ordinary families, for in the early seventeenth century a husbandman’s entire annual profit might be no more than £14–£15. Nor was expense the only problem. A plaintiff had to establish that the alleged words had been spoken with deliberate intent to defame, and had in fact damaged the reputation of the victim. This opened the way for several counter-arguments; defendants might claim the words had been spoken in jest, or in the heat of the moment, or simply to alert the victim to rumours already current.99 Witnesses or defendants might even argue that the words alleged could not have harmed the plaintiff’s good name because he or she had no reputation to lose.100 In many cases, defence witnesses acknowledged that defamatory words had been spoken, but claimed provocation and denied that any harm had been done. Witnesses for the prosecution faced the dilemmaof how to argue that the plaintiff’s good name had been damaged without conceding that she was now generally regarded as scandalous and immoral. Some attempted to square the circle by arguing that her good name had been injured among strangers and the poorer sort, while insisting that it remained intact among ‘civil and sober people’.101 97 See e.g. the account by Richard Locksmith, minister of Loddington, of his efforts to resolve a dispute between two local women: LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 22/24. 98 Ingram, Church Courts, 57; Sharpe, Defamation, 24. 99 CUL, EDR D2/11, fos. 29–30; EDR D2/19, fo. 77; WSRO, Ep1/11/13, fo. 187; Ep1/11/ 21, fo. 26; LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 1/63. For a table of fees see Ingram, Church Courts, 56, though fees were generally ‘taxed’, or scaled down, at the close of proceedings. 100 OAO archdeaconry papers, c32, fo. 39; c118, fo. 61; CUL, EDR D2/19, fos. 32v–33r. 101 WSRO, Ep1/11/9, fo. 119r–v; LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 15/100.

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Plaintiffs and defendants alike might also find it difficult to persuade bystanders to testify. Giving evidence involved trouble and expense, often requiring a lengthy journey to the court and overnight accommodation. Many witnesses expected to receive expenses, and sometimes compensationforloss of earnings. Equally important, potential witnesses were often friends or neighbours of both parties, reluctant to see their quarrel perpetuated, and conscious of having to live alongside them both while the case was proceeding, and afterwards. Regardless of the outcome, litigation was more likely to breed rancour than restore harmony. If the defendant was sentenced to perform public penance, the humiliation might well trigger fresh quarrels. Margaret Grovett, performing penance in 1614, renewed her insinuations in the church as soon as it was ended, and taunted her adversary that she ‘might begin to sue her again anew’.102 It is not surprising, then, to find some bystanders flatly refusing requests by the aggrieved party to bear witness. In 1629 a Leicester tailor initially refused on the grounds that he was far too busy at Whitsuntide to leave work, and when he did reluctantly appear in court, he flung down his cloak and declared that ‘he would be paid for his loss of time before he spoke a word’.103 Though witnesses could be made to appear by court citation, resentment might well reduce the value of their testimony. One woman insisted on placing her irritation on record, testifying in 1668 that she had nothing to say and ‘hath great wrong done her to be brought in as a witness in this cause’.104 Witnesses did not always support the party in whose name they had been cited to appear, and sometimes testified that the defendant had spoken in the heat of the moment, and had earnestly sought a reconciliation.105 Such testimony would be likely to increase pressure on the plaintiff to settle informally. Moreover witnesses might be aware that in a protracted case the other side would try to dredge up embarrassing episodes from the past to blacken their characters and discredit their evidence. One Sussex witness was challenged in 1605 over a pig she had allegedly stolen eight or nine years earlier. A respectable Oxfordshire matron found her testimony questioned on the grounds that some twenty-five years earlier, as a maidservant, she had borne an illegitimate child.106 The catalogue of offences alleged against witnesses to undermine their testimony is formidable 102

WSRO, Ep1/11/12, fo. 142r–v. LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 6/64, deposition of Richard Scarborough; Box 39/56; WSRO, Ep1/11/10, fo. 223. 104 LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 30/129. 105 LRO, 1D 41/4/291. 106 WSRO, Ep1/11/10, fo. 223; OAO, archdeaconry papers, c118, fo. 281v. 103

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indeed: alongside allegations of sexual immorality, pilfering, scolding, and drunkenness, we find charges of recusancy, horse-theft, murder, high treason, and bestiality.107 A defamation suit that was fiercely contested might endanger the good names of all those involved, not merely the two principals. Though depositions were given in private, the examination of witnesses was based on ‘interrogatories’ using information provided by both parties and their friends, and there can be no doubt that long-buried stories quickly found their way into local gossip. We can find parties asking witnesses what they intended to say in court, and witnesses asking each other, even those appearing for the other side. Allegations of bribery, coaching, and intimidation were not uncommon. One witness claimed that when she had asked an opposing witness what he knew about the matter in dispute, he replied that ‘he could not tell what to say in it, but he would say as the rest did’. A 16-year-old girl said in 1595 that the plaintiff’s husband had told her ‘she should be whipped and no body would receive her into service’ if she failed to testify as required.108 Neighbours were well advised to press for an informal settlement of disputes; litigation bred bitterness and division. All these problems faced any plaintiff, and women had to confront several further obstacles. To launch a suit it was necessary to contact a proctor, pay fees, arrange for witnesses to be summoned, and attend the court, and relatively few women possessed the requisite time, resources, and knowledge of court procedures. It might therefore be very difficult for them to launch a suit without the active support of their husbands. In London, where women dominated defamation business, travel expenses were of course negligible, female literacy was higher, and more women had disposable income of their own. From the surviving evidence it would appear that men often preferred to see their wives’ quarrels settled cheaply and informally. Even when a suit had been commenced, we can find husbands agreeing an informal settlement and expecting their wives to fall into line. When Agnes Daniel of Selsey began a suit against her neighbour Robert Bishop in 1603, the vicar and another parishioner effected a reconciliation. Agnes appears to have been reluctant to accept it, but when she raised the question of expenses, her husband silenced her politely but firmly: ‘I pray thee wife, take thou no 107 See e.g. WSRO, Ep1/11/15, fo. 148 (recusancy); Ep1/11/15, fo. 199 (horse-stealing); LRO, 1D 41/4/296 (murder); LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 26/26/17 (treason); WSRO, Ep1/11/11, fo. 72 (bestiality); cf. Amussen, Ordered Society, 100–1. 108 WSRO, Ep1/11/16, fo. 78v; CUL, EDR D2/19, fo. 72r–v; for other cases of bribery, coaching, and intimidation see WSRO, Ep1/11/12, fo. 229r–v; Ep1/11/13, fo. 82; Ep1/11/14, fo. 85; Ep1/11/16, fos. 80, 91; LRO, 1D 41/4/45; 1D 41/4, Boxes 16/106 and 27/13/1. One vicar allegedly taught a witness a ‘trick’ to lie without sin: 1D 41/4/868.

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care for that . . . Goodman Bishop and I are agreed.’109 Such episodes, though rarely documented, were probably commonplace. Pressure from husbands and male neighbours was reinforced by broader cultural assumptions. There was a marked tendency among men to belittle, even ridicule the significance of women’s disputes. If women were emotional and irrational by nature, why take their squabbles seriously? Male bystanders saw female disputes as generally of little consequence. A Cambridge chandler, roused at midnight in 1594 by a noisy dispute in the street between two women, described how ‘hearing them fall to scolding, he left them and went to bed’. When an angry Nottinghamshire woman summoned a male neighbour in 1579 to come outside and hear how she was being abused, he stayed where he was, ‘supposing it to be but a brawling matter’.110 Another witness explained that he had seen only the start of a quarrel, ‘by reason that he minded his own business whereabout he was going, namely the fetching of water’. Disputes between women did not rate highly if fetching water could take precedence. Similarly a tailor who had witnessed two women squabbling in a shop in 1594 recalled mainly his irritation at having to wait to be served.111 In such a climate, the pressure on women to settle informally must have been immense. Why then are ecclesiastical court records full of defamation suits, the majority initiated by women? Anger, humiliation, and the thirst for revenge were powerful emotions, of course, and hot-headed friends sometimes fanned the flames by declaring how they would act under similar provocation. Etheldreda Dale, for example, urged her friend to sue a neighbour in 1591 because ‘she hath spoken abominable words of you’, and declared, ‘I would trounce her, or else I would spend all to my very smock’.112 But in most cases people sued when they felt the cost of doing nothing outweighed the costs of litigation. They knew that inaction might easily be construed as an admission of guilt, if the allegations had been neither retracted nor silenced. ‘If the Goodwife Blisset were an honest woman she would have put up [i.e. sued] at the talk that hath been heretofore’, Joan Church insisted in 1599. A male witness in another case supported the plaintiff’s action by remarking that if she did not clear herself in court, ‘he verily believeth that her neighbours will think very ill of her as long as she lives’.113 Newcomers faced particular pressures, for without any established ‘credit’ they were more vulnerable than most. 109 110 111 112 113

WSRO, Ep1/11/9, fo. 257r–v; LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 1/63. CUL, EDR D2/19, fo. 38; LRO, 1D 41/4/291. LRO, 1D 41/4/1211; CUL, EDR D2/19, fo. 72v. CUL, EDR D2/19, fos. 5v–7v. BRO, D/A2 c40, fo. 87; LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 17/84; cf. Box 6/65.

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When Anne Banckes was accused of promiscuous behaviour before her marriage, she felt obliged to sue because neighbours had taken ‘special notice’ of allegations which had surfaced only three days after she had married and set up house. Her marriage and acceptance among her new neighbours were equally at stake.114 The fear that failure to sue would be regarded as a sign of guilt must have grown stronger as defamation suits became increasingly common, establishing a litigious cycle in which women felt obliged to sue because others had done so, adding yet more pressure on those coming later. One accidental consequence of the civil wars, when the church courts were defunct for almost two decades, was to break that cycle. In practice, the decision on whether to sue lay only partly with the victim. The main issue for most was not so much the defamatory words themselves as their neighbours’ response. As we have seen, allegations regarded as irresponsible or malicious served only to discredit the speaker. But if the victim found that her reputation had been damaged, she was in effect driven towards litigation by the likely or actual consequences. One factor was the fear of being presented by the churchwardens unless the allegations were seen to be quashed. Disciplinary as well as private business increased dramatically in the ecclesiastical courts in the Elizabethan and early Stuart period, and some connection appears highly probable. If individuals knew that a presentment was under consideration, they might well take steps to avert it, and this consideration was sometimes made explicit, especially by male plaintiffs or their friends.115 The story of Joanna Coffyn, who had not bothered to sue, is also suggestive. Coffyn had been accused by a neighbour’s maid of having an affair with her manservant, and had thought it sufficient to make the maid retract and apologize in the presence of several neighbours. But this failed to silence the rumours, and in 1614 she found herself prosecuted on suspicion of immorality. Insisting on her innocence, she denounced the maid as ‘a lewd wench of no credit’, and the judge responded by ordering her to bring a written certificate of good character from six honest neighbours’ wives—a more private version of compurgation—which secured her discharge.116 The support of friends had saved her, but a defamation suit would have been much less embarrassing. Most churchwardens presented alleged offenders only when they 114

GL, MS 9189/2, fos. 74v–75r. For differing views on this see C. Haigh, ‘Slander and the Church Courts in the Sixteenth Century’,Transactions of the Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian Society, 78 (1975); Sharpe, Defamation, 25–6; Ingram, Church Courts, 306–7. See also n. 60, above. 116 GL, MS 9064/17, fo. 107v. 115

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could report a ‘common fame’. In other words, a victim had no need to sue unless defamatory accusations had already undermined her good name within the neighbourhood. Taking legal action to avert a presentment was thus bound up with the need to fend off the more immediate consequences of a damaged reputation. The first signs would be evident in the changed language and behaviour of neighbours. Victims found themselves the butt of cutting remarks and gestures, and sniggers and jeers from the ‘poorer sort’, servants, and children. Losing face mattered deeply in a face-to-face society, and many victims probably feared ridicule as much as disapproval. Anne Young, vowing to sue over an insult, declared that she would spend £20 ‘rather than she would be laughed at’. A husband and wife who sued jointly had done so, a witness explained, partly because they had been ‘mocked and jeered’.117 Insults from young people of low status were particularly offensive, and a victim might feel that only court action could enforce the deference she saw as her due. When Dorothy Johnson sued a hot-tempered young maidservant for hurling a torrent of abuse, in 1629, witnesses agreed that the maid had been provoked, but thought that as a mere servant she should have asked pardon later for such an outburst; her refusal, one argued, justified the plaintiff’s determination ‘to have satisfaction and submission’.118 A damaged reputation might also bring far more serious consequences, within both family and community.119 Marital discord was easily the most important. In most cases, a woman suing for defamation was probably acting first to protect her marriage, next her standing in the neighbourhood, and only thirdly to avert the threat of presentment by churchwardens. All three motives were frequently cited, and often mutually reinforcing. In most suits the husband too had probably concluded that no other course would suffice to protect his wife’s good name, and by extension his own. Conduct-books agreed that one of a man’s most important duties was to defend his wife’s honour, and it is clear from depositions that it was quite often the husband who had secured witnesses and paid their expenses for travel, board, and lodging. In one Sussex case in 1615, the plaintiff’s husband hired a horse for a heavily pregnant witness and paid for her husband to accompany her.120 Another Sussex witness said he had come ‘at the instance, request and 117

WSRO, Ep1/11/15, fos. 146v–147r; cf. Ep1/11/15, fo. 251v; Ingram, Church Courts, 311–

12. 118 119 120

LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 6/81. For a good survey see Ingram, Church Courts, 308–13. WSRO, Ep1/11/12, fo. 154.

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charge’ of the plaintiff’s husband. A shepherd’s wife testifying in 1629 explained similarly that the plaintiff’s husband ‘hath paid for her diet to travel to and from Leicester and that she expects he will do so till she come home again’. Many other witnesses testified to similar effect.121 The preponderance of female litigants in defamation suits has overshadowed the role their menfolk often played in facilitating them and providing both practical and moral support. Such support was by no means guaranteed, however. It is easy to imagine the impact of persistent gossip and insults on marital relationships, especially when the husband found himself the butt of crude jokes branding him a cuckold, bawd, or wittol—one who shamefully connives at his wife’s infidelity. In the face of persistent slander against his wife, a man would be forced to take some action to protect his own good name. He could either defend his wife’s honour, by confronting her defamers or encouraging her to sue, or publicly dissociate himself to show he was neither wittol nor bawd. Thomas and Elizabeth Gorton, taunted as wittol and whore, responded by bringing a joint suit against a male defamer in 1629.122 In other cases, perhaps inevitably, slander and gossip destroyed marital trust and triggered bitter quarrels. It is not uncommon to find a suspicious husband threatening to end the marriage altogether unless his wife could clear her name in court. When Lettice Withers was accused of adultery in 1687, her husband Thomas, a Leicester butcher, beat her, turned her out of the house, and vowed ‘that in case she could not prove herself an honest woman he would have her racked and would not live with her’.123 Lawrence Burges beat his wife in 1627 after neighbours called her a whore, and allegedly encouraged others to beat her too. As a result, she miscarried.124 In such circumstances a wife would have to fund a defamation suit from her own resources, usually by turning to her friends and kin. When gossip circulated in a Berkshire village that Margaret Church was an adulteress, it was her parents who promoted a suit to clear her name. Her husband, angry and suspicious, had refused to assist. Theophilus Styrke, a Leicestershire clergyman, went further, issuing a formal certificate in 1669 to inform the world that he ‘utterly disowned’ 121 WSRO, Ep1/11/10, fo. 106v; LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 6/81. For similar cases see e.g. LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 39/56; WSRO Ep1/11/9, fos. 157–8; Ep1/11/10, fos. 108, 109v, 110, 119, 170; CUL, EDR K6/366; BRO, D/A2 c40, fo. 184v. 122 LRO, 1D 41/4, Boxes 6/63–8 and 20/106; Cunnington (ed.), Some Annals of Devizes, pt. i, pp. 88–9. 123 LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 47/34; cf. 1D 41/4/241; WSRO, Ep1/11/17, fo. 26v; Ep1/11/20, fo. 33; G. Walker, ‘Crime Gender, and Social Order in Early Modern Cheshire’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Liverpool, 1994), 83–4; Ingram, Church Courts, 309–10. 124 BCB7, fos. 29v–30r.

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his wife’s suit for defamation, implying that he thought the allegations well founded.125 A damaged reputation could also threaten much wider social and economic consequences. Any woman who failed to reverse the damage knew she might find herself gradually frozen out of her former social networks.126 An unusually well-documented incident at Easebourne, Sussex, in 1613 furnishes a rare glimpse of this process, and shows how sustained abuse might push the victim into litigation as the only way to halt it. When a group of women went into an alehouse one Sunday ‘to drink after evening prayer’ and ‘make merry’, Mercy Locke joined them with deep misgivings, reluctant to be in the same company as Margaret Grovett, who had railed at her on several previous occasions. Grovett promptly challenged her again, demanding, ‘Thou wilt not sit down, wilt thou?’, to which Mercy retorted, ‘Indeed, I have forsaken much good company for your sake, but I will do so no more’. Grovett thereupon launched another verbal assault, denouncing her as a brazen whore for seducing her husband. Many of those present were scandalized and did their best to restore peace. ‘Fie, Goodwife Grovett,’ one exclaimed, ‘are you not ashamed thus to abuse a young woman . . . and do you think that your husband is such a man?’ But Grovett persisted, and when Locke’s husband entered the room she railed at him too as a cuckold. Though Grovett’s husband insisted that the allegations were utterly false, Mercy Locke felt she had no option but to sue. People from several parishes had been drinking in the alehouse, and she and her husband probably felt that only an equally public vindication could restore her good name.127 Women from poorer families were especially vulnerable, for access to employment and parish relief was usually conditional on good behaviour, as determined by the ‘better sort’. When neighbours accused Joan Read of Devizes, a weaver’s wife, of being a witch, two of the town bakers banned her from their shops, and she begged magistrates to hear the charges in order to clear her name. Mary Kennet, a Sussex villager, complained that gossip labelling her a witch and whore had prompted neighbours to bar her from their homes and deny both work and alms. She had to travel to other villages to seek maintenance, and unless she could restore her good name, she would be forced to leave altogether.128 Moreover, once allegations had achieved a certain level of publicity, private 125

BRO, D/A c40, fo. 184v; LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 32/104. Styrke was minister of Keyham, 126 GL, MS 9056, fo. 81. 127 WSRO, Ep1/11/12, fos. 50v–54v. 128 B. H. Cunnington (ed.), Records of the County of Wilts.: Being Extracts from the Quarter Sessions Great Rolls of the Seventeenth Century (Devizes, 1932), 225; WSRO, Ep1/11/8, fos. 73v–75r. Leics.

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apology was no longer sufficient, even if forthcoming. Persistent accusations fed gossip that quickly spread beyond the parish boundaries to neighbouring villages and towns. A lost reputation brought notoriety across an area that might extend ten miles or more from the point of origin. Agnes Beaumont, who lived on a lonely farm, felt obliged to challenge vicious rumours that she had poisoned her father and gone mad by appearing in public in the neighbouring town of Biggleswade on market day in order to demonstrate that she had nothing to hide and was still sane.129 It was far harder for the victim of sexual smears to prove her innocence, and she might well believe that only litigation could undo the damage. The fact that the court itself was held in an urban centre, not the parish, was in this respect an advantage: word of her suit would soon spread as widely as the original slander. Finally, the cost of litigation may have proved less of a deterrent than we imagine, even for those of limited means. Initiating proceedings did not normally represent a determination to pursue the matter all the way to sentence. In most cases it served as a public declaration and warning shot, a device to trigger an informal settlement involving an apology and some financial compensation, or at least the reimbursement of expenses. It cost only 8d. to secure an initial citation, a sum within the reach of most householders, and many plaintiffs probably hoped to spend little more. A citation was often enough to persuade defendants to back down, to avert the trouble and expense they would face themselves, whereupon the suit would normally proceed no further. When Anne Woodward of Swinford, Leics., commenced a defamation suit in 1633 against Mary Bryers, the citation served its purpose by prompting an informal solution. Arbitration was arranged, through the intervention of the vicar and a local landowner, Sir Thomas Cave, in consultation with Anne’s husband and a male neighbour representing Mary Bryers. Mary admitted blame and withdrew her allegations, and at the vicar’s request the two women drank to one another and pledged their goodwill. Next day Mary paid 6s. to cover the expenses of the arbitration. The vicar later recalled that a retraction and promise of good behaviour ‘was all that they [the Woodwards] ever desired’.130 A female defendant eager to contest a case would often be as dependent as a plaintiff on her husband’s willingness to fund it, and she too would face pressure to settle informally. Such settlements are usually known to us only when they broke down, but in the great majority of cases conciliation brought a satisfactory end to the legal 129 The Narrative of the Persecutions of Agnes Beaumont, ed. V. J. Camden (East Lansing, 1992), 82–3 and passim; cf. Amussen, Ordered Society, 98. 130 LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 12/82–3, 86.

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proceedings. Laura Gowing found that only 18 per cent of the defamation cases brought by London women proceeded to sentence.131 In the eyes of the local community, and of many plaintiffs, a suit that went all the way had failed in its real purpose. The fact that most ecclesiastical suits were dropped long before their final resolution in court is a measure of the success of the system, not its failure. Court action had facilitated an informal, quicker, and less damaging resolution, and court officials generally encouraged mediation and private settlement. We can sometimes find a similar attitude even in disciplinary hearings. When Leicestershire churchwardens presented Betheline Andrews, a spinster, in 1637 for calling her neighbour a whore, her brother came to plead on her behalf that the two women were now reconciled, and the judge readily dropped the case.132 Most plaintiffs appear to have launched defamation suits reluctantly, responding to family or communal pressure. But this certainly did not apply in every case, and other suits suggest a combative and opportunistic response. When a woman called on bystanders to take note of insults and allegations, she was signalling her readiness to sue long before she could know whether they would in fact damage her reputation. This might be a defensive tactic to stop the speaker in her tracks, but could equally mean she had seen an opportunity to pursue an existing feud through the courts, or extort concessions in return for dropping the suit. Some plaintiffs were already engaged in litigation with their opponents in other courts over other issues, and in such cases a defamation suit might serve several roles: an opportunity to intensify pressure, a counter-attack, or a defensive move to prevent a damaged reputation from weakening her credit in the other proceedings. Some plaintiffs alleging defamation had already been sued by the defendant for the very same offence. Elizabeth Braby, a Sussex villager who sued her neighbour Alice Grantham in 1630, had recently performed public penance for defaming Grantham, and had then renewed her slurs. When Grantham complained and called her an ‘old whore’, Braby saw her own chance and seized it. The system did offer some protection against opportunism of this kind, however, for witnesses usually knew something of the background and testified accordingly. In this case they deposed that Braby was a troublemaker who had been sentenced to be ducked as a scold and bound over to the peace; one of her own kinsfolk called her ‘a scurvy woman of her tongue’, and regretted that the ducking had never taken 131 LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 8/46; WSRO, Ep1/11/11, fo. 161; LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 4/123; Gowing, Domestic Dangers, 61. The figure for male suits was slightly higher, at 23%. 132 LRO, 1D 41/13/64, fo. 37; Ingram, Church Courts, 310–11, 318.

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place.133 A suit patently malicious or opportunist was unlikely to succeed. The courts themselves were aware of the problem, and allowed defendants to plead that a suit had been brought merely out of malice, a fairly common line of defence. But in fraught relationships an element of malice was almost inevitable, and categories were frequently blurred. Most defamation suits were initiated by wives or widows. Spinsters, especially maidservants, faced immense problems. Few employers would take their quarrels seriously, and fewer still would provide the time and money to pursue a case through the courts. While many young folk may have cared less about reputation than their elders, those who did were strongly discouraged from litigation. A spinster’s case was likely to reach the courts only where there were unusual circumstances or strong parental support. A young woman living at home with prosperous parents was the most likely to sue, partly because the family itself might feel compromised by a slur against her. When Susan Stone of Fittleworth, Sussex, a yeoman’s daughter, brought a suit after being accused of sleeping with two local men, she did so with the support of her father, mother, and brother, all of whom testified on her behalf.134 The Durham court heard a case in 1567 brought by a man on behalf of his 13-year-old stepdaughter, accused of stealing. Similarly when Martha Mason, a Whittlesea spinster, launched a defamation suit in 1634, it was her father who wrote to the proctor providing him with the details to frame the libel.135 Other male relatives might also assist if they felt defamatory words had impugned the honour of their household or family. ‘Goodwife Bateson, you have called me whore and arrant whore,’ Catherine Edwards told an assailant at Cambridge in 1579, ‘I will see what my uncle will say to this.’ A defamation suit duly followed, partly because the verbal assault had taken place inside the uncle’s own house. The most common background to a defamation suit launched by a spinster was the disruption of her marriage plans. Joan Kirby, for example, sued in 1626 after defamatory allegations had led her suitor to call off their wedding.136 Mary Bachelor of Pulborough launched no fewer than three suits in 1690 over the local miller’s witticism that when she married, the bridegroom ought to pay him a reward ‘for breaking of the ground’. Witnesses reported that Mary’s father had taken deep offence, 133 134

WSRO, Ep1/1/14, fos. 161v–162r, 163r–v; cf. Ingram, Church Courts, 307–8, 314–16. WSRO, Ep1/11/14, fos. 38v–39v; cf. Ingram, Church Courts, 309–10 for a rather different

view. 135 Raine (ed.), Depositions from Durham, 84; CUL, EDR K7/181; cf. LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 55/ 162–76. 136 CUL, EDR D2/11, fos. 299–300; WSRO, Ep1/11/14, fos. 10v–11r; cf. LRO, 1D 41/4/ 270, 479, 494; Ingram, Church Courts, 310–11.

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and as a man worth two or three thousand pounds he could easily afford to help her crush those who had circulated the jest.137 The father’s role is still more evident in the case of Anne Patchett of Muston, Leics., whose failure to marry was provoking talk among neighbours in 1638. One Joan Pyne spread a cruel rumour that ‘Nan Patchett is a scrat’, a term defined in court as ‘one as is so strait in her privy member that she can not admit a man to . . . have carnal copulation with her’. This was a bitterly humiliating insult, especially with the rider that several had tried and failed. The rumours had allegedly led potential suitors to back away, and Anne’s parents stepped in to rescue her. Summoning Joan Pyne and other villagers to his house one Sunday after service, Anne’s father challenged Pyne to repeat her words. When she did so, it was Anne who launched a defamation suit, but it was clearly her father’s backing that had made it possible.138 Householders were unlikely to take such trouble for a mere servant. If they thought allegations well founded, they might turn her away; if false, they would try to suppress them by informal means, or seek to reconcile the quarrelling parties.139 When Mary Savage, a Berkshire maidservant, sued a married woman in 1604, her mistress testified that she had good cause, but explained that she and her husband had done their best to dissuade her from going to law. A Loughborough couple tried equally hard to persuade their maid Mary Joyner to drop her dispute with a local widow. They accompanied her to the widow’s house, composed their differences, and sent out for ale to celebrate the reconciliation.140 Reputation could be as important for servants as for others, and its loss might prevent them from obtaining a good place, or one at all. Margaret Herreson of Chester-le-Street sued after she had been put in the stocks for alleged thieving, and in consequence lost a position she had been promised.141 But servants could usually sue only when they received support from their kin, or when employers felt their own reputation had been compromised. It seems likely that Anne Passe, a Sussex ex-farm-servant, was able to bring a case in 1578 because rumours that pregnancy had made her leave her place were threatening the good name of her former master; one neighbour remarked that if he had nothing to hide he would surely have had her returned to complete her 137

WSRO, Ep1/11/21, fos. 26r–28v. LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 22/128–30. The minister, Dr Robert Sanderson, later bishop of Lincoln, attempted without success to make Pyne apologize to avert the suit. 139 LRO, 1D 41/4/600, 728. 140 BRO, D/A2 c46, fos. 135r–137v; LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 22/39–42. The reconciliation broke down and Joyner, now married, sued her adversary. 141 Raine (ed.), Depositions from Durham, 112; cf. Meldrum, ‘London Domestic Servants’, 54. 138

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contract.142 A Quorndon man who initiated a suit in 1719 in his maid’s name explained that ‘she being a young woman, and upon her preferment’, would be seriously handicapped by a damaged reputation. The clue to his altruism may lie in his comment that ‘one of my house is very abused’; the circumstances of the case had led him to identify her honour with that of his family.143 Very occasionally we find litigation between two spinsters who were clearly serving as proxies in a wider dispute between their respective families. That was the case in an unusual pew dispute in Shackerston, Leics., in 1640, in which the daughter of the manorial lord sued the vicar’s maidservant for sitting in her pew. The maid contested the case, denying that the plaintiff’s father had a rightful claim to the lordship, and insisting that the vicar and his wife supported her right to the pew. No servant would venture to fight such a case on her own authority, and the two young women were merely pawns in a family feud.144

     This chapter has focused hitherto on purely verbal conflicts. But female brawls were by no means exclusively verbal: insults might lead to threats, and threats to blows, just as in disputes between men. On the whole it was assumed that women would fight only with words, yet women were by no means instinctively averse to the use of physical force, and we have seen the brutality with which some treated young servants.145 Contemporaries were well aware that women sometimes lashed out with blows as well as words, and responded to this breach of propriety with a mixture of condemnation and ridicule. Respectable men regarded female violence as an unseemly confirmation that women were indeed creatures swayed by passion. Many held a rather schizophrenic view, damning serious violence as ‘unnatural’ and so doubly heinous, while dismissing minor brawls as comical. Squibs such as The Gossips Braule and The New Brawle, or Turnmill-street against Rosemary Lane, both published in 1654, depicted the protagonists as comically vulgar, while a Restoration interlude which showed female haymakers squabbling and fighting offered the revealing stage direction ‘The fellows look on and laugh’.146 Physical violence 142

WSRO, Ep1/11/3, fos. 5r–v. LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 60/129; cf. Box 48/14. 144 Ibid., Box 26/129–30. 145 See Ch. 4, above. 146 W.M., Huntington Divertisement, or, an Enterlude (1678), 31. A Jacobean newswriter could dismiss a brawl between Lady Davies and Lady Jacob as no more than ‘womanish brabbs’, even though it had triggered a Star Chamber suit: The Letters of John Chamberlain, ed. N. E. McClure (Philadelphia, 1939), ii. 444. 143

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between women has been largely neglected, and many questions remain unanswered, and seldom posed. Why did some women resort to violence, and in what circumstances? What forms did it take, and was it ever regarded as acceptable? And what can such episodes tell us about wider cultural values?147 The level of female violence is particularly hard to establish. Court records suggest it was very low; once we exclude witchcraft and domestic violence, homicide by women features very rarely. Only one such case came before the assize courts of Jacobean Sussex, ending in acquittal, and we find a similar situation elsewhere.148 Lesser assaults also came before the courts far more rarely than male assaults. James Sharpe, studying Essex quarter-sessions records for the period 1620–80, found that women constituted a mere 54 of the 665 persons accused of assault.149 Other courts show a similar pattern. The West Riding quarter-sessions records for 1637–42 show 419 men accused of assault but only 71 women, of whom 42 belonged moreover to the families of men also accused.150 Such figures are problematic, however. Given that men paid little heed to female violence unless it resulted in serious injury, the records may conceal a substantial ‘dark figure’ of minor assaults left unreported. The court-leet records of Salford, a manorial court, suggest that women comprised a rather more substantial minority at this lower level; in the course of the 1620s, jurors presented 18 women for assaulting other women, in most cases drawing blood, compared to 75 men charged with assaulting other males.151 Women did not normally carry knives or staffs and generally fought with their hands, fists, and feet, which made any injuries more likely to be superficial. By contrast, two women who fell out while working in the fields in County Durham in 1616 had more dangerous implements readily to hand, and one used her rake to inflict a serious head-wound on her opponent.152 As that incident 147 On women and violence see C. Stone, ‘The Cultural Significance of Interpersonal Violence, with special reference to Seventeenth-Century Worcestershire’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Warwick, 2001); C. Wiener; ‘Sex Roles and Crime in Elizabethan England’, Journal of Social History, 8 (1975), 49; cf. J. Beattie, ‘The Criminality of Women in Eighteenth-Century England’, Journal of Social History, 8 (1975), 82–9. 148 Cockburn (ed.), Calendar: Sussex: James I (1975), 86; id., Calendar: Hertfordshire: James I (1975), 210; id., Calendar: Kent: Elizabeth, 152, 490; id., Calendar: Kent: 1649–1659 (1989), 102, 117; id., Calendar: Kent: Charles II 1676–1688 (1997), 276. 149 J. A. Sharpe, Crime in Seventeenth-Century England: A County Study (Cambridge, 1983), 117. 150 J. Lister (ed.), West Riding Sessions Records, ii. Orders, 1611–1642, Indictments, 1637–1642 (Yorkshire Archaeological Society, 53, 1915), passim. 151 J. G. de T. Mandley (ed.), The Portmote or Court Leet Records of Salford, 1597 to 1669 (Chetham Soc.,  46, 48, 1902), i. 146–227. 152 J. C. Jeaffreson (ed.), Middlesex County Records (1886–92), i. 51; C. M. Fraser (ed.), Durham

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suggests, the site of violence was an important factor in determining its character. Female disputes mostly occurred in the street, market, or churchyard, and only rarely in the alehouse, where alcohol triggered many of the fights between men and reduced their inhibitions. It is probable too that bystanders intervened more readily to separate female assailants, prompted by a greater sense of disapproval and confident of running little risk to themselves.153 And when fights did break out, male authority figures such as husbands, constables, and churchwardens were better able to pressure the parties into settling their dispute without recourse to the law. What evidence we have suggests that respectable women shared the male view of female violence as an unacceptable breach of propriety and civility. An angry Romford woman, presented on suspicion of adultery in 1584, railed at the churchwardens that ‘if she were a man as she is a woman, she would be revenged’, but clearly recognized that this option was unavailable. Several Leicester women wrote to the mayor in 1653 when they saw an assailant pull up her victim’s clothes and beat her in the street, denouncing such behaviour as ‘to the shame of civil women’.154 Most of the evidence we have on fights between women relates to spinsters, or women beyond the pale of respectability. Mary Manwaring, for example, a woman ‘of very ill fame’, was hanged for manslaughter in 1678 after she fell out with another woman in a London alehouse, struck at her with some metal tongs, and ‘happened to beat out the brains of a child her female antagonist held in her arms’. Mary Bird was prosecuted in 1680 after attacking a heavily pregnant opponent, who went into premature labour and died a day or two later, blaming Bird for her death.155 Though homicides were rare, the Middlesex quarter-sessions and London Bridewell records indicate that violent brawls were commonplace among the disorderly poor. A disapproving Bridewell entry in 1618 notes three ‘unruly vagrants that fell out amongst themselves and fought one with another very barbarously’. Three fishwives were detained in 1628 for fighting, pulling each other’s hair, cursing, and Quarter Sessions Rolls 1471–1625 (Surtees Soc., 199, 1991), 264. Female violence outside the home involving knives was likely to be premeditated. Cf. a defamation suit brought by a Sussex woman accused of carrying a knife to cut a neighbour’s throat: WSRO, Ep1/11/16, fo. 232v. But homicide cases remind us that it was quite possible to kick someone to death. 153 See WSRO, Ep1/11/19, fo. 31v, for a woman asking a male neighbour to break up a fight between her maidservant and another. 154 McIntosh, Community Transformed, 248; LRO, BR II/18/27/622. 155 OBSP 16–18 Jan. 1678, 4, and MS note on the Wing microfilm copy from the Union Theological Seminary; OBSP 26–28 Apr. 1680, 4; Cunnington (ed.), Some Annals of Devizes, pt. i, p. 31.

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assaulting the Lord Mayor’s officers.156 Respectable neighbours deeply resented such people, and sometimes complained to the authorities. When neighbours reported a cook’s wife in 1577 for beating another woman with a cudgel, they added that she was also suspected of adultery, witchcraft, and plotting her husband’s murder. Margery Burges was similarly reported as ‘a turbulent and disordered person that will not be governed but fighteth, raileth and abuseth all her neighbours’.157 Women who indulged in physical violence were clearly associated with a whole range of antisocial behaviour. Such types were by no means confined to the capital, of course. Neighbours who saw a Leicester maltster’s wife and tailor’s wife beating each another with sticks feared that one or both might be killed. Ellen Watson, presented at Ely in 1573, was described as ‘a common scold and a fighter’, while scandalized officials reported that a Dorset woman, ‘a desperate doer of mischief’, ‘jests she can be hanged but once for all’. She sounds a match for any London virago. So does Eleanor Darling of Bromsgrove, Worcs., whose neighbours complained in 1607 that she had put them ‘in fear and danger of their bodies, their lives and their goods’.158 More problematic are the circumstances in which respectable women too might feel justified in resorting to physical violence. Few felt much compunction about chastising their children or maidservants, which contemporaries would regard as necessary ‘correction’ rather than violence. Some women also felt entitled to beat children and servants belonging to other households, though their parents and employers understandably saw this as trespassing on their own authority and such incidents occasionally ended in court. One Dorset villager was prosecuted in 1624 after beating a neighbour’s maid with a spade.159 In another suggestive episode, a London gentlewoman insulted by a boy in the street in 1585 tried to have him punished by his schoolmaster, whereupon his mother, ‘altogether devoid of feminine modesty’ (in the words of the indictment) waylaid her and beat her about the face.160 Women might also assume the 156 BCB 6, 6 June 1618; BCB 7, fo. 93; cf. BCB 5, fo. 116 and BCB 8, fos. 63, 104, 118, 128; W. Le Hardy (ed.), County of Middlesex: Calendar to the Sessions Records,  (1935–41), i. 6, 18, 26, 207– 157 8, 384. BCB 3, fo. 255; BCB 6, 11 Mar. 1620; cf. BCB 7, fos. 37v, 41. 158 LRO, BR II/18/23/665, 672; CUL, EDR D2/9, fo. 79; The Casebook of Sir Francis Ashley JP, ed. J. H. Bettey (Dorset Record Soc., 7, 1981), 35; J. W. Willis Bund (ed.), Worcester County Records (Worcester, 1899–1900), i. 103; C. M. Fraser (ed.), Durham Quarter Sessions Rolls 1471–1625 (Surtees Society, 199, 1991), 299; cf. Ashley, Casebook, 62; LRO, 1D 41/13/25, fo. 22v; Cockburn (ed.), Calendar: Kent: 1649–1659, 190. 159 Ashley, Casebook, 86; WSRO, Ep1/11/1, fo. 3v; GL, MS 9189/2, fo. 20v; Ingram, Church Courts, 315; Walker, ‘Crime Gender’, 85–6. 160 Jeaffreson (ed.), Middlesex County Records, i. 165; J. M. Guilding (ed.), Reading Records: Diary of the Corporation (1886–96), iii. 129–31; cf. n. 5, above.

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right to beat a suspected thief, either as summary justice or to extract a confession. In June 1656 Martha Taylor of East Smithfield assaulted a woman she accused of stealing a silver cup, a suspicion she had had confirmed by two cunning men. She probably lacked hard evidence, and was hoping to cow the victim into confessing and returning it.161 Some attacked women suspected to be witches, and the custom of ‘scratching’ a witch to remove her spell sanctioned a certain level of unauthorized violence. In 1646 Elizabeth Crosley, a poor Yorkshire woman, was assaulted by a maidservant who looked after the small child Crosley was thought to have bewitched. More striking, perhaps, was the readiness of two grown-up daughters of a Dorset gentleman and magistrate in 1605 to attack a suspected witch and scratch her face with a bramble. Though the injury was trivial, a witness noted that it had shamed the victim and encouraged others to attack her. Part of the significance of symbolic violence by women was to invite more serious assaults.162 We can also find a widespread readiness to use violence to protect family members, property, or rights in the face of immediate threat. Even in church, women quarrelling over pewing arrangements were sometimes ready to push, scratch, or kick their rivals to assert or defend their rights. Isabel Tompson of Littleport, presented for fighting in church while the Ten Commandments were being read, countered by claiming that her own blood had been spilt.163 Many other women resorted to force to defend their families and property against bailiffs, tax collectors, and other officials, whether alongside their menfolk or alone. Women also played a significant role in riots over common rights and grain supplies, as we will see.164 And some respectable women, especially in northern England, readily joined their menfolk in feuds over property or livestock, beating and stoning their adversaries.165 Among the more disorderly poor, as we might expect, women showed few inhibitions about joining riotous assaults in pursuit of a family feud. When a Southwark labourer and his wife fought another couple in 1579, it was the wife who stabbed their male opponent to death. Robert Shoemaker, studying riots and riotous assaults in Middlesex in the early years of the eighteenth century, found women involved in a third of all reported incidents.166 Some would beat a stray member of the opposing 161

Jeaffreson (ed.), Middlesex County Records, iii. 252. Cf. LRO, BR II/18/23/665, 672. J. Raine (ed.), Depositions from the Castle of York (Surtees Soc., 40, 1861), 7–8; PRO, STAC 8/149/24; STAC 8/151/7. 163 CUL, EDR D2/9, fo. 174v; cf. LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 9/61–3. 164 See Ch. 7, below. 165 See e.g. Fraser (ed.), Durham Quarter Sessions Rolls, 244, 274, 276, 279–80, 302. 166 Cockburn (ed.), Calendar: Surrey: Elizabeth, 183; cf. Le Hardy (ed.), Middlesex: Calendar,  162

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faction even without their menfolk present to help them.167 We can also find female gangs, made up of kin, servants, and friends, launching fierce attacks on other women in pursuit of personal or family feuds. Thus three women attacked Elizabeth Pannett senior and junior (perhaps a mother and daughter) in the churchyard of Brookland, Kent, in April 1666, inflicting fatal injuries on both victims.168 Similar assaults, though rare, can be found throughout the country. In 1581 five women living in the Strand were indicted for assaulting a widow and three other women, apparently belonging to a single family, throwing them to the ground and tearing their hair. Thomas Franklyn of Reading complained in July 1627 that seven women had attacked his wife and left her ‘swollen about the face’, explaining that she was too ill to attend the court in person. At Salford, jurors reported an unseemly affray in 1644 in which one woman and her daughter had fought with another woman and her two daughters. In 1666 four women from Hoddesdon, probably related, assaulted Susan Bigg of Hertford. The circumstances in all these cases remain unknown; they may have been private feuds, or alternatively attempts to purge the neighbourhood of a scandalous individual or family (a theme explored in Chapter 7). It is likely that assailants often blurred the two categories, persuading themselves that their feud was itself an issue of public welfare.169 Though they did not generally carry weapons, it is clear that women participating in such riotous assaults could inflict serious injuries with their fists and feet, if they so wished. They would also have ready access to knives at home, of course, and we find some groups hurling stones at their opponents, a largely female mode of violence and intimidation.170 It is clear, then, that gender proprieties might be quickly forgotten when passions ran high, especially among the poor whose inhibitions were in any case relatively weak. It is moreover unrealistic to draw a rigid distinction between verbal and physical brawling, or to look for special i. 207–8, 240; R. B. Shoemaker, ‘The London “Mob” in the Early Eighteenth Century’, Journal of British Studies, 26 (1987), 285–6. 167 LRO, 1D 41/13/36, fo. 77; S. A. H. Burne (ed.), The Staffordshire Quarter Sessions Rolls (William Salt. Archaeological Soc., 1929–50), i. 116, 152–3; Walker, ‘Crime Gender’, 104–5. 168 Cockburn (ed.), Calendar: Kent: Charles II, 1660–1675, 166, 168; see ibid. 226, for a similar case. 169 Jeaffreson (ed.), Middlesex County Records, i. 125; Guilding (ed.), Reading Records, ii. 358; W. J. Hardy and W. Le Hardy (eds.), Hertfordshire County Records (Hertford, 1905–57), vi. 153–4; cf. Lister (ed.), West Riding Sessions Records, 41; Mandley (ed.), Portmote Records of Salford, ii. 77. 170 For knives, see e.g. Cunnington (ed.), Records of the County of Wilts., 179–80; for sticks, J. Tait (ed.), Lancashire Quarter Sessions Records (Chetham Soc.,  77, 1917), 36, and n. 171, below; for stoning: Ashley, Casebook, 71; Le Hardy (ed.), County of Middlesex: Calendar, i. 240; Tait (ed.), Lancashire Quarter Sessions, 133, 221; WSRO, Ep1/11/8, fo. 55; R. Flecknoe, The Diarium, a Journall (1656), 3; see also n. 151, above; Ch. 1, n. 1, above; and Ch. 7, below.

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circumstances behind every fight. ‘Brawling’ was an indeterminate term, signifying violence that might be verbal, physical, or both, and it is hardly surprising that some verbal clashes ended in blows. In most cases these were very minor episodes. Thus when two Leicester women fell out in 1651 over some washing, they threw soil and dirty water at each other, one tore off her opponent’s headgear, and the other hit back with a ‘yard wand’. In a similar brawl at Portsmouth, Avis Reniger called John Collins’s wife a pickpocket, whereupon Collins’s wife threw some boiled turnips in her face and another woman hit her with a stick.171 Such incidents were typical of female violence among the poor. Their weapons were ad hoc—fists, sticks, dirty water, and a pot of turnips—and despite their passion little harm was done. Both incidents triggered formal complaints, but both were then settled informally. Overall, we should think of female violence in this period as minor rather than rare. While it was very unusual for women involved in fights to have their assailants indicted, a significant number made use of recognizances to have them bound over to the peace. This mechanism, which we have already seen utilized by battered wives, provided instant protection by threatening the assailant with imprisonment if she used further violence. Her sureties, moreover, afraid of forfeiting their money, would do their best to patch up the quarrel. Urban women turned to this instrument in increasing numbers, and it was also employed by rural women of modest status. Sarah Eales, a Warwickshire labourer’s wife, sought the peace in 1694 against a woman who had assaulted her in the fields and ‘threatened to knock her on the head’. Garthine Walker found 300 women securing recognizances in Cheshire in the 1660s, with 40 per cent of those bound over women too. Steve Hindle cites the case of one Cheshire woman before the civil wars who allegedly made a living by obtaining recognizances against neighbours and then demanding money to drop them.172 Robert Shoemaker’s study of Middlesex in the period 1660–1725 shows women securing about 35 per cent of the 2,039 recognizances, mostly sought after brawls, while in urban areas women actually outnumbered male plaintiffs. Only a quarter of the female plaintiffs were definitely married, and only 40 per cent of defendants.173 Spinsters were perhaps more likely to be involved in violence, and certainly more vulnerable, for they lacked the status of a householder and had no husband to deter 171

LRO, BR II/18/26A/130; Hoad (ed.), Portsmouth Sessions Records, 31. WRO, CR103, 59; S. Hindle, ‘The Keeping of the Public Peace’ in P. Griffiths, A. Fox, and S. Hindle (eds.), The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, 1996), 233 and passim; Walker, ‘Crime Gender’, 101; R. B. Shoemaker, Prosecution and Punishment: Petty Crime and the Law in London and Rural Middlesex, c.1660–1725 (Cambridge, 1991), 211. 173 Shoemaker, Prosecution and Punishment, 208–9. 172

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assault or secure redress. Single women became more prominent as plaintiffs in defamation cases too in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.174 With spinsters forming an increasing proportion of the population, and often maintaining themselves rather than living in service, it may be that more of them possessed the confidence, resources, and need to act on their own behalf. The law thus played a significant role in the pursuit and resolution of female disputes, through defamation suits, binding-over, and prosecutions in the lower courts. For the most part, however, it remained a secondary means of conflict resolution, a longstop. A woman asking for a recognizance was signalling her readiness to sue, but in most cases she was looking for mediators to effect an informal resolution. Magistrates themselves often set in train procedures of conciliation and mediation.175 A woman’s standing in the neighbourhood, and the level of support she could expect from her husband, gossips, and neighbours, were usually more important in determining how she would pursue a quarrel or respond to an affront. Reputation represented her social capital, and a good name ensured that friends would support and protect her in neighbourly disputes. If she chose to turn to the church courts over defamatory words, she was proclaiming both her innocence and her confidence that friends would rally to her support. Very often such a move represented a warning shot designed to secure a satisfactory informal settlement, and in most cases it proved effective. And even when a case was fought through the courts, the two parties and their friends were likely to be waging a parallel trial of strength within the parish. We should see formal and informal strategies as complementary, not alternatives. 174

Based on a study of the Leicestershire defamation cases to 1750, in LRO, 1D 41/4 Boxes

1–82. 175

Beattie, Crime and the Courts in England 1660–1800 (Oxford, 1986), 268–9.

6 Women and Neighbours: Disputes with Men

W fell out with their male neighbours as well as one another, and over many of the same issues. But everyone recognized that the social dynamics were quite different when personal disputes crossed the gender divide. The social structures and cultural values of the period almost invariably placed women at a serious disadvantage. This chapter explores the dynamics of such disputes, the problems they presented for women, and their options for defence or counter-attack. Though the scales were tilted against them, they could rarely afford to settle for the role of passive victim. Two minor incidents from Jacobean Sussex illustrate social and cultural realities that would have been familiar to all contemporaries. In 1607 a young sawyer’s wife from Racton called on a man to collect a debt, and was sent packing. ‘I think she will come no more unto me for money,’ he remarked complacently, ‘for I have called her all to naught and said that she was a whore.’1 Unable or unwilling to pay, he had turned the tables by a calculated assault on her sexual reputation, confident it was a weapon she would be unable to parry. The behaviour of Rowland Wood of Horsham is still more revealing. He told neighbours with gleeful disgust in 1612 how he had been drinking with one Joan Sammeway, and taking advantage of her tipsy state had ‘put his hands into her clothes to feel her privities and she was so filthy and foul that he defiled his fingers with so doing’. Wood appears to have felt no shame at his own conduct, and expected his listeners to agree that only Joan, drunken and sexually available, had been damaged by the episode. Her husband seems to have shared this assessment; mortified by the report, he refused to live with her any longer ‘unless she can purge herself of this scandal or redeem her good name’.2 1

WSRO, Ep1/11/11, fo. 68. WSRO, Ep1/11/12, fo. 62. Cf. the case of Robert Smyth, who allegedly said he had lain with Joan Farmer, of Beckford, Gloucs., and that she ‘had the pox on her thighs as big as a walnut or an egg, and was so scabby that he durst not lie with her any longer . . . so scabby she cannot shit’: PRO, STAC 8/145/28. 2

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The advantages men enjoyed in such disputes are obvious. The local figures of authority were all male, as were potential mediators such as the minister or squire; if a quarrel reached the courts, these too were controlled by male judges, lawyers, and jurors. The gendered structure of authority inevitably shaped the behaviour and responses of men and women alike. When Jane Lacey, a Sussex widow, was sued for defamation in 1600 after accusing a local farmer of trying to seduce her with a bushel of wheat, she turned for advice to the rector, who urged her to settle the matter privately, ‘because she was a poor woman and had no witnesses’. The rector thought no one would believe her word against a much wealthier male neighbour, and was astonished when she insisted ‘she would speak the truth unto death, . . . let him do what he will’.3 Similarly when Jane Allen, a farm servant, reported that a man had tried to rape her as she was milking cows, a neighbour remarked simply, ‘Faith, I would [she] had a little more wit.’ His words are open to more than one interpretation; did he assume she was lying, or naïve to publish a report that would not be believed, and would therefore damage her far more than the alleged assailant?4 The power of traditional assumptions is evident in either reading.

  Obstreperous men posed a threefold danger to women. First, the risk of physical assault; many men, angry or drunk, had few compunctions over striking a woman, and in family feuds might deliberately target an opponent’s wife. Second, sexual harassment, ranging from attempted seduction to rape, and sometimes escalating from the first to the second. And third, the destruction of their good name, by abuse, gossip, or shaming rhymes and rituals. These threats quite often overlapped. The level of physical violence is difficult to determine. Men could not hope to win or redeem honour by fighting a woman, behaviour which might well be scorned as shameful or ridiculous.5 Fights that resulted in death or serious injury were almost always between men; only three of 180 assault cases prosecuted before the Liverpool borough court between 1649 and 1671 involved men attacking women.6 But cultural 3

WSRO, Ep1/11/9, fo. 31. Ibid., fos. 266v–269r. 5 E. Foyster, ‘Male Honour, Social Control and Wife Beating in Late Stuart England’, TRHS, 6th ser., 6 (1996); id., Manhood in Early Modern England: Honour, Sex and Marriage (1999); Fletcher, Gender, ch. 16. 6 M. Power (ed.), Liverpool Town Books 1649–1671 (Record Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 136, 1999), passim. 4

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attitudes offered only limited protection, and could even backfire, for if a man saw women like servants and children as natural inferiors, he might regard assault as no more than a punitive beating. Threats alone could be terrifying, of course, in the absence of any effective police force. One Dorset villager faced an aggressive labourer threatening to wring her neck, and a Reading woman was afraid to leave her house in 1638 after four men threatened her, fired shots, and stoned her and her children. It was often impossible to know whether such threats were real. William Mercer of Garstang assaulted a cooper’s wife in a drunken rage in 1663, and his threat to knock out her brains understandably terrified her.7 And if most assaults were relatively minor, some proved lethal. A woman in Royston, Herts., was described in 1609 as close to death after a labourer assaulted her, while Dorothy Stapleton, a Kent villager, died from her injuries after being attacked and kicked by four men in July 1628.8 Even heavily pregnant women had no guarantee of immunity. Elizabeth Wynnes, a London victualler’s wife, went into premature labour after being assaulted by two male neighbours in 1613.9 In a still more horrific episode in 1589, two Surrey labourers stabbed Alice Smyth of Penhurst, slit open her belly, and tore out the child she was carrying. That was wholly exceptional, and her pregnancy may well have been its cause rather than incidental.10 But while historians have shown that very few women died from assaults by male neighbours or strangers, every woman knew that assault posed a real and potentially dangerous threat. Sexual harassment, in some form, was experienced by very many women, possibly most. We can find men at every social level who regarded any unaccompanied female as fair game, and contemporary ideas about women’s sexual drive and moral frailty encouraged them to assume that any target would quickly succumb to persuasion or pressure. Such assumptions explain the astonishing confidence as well as crudity of many sexual approaches. When George Ball accosted a woman at 7 The Casebook of Sir Francis Ashley JP, ed. J. H. Bettey (Dorset Record Soc., 7, 1981), 79; cf. ibid. 75; J. M. Guilding (ed.), Reading Records: Diary of the Corporation (1886–96), iii. 422; Power (ed.), Liverpool Town Books, 149. 8 Cockburn (ed.), Calendar: Hertfordshire: James I (1975), 68; id. (ed.), Calendar: Kent: Charles I (1995), 75; id. (ed.), Calendar: Kent: Charles II, 1660–1675 (1995), 19, 86, 180. 9 W. Le Hardy (ed.), County of Middlesex: Calendar to the Sessions Records,  (1935–41), i. 144–5; cf. 122, 123. 130, 135, 136; LRO, BR II/18/12/23; Cockburn (ed.), Calendar: Kent. Charles II, 1676–1688 (1997), 141 (assault leading to miscarriage), 228 (assault with a hop-pole on pregnant woman). 10 Cockburn (ed.), Calendar: Surrey: Elizabeth (1980), 233. For other homicidal attacks see Mary Dawes, killed with an axe in 1588, and Cypriana Chapman, stabbed to death in 1596: ibid. 321, 440.

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Chesterton, Cambs., in 1599, aware that her husband had been away for several months, he allegedly took out his penis and informed her baldly, ‘Thou art quite lost for want of such a thing as this is.’11 This mode of propositioning was by no means uncommon, and some men seemed genuinely bewildered if they found themselves rebuffed. One asserted that many other wives in the village had accepted his advances, confident this would suffice to overcome the woman’s scruples. When she continued to refuse him, he enquired, ‘But how do you for a bed-fellow?’, knowing her husband was away.12 Other men casually assumed that impoverished women would be ready to trade sexual favours for material reward. William Hodson of Downham, exposing himself in 1578 to several women working together in the fields, asked one why she wore such poor clothes. When she said she could afford none better, he demanded contemptuously, ‘Will not thy tail find thee hose and shoes?’13 Contemporary male assumptions also help to explain the common pattern of assaults that might best be described as ‘forcible seduction’ (somewhat akin to so-called ‘date rape’), in which a man wooed a neighbour with words, gifts, or even the promise of marriage, but was ready to use force if denied. The egregious George Ball had tried to force himself on another victim while simultaneously placing a shilling in her hand ‘to th’intent that she should concur’. Dorothy Sprigg complained in 1632 that a shepherd had walked into her kitchen one day ‘and pulled out his prick and said that if she would not suffer him to have the use of her now he would do it against a hurdle or a wall wheresoever he met her’.14 There were many such stories. Defamation, the third threat, was employed as readily by men as women, through direct insults and the circulation of malicious or ribald gossip. The fragility of female reputation made women highly vulnerable, as we have seen, with painful repercussions at home as well as in the community. ‘Thou art a knave,’ one villager told her adversary, ‘for thou hast set my husband against me, and he and I are at strife by thy means.’15 Whatever the grounds of a dispute, men would usually switch their attack to the woman’s sexual reputation. When Elizabeth Meade irritated a neighbour by throwing some old animal bones into the street, he damned her as a ‘foreridden whore’. Another man, quarrelling over gleaning rights, dredged up an old story that his adversary had borne two bastards 11

CUL, EDR K20/24. LRO, 1D 41/4/964; G. R. Quaife, Wanton Wenches and Wayward Wives (1979), 136–7; D. Underdown, Fire from Heaven: Life in an English Town in the Seventeenth Century (1992), 68–9. 13 CUL, EDR D2/10a, fo. 79. 14 CUL, EDR K20/24; LRO, 1D 41/13/60, fo. 88. 15 WSRO, Ep1/11/7, fo. 114v; Ingram, Church Courts, 309. 12

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a dozen years earlier, before she was married.16 The shift appears to have been almost automatic. ‘If that thou sayest that I am a rogue, a rascal and a villain,’ an angry man shouted in 1590, ‘I say that thou art a whore.’17 Any offensive words or actions could be dismissed by branding the opponent ‘a whore of her tongue’ or damning her ‘whorish tricks’. Such exchanges might be almost formulaic, but ‘whore’ was a far more damaging insult than ‘rogue’ or ‘knave’. The fragility of female reputation was also frequently exploited in quarrels between two men, with one attacking his opponent by smearing his wife, mother, or sister. Thus in a heated exchange over some pigs in 1617, a Sussex villager called his adversary ‘by all the ill names he could, and his wife also, and told him she was a whore and an arrant whore and Tom Browne’s whore’. Another villager whose ox was impounded in 1608 exclaimed angrily, ‘Why, John West, you need not stand so much upon your honesty, your sister Mary hath had one bastard.’18 Such tactics were effective, for while a man might simply brush aside accusations he knew to be false, the taunt that his wife was a whore sowed doubts much harder to dismiss. The consequences remain evident in a multitude of court depositions describing marital recriminations, violence, and depressive illness.19 One parishioner bred heartache in a Leicestershire parsonage in 1707 by telling the vicar that his wife was a whore, exploiting a malicious rumour started by a friend at odds with the vicar over tithes.20 Sometimesthe speaker would twist the knife still further, claiming to have cuckolded his adversary himself. Matthew Pippin, branded a cuckold in 1634, replied, ‘How knowest thou that? I do believe my wife is an honest woman’, whereupon his opponent flung back: ‘I know thou art a cuckold, for I made thee one’.21 William Vann jeered at his rival, ‘I have made thee a cuckold for I have lain with thy wife forty times’, while another man boasted, ‘I can lie with your wife and turn you out of doors’.22 In such circumstances, the victim’s only hope of redeeming his honour lay in challenging his tormentor. Many speakers probably hurled their taunts confident that the victim lacked the courage or strength to do so, adding further to his shame. No one doubted, of course, that it was the woman and her cuckolded husband who suffered most from the revelations. 16 WSRO, Ep1/11/14, fos. 52–4; CUL, EDR K7/24; cf. WSRO, Ep1/11/13, fos. 68v–69r; LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 41/189. 17 CUL, EDR K11/57; cf. EDR K13/51; WSRO, Ep1/11/1, fo. 17v. 18 WSRO, Ep1/11/13, fo. 19; Ep1/11/11, fo. 132; cf. Ep1/11/14, fo. 81. 19 WSRO, Ep1/11/17, fo. 26; Ep1/11/20, fo. 33v; see also Ch. 5, above. 20 LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 50/72–81. 21 Ibid., Box 20/107. 22 Ibid., Boxes 14/90 and 70/70.

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In most respects the languages of male and female insult were very similar.Mensometimesdenounced their female adversaries as drunkards, thieves, liars, or, occasionally, witches. A Sussex villager told his neighbour in 1570 ‘that he would spend all his sheep he had but he would burn her as a witch’, while Elizabeth Hooton sued the rector of Markfield, Leics., in 1626 for calling her a witch and vowing to ‘scratch or harrow her’ before he would let her receive communion.23 But the overwhelming majority of recorded insults were sexual in character. A Sussex villager of limited vocabulary told his neighbour ‘she was a whore, whore, and whore, and a rascally whore, a rogue whore and beggarly whore’. ‘Damn you,’ cried a more imaginative man, ‘what are you, one of the whores of Babylon?’24 Men often jeered that an adversary had sold herself for money or goods, and that a seemingly respectable woman had ‘got her fine apparel with her tail’.25 Some spelled out the paltry rewards for which poorer women had allegedly sold themselves, ranging from two cows to the insulting offer of some bread and cheese. One Sussex villager mocked that his adversary had been thought worth only a lobster, adding that for a crown (5s.), she would have readily consented.26 Such insults linked moral with social baseness, and were clearly effective. Other men jeered that their adversaries were available to anyone for a pittance, ‘two-penny whores’, ‘anybody’s whore for a groat’, ‘highway whore’, and so on.27 One woman was described as ‘common with any man or any living flesh’, another as ‘common to half the bargees in Wisbech’.28 Some speakers jeered that their opponents were riddled with the pox. A man told Audrey Atkins she was ‘a quean that ran over the country and hast been at Ashby with a pox and at London with a pox’. A Leicester man railed at a ‘pocky faced bitch’ and declared that all her family were whores, observing caustically that ‘none of his family had their noses eat through with the pox’.29 Men also resorted freely to the language of dirt and animality, flinging insults such as ‘filth’, ‘bitch’, or ‘sow-like whore’. One invited his adversary ‘to go pick maggots out of her poll’. Another, filling his dungcart, delivered the comprehensive verdict ‘Thou art a whore all thy body over except thy shoes.’30 23 WSRO, Ep1/11/1, fo. 17v; LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 2/90. Hooton may be related to her Quaker namesake a generation later; many Quaker leaders too were denounced as witches. 24 WSRO, Ep1/11/11, fo. 65v; LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 60/81. 25 WSRO, Ep1/11/13, fo. 113v. 26 LRO, 1D 41/4/1236; 1D 41/4, Box 20/135; WSRO, Ep1/11/12, fo. 38v. 27 PRO, STAC 8/62/13; LRO, 1D41/4, Box 50/2, 3. Female speakers used similar tactics; 28 see Ch. 5, above. LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 20/135; CUL, EDR K2/40. 29 LRO, 1D 41/4, Boxes 3/1 and 53/132–3. 30 LRO, 1D 41/4/599; E. Brinkworth (ed.), Shakespeare and the Bawdy Court of Stratford (1972), 166; WSRO, Ep1/11/16, fo. 55v; Ep1/11/21, fo. 23.

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If most of these slurs were similar to those used by women, the male language of insult differed significantly in several respects. The most striking was the readiness of some men to jeer at an adversary as not only a whore but his whore. Such men clearly shared Laura Gowing’s view of male and female sexual codes as ‘incommensurable’.31 They believed their ‘revelation’ would do little if any damage to themselves, and knew it was impossible to disprove. Women were sometimes shocked and puzzled by male behaviour in this regard. ‘What kind of knave is John Greene’, a Cambridge baker’s wife wondered in 1597, ‘that could not be contented to make poor Fox a cuckold but he must call him cuckold also?’32 The answer, of course, was that Greene could relish his ‘conquest’ all the more by tormenting the husband he had usurped. Sexual politics, like all politics, was about power, and the women functioned here as weapon as much as prize. Some men also boasted about the children they had fathered by other men’s wives. One was apparently happy to divulge that he had fathered twins by another woman, and was paying 5s. a week for their nursing. Another, who claimed to have fathered a child by a neighbour’s wife, allegedly told her later that he had said so ‘only to cross the old knave your husband’.33 We can identify several other gendered characteristics of insult. The double standard encouraged some men to claim that a woman had proposed sex rather than merely consenting to it. Convention required that men should always take the sexual initiative, and such an accusation marked her as either a prostitute or totally in thrall to her appetites, a condition both scandalous and comical. One man allegedly accused Jane Wynes of offering to pay him 2s. 6d. for sex, and promising she would not become pregnant.34 Such a charge was infinitely more demeaning than for a woman to accuse a man of propositioning her. Other men drew on the widespread view of women as garrulous, mocking an opponent’s mouth as grotesquely large or misshapen with jibes such as ‘frog-mouthed’, ‘plaice-mouthed’, ‘long-jawed’, and ‘Mother Flounder-face’.35 And occasionally we find men exploiting the widespread belief that unfaithful women were also domineering wives. A Sussex villager turned on a neighbour after evening prayer one day in 1594 and jeered, ‘Thou mayest say to 31

Gowing, Domestic Dangers, 110. CUL, EDR D2/19, fo. 270. 33 LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 7/4; 1D 41/13/57, fo. 116; CUL, EDR K6/19; EDR K7/206; WSRO, Ep1/11/15, fo. 246. 34 WSRO, Ep1/11/15, fo. 246v; LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 55/116; 1D 41/4/1196; 1D 41/4, Box 12/89. 35 WSRO, Ep1/11/11, fos. 72–3; Ep1/11/16, fos. 55v, 143v–144r. 32

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thy husband come in cuckold and go out blockhead’, branding her as shrew as well as adulteress.36 Mocking gestures frequently accompanied all these insults. The ‘V-sign’, made with two raised fingers to symbolize the cuckold’s horns, could be directed at either sex.37 Obscene rhymes circulated orally and were sometimes written down and posted in public places, often accompanied by rams’ horns to signify a whore and cuckold.38 In 1609 a group of Leicestershire villagers circulated a typical libel against two local women which began: A simple song of whores we frame according to our art a whore to move we mean to prove to see who will take her part

and fastened horns to the door of one of their victims. The aim was clearly to trigger public pressure, using the cloak of anonymity to test the state of local opinion.39 Equally common was the practice of holding up a wisp of straw to mock an alleged scold; the symbolism is obscure, but may have suggested a foolish woman who would rail at nothing. An Elizabethan funeral in Sussex was disrupted by a fierce quarrel between a pall-bearer and female mourner: ‘Haste, whore, haste,’ he cried, ‘I will set up a wisp for a whore to scold at.’40 Some gestures were more original. A Leicestershire villager who tormented his neighbour in 1671 by calling her a whore and neighing like a horse was presumably exploiting the assonance of whore/horse.41 Other men preferred visual forms of slander, like the two villagers who chalked a picture of male genitalia on a church pew in 1614, along with the initials of the woman who usually sat there.42 A gentleman spurned by Elizabeth Walton of Hampstead exacted savage revenge in 1708 by sending a picture depicting her in a pornographic pose, with a covering letter in which he jibed that as two men were insufficient to satisfy her carnal appetites he would also send her a carrot ‘of the largest size’. Copies of the picture, which a cookmaid said showed such things 36

WSRO, Ep1/11/7, fo. 89v . See e.g. LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 22/131–45, esp. 135 where Rowland Randle, a blacksmith, explains that ‘cuckold’ could also be used for the wife of an adulterous husband. 38 A. Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England 1500–1700 (Oxford, 2000), ch. 6; M Ingram, ‘Ridings, Rough Music and the ‘Reform of Popular Culture’ in Early Modern England’, Past and Present, 105 (1984), id., ‘Ridings, Rough Music and Mocking Rhymes in Early Modern England’, in B. Reay (ed.), Popular Culture in Seventeenth-Century England (1985). 39 LRO, 1D 41/13/33, fo. 9v. 40 WSRO, Ep1/11/7, fo. 115. 41 LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 33/12. 42 LRO, 1D 41/13/39, fo. 23v. 37

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‘that even men blush at repeating’, were circulated among friends and servants to add to her shame.43 Other rituals could inflict still greater humiliation. One drew on the old practice of sentencing notorious whores and bawds to be shorn as a public mark of disgrace, which reflected the fact that venereal disease might itself result in the loss of head, facial, or body hair.44 The idea of ‘polling’ promiscuous women enjoyed a parallel life in popular discourse, and sometimes practice (and was of course used widely in continental Europe in 1944–5 against women who had consorted with the occupying German forces). By an unsavoury extension, cutting off or pulling out a woman’s pubic hair could function both as a trophy of male ‘conquest’ and as conclusive proof of her depravity. In 1575 a Shoreditch man boasted of his exploits by producing some hair wrapped in a paper and declaring it ‘was Daie’s wife’s hair of her privy members’.45 Scandalous rumours circulated around Wheatley, Oxfordshire, in 1616–17 that a man had assaulted Margaret Woodbridge and pulled out the hair from one side of her ‘gear’, leaving it bald; as a result, she found herself exposed to mockery and suspicion throughout the district.46 Other forms of symbolic assault might trigger far more serious violence. In a vicious episode at Stoneleigh, Warwickshire, one Sunday in May 1691, a group of young men seized Anne Simkins from nearby Baginton, pinned her to the ground, and thrust nettles into her vagina with a stick until she was bloody. ‘Now let her go,’ one said, ‘we have given her her due, she’ll scarce ever come to Stoneleigh again.’ The perpetrators were happy to boast about their action, and their trophy; picking up a clump of sheep’s wool, one told a friend ‘we pulled as much hair as this wool . . . from the bottom of her belly’.47 Presumably they viewed her as a polluted woman, to be barred from the parish by a ruthlessly appropriate form of punishment. Nor was such brutalized ‘moral cleansing’ unique. In 1589 two men at 43 Bodleian, MS Rawlinson B382, fos. 397–8; on graffiti see J. Fleming, Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England (2001); see also M. Jones, ‘“Such pretty things would soon be gone”: The Neglected Genres of Popular Verse, 1480–1650’, in M. Hattaway (ed.), A Companion to English Literature and Culture (Oxford, 2000). 44 Two Wisbech men were presented in 1601 after their hair and beards had fallen out, giving rise to a common fame of ‘incontinent living’: CUL, EDR B2/20, fo. 2v. 45 BCB 2, fo. 104; for a similar case see BCB 5, fo. 121v; cf. ‘The Cony Barber’, Roxburghe, iii. 572–5; T. Brewer, The Countrie-Girle (1647), sig. G. 46 S. Mendelson, ‘The Civility of Women in Seventeenth-Century England’, in P. Burke, B. Harrison, and P. Slack (eds.), Civil Histories. Essays presented to Sir Keith Thomas (Oxford, 2000), 118; BCB 5, fo. 121v; cf. Ch. 8, below. 47 WRO, CR103, 20–7; for a somewhat similar case, see A. Shepard,‘Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England, with special reference to Cambridge, c.1560–1640’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Cambridge, 1998), 166–7.

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Bobbing, Kent, assaulted a pregnant spinster named Margaret Fraunces, shaved her head, and burned her thighs. The effects were even more traumatic than they had probably intended, for she was shocked into premature labour and died, along with her baby.48 Though such savagery was exceptional, assaults like that at Stoneleigh were clearly related to the well-known customs of ‘skimmington’ and ‘rough music’, which saw mobs humiliating and sometimes beating alleged moral offenders, and to the London apprentices’ regular attacks on brothels and their inmates.49 We know of the Stoneleigh incident only through the chance survival of a justice’s private notebook. There is no evidence that anyone was prosecuted.

    There can be no doubt, then, that men possessed huge advantages in any personal dispute between the sexes, and could threaten and hurt women in a variety of ways. How did women respond, and by what means could they best protect and defend themselves? Physical assault Physical assault posed the most terrifying threat, and the narratives women constructed for the magistrate laid stress on their weakness, fear, and helplessness.50 In reality, most victims doubtless resisted as best they could, fending off the assailant and shouting for help. Elizabeth Walker of Charlwood, Surrey, ambushed on 25 August 1591, shouted ‘Rogue and cutpurse rogue’, and kicked her assailant’s shins until help arrived.51 Nor were all women soft targets. Anne Purser, a Sussex widow, was acquitted in 1562 of killing a man on the road to Chichester by throwing stones at him, and may have been trying to drive away an assailant. We have a better documented case in 1714 when Cecilia Fowley, a Kent maidservant, was accosted by a highwayman demanding her wages and clothes; nothing daunted, she pulled him from his horse and gave him a blow to the head which proved fatal.52 We should not underrate the 48

Cockburn (ed.), Calendar: Kent: Elizabeth (1979), 289. E. P. Thompson, ‘Rough Music’ in his Customs in Common (1991); Ingram, refs. in n. 38, above; K. Lindley, ‘Riot Prevention and Control in Early Stuart London’, TRHS, 5th ser., 33 (1983); P. Griffiths, Youth and Authority: Formative Experiences in England, 1560–1640 (Oxford, 1996), 151–61. 50 G. Walker, ‘Crime Gender and Social Order in Early Modern Cheshire’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Liverpool, 1994), 77–80. 51 Cockburn (ed.), Calendar: Surrey: Elizabeth, 374. 52 Id. (ed.), Calendar: Sussex: Elizabeth (1975), 23–4; F. L. Rayner and G. T. Crook (eds.), The Complete Newgate Calendar (1926), ii. 253. 49

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physical toughness of women whose lives were spent in heavy daily toil. Most women would flinch from tackling a highwayman, of course. Their best security lay in keeping company at all times: working together in the fields, gathering firewood together on the common, travelling together to market. Company offered protection and deterrence, and the culture of female sociability was rooted in the demands of physical security as much as economic necessity. Male company helped too; contemporaries disapproved of assaults on women, and bystanders were likely to intervene or summon a constable if they saw a woman threatened or attacked. When a drunken bricklayer smashed down a door in his Southwark lodging house in January 1582 and accosted a maidservant, he was promptly challenged by two men who intervened to protect her. Only the fact that he stabbed one to death caused the incident to be recorded; such interventions would normally leave no trace.53 Married women naturally looked to their husbands for protection, and the mere existence of a spouse probably acted as a deterrent. Contemporaries expected men to protect their wives in person as well as reputation, and most would have done so.54 When James Weston, the pugnacious curate of Kibworth, Leics., attacked Thomas Vale’s wife in a property dispute, cut her head with a stone, and threw her to the ground, her husband heard her cries and rushed to help—only to suffer the same fate himself.55 Many husbands doubtless intervened with rather more success. Most assaults were minor incidents, triggered by disputes between neighbours, and resolved informally through local mediation. But when a woman had been badly hurt or feared further attacks, she or her family might decide to turn to the law for protection. A Tolpuddle glover had an assailant bound over in 1621 for ‘an outrageous battery’ on his wife. Three women joined at Ilminster, Somerset, in 1656 to lay charges against a violent neighbour who, they alleged, had assaulted each of them and abused many others.56 Binding-over, a mechanism we have seen employed elsewhere, offered cheap and speedy protection and was particularly valuable in the context of family feuds, where no husband, however tough, could watch over his wife’s every movement. It was also appropriate when the husband regarded violence as a crude and demeaning method of resolving disputes, or knew he was weaker than his wife’s 53

Cockburn (ed.), Calendar: Surrey: Elizabeth, 225–6; cf. Ch. 3, above. Cockburn (ed.), Calendar: Surrey: Elizabeth, 374. 55 LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 26/74; cf. J. G. de T. Mandley (ed.), The Portmote or Court Leet Records of Salford, 1597 to 1669 (Chetham Soc.,  46, 48, 1902), i. 62. 56 Ashley, Casebook, 69; E. H. Bates Harbin, Quarter Sessions Records for the County of Somerset (Somerset Record Soc., 23–4, 28, 34, 1907–19), iii. 293. 54

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assailant.57 We are only beginning to explore the culture of early modern masculinity, and it is by no means clear in what circumstances a man felt it was honourable, or more appropriate, to defend his wife through the law rather than with his fists or quarterstaff. There is no doubt, however, that the use of recognizances grew rapidly over the period, especially among the middling sorts.58 Most of those who chose this course were looking for protection rather than punishment. Recognizances were generally discharged at the next quarter sessions, and many were cancelled earlier. A Dorset villager bound over in 1623 for beating a woman so badly that that her life was allegedly in danger was nonetheless discharged four months later on the motion of the victim herself, who had presumably reached a private accommodation.59 Binding-over encouraged the process of conciliation, which may often have included some financial compensation to the victim. Even when cases did proceed to indictment and trial, magistrates seem to have regarded them as semiprivate matters rather than offences against the state or public order. The small fines they imposed may have been largely symbolic, and linked to more substantial private settlements between the two parties.60 Sexual Assault Sexual harassment and assault posed far more complex problems, for reporting an incident would afford it publicity and invite gossip and speculation. What had really happened? Why had the woman been alone with her assailant? Had she given him some degree of encouragement? Was she alleging assault to hide consensual adultery or fornication? Very often husbands, neighbours, and the courts had only bare assertions to guide them on whether an encounter had been a matter of ready consent, reluctant acquiescence, rape, or mere invention, and their conclusions were highly unpredictable. The problems women faced were particularly acute in the case of alleged rape. When there was no other evidence than the woman’s 57 Mary Randall had a spouse unable to protect even himself, and in 1633 begged the peace against a man ‘for taking her husband by the privy members’; he was presumably too hurt to appear in person. W. L. Sachse (ed.), Minutes of the Norwich Court of Mayoralty 1632–1635 (Norfolk Record Soc., 36, 1967), 75. 58 S. Hindle, ‘The Keeping of the Public Peace’ in P. Griffiths, A. Fox, and S. Hindle (eds.), The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, 1996); R. B. Shoemaker, Prosecution and Punishment: Petty Crime and the Law in London and Rural Middlesex, c.1660–1725 (Cambridge, 1991); C. Stone, ‘The Cultural Significance of Interpersonal Violence, with special reference to Seventeenth-Century Worcestershire’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Warwick, 2001); and refs. in n. 5, above. 59 Ashley, Casebook, 75. 60 J. M. Beattie, Crime and the Courts in England 1660–1800 (Oxford, 1986), 456–61.

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allegation, the courts tended to give defendants the benefit of the doubt. But how could any rape victim prove her story if there had been no one within earshot, unless she had serious injuries to show? If she had submitted in fear of instant death or mutilation, the courts construed her behaviour as consent. A young woman of Waltham Holy Cross, pregnant in 1632 following a rape, pleaded that her assailant had ‘used much violence to her by dragging her about the fields and said he would kill her if she would not lie with him, and being much scared and in fear of her life she yielded unto him’. Unimpressed, the court ordered her to perform public penance.61 Assize-court records show how hard it was to secure a conviction, which must have discouraged most victims from even reporting the crime. In twenty-five of the thirty-two rape trials in Elizabethan and Jacobean Surrey, the alleged victims were girls aged 11 or below. Only five victims in Elizabethan Surrey, Kent, and Essex appear to have been married women, and two of these cases involved burglary as well as rape. These figures tell us nothing about the actual pattern of rapes; they reflect, rather, a recognition that only crimes against small children stood much chance of being prosecuted successfully, because sexual injury could be proved and issues of consent were irrelevant. Even so, only nineteen of the sixty-three Elizabethan men who stood trial for rape in these three counties were found guilty (plus one who stood mute), a conviction rate below a third. Moreover in Surrey ten of the twenty-two men accused were described as labourers, which may indicate that men of higher status might escape prosecution altogether.62 Our verdict on early modern justice should be tempered by the fact that judges and juries were very conscious of the evidential problems they faced. The punishment for rape was hanging, and where juries had only contested verbal allegations to guide them, their reluctance to convict is understandable. While men today accused of rape usually plead consent, early modern defendants often denied that intercourse had taken place, or denied ever having met the alleged victim. The courts regarded false accusations as a serious problem, suspecting malice, attempts at extortion, or desperate efforts to camouflage consensual liaisons. In the case of child victims, juries were happy to convict whenever the evidence was clear. They reacted with horror to the behaviour of Henry Simkins of St Giles-in-the-Fields, who in December 1697 carried 61 GL, MS 9064/19, fo. 51; cf. LRO, 1D 41/13/65, fo. 144;1D 41/13/82, fo. 72v. On rape see N. Bashar, ‘Rape in England between 1550 and 1700’, in London Feminist History Group (ed.), The Sexual Dynamics of History (1983); M. Chaytor, ‘Husband(ry): Narratives of Rape in the Seventeenth Century’, Gender and History, 7 (1995); G. Walker, ‘Rereading Rape and Sexual Violence in Early Modern England’, Gender and History, 10 (1998. 62 Figures calculated from Cockburn’s Calendars.

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Grace Price, aged 10, to an alehouse, plied her with liquor, and then led her to an empty house where he raped her on the stairs and infected her with the pox. But many cases were less clear, and though juries sympathized with the plight of abused children they might still wonder how far they had been coached by their parents.63 Judges and juries were also hampered by a limited understanding of the psychology of sexual violence. Most would have agreed with a village constable who doubted a rape allegation in 1703 on the grounds that the accused ‘hath a handsome wife of his own enough to satisfy any reasonable man’.64 But if the courts had good reason to be cautious, there can be no doubt that many rapists walked free, and that victims were often deterred from reporting them. Many women remained silent too about other forms of sexual assault and harassment, with equally good reason. First, most incidents involved neighbours. Sometimes an admirer had begun with compliments and flattery, which the recipient may have regarded as harmless or even welcome, but later tried to force the issue when his blandishments proved fruitless. In such a scenario, possibly extending over several months, she knew her initial ‘complicity’ would look very damaging were the whole story to emerge. Second, belief in women’s sexual frailty was so deeply entrenched that some blame almost always attached to the victim, however innocent. The mere fact of involvement cast a shadow over her good name. The diarist Ralph Josselin recorded a shocking incident in March 1672 when a neighbour’s wife assaulted and ‘sought to split at the secrets’ a woman her husband had raped, while an accomplice hacked at the victim with a fork. Josselin did not explain the episode, but we can probably link it to the familiar attacks by a wronged wife on ‘the other woman’; the wife here was perhaps trying to absolve her husband by casting the victim as a temptress. Neighbours might do likewise.65 Equally suggestive is the attempted rape of an 8-year-old girl at Leicester in 1621. Though the assailant, James Hewes, admitted the offence, and witnesses described the child crying out in terror, her own mother regarded her as in some way to blame. Neighbours reported her raging that Hewes ‘had 63 OBSP 14–19 Jan. 1698, 4; B. Capp, ‘The Double Standard Revisited: Plebeian Women and Male Sexual Reputation in Early Modern England’, Past and Present, 162 (1999); Sir Matthew Hale, Historia Placitorum Coronae (1736), i. 626–36. See also the extraordinary case of Stephen Arrowsmith, an apprentice accused of raping his master’s young daughter. The jury acquitted him, regarding the evidence as contradictory, and one juryman argued that rape of a girl as young as 8 or 9 was physically impossible; the Recorder refused to accept the verdict, and made the jury withdraw again and reverse it: OBSP 11–12 Dec. 1678, 14–16. See further M. Ingram, ‘Child Sexual Abuse in Early Modern England’, in Michael J. Braddick and John Walter (eds.), Negotiating Power in Early Modern Society (Cambridge, 2001). 64 LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 50/95. 65 The Diary of Ralph Josselin, ed. A. Macfarlane (Oxford, 1976), 562–3.

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made a whore of her daughter’ and ‘that she would whip her, and got a rod for that purpose’.66 When a small child could be blamed by her own mother for being attacked by a rapist, it is hardly surprising that women were extremely wary in reporting sexual assaults. In the case of lesser offences too, the victim might feel that the costs of speaking out far outweighed any likely benefits. A woman knew she could easily arouse suspicion in her husband’s mind, and sow discord within the neighbourhood. The accused would almost certainly deny her story, in which case there was little chance of satisfaction unless she could produce corroborative evidence. He might claim she had simply misinterpreted some harmless banter, as in the revealing encounter between Joan Sillby and Thomas Stevens, a Leicestershire miller, in December 1609. When Sillby took some barley to the mill one day, explaining that her husband was away, the miller asked, ‘how dost thou for a bedfellow now in thy husband’s absence?’; and when she declared herself quite content, he countered, ‘Nay, thou hast a cony and therefore if one should offer thee money, about 5s . . ., it would please thee well’. He was outraged when she reported his words, and took the churchwardens to confront her, insisting he ‘had spoken but in jest and that he meant no harm’.67 Whatever the truth, ambiguities and misunderstandings were inevitable in a culture that revelled in sexual banter despite (or perhaps because of) its obsession with female chastity. The miller’s indignation, and his assumption that the parish officers would sympathize, suggests that women were expected to take bawdy jests and innuendo in good part. Parishioners did not want to see every smutty remark taken before the courts. Women were thus well aware that allegations of sexual assault or harassment might easily backfire. They were likely to encounter suspicion, scepticism, even ribald mirth. When Mary Salisbury described how she had escaped an attempted rape by striking her assailant and fleeing, her male auditors treated the incident as a jest.68 A tanner denounced by a woman for soliciting her with a handful of money jeered that she had refused only because she wanted more.69 In any such exchange a woman was unlikely to emerge unscathed. The man might also threaten to sue for defamation, and parish officers would normally urge her to patch up the dispute unless she had compelling evidence to support her claims. All parties knew that it was far easier to prove defamatory words than a sexual assault with no witnesses. Even if she 66 LRO, BR II/18/14/28. This was apparently an unusual response, however: see Ingram, 67 ‘Child Sexual Abuse’. LRO, 1D 41/13/33, fo. 71v. 68 LRO, 1D 41/13/58, fo. 198v. 69 LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 50/5.

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persuaded the churchwardens to take action, she knew the ecclesiastical courts could impose no sentence heavier than penance, and that a householder accused on a ‘public fame’ could usually clear himself by finding friends to swear to his good character. She would then find herself worse off than before, having publicized her own ‘uncleanness’. The churchwardens of Mowlsey, Leics., presented Ambrose Horton after Jane West publicly accused him ‘to have committed incontinency with her’, but Horton was able to clear himself by compurgation, whereas she, having openly admitted the fact, was ordered to perform penance.70 When William Johnson was presented in 1626 for soliciting Ellen Richardson and ordered to purge himself, she objected that one of the compurgators was his brother-in-law and the charge itself inaccurate. Ellen was ready to swear on oath that he had not only attempted but succeeded in forcing himself on her, but her offer was ignored, the compurgators were allowed to proceed, and Johnson was predictably cleared.71 A poor woman or servant accusing a respectable householder knew she was unlikely to be believed, and the parish officers might even present her for spreading scandal. A victim of sexual assault or harassment might thus find herself sentenced to perform penance and beg forgiveness from the man who had abused her.72 With the scales heavily weighted against them, women usually tried to avoid compromising situations by going in company rather than alone. But those who did find themselves targeted recognized that they must take steps to defend themselves, for silence and passivity would simply invite more trouble. Many sought to defuse the situation with a jest or rebuke. If the man persisted and tried to force the issue, they would try to fend him off and escape. One desperate woman kicked her assailant in the stomach, seized a staff, and threatened to smash his head; another struck her attacker with a pitcher and called out to her servant.73 Many women appear to have been reluctant to inform their husbands, however, afraid of arousing suspicion. This was a sensible course if their own efforts proved successful, but it could easily backfire. If repeated harassment eventually forced a woman to speak out, her husband would be all the more suspicious if she had been concealing the facts. Juliana Davies of Oxford claimed in 1634 that a neighbour had been pestering her for two years, wooing her with flattery and promises, and less subtly by exposing 70

LRO, 1D 41/13/58, fo. 231. Ibid., fo. 99v. 72 LRO, 1D 41/4/973; see also the important case explored in S. Hindle, ‘The Shaming of Margaret Knowsley: Gossip, Gender and the Experience of Authority in Early Modern England’, Continuity and Change, 9 (1994). 73 Quaife, Wanton Wenches, 137; LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 20/108; 1D 41/13/60, fo. 88. 71

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his genitals and feeling under her clothes. She had said nothing to her husband. On one occasion, when the neighbour had assaulted her in a cellar, she claimed she had called to her sister for help, but admitted she had still told her husband nothing. Understandably, he was deeply suspicious when the relationship eventually became public, and she begged the court to help her regain his trust.74 Such stories were common. Ellen Hollinsworth of Bottesford was pestered for several years by a determined admirer who had also assaulted and tried to rape her; she eventually complained to neighbours, but said nothing to her husband, and he too was deeply suspicious when the facts emerged.75 The story of Anne Varney of Donnington in 1716 is still more striking. Whenever her neighbour, William Hall, saw her going into her dairy, he would follow and proposition her. When her husband fell sick, Hall allegedly urged her to poison him and promised to marry her himself; more prosaically, he offered her 12 guineas for sex or 1 guinea ‘to have the handling of her privities’. Eventually, finding all these inducements in vain, he tried to rape her. Varney said nothing at all to her husband until the attempted rape, when, she explained, ‘finding she could not be free from the importunities of Hall and fearing he might come again and offer the same force when she had not any body by her [she] thought fit to acquaint her husband with it’.76 She appears to have regarded this as a last resort, likely to create as many problems as it solved. In this case, like many, the evidence could indicate either a woman who had been engaged in an exciting, dangerous flirtation, or a victim too frightened to speak out. A suspicious husband might well take the less charitable view. Moreover the situation itself might have shifted from the first to the second, or contain elements of both. William Newell of Gumley, Leics., for example, suspected his wife Mary of having an affair, a charge she stoutly denied. But in 1704, after he resorted to the magical device of the sieve and shears to elicit the truth, she confessed she had long been solicited by a neighbour, pleading that she had always resisted his advances except ‘one time that he actually forced her’; she added that she had often threatened to cry out for help, while admitting she had never actually done so.77 It is hardly surprising that husbands and neighbours often remained unsure where the truth lay, and a woman must often have doubted whether her reputation would survive unscathed once she spoke out. 74 OAO, diocesan papers, c12, fos. 264v–265r. The accused claimed the charge was malicious, triggered by his prosecuting the woman’s husband over another issue. 75 LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 18/59. 76 Ibid., Box 60/51–5. 77 Ibid., Box 50/95.

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Despite these risks, many women did nonetheless speak out against men they alleged had assaulted or harassed them. Some were driven by a deep sense of outrage, or convinced that no other course would provide a sufficient deterrent. Others had the decision taken for them when a husband or neighbours became suspicious. The next step was to decide on tactics: whether to look for an informal resolution, or seek redress through the courts. In cases of harassment, the victim might initially attempt to shame the offender by semi-private means. Alice Richardson sought to deter a persistent man in 1568 by complaining to his sister, hoping his family would then apply discreet pressure. Anne Day of Kingston, near Ely, complained privately to her husband in 1638 after being pestered by a neighbour, and then to the local minister and a friend, insisting later that she had done so not to disgrace him but merely to make him desist.78 A maidservant would sometimes turn to her employers for help. Though usually reluctant to believe a servant’s word against a respectable householder, they might be convinced if circumstantial evidence was forthcoming, especially if the honour of their own household entered the equation. When a Leicestershire servant complained in 1583 that she was being pestered by the local rector, Richard Swain, she repeated his advice to father any child on one of her master’s sons. That guaranteed an attentive hearing.79 Another servant was initially disbelieved when she alleged in 1611 that the local minister had tried to seduce her, but when she stuck to her story her master and a friend agreed to hide and watch, and found she was telling the truth. The scandal became public, and the minister was eventually suspended from office.80 Other women resolved to fight back publicly. Some chose to confront and denounce their assailants. ‘Thou wouldst have been naught with me, and wouldst have had me to [have] been thy whore’, Judith Farthing railed at a neighbour in 1639. Facing him in private would have been an embarrassing, perhaps frightening experience; in company she felt able to counter-attack, and had the satisfaction of seeing him presented by the churchwardens.81 Others complained bitterly to their friends and neighbours, which might similarly trigger a public outcry and raise the threat of presentment.82 Expressions of outrage were most vehement when the woman had been assaulted in her own home, a violation of her private 78

CUL, EDR D2/7, fo. 66v; EDR K6, fos. 254r–256v. LRO, 1D 41/4/375 (Swain was rector of Hallaton). 80 LRO, 1D 41/13/34, fos. 66r–v. The minister was Edmund Pollard of Somerby. 81 LRO, 1D 41/13/65, fo. 263. The man stoutly denied the charge. For similar presentments following a woman’s allegations see ibid., fos. 28, 38v, 39, 268v . 82 LRO, 1D 41/4, Boxes 12/79, 18/59, and 19/150. 79

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space as well as person. ‘Thou rogue,’ a Cambridge woman shouted to an alleged attacker in 1584, ‘thou camest over my wall to have been naught with me.’ Another victim scolded a man who ‘would have been naught with me in my own yard’, another double defilement.83 Anne Draper of Hallaton, Leics., denounced an intruder in 1637 as ‘the filthiest, scurviest knave that ever came into her house’, declaring that ‘much ado I had to make resistance and to escape him’. ‘You put out the candle and your ware came out of your hose,’ she railed, ‘and you bade me feel if it were not a good one.’84 Neighbours would certainly deplore such a breach of the sanctity of the home, though they might also wonder if she had perhaps compromised herself by allowing the man to be there. Those reporting such incidents accordingly laid heavy emphasis on their total innocence. A Lutterworth woman assaulted in 1704 explained in great detail how the man had entered her chamber and tied her up before attempting to rape her; on another occasion, she deposed, he had assaulted her in a stable, pulled up her clothes ‘and did then spend his nature upon my thighs’, a detail designed to arouse disgust and confirm her own refusal to yield.85 Women alleging sexual harassment of any kind almost invariably adopted the role of helpless victim. Only rarely do we find a woman seeing off an attempted assailant and setting out instead to ridicule him when she told her story to friends. Alice Sawnders of Whitechapel, one such, declared in 1597 that ‘Peter Gilden a butcher would have committed adultery with her if his [——] would have stood’. But such bawdy talk embarrassed her neighbours, as it clearly embarrassed the court clerk, and when she rebuffed the churchwardens’ reprimand with ‘Shit on the churchwardens’, her loose tongue landed her in further trouble.86 Any woman publicly denouncing an alleged assailant would almost certainly have told her husband already. It is clear that many victims did feel able to confide in their partners, and that many husbands provided immediate and effective support. When Margaret Hoskyns complained in 1575 that a neighbour had solicited her and that ‘she durst not go alone with him’, her husband confronted the man in church, prompting the minister and churchwardens to launch an investigation. A Leicestershire villager harassed in 1637 also complained to her husband, who informed the parish officers and had the offender presented.87 Some husbands were 83

CUL, EDR K17/73; LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 22/32. LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 20/108–13. Despite her impassioned testimony she was sentenced for 85 defamation. Ibid., Box 50/50; cf. Box 18/59. 86 GL, MS 9064/14, fo. 130v. 87 WSRO, Ep1/11/3, unfoliated: Box v Hoskyns, 1576; LRO, 1D 41/13/64, fo. 77; cf. WSRO, Ep1/11/16, fo. 74; BCB 3, fo. 181. 84

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prepared to confront men of far higher status to defend their wives’ honour. Anthony Tompkins complained bluntly and bitterly to a local gentleman that his poor wife ‘could not keep her arse free from him’.88 Not surprisingly, such encounters sometimes ended violently. John Genge, a Dorset husbandman, was bound over in August 1623 ‘for cruelly beating William Coish’, whom he accused of being ‘unchaste’ with his wife. Coish himself was bound over to answer a charge of immoral behaviour, but both recognizances were later discharged on the petition of all parties; no one really wanted to see such matters aired publicly.89 A man who doubted his wife’s fidelity was even more likely to challenge his alleged rival. Robert Thomas, a Sussex villager who suspected his wife Alice of an affair with William Harman, a labourer, assaulted him when he found the pair together on a bed one day in 1572. Tragically, the fight ended with Harman killing the husband he had wronged, and both he and Alice were condemned to death. The lecherous career of Theophilus Hart, an Oxfordshire minister, ended abruptly too in 1686 when an angry butcher found his wife in bed with Hart and split his head open with an axe.90 By contrast, a similar encounter at Bottesford, Leics., in 1635, ended in farce. A villager who discovered John Sills making love to his wife in a stable attacked him with a spade, and the two men wrestled to the ground until Sills fled with his codpiece broken and his breeches down, an ignominious retreat which doubtless entertained their neighbours for many a day.91 Other husbands took more calculated revenge. An Essex libel in 1601 told the story of a cuckolded tailor who had his wife’s lover beaten up and thrown into a bed of nettles.92 Occasionally too a man would make his wife ‘play along’ to surprise the adulterer in the act, and if the affair had originated in intimidation she herself might suggest such a course. A Cambridgeshire villager’s wife, who confessed in 1572 to a long-standing but reluctant liaison with her former employer, complained that ‘she could not yet be quiet for him’, and offered to betray him into her husband’s hands.93 Similarly, The Trappan’d Maultster, a ballad, shows an alewife’s husband 88 LRO, 1D 41/4/120; cf. 1D 41/4/371; 1D 41/4, Boxes 13/90 and 18/59; CUL, EDR D2/11, fos. 118–19. 89 Ashley, Casebook, 74; cf. Quaife, Wanton Wenches, 138. 90 Cockburn (ed.), Calendar: Sussex: Elizabeth, 85; B. W. Griggs, ‘Remembering the Puritan Past’, in M. C. McClendon et al., (eds.), Protestant Identities: Religion Society, and Self-Fashioning in PostReformation England (Stanford, Calif., 1999), 183. 91 LRO, 1D 41/13/63, fo. 41v. Waring’s wife was presented for consenting. 92 Cockburn (ed.), Calendar: Essex: Elizabeth, 544. 93 CUL, EDR D2/7, fo. 247v; cf. The Diary of Henry Machyn, ed. J. G. Nichols (Camden Soc., 42, 1842), 310.

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lying in wait and threatening to castrate a man who had used their debts to manipulate her into agreeing to sex.94 Other men looked for satisfaction of a very different kind, demanding financial compensation for their wrongs. Such a response reflected the traditional conception of a woman’s sexuality as her husband’s property, and the assailant or lover as someone who had trespassed on his exclusive rights. In 1629 Richard Black of Pickworth, Rutland, told neighbours angrily that he was demanding ‘satisfaction’ from William Willowes, who had boasted of ‘kissing of his wife’ (a common euphemism for intercourse). Black’s wife allegedly admitted a long-standing liaison, and ribald reports circulated that Willowes had handed over money after a churchwarden, one of Black’s friends, threatened that otherwise he would be presented to the ecclesiastical court.95 Such informal settlements combined elements of compensation, threat, and public ridicule, and may have been quite common. In another case, Robert Banckes of Waterbeach agreed to pay £20 compensation in 1605 after he boasted in an alehouse about his liaison with a neighbour’s wife and ‘put out his two middle fingers making horns’ at the cuckold. Though the affair became notorious, the churchwardens did not present him, presumably deeming the informal settlement punishment enough. Among the poor the sums involved might be much smaller. A Leicester man allegedly boasted of forcing his wife’s lover to give him 18d. and a pair of shoes as the price for remaining silent.96 Composition offered a speedy resolution, created less scandal, and of course averted the risk of the husband emerging from any fight the loser. On the other hand it might be seen as a cowardly betrayal of masculine honour to shrink from a challenge, and by accepting money he exposed himself to the taunt of being a bawd to his own wife.97 Some husbands took no action at all in such circumstances, turning a blind eye to adultery in return for material benefits. Such a response, familiar at the Restoration court, is found among ordinary folk too. William Bagwell, a ship’s carpenter, did nothing to hinder his wife’s affair with Samuel Pepys, and Pepys made sure that his career in the navy prospered accordingly.98 The situation was more fraught, of course, when 94

Pepys Ballads, iii. 277. LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 9/108. For kissing as a euphemism for intercourse see e.g. the mocking phrase ‘I kissed thy wife suppose the rest’: M. C. Pilkinton (ed.), Records of Early English Drama: Bristol (1997), 215. 96 CUL, EDR D2/25, fos. 67v–68v; LRO, 1D 41/4/1232; Quaife, Wanton Wenches, 142. 97 For mockery of two Londoners who had prosecuted men for cuckolding them instead of (or as well as) beating them, see Select City Quaeries, Part II (1660), 9, 14. 98 Pepys, Diary, vols. iv–vi, passim. 95

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such passivity reflected fear rather than calculation.99 Neighbours were openly contemptuous of Mary Salisbury’s husband, so feeble, they said, that if another man had sex with her, ‘her husband should stand at her back and should not dare to speak’. Neighbours also poked fun at Roger Stutville, a Cambridgeshire villager, jibing that he stayed at home to mind the child or clean the floor while his wife Agnes went out with their servant Robert Mann, her alleged lover; eventually Agnes’s father and brother stepped in, beating up Mann to make him end the liaison.100 The voice of the timid husband is seldom heard, though we find William Davey of Pampisford, Ely, grumbling pitifully that his wife’s lover ‘doth beget children and I do keep them’. With no idea what to do, he begged his friends for advice.101 A woman subjected to unwelcome advances faced an equally miserable predicament, of course, if she found her husband unable or unwilling to protect her. In one case, where a tenant’s wife was being solicited by their landlord, the couple solved the problem by moving to a different cottage.102 But it was often less simple. In a small community, a powerful philanderer might well be able to defy a poor man, and persuade or intimidate the churchwardens to look away. Thomas Atkinson of Bottesford, Leics., pursuing a woman in 1636 despite her husband’s deep resentment, pressured the churchwardens to ignore the gossip that was circulating in the village. George Stokes, another Leicestershire villager, allegedly offered a substantial sum of money to Hannah Julian’s husband if he would connive at her becoming Stokes’s mistress, and threatened to prosecute the churchwardens if they dared present him. Thomas Johnson’s wife confessed that she had been raped by one of the churchwardens, who had no intention of presenting himself and found a way to block his successors from doing so.103 Parish politics were shaped by pressure and intimidation as often as by communal values. Most women fighting back against sexual assault sought practical help from their husbands and neighbours, but a significant minority turned to the courts for protection or redress. In cases of persistent harassment, they might take such a step when informal pressures had clearly failed.104 Others sued as the only way to silence damaging gossip. Litigation constituted a formal declaration of innocence, and neither revenge attacks nor private composition could offer the same public and 99 100 101 102 103 104

CUL, EDR D2/7/247v. LRO, 1D 41/13/58, fo. 198v; CUL, EDR K15/5. CUL, EDR K5/238. CUL, EDR K20/24, deposition of Parnella Wright. LRO, 1D 41/4, Boxes 18/59, 55/218–19, and 30/24–7. Underdown, Fire from Heaven, 68–9.

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official vindication. Sexual assaults could be prosecuted in both civil and ecclesiastical courts, and victims sometimes pursued both routes. When a Loughborough man solicited and then raped Anne Ward, a widow, in 1634, she laid charges both before a justice and the local minister. A draper in the same town, accused of rape in 1635, was similarly bound over to the assizes and also presented to the ecclesiastical court.105 Women who reported attacks usually chose to describe them as assaults or attempted rather than actual rapes. The offender would escape with a far lighter punishment, but a conviction was easier to secure with much less collateral damage to the woman’s own reputation. An assault charge was also simpler and cheaper to pursue, being usually tried at quarter sessions or a borough court rather than at the assizes. John Beattie has plausibly suggested that many of the assault charges brought by women were really cases of rape or attempted rape.106 Justice in the ecclesiastical courts offered a different kind of satisfaction. To see the offender made to perform public penance and beg forgiveness would provide a deeply satisfying resolution, psychologically as well as socially—far more so indeed than modern penalties, which require no public act of submission and contrition. And while conviction was by no means certain, presentment itself was a humiliating experience. Even to be cited guaranteed publicity, and the accused might then have to find neighbours willing to testify on his behalf after listening to the charges. One villager, presented in 1611 for fathering an illegitimate child, claimed the charge was malicious but flatly refused to bring compurgators, ‘for that he will not make the matter public in the country’.107 Even if the accused was not convicted, his court appearance would be remembered and leave a question mark over his good name. A man charged with rape, a serious felony, might have to wait several months for his trial at the assizes, contemplating the slim but real possibility of a shameful death on the gallows. Any woman seeking redress through the courts faced a series of hurdles. First, she had to persuade parish officers to take her allegation seriously, rather than brushing it aside or urging the parties to settle privately. Support from her husband would certainly help, especially if he 105

LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 16/136; 1D 41/13/57, fos. 116, 163v. Beattie, Crime and the Courts, 129–30. In a fairly typical case Jane Clayton of Dinston, Lincs., prosecuted a neighbour in 1680 for ‘attempting to have the use of her body’; he eventually confessed and was fined 20s. S. A. Peyton (ed.), Minutes of Proceedings in Quarter Sessions held for . . . Lincoln, 1674–1695 (Lincoln Record Soc., 1931), i. 114–15; cf. J. Tait (ed.), Lancashire Quarter Sessions Records (Chetham Soc.,  77, 1917), 205. 107 LRO, 1D 41/13/35, fo. 49v; cf. 1D 41/13/37, fo. 152a; M. MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety, and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1981), 109. 106

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was a figure of some local standing. One man, whose wife had accused a churchwarden of soliciting her, eventually persuaded the other churchwarden to present his colleague.108 In another case, involving a woman allegedly raped by a churchwarden, the husband made her testify before a justice, and the case was referred to quarter sessions.109 Thomas Varney of Donnington, Leics., took a similar course, and also had the accused prosecuted in the ecclesiastical court in an office-promoted instance suit, a device which bypassed the churchwardens.110 But we find other women setting out to overcome the problem of gender bias by their own efforts. The key lay in persistence, and even a poor woman might succeed, in time, if she could persuade her friends to speak out in her support and convince some of the ‘better sort’. The churchwardens of Little Stretton, Leics., eventually presented a man who had been accused by a labourer’s wife so obscure they did not even know her full name; they commented that she had ‘openly and oftentimes complained’, creating a widespread ‘fame’ which had clearly refused to go away.111 Parish officers generally placed more trust in a man’s word, but women would not necessarily take the same view, and their vigorous support for a friend whose honesty they trusted might create a powerful groundswell of opinion. If they persisted, they might generate a ‘public fame’ sufficient to convince the churchwardens that the only way to restore parish harmony was by presenting the alleged offender. The wording of some presentments suggests parish officers pushed to act against their wishes, or forced to balance conflicting pressures. When a Market Harborough woman accused two men of soliciting her, for example, in 1611, the churchwardens were initially so sceptical that they presented her for slander, but they conceded that she had raised a ‘common fame’ in the town, and were eventually driven to present the men as well—one of whom promptly fled the town.112 Friends or gossips could help in many other ways. Initially they would offer emotional support, especially important if a victim felt reluctant to confide in her husband. If the matter became public, they could try to shame and deter the offender by scolding him in the street. If other women had been solicited or attacked in the past by the alleged offender, they could provide still more valuable support, for by speaking out they 108

LRO, 1D 41/13/64, fo. 77; 1D 41/13/60, fo. 109v. LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 30/24–7. 110 Ibid. 60/51–5. 111 LRO, 1D 41/13/59, fo. 215v; cf. 1D 41/13/33, fo. 63; 1D 41/13/49, fo. 10; 1D 41/13/57, fo. 251; CUL, EDR D2/10a, fo. 135v. Lucy Spence, who accused her former master in 1639, attended the court herself offering to prove her allegations: LRO, 1D 41/13/65, fo. 65r–v. 112 LRO, 1D 41/13/36, fos. 36, 49. 109

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would greatly strengthen the victim’s credibility. A plurality of voices helped to neutralize gender bias, increasing pressure on the parish officers to act or forcing the accused on to the defensive. When a London servant fathered her child on her master, Ethelbert Thorne, in 1575, and said he had forced sex on her twice within a week of her arrival, her testimony was reinforced by a married neighbour who said Thorne had once tried to rape her, ‘and wrestled so with her that the skin went off her shoulder and her hips so that she kept her bed fourteen weeks’. Thorne vigorously denied both allegations, but the Bridewell governors believed the two women, and had him whipped. The servant’s word alone might well have been insufficient.113 Joan Richardson of Chesterton found similar support when she named George Ball as the father of her child, in 1600; this time no fewer than five other women came forward to testify that he had solicited them too, over a period of several years.114 Such a pattern was quite common. Four women told personal stories of attempted seduction and assault against an Arundel churchwarden in 1637, building up a powerful case against him.115 Elizabeth Betsworth used a wedding party in 1618 to lash out at ‘an arrant whoremaster’, who, she claimed, had pestered her for years and was now targeting her daughter and maid, ‘insomuch that they could never be in quiet for him’.116 Whenever men were presented for offences against several women, we are probably seeing the result of similar concerted action by the victims.117 It was even more important when the women were conscious of social as well as gender inferiority. In 1640 Hamlet Dawkins, a mine-owner from Coleorton, Leics., found himself the target of a determined campaign by three local women, who branded him a whoremaster and ‘hot shot’. They claimed he had tried to seduce them all, and circulated their allegations among his workforce to increase his embarrassment. Dawkins was not presented but felt sufficiently threatened to launch three defamation suits to clear his name.118 Defamation The third category of male threat, defamation, was closely related to sexual assault and harassment, for much of it was again sexual in character. A woman’s best protection lay in a solidly established reputation, which 113

BCB 2, fo. 75v. CUL, EDR K20/24. 115 WSRO, Ep1/11/16, fos. 74–80, 89–93, 139–40, 142v–143r; the man accused alleged a malicious conspiracy. Cf. BCB 3, fo. 181. 116 WSRO, Ep1/11/13, fo. 68. 117 Bates Harbin (ed.), Quarter Sessions for Somerset, iii. 12, 293, 302; LRO, 1D 41/13/70, fo. 44. 118 LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 26/97–101. 114

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would make bystanders unwilling to listen to abuse. As we have seen, villagers often rounded on defamatory speakers, urging them to stop and sometimes threatening to bear witness against them.119 Trusting husbands would also defend their wives against attack, confronting the slanderer and making him retract.120 Court records have familiarized us with litigation as a response to slander, and we almost certainly underestimate the importance of more direct means of redress. After a fierce quarrel on 8 March 1601 at Teynham, Kent, Ellen Lyvings complained to her husband Robert about the insults a man had flung at her. Robert hastened to confront the offender, and when he repeated them, the two men fought in the street until Robert was run through with a rapier and mortally wounded. He had defended his wife’s good name, quite literally, to the death.121 There was a less bloody but equally revealing outcome when a drinking companion insulted Randolph Bolter of Wigston, Leics., in 1637, calling his mother a whore and his late father a cuckold or bawd. While his mother sued for defamation, Bolter himself chose to avenge her honour by fighting the man in the street.122 A generation later we find the Lancashire apprentice Roger Lowe stung by malicious gossip that he was a bastard, tracing its source to a man in Leigh, and setting off to confront him there. Arriving in the town, Lowe summoned the offender to an alehouse, and beat him up.123 We know of these three incidents only because Lyvings was killed, Bolter’s mother brought a defamation suit, and Lowe happened to keep a diary. There was almost certainly a huge ‘dark figure’ of confrontations which have left no trace in the written record. Another incident, which ended peacefully, supports this impression. When Elizabeth Meade heard that a man was slandering her in the local alehouse one day in 1628, when her husband happened to be away, she set off to confront him in person, taking two servants in case he proved violent. We can probably infer that a husband would normally have undertaken such a mission, and that contemporaries recognized such a confrontation was always quite likely to end violently.124 When a Brentford churchwarden called Henry Gilden’s wife a ‘drab’ in 1584, Gilden warned him bluntly, ‘If you use such words it may hap I will lay my dagger on your pate.’125 119

See e.g. WSRO, Ep1/11/15, fo. 192v; and Chs. 5, above, and 7, below. e.g. WSRO, Ep1/11/15, fo. 193v; n.21, above. 121 Cockburn (ed.), Calendar: Kent: Elizabeth, 475. 122 LRO, 1D 41/4, Box19/139–47. 123 The Diary of Roger Lowe, ed. W. Notestein (1938), 105. Lowe had vowed to kill him, but probably not in earnest. 124 WSRO, Ep1/11/14, fo. 57r–v; cf. Ep1/11/10, fos. 238v–239v. 125 GL, MS 9064/12, fo. 34. 120

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Women did not simply rely on their husbands to protect them, however: many fought back themselves. Most, as we will see, spurned the accusations, and often flung back allegations of their own. A few bold spirits retaliated more forcefully. A Sussex villager could still recall in 1635 a vivid scene fifteen years earlier when Richard Howicke slandered Mary Collins and she responded by chasing him through Fernhurst Fair brandishing a club, ‘before all the company’, forcing him to make an ignominious retreat.126 Many more preferred to seek redress in the courts by launching a defamation suit. Laura Gowing, studying the early Stuart London courts, found that while most suits by female plaintiffs were against other women, about a third of her sample (338) were against men. At Salisbury, women made up 60–70 per cent of plaintiffs in the period 1615–29, but men formed a majority of defendants (60 per cent).127 Married women often sued with the moral and practical support of their husbands, and some couples brought joint actions, to avenge the slur of cuckoldry as well as whoredom. In other cases, however, women had to act alone, when the husband judged legal action unnecessary or, far more serious, had lost confidence in his wife’s honesty. In some cases a woman had been turned out of the house until she could clear herself in court.128 In that situation, she had little choice but to sue. We find others determined to sue despite strong pressure to accept mediation. Elizabeth Lee, a spinster in Thurmaston, Leics., took offence in 1636 when Edmund Petty laid his hand on her stomach and declared she was pregnant. Petty claimed later that he had spoken in jest, as many witnesses confirmed, and two local gentlemen tried to settle the dispute by arbitration, but Lee rejected their proposals and insisted on bringing a defamation suit.129 Litigation carried risks of its own, of course, and gave further publicity to the allegations. In one case a male witness remarked sourly that the publicity created by the suit had injured the plaintiff’s name far more than the words over which she was suing. In another, the man responsible for a damaging story declared that if the woman dared to sue him ‘he would go into the churchyard and there speak it before the whole parish’.130 Litigation was sometimes opportunist, but it could also be an act of considerable courage—or obstinacy—by a woman resolved to defend her good name whatever the cost. 126 WSRO, Ep1/11/15, fo. 255v. Howicke remained a malicious gossip, one ‘who loveth to talk more of whores and such uncivil matters than of any goodness’. 127 Gowing, Domestic Dangers, 60; Ingram, Church Courts, 302–4; Amussen, Ordered Society, 102. 128 WSRO, Ep1/11/12, fo. 55, cf. n. 2, and Ch. 5 sect. ‘Defensive Tactics’, above. 129 LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 18/13–18; cf. WSRO, Ep1/11/14, fo. 18r–v. 130 CUL, EDR K6/366; WSRO, Ep1/11/15, fos. 192v, 193v.

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So far we have explored women’s readiness to take defensive action against male threats. Some were equally prepared to go on the attack or counter-attack in disputes with men, and to this aspect of female agency we turn next.

      ( - )  What tactics would women find most effective against a male adversary? How might they offset the cultural bias that gave men a huge advantage in any dispute? Women could not reshape the dominant culture, of course, but they found ways to limit the effects of the double standard, and in a few situations could even turn it to their advantage. If they remained highly vulnerable to sexual defamation, the church courts offered an effective and popular remedy. By contrast, the taunts they commonly flung at men, such as ‘rogue’, ‘knave’, and ‘jack’, were not actionable in the church courts, and such actions were discouraged by the civil courts. A woman could therefore hurl insults with relative impunity, knowing that if her adversary retaliated with the traditional taunt of ‘whore’ she could threaten to prosecute him, and perhaps exact a price for lifting the threat. In a typical exchange in December 1619 Anne Tunbridge of Sawston, Cambs., who was trying to stop a man selling her husband a horse, called him a ‘scurvy jack and knave’, to which he replied, ‘Away you paltry scurvy quean, I have nothing to say to you’. This almost formulaic insult enabled Anne to sue for defamation, whereas her own words were not actionable.131 ‘Whore’ and ‘knave’ were frequently little more than generic expressions of contempt, triggering each other almost automatically. ‘Do ye call me whore? Thou art a knave’, a Sussex woman declared in 1573. ‘Marry, if I be a knave, thou art a whore of thy tongue’, an angry man exclaimed in another quarrel.132 There were thousands of such exchanges, and in each case only the man’s words—admittedly the more damaging—could be used in a legal action. We have already seen that while many defamation suits were prompted by genuine concern over reputation, others were opportunistic or vexatious. Paradoxically, the double standard which rendered women vulnerable could also enable them to manipulate the courts against men in slander litigation. Of course men too cared about their ‘good name’ and ‘worth’, and felt vulnerable to allegations and insults. And despite the double standard, 131 132

CUL, EDR K1/188; cf. LRO, 1D 41/4/291. WSRO, Ep1/11/1, fos. 44v, 53.

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many respectable married men were upset by smears about their sexual ‘honesty’. Before we see how this too might provide women with an effective weapon, we need first to look briefly at male honour among the middling and lower social orders, and the neglected place of sexual honesty within it. It was generally recognized that honour and reputation differed for men and women, though both contained multiple elements. For women, sexual honesty was the crucial prerequisite, and while she could win respect through many other attributes, these counted for nothing once her sexual reputation was lost. For men, reputation was more often seen in terms of their ‘credit’, ability to govern and provide for a household, and physical courage. To be ‘worthy of credit’ a man had to be both financially secure and trustworthy. Chastity or fidelity, it is often suggested, mattered little; a man’s most important sexual concern was his ability to control the sexuality of his wife, hence the obsession with cuckoldry.133 But as Alexandra Shepard has recently observed, no single code applied universally, and both attitudes and behaviour were influenced by age, social and economic status, and other factors. Young bachelors and some of the poor evolved very different codes of honour and reputation, in which financial creditworthiness played little part. Many of the young admired physical prowess in sport and combat, values reflected in tales such as The Pinder of Wakefield and the Robin Hood ballads, and in the sometimes violent encounters at church-ales and parish wakes.134 Some of them espoused too a culture of heavy drinking and promiscuity, in which sexual conquests (real or imaginary) compensated for their social and economic impotence. The insults that men flung at one another reflect the diversity of male values. Allegations of cowardice, lying, or cheating figured prominently, as we would predict. We should not overlook the directly sexual element in male reputation, however, and the context frequently indicates that terms such as ‘rogue’ and ‘knave’ had also been used with a sexual connotation. Sexual insults might figure in male quarrels that had erupted over entirely different issues, such as an alehouse bill or 133 Gowing, Domestic Dangers; Foyster, Manhood; Fletcher, Gender; C. Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: the Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (1998); F. Dabhoiwala, ‘The Construction of Honour, Reputation and Status in Late Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century England’; E. Foyster, ‘Male Honour, Social Control and Wife Beating in Late Stuart England’; L. Gowing, ‘Women, Status and the Popular Culture of Dishonour’; and G. Walker, ‘Expanding the Boundaries of Female Honour in Early Modern England’, all in TRHS , 6th ser., 6 (1996); R. B. Shoemaker, Gender in English Society 1650–1850 (1998). 134 A. Shepard, ‘Manhood, Credit and Patriarchy in Early Modern England c.1580–1640’, Past and Present, 167 (2000).

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impounded livestock.135 John Wilson, quarrelling with a neighbour, deliberately introduced a sexual slur to embarrass his opponent: ‘Hold your tongue you whoring dog, you got your maid with child one Sunday morning when your wife was at church.’ When another man told his adversary bluntly, ‘Go hang yourself, and drown your bastards, and there’s an end of an ill breed’, witnesses agreed they had been quarrelling over something quite different.136 The practice of introducing sexual allegations gratuitously, common against female adversaries, was clearly effective against male opponents too, especially respectable married men and bachelors aspiring to join their ranks. Men’s anxiety over such allegations derived in part from the fear of being prosecuted and ordered to pay maintenance for an illegitimate child. But this was not their only concern. For respectable men as for women (if to a lesser degree), sexual ‘honesty’ formed an intrinsic part of their sense of moral worth, and their good name. It affected their standing within the family and beyond it, and its loss exposed them to domestic recriminations and the criticism and mockery of neighbours. Robert Strudwicke, a Sussex villager, sued a woman who had teased him at a funeral in 1636, ‘jesting and laughing’ that he had made his servant pregnant and sent her away.137 John Kerchin, a yeoman of Twyford, Leics., was deeply worried in 1664 when a woman raised a ‘common fame’ that he had had sex with her, although the churchwardens had taken no action against him. He attended the archdeacon’s court voluntarily to clear his name, explaining that ‘tendering of his reputation [he] desireth that he may have the benefit of the law’, and asked for purgation ‘for the proving of his innocency’.138 Defamation suits brought by men throw valuable light on contemporary perceptions of male honour and its constituent elements. ‘Thou as honest a man as I?’ cried a Sussex villager scornfully to his companion, as they walked home together from market one day in 1635. ‘Thou fuckest other folks’ wives.’ A Leicestershire shoemaker told alehouse companions in 1629 that the individuals he named ‘were two of the wenchingst [sic] fellows in the town’, alleging ‘they had Elizabeth Jackson by the cunt in the . . . field’ the previous night.139 Thomas Wiseman, a Cambridgeshire villager, told a neighbour in 1638 ‘in very angry manner that he was a very dangerous man and that he was taken in bed with 135

LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 3/42; WSRO, Ep1/11/13, fos. 146r–147v. LRO, 1D 41/4, Boxes 73/24 and 60/85–8. 137 WSRO, Ep1/11/15, fo. 292r–v; cf. LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 70/28; Capp, ‘Double Standard’, 70–3; above, Ch. 3. 138 LRO, 1D 41/13/68, fo. 41. 139 WSRO, Ep1/11/15, fo. 253v; LRO, 1D 41/4/59, fo. 235. 136

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another man’s wife’.140 Regardless of whether their allegations were true, these men clearly regarded promiscuity, and especially adultery, as incompatible with male ‘honesty’. We even find one Leicestershire villager in 1633 choosing to attack a woman not through any alleged promiscuity on her part, the usual course, but that of her husband. ‘Thy husband is a whoremaster knave and an arrant whoremaster,’ he told Elizabeth Sleeth, ‘for he came to my house on my wedding day at night to seek out some whore that he thought had been there.’ Sleeth’s husband sued for defamation.141 Such exchanges suggest that sexual reputation played a significant role in the construction of male honour and reputation. Insults directed at men focused on their own behaviour as well as their wives’, and while taunts such as ‘whoremonger’ and ‘whoremaster’ slandered men only indirectly, through their association with immoral women, they were clearly being condemned for their own promiscuity.142 Not every allegation need be taken at face value, of course, and some exchanges reflected banter and ridicule rather than moral outrage. If some young men liked to boast about their exploits, others naturally teased them over incidents that had ended in farce. One Cambridgeshire villager entertained friends in 1603 with a Chaucerian tale of how John Gooditch arranged a tryst with Humfrey Davies’s wife, and how Davies returned home unexpectedly ‘in the time before John Gooditch had done, and Gooditch was glad to run away with his breeches in his hands’.143 But in many cases we detect a genuine sense of moral outrage. The absence of any universal code of male sexual morality allowed a far greater diversity of behaviour, and respectable men were often disgusted to see others brazenly flouting their values. One accused Edward Levett of Melton Mowbray in 1598 of having ‘been naught with three sisters’, claiming he had seduced them with an angel, a hat, and a pair of hose.144 A scandalized villager vowed in 1627 to have an outsider punished for spending the night with a married woman: ‘I will make thee to stand in a white sheet’, he declared.145 A Cambridge man was equally disgusted in 1634 by a neighbour he accused of consorting with two lewd women. ‘You keep them in your stables,’ he railed, ‘which of them hath the best cunts you know, you whoremasterly rogue, you have had trial of them both.’146 And when an Oxford man 140 141 142 143 144 145 146

CUL, EDR K4/34. LRO, 1D 41/4/140. For a different view see Gowing, Domestic Dangers, ch. 3. CUL, EDR K7/261. LRO, 1D 41/4/781 (an angel was a coin worth 6s. 8d.); cf. LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 50/26. LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 4/36; cf. 1D 41/4/689. CUL, EDR K1/252, K5/131; cf. K5/144.

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allegedly boasted in 1617 that he had had another man’s wife ‘twenty times for a quarter of a pig’, a neighbour judged his behaviour contemptible.147 Moral outrage was reinforced by fear. Just as respectable women spied danger in every notorious whore, who might one day batten on their own husbands or sons, respectable men saw in predatory neighbours a threat to their own wives, daughters, and servants, and so to themselves. We hear the voice of the anxious husband when Thomas Wiseman called his neighbour ‘a very dangerous man’ for being taken in bed with another man’s wife. We hear it louder in a Leicestershire villager who complained bitterly in 1633 about ‘the young men that went up and down the town to fuck other men’s wives’.148 For respectable householders the double standard represented a threat, not an exciting licence, and it is not surprising that they turned angrily on suspected philanderers. When a Leicestershire curate complained to the local miller in 1626 that ‘the women of Syston’ were unable to visit the mill without being sexually harassed, he was voicing personal concern as well as moral standards, for his own wife was among the victims. There was equal anxiety in Knipton about a man who had allegedly boasted that he had lain with William Wayte’s wife ‘and five wives of the town more’.149 Libertines threatened every respectable family with dishonour. Richard Kirby of Lutterworth, who found a man in his house being ‘naught’ with his maidservant, in 1597, told him that he had ‘defiled his house’.150 Female Resistance: Verbal The fact that men too cared about their good names, and that sexual honesty mattered to respectable men, offered women the possibility of fighting insult with insult, and even of taking the offensive. How did they deploy slander as a weapon against men? Women, like men, possessed an extensive vocabulary of insult. In disputes over money or goods they might denounce an adversary as a thief, rogue, cheat, or ‘rascal bloodsucker’.151 Failure to pay a debt could trigger the damaging taunt that he was a penniless bankrupt. ‘If every bird had his feather,’ Mary King jeered at a Whittlesea man in 1622, ‘thou were not worth the coats of thy back.’152 Some women shrugged aside their 147

OAO, archdeaconry papers, c118, fo. 78v. CUL, EDR K4/34; LRO, 1D 41/4 Box 12/99. 149 LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 3/55–9. The curate himself, however, was allegedly violent, quarrelsome, and drunken. 150 LRO, 1D 41/4/728; see Ch. 4, above. 151 LRO, 1D 41/13/35, fo. 108. 152 CUL, EDR K6/355; Guilding (ed.), Reading Records, ii. 395. 148

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gender inferiority by deriding the base origins or status of their adversary. We find men dismissed as ‘crawling knave’ and ‘slave’, and a churchwarden stripped of his dignity and branded a ‘tinker’. A Durham man was told in 1567 that he would be hanged like all his forefathers.153 Other womenjeeredthat their adversary was a ‘drunken fuddling fool’, ‘drunken pocky-faced rogue’, or ‘a miserly knave and an drunken miser’.154 Men too could find themselves abused with images of filth and animality, dubbed a ‘filthy pig’ or ‘stinking fool and ass’; one Cromwellian naval commander was dismissed as a ‘horse-turd’ by a disgruntled sailor’s wife.155 Clerics enjoyed no immunity. When Walter Mattock of Storrington, Sussex, had a parishioner arrested in 1629, his wife railed that ‘she cared not a fart nor a turd for never a black-coat in England’, and hoped to live ‘to tread a hundred such black coats under my feet’. Perhaps she did, for Mattock was sequestered in 1643, and found a place in John White’s First Century of Scandalous and Malignant Priests.156 Other women seized on men’s own vulnerability to sexual defamation, damning them as whoremongers, and sometimes jeering they had contracted the pox with all its humiliating symptoms. Margery Browne of Whetstone, Leics., quarrelling with her neighbours in 1566, called Agnes Ward a whore and jeered that her husband Geoffrey was a ‘burned arse knave, and not able for any woman’. Ward’s disease had unmanned him, and his wife had made him a cuckold. They both sued for defamation.157 Other women poked fun at an opponent’s allegedly rampant sexual appetite. The term ‘salted bitch’, signifying a promiscuous woman, found male equivalents in ‘lecherous monkey’ or, more often, ‘town bull’. Frances Draper of Bottesford, railing at a promiscuous neighbour in 1628, jeered that soon ‘he would be a common town bull’. In a London street dispute Elizabeth Mobbs scolded her adversary as ‘the town bull’ and the ‘great bull of Bedlam’. ‘Bull’ had rather more positive associations than ‘bitch’, but the allusion to lunacy as well as animality made her contempt abundantly plain.158 Elizabeth Marsh of Arundel also mocked her adversary as the town bull, and when he countered that ‘he never rid her’, 153 LRO, 1D 41/4/291, 393; 1D 41/13/57, fo. 275; J. Raine (ed.), Depositions and Other Ecclesiastical Proceedings from the Courts of Durham (Surtees Soc., 21, 1845), 84. 154 LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 3/15; 1D 41/13/56, fo. 46; CUL, EDR D2/6, fo. 120v. Women also used allegations of drunkenness to discredit male witnesses; see e.g. GL, MS 9065A/6, Blisworth v Bancroft, 1626, deposition of Alice Fulham; WSRO, Ep1/11/13, fos. 90r–v. 155 Pilkinton (ed.), Records of Early English Drama: Bristol, 164–5; WSRO, Ep1/11/14, fo. 62; J. C. Jeaffreson (ed.), Middlesex County Records (1886–92), iii. 277. 156 WSRO, Ep1/11/14, fo. 162v–163r; J. White, The First Century of Scandalous and Malignant Priests (1643), 35–6. 157 LRO, 1D 41/4/34. 158 LRO, 1D 41/4, Boxes 7/121, 22/32, and 53/117; LMA, DL/C231, fo. 48.

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flung back that it was only because he had ‘lacked Goodwife Manser to lay a plaster to his arse’.159 Women accused of sexual immorality themselves sometimes found the courage to retaliate in kind, rather than adopting a defensive posture or countering with weaker insults such as knave or rogue. A Leicestershire villager, cursed as a whore in 1568 in a quarrel over a strayed horse, riposted, ‘if thou hast been a whoremaster, I was never a whore’. When a Berkshire man called Dorothy Ibell a whore in 1603, she flung back that ‘she was none of his whores’, and told him ‘to seek his whore’ in a neighbour’s sheephouse. Grace Carowe, a Cambridgeshire villager gossiping with friends in 1572, hit back at a man who scolded at them as ‘whores in your sayings’ by denouncing him as an adulterer.160 As such incidents suggest, women could be surprisingly pugnacious in their dealings with men. When Joan Addams, a Sussex villager, was called a whore during a street quarrel in 1635, she demanded, ‘Whose whore am I, yours?’, and when her adversary said he would scorn her she retorted that he had once tried to rape her. He felt sufficiently threatened by her words to sue. Similarly Elizabeth Harrison, a Leicester maidservant, stormed round to the lodgings of a man she suspected of circulating defamatory papers about her in 1716, and declared angrily that he might well have twenty bastards ‘for he was a whoremaster rogue’.161 A few women even introduced sexual reputation into disputes with men that had broken out over entirely different issues. Remarkably bold in the context of the double standard, their behaviour confirms the potency of sexual defamation as a weapon against both sexes. In 1544 Helen Pyerson of Cambridge rounded furiously on a town official for gaoling her servant: ‘Thou art a knave and a bawdy knave, old cuckold knave, whoreson churl, and thou art naught with Elizabeth Pynner,’ she railed, ‘as all Cambridge knoweth.’ A widespread rumour had provided her with an effective weapon and the confidence to use it.162 Grace Dorman felt sufficiently bold to hit back at a neighbour upbraiding her over some strayed pigs, in 1594, by dismissing him as a ‘pennycunt’, explaining to puzzled bystanders that he had offered a penny to a beggar ‘to have been naught with her’. The sting lay in his association with a base beggar-woman, but the striking feature for us is her readiness to grasp at 159 WSRO, Ep1/11/16, fo. 55. Her adversary hit back by inviting her ‘to go pick maggots out of her poll’, and jeered that she ‘was an honest woman but she looked like a whore’, an ingenious formulation not directly defamatory. 160 LRO, 1D 41/4/37; BRO, D/A2 c40, fos. 230v–231r; CUL, EDR D2/7, fo. 286. 161 WSRO, Ep1/11/15, fo. 257r–v; LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 55/178. 162 CUL, EDR D2/3, fos. 120v–121v.

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a sexual insult.163 Others did the same, clearly recognizing the damage they might inflict. When a young man snatched Elizabeth Wodnott’s pudding-bag, as young folk were ‘at pastime’ at Funtington, Sussex, one Sunday in 1615, a bystander urged him to give it back but Wodnott retorted, ‘Nay, let him keep it and lap his bastards in it’. The man was suspected of an affair with a married woman in another village, for which he was subsequently presented, and Wodnott’s jibe drove him to launch a defamation suit against her in an attempt to clear his name.164 Sexual insults proved most effective when a man cared about his good name but had not yet firmly established it, or was already the subject of gossip. They were also effective against the clergy and parish officers, whose moral authority depended on their respectability. Ministers inevitably came into conflict with their parishioners over tithes and church fees, and whenever they reprimanded sinners. They were as likely as any other villager to become embroiled in minor disputes over animals and property, while uncertainties over their proper social status, and that of their wives, created further problems. The pressure on them to set higher standards of sexual propriety left them vulnerable to any whiff of scandal.165 Most clergymen felt inhibited from swapping abuse or blows, and as they could hardly ignore serious allegations they might have little option but to sue. Court records illustrate the range of abuse they encountered from both sexes. Dionise Holland, of King’s Sutton, Oxon., allegedly told her minister to kiss her horse’s tail, threw a stone at his face, and said that by marrying him his wife had given herself to the devil. Susan Page, a Sussex villager, denounced her minister in 1617 as a drunken rogue who ‘lived by the sweat of other men’s brows’.166 A spinster in County Durham railed at a clergyman as a ‘base, bastardly rogue’, while an Essex villager spat in her minister’s face, calling him a minister of the devil, bloodsucker, and lecher.167 Most cases, however, focused once more on sexual insults and gossip, and while some allegations were well founded, other speakers had probably grasped at this weapon as a tactical device. In 1629, for example, Elizabeth Turville was sued by John Moore, rector of Knaptoft and Shearsby (best known for his anti-enclosure campaigns), 163

LRO, 1D 41/4/624. WSRO, Ep1/11/12, fos. 155v–156r, 160r–v. 165 White, First Century, passim; LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 35/177–8; 1D 41/13/51, fos. 17, 22v. 166 S. A. Peyton (ed.), The Churchwardens’ Presentments in the Oxfordshire Peculiars of Dorchester, Thame and Banbury (Oxfordshire Record Soc., 10, 1928), 286; WSRO, Ep1/11/12, fos. 200v–201r. 167 W. H. D. Longstaffe (ed.), The Acts of the High Commission Court within the Diocese of Durham (Surtees Soc., 34, 1858), 16; F. G. Emmison, Elizabethan Life: Morals and the Church Courts (Chelmsford, 1973), 210–13. 164

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after allegedly claiming he ‘had preached false doctrine and delivered many things in his sermon that might better have been left out, and that he had kissed Motley’s wife, and that one Black Dick’s wife was coming to the town and that she would be a fit woman for Mr John Moore to kiss’. Witness accounts suggest that Turville regarded some of Moore’s strictures from the pulpit as personal criticism, but the immediate context of the dispute was his attempt to impound her pigs. Turville had seized on sexual gossip as the most powerful weapon to undermine the rector’s reputation.168 In a similar case at nearby Wymeswold, also featuring impounded pigs, Richard Palmer, the minister, sued Anne Pywell and her husband, a churchwarden, after she accused him of soliciting her for sex. Palmer had allegedly stamped his foot in rage, calling her an ‘arrant arrant arrant brazen-faced whore’, and threatened to denounce her from the pulpit. He won his suit, but the Pywells found revenge a few years later when he was ejected from his living as scandalous and malignant.169 Disputes with parish officers reveal similar patterns. Angry women sought to undermine their dignity and authority by dismissing them as ‘beggarly and runnagate knave’, ‘drunkards and whoremasters’, and so on.170 We also find sexual allegations, sometimes deployed with blatant cynicism. When the constable of Bladon, Oxon., enforced a suppression order against a disorderly alehouse in 1666, the alewife swore to ruin him, vowing she ‘would stick as close to him as his shirt to his back’, and accused him of attempting to seduce her. A Dorset justice bound over a woman in 1620 ‘for saying the constable of Wick came to ravish her daughter when [really] he came to see the rule of her alehouse on the sabbath day’.171 Eleanor Starky, a Norfolk alewife, secured the peace in 1663 against a bailiff who had served a warrant on her husband, claiming he had beaten and threatened her because she would not allow him to lie with her or her maid. But next day the justice learned that Starky and her husband had attacked the bailiff and his assistants, cut their bridles and stirrups, and stabbed one of their horses—‘and then came first to complain’.172 Officials collecting taxes occasionally faced similar problems. Two Yorkshire subsidy-collectors who launched a Star Chamber suit in 168

LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 6/88–90. Ibid., Box 25/134–51; A. G. Matthews, Walker Revised (Oxford, 1948), 241. An informal settlement in 1640 had broken down, partly because of a wider feud between Palmer and the Pywells over money and Laudian forms of worship. 170 H. Johnstone (ed.), Churchwardens’ Presentments (17th Century), Archdeaconry of Chichester (Sussex Record Soc., 49, 1949), 25; CUL, EDR B2/21, fo. 137; EDR K6, fo. 146. 171 OAO, archdeaconry papers, c31, fo. 181; Ashley, Casebook, 63; CUL, EDR K7, fo. 187. 172 The Notebook of Robert Doughty 1662–1665, ed. J. M. Rosenheim (Norfolk Record Soc., 54, 1989), 29. 169

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1610 complained that villagers had accused them of rape to justify their refusal to pay.173 It is impossible now to determine the scale of false and malicious sexual allegations. Contemporaries were often sceptical, and tried to prevent single mothers from fathering their children on innocent men, a common practice driven both by fear and calculation.174 Henry Stanby, presented in 1620 for fathering a bastard, informed the court that his accuser had already been gaoled after confessing she had lied and was not even pregnant.175 A Southampton woman who accused a local weaver in 1609 of giving her the pox later withdrew the charge and begged his forgiveness.176 Some allegations were more subtle. Henry Lea of Quorndon, presented in 1611 after a widow alleged they had slept together, pleaded that she had spread false reports to manipulate him into marriage.177 Other cases were linked with attempts at extortion and blackmail, and in London we find a subculture of extortion in which disreputable women (and men) threatened to charge respectable citizens with rape or fathering a bastard. Similar cases occurred elsewhere. When Elizabeth Price of Bredon, Leics., raised a ‘clamour’ against a neighbour, a local magistrate decided she was merely attempting to extort money.178 False accusations may have appeared an easy way to make money, for the target might well prefer to pay rather than face the trouble and embarrassment of clearing his name. But they could easily backfire. When Anne Spray of Melton Mowbray accused Christopher Dexter of trying to rape her and causing her to miscarry, in 1691, the constable was suspicious, observing that Dexter was ‘a very civil and modest man’ while Spray was ‘a very scandalous person and of ill fame’. It was Spray who was carried before a local justice and prosecuted. Another man had charges against him dismissed in 1621 when he explained that his accuser was spiteful because he had sued her over an unrelated matter.179 In other cases the courts were clearly uncertain what to believe.180 We should 173

PRO, STAC 8/61/7. Capp, ‘Double Standard’; see also Bates Harbin (ed.), Quarter Sessions Records for Somerset, iii. 339; Ch. 4, above. 175 LRO, 1D 41/13/53, fo. 57v; 1D 41/13/35, fo. 49v. 176 J. W. Horrocks (ed.), The Assembly Books of Southampton (Southampton Record Soc., 1917–25), ii. 11–12; LRO, 1D 41/13/76, fo. 138. 177 LRO, 1D 41/13/37, fos. 152, 152a; Bates Harbin (ed.), Quarter Sessions Records for Somerset, iii. 361. 178 LRO, 1D 41/13/60, fo. 145v; Capp, ‘Double Standard’, 83–92. 179 LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 47/61–2; 1D 41/13/52, fo. 55v. 180 Michael Crosley, curate of Measham, Derbyshire, insisted he had been slandered when a single mother named him in 1610 as the father, but he was ordered to find the high number of seven compurgators to clear his name. Similarly the churchwardens doubted Frances Gibson 174

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not forget, of course, that a malicious accusation might nonetheless be true. When a married woman accused Richard Sampson in 1609 of committing adultery with her on his wedding day, and claimed he was the father of most of her children, she must have known that such an extraordinary charge would damage her own reputation even more than his. Anger at betrayal by an old lover sounds a plausible motive.181 It seems unlikely that many men thought initially of litigation as the appropriate response to slander. They were more likely to challenge and fight the offender.182 If the slander had been uttered by a ‘mere’ woman, they might simply brush it aside. So why did some men feel impelled to turn to the courts? Some clearly sued to head off the threat of presentment to the church courts. John Blackesley, a young Leicestershire villager, sued for defamation in 1671 after the churchwardens told him they would otherwise present him on a ‘fame’.183 Some feared prosecution in the secular courts, and the threat of a maintenance order.184 Others sued because alternative options had been blocked. When a neighbour appeared at Randall Leeson’s door in Packington, Leics., in 1592, shouting ‘Come out thou whoremaster knave and bring thy quarterstaff’, Leeson replied, ‘Thou art but an ass and a beast to offer to strike me and knowest that I am bound to the peace’.185 Recognizances were clearly proving effective, though this exchange suggests that many men would have preferred to settle their disputes by force. A Sussex villager mocked as a cuckold in 1622 led the speaker to a field behind the house where they fell together ‘by the ears’, and it was perhaps only because friends followed and pulled them apart that he then turned to the courts for satisfaction.186 Not that violence and litigation were mutually exclusive: another villager, charged with lying with a whore by the roadside, punched his accuser in the face but also sued him for defamation. As when she accused a neighbour of attempted rape, and presented her for slander as ‘a very idle and misliving woman’, but when she stuck to her story in court, the judge ordered the alleged offender to appear and answer the charge. LRO, 1D 41/13/64, fos. 241, 244; 1D 41/13/33, fo. 53v. 181

LRO, 1D 41/13/32, fo. 51. See above, and for verbal disputes that escalated to violence and ended fatally see e.g. Cockburn (ed.), Calendar: Kent: Elizabeth, 78, 361; id. (ed.), Calendar: Kent: James I (1980), 7, 16, 60; id. (ed.), Calendar: Surrey: Elizabeth, 312, 391, 420, 421, 501. 183 LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 33/13; CUL, EDR D2/19, fos. 23v–25r. For a range of views on this issue see C. Haigh, ‘Slander and the Church Courts in the Sixteenth Century’, Trans. of the Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian Soc., 78 (1975), 5–9; Sharpe, Defamation, 25–6; Ingram, Church Courts, 306–7. 184 WSRO, Ep1/11/11, fos. 20v–22v; CUL, EDR K4/172; LRO, 1D 41/4/781. 185 LRO, 1D 41/4/565. 186 WSRO, Ep1/11/13, fos. 188v–90r. 182

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Martin Ingram has remarked, violence frequently lurked in the background of defamation suits.187 A final category of male plaintiffs needed to have their respectability vindicated in a correspondingly respectable manner. The urge to protect their goodnameand‘credit’, for personal satisfaction, domestic harmony, or to win back the respect of the ‘better sort’, provided incentive enough. Others needed a public and formal vindication because defamatory stories had disrupted their marriage plans. An Elizabethan widower in Downham sued a man for allegedly advising women to keep away on the grounds that he had been cruel to his previous wife. George May, newly arrived minister of Gt. Wilbraham, Cambs., sued in 1575 after a neighbour warned his prospective bride that he was a ‘skipjack’ who already had a wife.188 James Chester, a Leicestershire villager, sued in 1620 after a report that he had been ‘burned’, and his fiancée testified that her father had advised her to break off the match unless he ‘could and would clear himself’.189 Only a formal vindication could rescue such a situation; giving the detractor a bloody nose would do nothing to help. Another prospective bridegroom, William Wells, sued in 1634 after a neighbour jeered that he had been treated by a surgeon and ‘had lost an inch of his prick’. His young cousin Alice said the words had been spoken ‘in a jesting manner’, and they were fairly typical of the crude banter common even in mixed company; but the report prompted his bride to break off the match, and Wells turned to the courts in an attempt to win her back.190 Christopher Mobbs of Littleport took legal action in similar circumstances in 1633 after allegations linking him with ‘Mother Smothersmock’ had disrupted his marriage plans and made him ‘a laughing stock’ in the town.191 Female Resistance: Physical Violence We have seen women pursuing men through the courts, and others trading insults. Finally, we should note a small minority ready to use physical violence too. Public disapproval of female brawling was never sufficient to deter the disorderly poor, as we saw in Chapter 5, and such women cared little whether their opponents were male or female. Joan Cawkett of Cow Cross, described as a common whore, was found by the watch in 1613 ‘fighting and buffeting with a fellow’. When a porter challenged two ‘nightwalkers’ he found breaking into a house, they 187 188 189 190 191

WSRO, Ep1/11/15, fo. 65v; Ep1/11/2, fo. 27; Ingram, Church Courts, 315–16. CUL, EDR D2/7, fo. 58; EDR, D2/11, fo. 80. LRO, 1D 41/4/1276. LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 16/25–9. CUL, EDR 7/103, 174, 177; Ingram, Church Courts, 311.

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assaulted him and threatened ‘to knock out his brains’.192 A lowly coachman’s wife who beat a gentleman was ordered to make a public apology for offending social as well as gender conventions.193 Most of these assaults were minor, but a few resulted in serious injuries. Isabel Taylor, who lived in a bawdy house, was arrested one night in 1639 for hurling stones at a man, ‘and hurt him sore’. Margaret Gibson of Newington attacked a man with a knife in May 1567 and stabbed him to death. Susan Fisher, who kept a bawdy house in Charterhouse Lane, was indicted in 1613 for thrusting a spit into a man’s nostril, with similarly fatal consequences.194 We can find equally turbulent spirits in the provinces.195 A few men even turned to the magistrate to have female adversaries bound over to the peace, despite the ridicule they would probably invite. A smith’s wife was bound over in 1613 for beating a London barbersurgeon; a Dorset widow was bound over by a neighbour and kinsman in 1621 ‘for throwing her water on him and assaulting him with a sword’; and Susan Battersby of Leicester was bound over in 1623 after smashing a jug over a man’s head.196 Emily Pott of Stone, Kent, left her adversary no time to seek a recognizance: she attacked him with an axe in 1562 and killed him on the spot.197 Such women had few inhibitions about assaulting parish officers too. It took four men to restrain Anne Phillipps, drunk and disorderly, when she was arrested by the London watch in 1609. When Nathaniel Sparks was arrested for pilfering in 1628, his wife threatened the marshal’s man that ‘she would thrust a knife into his guts’. Another woman told a constable she would ‘rip up his guts’. The Bridewell minutes contain many such incidents.198 Others indulged in violence by proxy: Mary Lashley threatened to get friends to shoot her prosecutor, while Katherine Ratcliffe encouraged her lover, fighting another man in 1609, with cries of ‘Kill him, my love, kill him, my love, stab him’.199 Ecclesiastical officers encountered similar truculence. When the minister of Twyford, Leics., reprimanded two unruly women for their wicked lives, one spat in his face and the other threatened to beat him. Mary 192 193

Le Hardy, Middlesex: Calendar,  i. 189; BCB 7, fo. 317; see also Ch. 5, above. W. J. Hardy (ed.), Middlesex County Records: Calendar of the Sessions Books 1689 to 1709 (1905),

275. 194

BCB 8, fo. 250v; Cockburn, Calendar: Surrey: Elizabeth, 61; Le Hardy, Middlesex: Calendar, 

i. 63. 195 See e.g. Tait (ed.), Lancashire Quarter Sessions, 221; S. C. Ratcliff and H. C. Johnson (eds.), Warwick County Records (Warwick, 1935–64), ix. 1, 7; Power (ed.), Liverpool Town Books, 66. 196 Le Hardy (ed.), Middlesex: Calendar,  i. 218; Ashley, Casebook, 66; LRO, BR II/18/ 197 15/250. Cockburn (ed.), Calendar: Kent: Elizabeth, 33. 198 BCB 5, fo. 346v; BCB 7, fos. 82v, 85v; BCB 8, fo. 184v; cf. BCB 6, 30 Apr. and 15 July 1625; 199 BCB 7, fos. 40, 43. BCB 5, fo. 350v; BCB 11, fo. 112.

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Bawme of Market Bosworth cursed a churchwarden and beat him ‘with stones in her hands’.200 Some went further still: a Leicester alewife urged a customer to thrust a spit in the mayor’s belly, and a few incidents ended in tragedy. When two justices’ men arrived in 1596 to arrest Elizabeth Walker of Goodnestone, Kent, for keeping a disorderly alehouse, she retreated upstairs and threw a ‘great stone’ at them, striking one on the head with fatal consequences.201 It would be wrong to associate female violence exclusively with the disorderly poor, for any quarrel had the potential to escalate to blows. Mary Andrewes, an Oxfordshire villager quarrelling in 1600 over a right of way throughherorchard, railed at her adversary as ‘rogue, villain, thief, whoremonger’, and struck him with a cudgel.202 But such incidents were rare, and most ‘assaults’ by respectable women amounted to little more than impulsive slaps or punches. A Leicestershire villager was presented in 1585 because she ‘did break a man’s head in the [church] porch’, while churchwardens at Lodsworth, Sussex, presented a married woman for quarrelling with a man in the churchyard on the sabbath ‘and flying with her fists in his face before us’. Mary James, a Sussex gentleman’s wife, was presentedin1624 for using ‘unreverend speeches’ to the minister and ‘laying violent hands’ upon him.203 Churchwardens were required to present any act of violence that took place in the church or churchyard, however trivial, and villagers would probably have ignored such incidents had they occurred elsewhere. Respectable women sometimes resorted to violence in disputes over common rights or grain supplies, as we will see, but it would appear they rarely did so in the course of personal disputes with male neighbours. For most women, of course, physical violence was hardly a serious option, however great their anger. Even if they brushed aside the powerful cultural constraints, they knew a male adversary was likely to be stronger, armed, and unencumbered by small children. But some women clearly found it hard to contain their feelings. Elizabeth Hysplitt, a Wiltshire woman, told her adversary bluntly in 1583, during a family quarrel in her husband’s presence, ‘I dare to whip thy tail my self’; and when he told her not to threaten him, ‘for she was a woman and he had nothing to do with her’, she flung back, ‘what I do my husband shall not know of’.204 Other women nurtured fantasies of violent revenge, and the ballad literature of the period includes several startling examples of 200 201 202 203 204

LRO, 1D 41/13/37, fo. 158v; 1D 41/13/64, fo. 212v. LRO, BR IV/3/98; Cockburn (ed.), Calendar: Kent: Elizabeth, 404. BRO, D/A2 c40, fo. 157r–v; cf. LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 50/1. LRO, 1D 41/13/11, fo. 149v; Johnstone, Churchwardens’ Presentments, 79, 90. Cunnington (ed.), Some Annals of Devizes, pt. ii, 2.

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women threatening bloody vengeance against men. The Nine Maidens Fury at the Hart-fordshire Man tells how some young women discover the rogue has deceived them all, whereupon they waylay him one day, brandishing a dagger, and threaten to geld him on the spot. In another ballad, ‘young Kate’ spurns the miller’s advances, and when he threatens to kill her turns the tables by proclaiming that she and her friends had pinned him to the ground and castrated him, a ‘revelation’ which condemns him to universal mockery and repugnance. There appear to be no recorded cases of any such actions, but these ballads clearly found an audience of sympathetic women or paranoid men.205 They belong to a much larger corpus of ballads which show seducers exposed to shame and humiliation by their intended targets. More significant was the widespread fear that female resentment might find other and more sinister outlets, through secret weapons such as witchcraft and arson.206 Some alleged witches appear to have believed in their supposed powers, and witches certainly aroused deep fear among their neighbours. Frances Moore, one of the Huntingdon witches condemned in 1646, confessed to killing one William Foster because many years earlier he ‘would have hanged two of her children for offering to take a piece of bread’.207 It is easy to imagine the festering hatred such an incident would have engendered, and her story suggests a neighbourhood politics in which the formal authority and power of the rich might be pitted against the covert powers of the alienated poor. Witchcraft and arson lie beyond the scope of this book, but were never far from contemporaries’ minds. Over five hundred of the patients who consulted the astrological physician Richard Napier believed they had been bewitched.208 That itself suggests the potency of the ‘weapon’. Whether or not some women consciously sought to deploy maleficium, or exploit belief in it, the power of suggestion made witchcraft a formidable presence even when no one made explicit reference to it. Contemporaries were well aware that women could possess considerable influence within the neighbourhood, both individually or collectively, despite their formal exclusion from public life. Such influence, moreover, could extend far beyond the pursuit of personal disputes to issues that affected the neighbourhood or community, and to these we turn next. 205

Pepys Ballads, iii. 276; Robin the Plow-man’s Courage, ibid. iii. 305. On female arson see B. Capp, ‘Arson, Threats of Arson, and Incivility in Early Modern England’, in Burke, Harrison, and Slack (eds.), Civil Histories, 203, 207–9. 207 The Witches of Huntingdon (1646), 5–7. For a recent survey of women’s roles as both agents and victims, see J. A. Sharpe, Instruments of Darkness: Witchcraft in England 1550–1750 (1996). 208 MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam, 199. 206

7 Women as Citizens: Public and Political Life

C recognized no public role for women. They were seen as too weak, in every sense, to engage in public affairs, and exclusion was thought to be in their own best interests. Mary Verney, terrified at the approach of civil war in 1642, could be reassured ‘that neither king nor parliament have any quarrel against women, who never did either any hurt save only with their tongues’.1 But as that final, throwaway phrase suggests, we should not necessarily equate lack of political rights with lack of interest. Moreover, the proposition that women were excluded from ‘public’ and ‘political’ affairs begs the question of how these terms are to be applied in this period. As Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford have pointed out, modern concepts of citizenship are of very limited value for either sex in an age when rights and responsibilities often rested on local custom rather than legal definition.2 To understand women’s role in public life we need to redefine ‘politics’ to include the world of parish as well as national affairs. As Keith Wrightson has remarked, the early modern parish was as much a political forum as an administrative unit, and as such the site of continuous negotiation over the distribution and exercise of local power.3 It is now increasingly recognized that women played their part in this negotiation. Martin Ingram has noted their ‘quasi-public power; as brokers of gossip, makers and breakers of reputation’, while others have started to explore their role in defining and enforcing ‘honest’ behaviour among their neighbours.4 Scholars have noted, too, women’s role in 1

F. P. Verney, The Memoirs of the Verney Family during the Civil War (1892; repr. 1970), ii. 66. Mendelson and Crawford, Women, ch. 7. 3 K. Wrightson, ‘The Politics of the Parish in Early Modern England’, in P. Griffiths, A. Fox, and D. Hindle (eds.), The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England (1996), p. 11 and ch. 1, passim; Amussen, Ordered Society, ch. 2. For recent studies of parish politics see also e.g. M. K. McIntosh, Controlling Misbehavior in England, 1370–1600 (Cambridge, 1998). 4 M. Ingram, ‘“Scolding Women Cucked or Washed”: A Crisis in Gender Relations in Early Modern England?’, in J. Kermode and G. Walker (eds.), Women, Crime and the Courts in Early Modern England (1994), 49; L. Gowing, ‘Language, Power and the Law: Women’s Slander Litigation in Early Modern London’, ibid., ch. 2; Ingram, ‘“Scolding Women”’, ibid., ch. 4; J. Sharpe, ‘Women, Witchcraft and the Legal Process’, ibid. ch. 5; Gowing, Domestic Dangers, 2

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popular protests, and charted the extraordinary surge of female political activity during the 1640s and 1650s. But we have as yet only a limited understanding of the multifarious strands of female participation in public life. This chapter explores women’s participation in the politics of the parish, through informal networks, gossip, and the collective pressure they could exert on parish officers. We will find them frequently assuming a role as active citizens at this level. We will find other women taking a lively interest in national issues. Moreover, women’s traditional concern for the reputation and welfare of their families could easily translate into a shared determination to protect the good name, and moral and material welfare, of the wider community. It is this that provides our point of entry.

   The informal networks to which women turned for help in personal disputes played an equally important role in the life of the community. They could be used to force recalcitrant neighbours to conform to locally accepted codes of behaviour, or to protect the interests and reputation of the parish as a whole. Women who cared about their own good name also cared about the good name of their neighbourhood, conscious of the close links between them, and defended both to the best of their ability. ‘Community’ is of course a problematical term. Early modern society was by no means an organic whole, and individuals generally saw a network of friends and neighbours as their primary frame of reference. But most people also felt a wider sense of community, conscious of shared interests, concerns, or values that distinguished them from outsiders.5 Such communities might be centred on the street, parish, or town, or rooted in social or religious identities. Networks and communities tended to coalesce in periods of crisis, only to loosen once more as family rivalries and competing interests or values reasserted themselves.6 ch. 4; id., ‘Ordering the Body: Illegitimacy and Female Authority in Seventeenth-Century England’, in M. J. Braddick and J. Walter (eds.), Negotiating Power in Early Modern Society (Cambridge, 2001). 5 A. Shepard and P. Withington (eds.), Communities in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2000), esp. ch. 1; D. C. Beaver, Parish Communities and Religious Conflict in the Vale of Gloucester, 1590–1690 (Cambridge, Mass., 1998). 6 See e.g. P. Collinson, The Religion of Protestants (Oxford, 1982), chs. 4–5; id., The Birthpangs of Protestant England (1988), chs. 2, 5; D. Underdown, Fire from Heaven: Life in an English Town in the Seventeenth Century (1992); S. Hindle, The State and Social Change in Early Modern England, c.1550–1640 (2000) chs. 7–8; K. Wrightson; ‘“Sorts of people” in Tudor and Stuart England’, in J. Barry and

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Contemporaries paid far more than lip-service to the ideal of community, while recognizing that social and personal differences posed a perpetual threat to its realization. ‘Reputation’ concerns us here in its less familiar, collective aspect. Men and women alike subjected their neighbours to a level of scrutiny that appears to us both intrusive and obsessive, prompted by a combination of curiosity, moral principle, and self-interest. Respectable folk knew that a neighbour’s promiscuity might well burden them with higher poor rates to maintain an illegitimate child. It might also threaten their own good name, for dishonour was contagious; just as an adulterous wife tarnished the reputation of her family, so open scandal damaged the whole street, neighbourhood, or parish. This collective aspect of reputation weighed heavily with contemporaries, and ‘common scolds’ and ‘makebates’ were punished in part because they had threatened the good name of the whole community. It is easy to understand the resentment in Desford, Leics., when a drunkard who claimed to have slept with a mother and daughter on the same night averred there were only two honest women in the whole town. Another villager, who had slandered two ‘very honest and modest women’, was presented for words ‘greatly tending to the discredit and discontent of the parish’, not merely the immediate victims.7 Disgruntled individuals sometimes attempted quite deliberately to blacken a town’s collective good name, like the Leicester victualler who lost his licence in 1613 and threatened to abandon his family and ‘let the best men in the country know that the town had undone him’.8 Whenever a neighbourhood, parish, or town suffered a damaged reputation, its inhabitants might find themselves exposed to jeers and abuse in markets and other public places. London had several districts associated with vice, and a woman under attack was often scolded for behaviour described as more fit for Rosemary Lane, or some other notorious haunt of prostitutes. In the provinces too we find derogatory phrases and mocking rhymes aimed at an entire community. The Tudor antiquarian Richard Carew noted an ‘inveterate byword’ in Cornwall that the hamlet of Crafthole was ‘peopled with twelve dwellings and thirteen cuckolds’. Travellers passing through would taunt the inhabitants, whose womenfolk allegedly fought back by emptying chamber pots at the offenders. At C. Brooks (eds.), The Middling Sort of People (1994); K. Wrightson and D. Levine, Poverty and Piety in an English Village: Terling 1525–1700 (2nd edn., Oxford, 1995); S. Hindle, ‘Exhortation and Entitlement: Negotiating Inequality in English Rural Communities, 1550–1650’, in Braddick and Walter (eds.), Negotiating Power. 7 LRO, 1D 41/13/61, fo. 41v; 1D 41/13/33, fo. 9v; F. G. Emmison, Elizabethan Life: Morals 8 and the Church Courts (Chelmsford, 1973), 62. LRO, BR IV/3/54.

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the other end of the country, a mocking rhyme circulating in east Yorkshire in the late seventeenth century informed the world that At Whitton’s town end, brave boys! At Whitton’s town end! At every door There sits a whore.

Proverbial wisdom held that at Gosport, a seafaring community, there were ‘scarce three honest women in the town’, and that ‘All the maids in Wanswell [Gloucs.] may dance in an eggshell’.9 Female promiscuity was not the only potential threat to a community’s good name. To say of a person that ‘He’ll prove a man of Dursley’ meant he was untrustworthy, and the phrase was bitterly resented by the town’s inhabitants. The violent manners of the moorland people of Lydford, Devon, gave rise to a saying, ‘Like Lydford law, hang first and judge him afterward ’.10 Many other towns found themselves labelled with some unwelcome attribute which then hardened into proverbial lore. A pamphleteer remarked expansively in 1655 that from the top of Bredon Hill one could say, ‘Yonder is rich Worcester, brave Gloucester, proud Tewkesbury, beggarly Evesham, drunken Pershore, and roguish Winchcombe.’11 A town where the godly had largely eradicated vice might then find itself mocked as fanatical or hypocritical. Puritan Banbury became a byword for zealotry, and Dorchester’s godly discipline attracted similar abuse and ridicule.12 The respectable thus hated vice both for itself and because it shamed the whole community. A shoemaker in Ashby-de-la-Zouch testified against an immoral neighbour as ‘a scandal to her neighbourhood’, and an adulterous London woman was similarly described in 1592 as having behaved ‘to the slander of the parish of Whitechapel’.13 The Jacobean parish clerk of St Botolph’s, Aldgate, vented his outrage at the ‘lewd’ individuals whose behaviour he was obliged to record. He noted with disgust 9 R. Carew, The Survey of Cornwall, ed. F. E. Halliday (1969), 177; The Diary of Abraham de la Pryme, ed. C. Jackson (Surtees Soc., 54, 1869), 139; John Aubrey: Three Prose Works, ed. J. BuchananBrown (Fontwell, 1972), 297; D. Rollison, The Local Origins of Modern Society: Gloucestershire 1500– 1800 (1992), 79; cf. R. Brathwait, Barnabae Itinerarium: Barnabees Journall, ed. D. B. Thomas (1932), 57, 111. 10 Rollison, Local Origins, 69–70; The Journal of James Yonge, 1647–1721, ed. F. N. L. Poynter (1965), 145. 11 Harry Hangman’s Honour: or the Gloucester-shire Hangman’s Request (1655), 9; cf. F. G. Emmison, Elizabethan Life: Disorder (Chelmsford, 1970), 224. 12 The Essex rhyme ‘Braintree for the pure, and Bocking for the poor, Coggeshall for the jeering town, and Kelvedon for the whore’ had variant forms for other counties: A. Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England 1500–1700 (Oxford, 2000), 160; cf. Underdown, Fire from Heaven, 161–2. 13 LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 50/7; GL, MS 9064/13, fo. 149v.

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in 1617 that an illegitimate child born in the street had been abandoned both by its mother, ‘like a base strumpet’, and its father, ‘like a base varlet’. Recording the fourth marriage of ‘a notorious scold’, he added contemptuously, ‘I am sorry my book is blotted with her name’. Such people polluted the parish, as well as his page.14 The London minister Richard Cooke reacted to local scandal even more vehemently, publishing an impassioned sermon in 1629 on the betrayal of the parish by one of its former officers. The man had conducted a lengthy and secret affair with his maidservant, who was eventually hanged for murdering her illegitimate child, with her master indicted for aiding and abetting the crime. Cooke bitterly reproached him for the damage he had inflicted on the parish’s good name. ‘What satisfaction can you make to this place and parish . . .?’ he demanded. ‘What dishonour have you done us, in bringing this disgrace, and casting this aspersion upon us?’15 The sense that offenders must satisfy the community as well as God was reflected in contemporary forms of punishment. Felons were expected to express contrition to the crowd round the gallows, and sinners performing public penance were made to beg the congregation for forgiveness. When a Leicestershire villager failed to perform his penance in 1635, the churchwardens presented him again for ‘not as yet satisfying the congregation’.16 Public punishment symbolized the community’s collective repudiation of the offence and its reassertion of traditional values. A hundred people gathered in Hinckley market one Monday in 1620, a minister reported, ‘upon no occasion but to see the whore of Higham do her penance at the cross, which argues a great expectation of public punishment’.17 Respectable parishioners often felt deeply resentful if officers failed to present a notorious offender. A woman in Bignor, Sussex, who was living openly with a man from nearby Sutton while her husband was away, provoked outrage in both villages. ‘Many are offended and talk of it far and near’, one man complained, another adding that ‘many marvel and are offended that they are suffered so to keep company together’.18 In urban communities, tenants might threaten to move away if such abuses remained unpunished. Neighbours in Wapping, concerned over Susan May’s scandalous affair in 1632 with her husband’s former apprentice, told their landlord they would move out unless he took action against her. Their concern for public morals was 14 15 16 17 18

GL, MS 9234/8, fos. 4, 22, and passim. R. Cooke, A White Sheete, or A Warning for Whoremongers (1629), 32–5. LRO, 1D 41/21, presentments for Wigston (Goscote deanery), 1635 (my italics). LRO, 1D 41/13/51, fo. 11a. WSRO, Ep1/11/3, fo. 23r–v.

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reinforced by the fear that their own reputations might be compromised by remaining. In another case, a lodger complained of being subjected to abuse merely because she lived in the same building as a notorious libertine, and she too decided to leave.19 Paradoxically, public punishment threatened to undermine the communal reputation it was intended to uphold, by drawing attention to scandal. When a London woman told her adversary ‘she would be sorry to have the street so disgraced to have a coach [with] two wheels to fetch her away’—that is, carted to Bridewell as a whore—she was perhaps thinking of the jeers outsiders might fling at the other residents.20 Parishioners therefore sought to punish notorious sinners while minimizing collateral damage to the good name of the parish itself. Penance in the parish church could usually be screened from the eyes of strangers, but problems arose when a court ordered it to be repeated more publicly, in the market place or church of a large town. The anxieties this might generate are vividly expressed in a letter from the vicar and other householders of Oadby to the Leicester archdeaconry court in 1620, concerning a maidservant named Alice Blofeild who had borne an illegitimate child. Confirming that she had performed her penance in Oadby church with ‘many tears’, they begged the court to revoke its demand for further penance in Leicester. She was not a native of Oadby, they explained, and had committed her lapse before arriving, so a highly public penance in the county town would inflict an unwarranted disgrace on the whole community. ‘We verily think it will be a great scandal unto our town’, they pleaded.21 Similarly, the minister of Higham-on-the-Hill pleaded for an adulterous couple to be spared public penance in Hinckley market, but was happy to see them perform it in Higham church.22

      The reputation of communities and individuals alike was constantly reshaped by news, rumour, and comment. Gossip, ubiquitous in early modern England as in most places, played a key role in moulding local public opinion and in the wider politics of the parish. Men and women exchanged news in the street, alehouse, or market, at church, working in the fields or sheltering from the rain, even at deathbeds and funerals.23 19 20 21 22 23

GL, MS 9064/19, fo. 53v; cf. BCB 4, fo. 23v. LMA, DL/C/231, fo. 57v. LRO, 1D 41/4/1200. LRO, 1D 41/13/51, fo. 11a. For the role of gossip in early modern England see S. Hindle, ‘The Shaming of Margaret

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Though contemporaries associated gossip primarily with women, court depositions show that men were equally fond of discussing the intimate details of their neighbours’ lives. The characterization of gossip as female reflected an uneasy awareness that women exchanged news among themselves which they might conceal from their husbands. Men worried about the subversive implications, fearing such behaviour would undermine the respect and authority they claimed as husbands and fathers. We find similar unease when other subordinates were able to associate unsupervised; servants’ gossip aroused deep concern among both masters and mistresses.24 Gossip, a multifaceted phenomenon, was not always judgemental or malicious. Much was simply informative, the exchange of news about comings and goings, triumphs and setbacks, prospective marriages, births, and deaths. It satisfied natural curiosity, reinforced a sense of common concerns, and gave speakers a temporary sense of their own importance. Anthropologists have noted the intense tedium of life in small and relatively isolated communities, and even the most trivial or speculative news offered welcome diversion. Gossip of this kind functioned to cement social bonds, and the recipients of any small confidence recognized it as a mark of acceptance, a token of their inclusion within the group or community.25 Newcomers had to earn such acceptance, and were more often the subjects of gossip than its recipients. When Mary Porter and her family faced damaging rumours at Cambridge in 1619–20, a neighbour remarked that ‘folks do but talk ill of them because they be strangers’, and the defamation suit she eventually brought was designed to establish her good name rather than protect it.26 Judgemental gossip played a multifaceted role. It often served to reinforce the boundaries of acceptable behaviour, by targeting individuals who failed to conform. Speakers set out to create a tide of public opinion which would force them to mend their ways or leave, or trigger disciplinary action. More immediately, of course, they were alerting neighbours to an alleged thief, lecher, or cheat in their midst. Judgemental Knowsley: Gossip, Gender and the Experience of Authority in Early Modern England’, Continuity and Change, 9 (1994); on the political dimension see D. Freist, Governed by Opinion: Politics, Religion and the Dynamics of Communication in Stuart London 1637–1645 (1997), ch. 5. 24

J. C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance (1990); Chs. 2 and 4, above. M. Gluckman, ‘Gossip and Scandal’, Current Anthropology, 4 (1968); R. L. Rosnow and G. A. Fine, Rumor and Gossip: The Social Psychology of Hearsay (Oxford, 1976); S. E. Merry, ‘Rethinking Gossip and Scandal’, in D. Black (ed.), Toward a General Theory of Social Control (Cambridge, Mass., 1984); M. Tebbutt, Women’s Talk? A Social History of ‘Gossip’ in Working-Class Neighbourhoods, 1880–1960 (1997); N. Barley, The Innocent Anthropologist: Notes from a Mudhut (Harmondsworth, 26 1983), esp. 57–8. CUL, EDR K6/185. 25

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gossip thus constituted a powerful coercive weapon, defining and reasserting the social values of the community. But such gossip might also divide a community, if the individual targeted had friends who rallied to his or her defence. And in other circumstances its role was clearly subversive rather than coercive. Whenever gossip was aimed at a figure of local authority, neighbours could relish the pleasure of seeing him deflated and ridiculed with little danger to themselves, provided their talk remained discreet. In practice these differing elements often overlapped. Light-hearted banter might quickly become more serious if challenged by one of the company.27 An ‘idle’ or ‘merry’ story could also appear very differently once it reached the ears of its targets. In 1579 a Cambridge washerwoman passed on an amusing tale about a local servant who asked her mistress whether it was possible to be ‘begotten with child against a wall’, and being informed it was, declared naïvely that her master had much deceived her. Unlike the washerwoman, the family concerned took the story seriously, and sued for defamation.28 Many women as well as men enjoyed bawdy stories, and scandalous gossip about neighbours by either sex could easily backfire. Dorothy Hemmynge, ‘being merrily disposed’ at the George inn in Arundel one winter’s day in 1615, announced there were eighteen cuckolds in the town, and proceeded to list them while a customer kept a tally, marking off each name on a stick. The targets of her wit failed to see the joke.29 A decade later, in 1624, some village women near Arundel spread the even more titillating news that a cow had produced two human children (a boy and girl), fathered by a young farm servant named Thomas Harold. That might have been brushed aside as the idle gossip of ‘silly women’, but bestiality was a felony for which men were occasionally hanged, and Harold was no simple labourer; his father, a prosperous yeoman, saw nothing funny in the rumours and launched defamation suits in his son’s name against those responsible.30 Lighthearted gossip about the clergy was even more likely to backfire. A group of Oxfordshire women talking ‘merrily’ in 1634 found themselves in trouble when one jested that the local minister’s betrothed ‘was in dangerous case’, for ‘she that put her leg into the parson’s bed did put her foot into hell’. The saying was proverbial, but the vicar understandably regarded such talk as defamatory.31 Many villagers relished ‘merry’ stories 27

WSRO, Ep1/11/21, fo. 26; Ep1/11/13, fos. 126v, 187. CUL, EDR D2/11, fo. 294. 29 WSRO, Ep1/11/12, fos. 154–5; cf. M. Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories (1981), 63–4; Underdown, Fire from Heaven, 61–2. 30 WSRO, Ep1/11/13, fos. 211r–212v, 217v–219r. 31 OAO, archdeaconry papers, c12, fo. 166v. 28

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about their ministers, which reduced them to the ordinary humanity of other folk. If the minister then sued to defend the dignity of his position, the gossip itself might take on a much darker hue.32 Judgemental gossip about superiors might also provide an emotional release for people nursing resentments they felt unable to avenge or assuage. Margaret Knowsley, a Nantwich servant sexually harassed by her clerical employer, confided initially in a few close friends in 1627 to relieve her feelings of desperation, urging them to keep the information to themselves. Instead they spread the story through the town, whereupon Knowsley became equally vociferous herself, only to retract her allegations when she found the local magistrates determined to blame her rather than the minister for the scandal. Her attempts to avert retribution proved futile, and her public flogging through the streets provided a brutal demonstration of the price of slander and gossip against figures of authority.33 Gossip that circulated more discreetly is by definition unlikely to appear in the historical record. We catch one glimpse in July 1659 when Ralph Josselin, the Essex diarist, noted that Potter’s mill had burned down and added that the women of the town had often hoped for such an event. Millers frequently abused their position in village life, and were widely resented as grasping and lecherous. Potter’s customers had evidently found comfort in gossip and malicious fantasy.34 Gossip was often the only weapon available to humble folk afraid to confront the wealthy and powerful. In one striking instance in 1579, a London alewife came home one day to find that her landlord had called for the rent and had brazenly taken another woman upstairs to a bedchamber, from where their noisy lovemaking was very audible. Though scandalized, she was afraid to confront them; ‘she was much amazed and said a vengeance of them, I am loath to go up, I cannot tell what to do’. Her friend was equally nervous, explaining that she ‘was afraid of Wood [the landlord, a prosperous brewer] and durst not go to them, but if it had been a meaner person she would have gone up’. The two women relieved their feelings by gossiping about the incident, and word eventually reached the ears of the Bridewell governors. In this case judgemental gossip resulted in judgement; Wood was prosecuted and confessed, and had to pay £10 to the poor to escape a whipping.35 The significance of judgemental gossip varied enormously according 32

For a vivid example see WSRO, Ep1/11/9, fos. 63–6. Hindle, ‘Shaming of Margaret Knowsley’. 34 The Diary of Ralph Josselin 1616–1683, ed. A. Macfarlane (1976), 448. On the popular perception of millers see E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common (1991), 218–20. 35 BCB 3, 29 Aug. 1579. 33

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to the speaker’s perceived intentions, the standing and character of both parties, and the reaction of the audience. Some speakers emphasized they were merely repeating gossip, not vouching for its truth, and were clearly anxious to avoid any risk of being sued.36 No doubt some wanted to share a titillating story, while others were testing the water, gauging reactions before committing themselves further. For damaging gossip, like public insult, was by no means automatically believed. Listeners had their own views about the parties involved, and if the story concerned someone well respected, would often respond by dismissing it. Joan Church, a Berkshire villager harvesting peas with her neighbours in 1599, found a cold reception when she made scurrilous allegations about two women and ‘Black Dick’ (one Richard Belcher). The vicar’s wife, working alongside them, bade her hold her tongue, and when Belcher was informed of the incident and sued for defamation he found support among the women Joan had been canvassing.37 Scepticism was often justified, for the distinction between gossip and slander was easily blurred. A speaker voicing damaging allegations about a third party might well bear a personal grudge against the person concerned. Many women set out quite openly to make a public issue of their private grievances, insisting that their adversary posed a threat to the whole community. A Sussex villager who complained that Thomas Harolde had bewitched her husband’s cattle warned that anyone who had dealings with him ‘should never prosper’. Similarly, Grace Wade reported in 1638 that John Dashfield, vicar of Littleport, was so lewd that it was dangerous for any woman to come near him.38 In a small community, moreover, many people retailing gossip were likely have some connection with both parties, and perhaps some stake in the issue.39 Speakers generally left no doubt how they wanted their audience to respond, spicing their news with expressions of amazement and disgust if they wished to trigger outrage rather than sniggers.40 Some declared that such offences should be severely punished. Katherine Parker of Loughborough, describing how a man had made his neighbour drunk and insensible so he could commit adultery with his wife, heaped abuse 36 See e.g. this cautious exchange in 1597: ‘ “I understand, Goodman Smith, that you have slandered me”. “Nay, not I”, said Smith, “but I have said that my wife told me that you had had to do with her, clear yourself as you can, but I will not say so for an hundred pounds of my self”’: CUL, EDR D2/19, fo. 215. 37 BRO, D/A2 c40, fos. 86–8; cf. WSRO, Ep1/11/15, fos. 177v, 192v, 256v, 257; CUL, EDR K6/386. 38 WSRO, Ep1/11/10, fos. 279v–281v; CUL, EDR K26/111. 39 CUL, EDR K6/158. 40 Ibid. K6/384–7; LRO, 1D 41/4/447, 1207; cf. Underdown, Fire from Heaven, 101.

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on the guilty pair and swore that had it been her case, she would have summoned the parish officers and scratched out the woman’s eyes. Helen Sims, a Berkshire villager, was still more vehement. Telling friends in 1599 that her enemy Elizabeth Boneham had committed incest with her own stepfather and had a child by him, she declared, ‘it is pity that she is not set quick in the earth and further said that she would make her weary of the town’. Neither law nor custom provided for an offender to be buried alive, but Sims was announcing a personal crusade to drive her from the community.41 As such incidents demonstrate, respectable women felt in some sense collectively responsible for the good behaviour and honour of their neighbours, especially other women, and assumed an informal authority over them. Alongside the structures of parish office-holding lay a parallel and informal political world based on female networks and public opinion, in which the enforcement of sexual honesty loomed large. Some women appear to have felt they would betray their husbands and every husband if they ignored openly scandalous behaviour. When Lucy Pratt was rebuked in 1620 for accusing a Cambridge neighbour of adulterous liaisons with at least three men (one a Bachelor of Divinity), she riposted, ‘Needs must, we misuse and wrong our husbands, when she doth thus misuse and wrong her husband.’ The shameless promiscuity of one woman would contaminate all unless exposed and punished. A sense of collective responsibility played a significant part in women’s close scrutiny of their neighbours.42 In time judgemental gossip was likely to reach the ears of its target, and this was often the intention. It might arrive as no more than a friendly hint or gentle reproach. ‘I am sorry for thee, John Eaton,’ a Littleport woman told a visitor in 1574, for ‘I hear say that thou wast taken in bed with Goodman Wayde’s maid.’ Witnesses said the words had been spoken ‘upon good will and in good part, . . . to advertise him of such talk as went of him’.43 In other cases offenders were left in no doubt of public contempt and condemnation. A Sussex woman informed a man working in the village street in October 1636 that he was a rogue and knave, and ‘should have found to a child which was his own’, adding, ‘it is true and thy wife saith so’. Joyce Mitchell, of Burbage, Leics., humiliated a neighbour in 1672 by proclaiming his ‘shame’ to two strangers as they rode through the village: ‘This is the rogue and that is the jade’, she cried, ‘which was playing the rogue together at the rick, and his breeches was 41 42 43

LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 9/111–12; BRO, D/A2 c40, fo. 84. CUL, EDR K5/57. Ibid., D2/11, fos. 29–30.

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down and also his shirt was up’. When Jane Heyrick spotted a Glenfield man drinking at a suspicious alehouse in another village, she called him a ‘whoremaster rogue’ and added, ‘go home to your wife, and if I see any of Glenfield I’ll send your wife word what a whore you haunt’.44 Gossip could generate public ridicule, abuse, or ostracism, each one a powerful form of pressure. Notorious offenders who ignored such pressures might soon find themselves facing other sanctions. The elaborate shaming rituals of ‘rough music’ were primarily male affairs, but women played an active part in others that were simpler and far more common. Women repeated mocking rhymes and songs, and sometimes composed them. Elizabeth Maunder, servant to Adam Winthrop, dictated a set of libellous verses to a man in Fleet Street in 1605, and then fastened the paper to the victim’s door. Katherine Farmer, a Wiltshire servant, stood on a neighbour’s table to sing a libellous song about his family.45 Women also possessed their own repertoire of abusive gestures and rituals. In 1665 we find a young Norfolk woman throwing water over the harvest-queen, and jibing about her alleged bastard.46 Six young spinsters performed a derisive ritual in the churchyard at Ratcliffe, Leics., in 1610, using a willow garland ‘in very profane manner’ to embarrass a villager on the day of his wedding. Willow symbolized fidelity, a quality the bride or groom presumably lacked. An Essex woman flung abuse at another couple as they went to church to be married, while a Cambridgeshire bride-to-be, listening to her banns being read in 1572, fled in tears when a woman called out to her betrothed that his wedding would be ‘as sorrowful a day as ever thou hadst’.47 A balladeer told how ‘sluts’ in Crutched Friars had thrown dildoes and ‘merkins’ (models of the female genitalia) over a neighbour’s fence to disgrace her.48 Married people were targeted too. One woman hung a horn over her neighbour’s fence and defiantly brought it into the 44

WSRO, Ep1/11/15, fo. 301; LRO, 1D 41/4 Boxes 33/11 and 67/32. BCB 5, fo. 10v; B. H. Cunnington (ed.), Records of the County of Wilts: Being Extracts from the Quarter Sessions Great Rolls (Devizes, 1942), 68–70. On mocking rhymes see Fox, Oral and Literate Culture, ch. 8; M. Ingram, ‘Ridings, Rough Music and Mocking Rhymes in Early Modern England’, in B. Reay (ed.), Popular Culture in Early Modern England (1985). For women repeating rhymes: E. R. Brinkworth (ed.), The Archdeacon’s Court: Liber Actorum, 1584 (Oxfordshire Record Soc., 23–4, 1941–2), i. 12, 107; HMC, Various Collections, 1 (1901), 91; and composing them: W. J. Hardy and W. Le Hardy (eds.), Hertfordshire County Records (Hertford, 1905–57), v. 439; PRO, STAC 8/92/10; Emmison, Elizabethan Life: Morals, 53; Fox, Oral and Literate Culture, 305, 312. 46 The Notebook of Robert Doughty 1662–1665, ed. J. M. Rosenheim (Norfolk Record Soc., 54, 1989), 64. 47 LRO, 1D 41/13/34, fo. 105r–v; Emmison, Elizabethan Life: Morals, 155; CUL, EDR D2/7, fo. 221. 48 ‘News from Crutchet-Fryers’, Pepys Ballads, iv. 287. 45

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courtroom when questioned for the offence. Others smashed the windows of suspected bawdy houses. Alice Mustian of Salisbury erected an impromptu stage in her backyard in 1614, and presented a play on the adulterous affairs of her neighbours.49 A group of women at Wellow, Somerset, went further: seizing a scandalous neighbour, they exposed her private parts, washed them with soap and water, and ‘thrust her out of the company’ in a brutally symbolic ritual of humiliation, cleansing, and exclusion.50 It is easy to imagine the humiliating effects of persistent gossip in a small community, even without these shaming rituals. ‘Losing face’ was no small matter in a society dominated by face-to-face contacts. The consequences quickly became apparent as victims found themselves ‘hit in the teeth’ with taunts and jeers, and rendered ‘ridiculous’.51 One Leicestershire villager, describing a mocking rhyme sung in several alehouses in 1638 about a young bride-to-be, added that he had ‘heard divers neighbours scoff at her by reason thereof’. A London woman complained of being abused and hooted whenever she left her house.52 To respectable householders, laughter, jeers, and abuse were deeply hurtful, especially in the mouths of social inferiors. A Sussex villager vowed to spend twenty pounds on litigation, ‘rather than she would be laughed at’.53 Men could be equally sensitive. Richard Gray was mortified when he walked down a Sussex village street in 1624 and heard a woman call out from her doorway, ‘Yonder goes old Gray the whoremaster’.54 Several ballads on the theme of the seducer outwitted by his victim show him mortified as he becomes a public laughing stock. One tells how ‘The maids that lived within the town | Did laugh and jeer him basely’, until he fled in shame. Such tales were primarily fantasies for young women more often at the mercy of predatory men, but were not wholly unfounded. A northcountry diarist noted in 1718 that a man had been ‘hooted out of town’ over an attempt on a woman in Morpeth.55 It was not easy to survive unscathed in the face of public contempt or 49

Emmison, Elizabethan Life, 54; BCB 6, fo. 60v; Ingram, ‘Ridings’, 166. B. Capp, ‘Separate Domains? Women and Authority in Early Modern England’, in Griffiths, Fox, and Hindle (eds.), The Experience of Authority, 132. 51 LRO, 1D 41/4, Boxes 33/13 and Box 50/5. 52 Ibid., Box 20/43, 46. One version ran ‘I must be married on Friday, | I cannot be married before, | I must marry a limping knave | Because I am my uncle’s whore’. It was sung in villages straddling the Leics.–Derbyshire border. Cf. BCB 4, fo. 23v. 53 WSRO, Ep1/11/15, fos. 146v–147r; cf. Ep1/11/14, fo. 250; Ep1/11/15, fo. 251v; Ch. 5, above. 54 WSRO, Ep1/11/13, fos. 234, 255; cf. Ch. 6, above. 55 P. Fancy, This is call’d, Maids looke well about you [1655?]; ‘The Diary of the Rev. John Thomlinson’, in J. C. Hodgson (ed.), Six North Country Diaries (Surtees Soc., 118, 1910), 139. 50

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hostility. Some people were left psychologically scarred, like a Leicestershire woman described in 1691 as ‘extremely much dejected and impaired in her health’. A widower who strenuously denied fathering his maidservant’s child admitted that he was paying maintenance ‘to avoid the clamour and noise of the country’.56 Family relationships suffered too. A young man complained that a malicious story had ‘caused his father and mother to fall out with him’.57 Young people might find their marriage plans disrupted, as the prospective spouse or parents-in-law took fright. After a woman spread stories in 1625 about Joan Kirby, a Sussex villager, her former suitor ‘quite left her and gave her over’.58 Gossip bred distrust and violence between married couples, and sometimes total breakdown.59 Gossip could have economic consequences too. Tradesmen depended on moral as well as economic credit, and lost custom when either was forfeited. A North Yorkshire woman, waging a fierce campaign in 1685 to father a bastard child on a local grocer, vowed she would ‘torment [him] to eternity’, and did so to such effect that he turned to the quarter sessions in desperation, complaining that his business was suffering. A woman who burst into a crowded victualler’s house in Washington, Sussex, in 1621 and railed at his wife as a drunken whore, also achieved her goal. The incident inevitably bred talk and suspicion, and a witness testified later that ‘many . . . neighbours and guests that were wont to frequent her house do now forbear and refrain to come thither, fearing lest some discredit may happen to them thereby’.60 Respectable people had no wish to be compromised by association. Even servants were economically vulnerable to gossip, sometimes losing their place or being unable to find one. A witness described in 1714 how irresponsible alehouse talk that Elizabeth Burdett had miscarried of a bastard ‘has hindered her from several good services’.61 Poor families might be driven out of the district altogether, unable to survive without access to local networks of support and employment. And such exiles might find their reputation pursuing them. When parishioners at Sheriff’s Lench, Worcs., complained in 1619 against a violent scold as ‘not fit to dwell amongst any well disposed 56

LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 46/92; Ingram, Church Courts, 308–3; LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 20/80. LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 33/13. 58 WSRO, Ep1/11/14, fos. 10v–11r; LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 22/128–30; cf. Chs. 5–6, above. 59 WSRO, Ep1/11/8, fos. 96v–97r; LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 47/34; GL, MS 9189/2, fos. 74v–75r; CUL, EDR K4/13. 60 J. C. Atkinson (ed.), Quarter Sessions Records (North Riding Record Soc., 1884–92), vii. 81; WSRO, Ep1/11/13, fos. 133v–134r; cf. Chs. 5–6, above. 61 LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 55/84–5; 1D 41/4, Box 36/115; McIntosh, Controlling Misbehavior, 120–1. 57

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people’, they added that she had been driven out of three villages where she had formerly lived ‘through her wicked behaviour’. Her personal history was clearly known throughout the district.62 In street disputes too, it is not unusual to find speakers jeering that an adversary had been driven out of her former parish. ‘Thou hast no abiding place,’ a Cambridgeshire woman taunted her opponent in 1639, ‘and thy name was up before thou camest to Bottisham.’63 A London woman told Margaret Dudley bluntly in 1512, ‘I was never driven out of Ipswich for lying with a priest as thou wast.’ Rumour and gossip had wings even in early Tudor times.64

     Judgemental gossip thus bore directly on the lives and livelihoods of those targeted. They could be humiliated, marginalized, or even driven away, and women played a central role in this ‘politics of public opinion’. By generating a ‘common fame’, gossip might also trigger prosecution in the ecclesiastical or secular courts. In this process too women played an active role. Persistent gossip would inevitably reach the ears of the parish authorities. Women’s talk might soon become common knowledge, or their husbands might notify the parish officers. Many women reported offenders themselves, rather than leaving it to their husbands’ discretion. Oliver Evans of Ealing found himself presented for immorality in 1592 ‘by the accusation of certain women named in the presentment’. Joan Hicknell, who denied consorting with married men, was overborne by female neighbours who testified against her. The headborough of Stratford-le-Bow described in 1635 how he had heard of an alleged scandal from the women visiting his bakehouse, and had secured a warrant and gone to investigate.65 Very many of the offences reported by women were sexual, like these, or sex-related. Eight women gave information against a married woman in Hackney ‘vehemently suspected’ of infanticide, while several ‘substantial women’ in Stepney laid information in 1606 against one Joan Lawrence, accusing her of fathering a child on innocent men to extort money.66 But we also find women 62 Atkinson (ed.), Quarter Sessions Records, i. 305; LRO, 1D 41/13/37, fo. 152a; PRO, STAC 8/151/7. 63 CUL, EDR K4/31; LMA, DL/C231, fos. 3, 29v; Amussen, Ordered Society, 98. 64 GL, MS 9064/11, fo. 64. 65 GL, MS 9064/13, fo. 148v; BCB6, fo. 335; GL, MS 9065A/7, Cole v Osselbrooke, 1635, deposition of Henry Terry; cf. BCB7, fo. 319v; BCB5, fo. 438. 66 W. Le Hardy (ed.), County of Middlesex: Calendar to the Sessions Records,  (1935–41), i. 181; BCB 5, fo. 148.

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reporting a wide range of other offences. They were just as likely as men, for example, to report common scolds. It was five Westminster women who denounced Maudlin Tichon for scolding in 1611, as a result of which she was sentenced to be tied behind a boat and dragged across the Thames ‘according to the ancient custom of the city’.67 Three Somerset women reported a grave-robber in 1656; a Dorset widow laid information against a disorderly tippling house whose drunken revellers kept her awake at night; and a Norwich woman denounced an intruder stealing from a neighbour’s vegetable garden.68 Others reported antisocial neighbours like Joan Day, prosecuted in 1637 ‘for cozening and cheating divers people with rags instead of yarn’. Two Reading women denounced an outsider for keeping an unauthorized shop which probably posed a threat to their own livelihoods.69 Contemporaries appear to have felt no unease about this direct female role in the maintenance of law and order, and if the information led to a prosecution, it was of course the accuser, not her husband, who would give evidence in court. In the absence of a professional police force, the victims of crime were generally expected to take the initiative in the work of detection and prosecution, and women were as ready as men to identify suspected thieves and press the constable to search their homes. But it is clear that many felt a much wider sense of public responsibility, and were ready both to report suspicious behaviour and to badger parish officers into taking appropriate action. Early in 1594, for example, Thomasine Cooper of Cambridge knocked on the constable’s door at midnight, declaring she had seen ‘a knave and a whore in bed together’, and when he refused to stir, scolded him until he agreed to search the premises.70 Elizabeth Freeman of Melton Mowbray proved equally determined. Spying a couple committing adultery in a barn in April 1593, she promptly fetched two other women ‘to behold the same’, and then notified the churchwardens. Aware they might ignore her unsupported allegation, she had met their objection before bringing her news.71 Other women engaged in patient, sometimes prurient, detective work. In 1592 Katherine Dale of 67

W. H. Manchée, The Westminster City Fathers (the Burgess Court of Westminster) 1585–1901 (1924),

118. 68 E. H. Bates Harbin (ed.), Quarter Sessions Records for the County of Somerset (Somerset Record Soc., 23–4, 28, 34, 1907–19), iii. 299; The Casebook of Sir Francis Ashley JP, ed. J. H. Bettey (Dorset Record Soc., 7, 1981), 41–2; W. L. Sachse (ed.), Minutes of the Norwich Court of Mayoralty 1632–1635 (Norfolk Record Soc., 36, 1967), 108; cf. Ingram, ‘“Scolding Women”’. 69 BCB 8, fo. 101; J. M. Guilding (ed.), Reading Records: Diary of the Corporation (1886–96), iii. 56. 70 CUL, EDR D2/19, fos. 37v–40r; cf. Ingram, Church Courts, 307; Underdown, Fire from Heaven, 66. 71 LRO, 1D 41/4/590.

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Dullingham, Cambs., reported that a married neighbour had become pregnant while her husband was away, and to substantiate her claim ‘scored up the very weeks,days, hours and minutes since’. Three Leicester sleuths who suspected a liaison between two neighbours, in 1620, resolved to ‘dog’ the pair to obtain hard evidence, and eventually caught them together in a close, where the man had gone ostensibly to practise his bagpipes.72 In all these episodes the informants had no evident personal stake, and saw themselves as good citizens upholding the moral welfare of the community.73 Women also played an active role in the exposure of alleged witches. Recent studies have established that while trials were conducted within a male-controlled judicial system, women frequently played a prominent role in generating the climate of fear and suspicion that lay behind them. The proportion of female witnesses was far higher in witchcraft cases than other felonies, and increased over time, and women—often neighbours—played a crucial role by searching the alleged offender’s body for the devil’s marks. Moreover, as James Sharpe has observed, ‘many men giving evidence in witchcraft accusations simply repeated what their wives had told them’.74 Many of the accusations themselves originated over issues such as children’s illnesses or the denial of small favours, matters firmly within the female domain. Diane Purkiss has suggested they were useful fantasies ‘which enabled village women to negotiate the fears and anxieties of housekeeping and motherhood’.75 If witch-trials are impossible to divorce from the misogynistic culture of the period, they also represent another aspect of female social regulation, and female parish politics. Women knew how to appropriate the judicial machinery to pursue their own agenda.

72 CUL, EDR D2/19, fos. 5v–7v; LRO, 1D 41/4/1215; cf. Bates Harbin (eds.), Quarter Sessions Records for Somerset, iii. 293. 73 In other cases personal and public concerns overlapped. Alice Burton of Wisbech pressed the churchwardens to present a man who allegedly committed adultery with his wife’s sister, in his own house, as his distraught wife lay dying in another room. Burton declared ‘it was a shame such matters were suffered’, but her testimony shows she had also been a close friend of the deceased. CUL, EDR K5/54, 54a. 74 J. A. Sharpe, Instruments of Darkness: Witchcraft in England 1550–1750 (1996), 181; F. Valletta, Witchcraft, Magic and Superstition in England, 1640–1670 (Aldershot, 2000), 173–5. For a different view see C. Holmes, ‘Women: Witnesses and Witches’, Past and Present, 140 (1993). 75 D. Purkiss, ‘Women’s Stories of Witchcraft in Early Modern England: The House, the Body, the Child’, Gender and History, 7 (1995), 410 and passim; cf. Sharpe, Instruments, 185.

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    It would be wrong to see women’s intervention in neighbourhood affairs as merely coercive. Their networks were rooted in a culture of mutual support and protection, and intervention was also triggered by a wish to defend their friends and neighbours. Action to enforce communal values might itself be driven by a determination to relieve the victims of abuse, whether a betrayed spouse or bewitched neighbour. Dorcas Merne of Reading, assaulted by a man in 1627 while heavily pregnant, was able to inform the borough court that the truth of her allegations ‘shall be manifested by women’. Her friends had rallied round her.76 Friends sometimes took the initiative in such situations, acting as a group to make sure their allegations were taken seriously. We find five women prosecuting a London sailor in 1616 for beating a pregnant neighbour and causing her to miscarry. Eight women prosecuted some Holborn men who had carried a woman in labour into another parish (to free their own from a financial burden), with the result that her baby had died. When a Lewisham labourer’s wife assaulted a pregnant neighbour in 1652, with fatal consequences, seven women joined to press charges against her.77 Women’s traditional role in caring for the sick and dying also equipped them better than most men to judge whether a death might have been caused by ill-treatment or foul play. When Widow Goodspeed of Berkhamstead alleged in 1652 that a local woman had been murdered by her husband, magistrates responded by ordering an investigation.78 The authorities were usually reluctant to intervene over the death or injury of a servant, but here too women were more likely than men to speak out over beatings they regarded as wholly unacceptable. In 1608 a Southampton woman informed magistrates against a carpenter who had seriously injured his apprentice, a little boy, by kicking him in the genitals. Again, women usually joined together to lay such complaints, to strengthen their impact and perhaps for their own safety. Thus three Stepney ‘women of good repute’ joined in 1662 to accuse a victualler who had flogged his maid with ‘great knotted whipcords’, leaving her, they reported, ‘a lamentable spectacle to behold’.79 Women were also more likely to be familiar with the domestic background in such cases. When 76

Guilding (ed.), Reading Records, ii. 363. Le Hardy (ed.), Middlesex: Calendar,  iii. 175, 277; Cockburn (ed.), Calendar: Kent: 1649–1659 (1989), 117; cf. 102. 78 Hardy and Le Hardy (eds.), Hertfordshire County Records, v. 426; see also Ch. 3, above. 79 J. W. Horrocks (ed.), The Assembly Books of Southampton (Southampton Record Soc., 1917–25), ii. 98; J. C. Jeaffreson (ed.), Middlesex County Records (1886–92), iii. 318. 77

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Joan Bunche was tried in 1589 for kicking and beating to death her 10-year-old maid, neighbours could cite a long history of cruelty.80 Women frequently testified on behalf of battered wives in divorce cases, and gave evidence on the injuries of rape victims.81 The supportive role of friends is still more apparent in their readiness to defend and protect a neighbour’s good name. Historians have tended to focus more on insults and defamation than on bystanders’ responses. Very often, as we have seen, they reacted angrily, chiding the speaker and demanding to hear no more. If the victim was respected and the evidence weak, such vigorous support was often sufficient to stifle gossip. In some cases, friends mounted an immediate counter-attack. In the spring of 1639 Tabitha Hunt of Botcheston, Leics., gave birth to her eleventh child prematurely, and as the ‘goodwives’ carried it to the church to be christened, one Simon Reade jeered that it was a bastard conceived while her husband was in Ireland. The women rallied angrily, telling him to hold his tongue; one retorted that she would be glad to see Reade with a child as much like its parents, and another declared herself ready to bear witness against him. They told Tabitha what had happened, and when she sued for defamation six testified strongly in her support.82 If rumours persisted and the victim was eventually presented on a ‘public fame’, friends might still be able to rescue her by swearing in court to her good character, through the process of compurgation. A circle of supportive friends was an invaluable asset in a system that rested heavily on public opinion and established reputation. Neighbours faced a more complex predicament when both parties in a defamation suit were their friends or acquaintances. In such a situation, many proved reluctant to take sides and urged reconciliation, even after proceedings were under way. Some used their own depositions to nudge the parties towards a settlement, by adopting a relatively neutral stance. They might assure the court that no malice had been intended and no harm done to the plaintiff’s good name. Occasionally we find them trying to restore harmony by blaming the dispute on a meddling outsider. In a suit between two poor villagers in Loddington, Leics., in 1639, witnesses for the plaintiff (seven women and the vicar) testified that the suit had been provoked by an irresponsible gentlewoman in another parish. No credit should be given to her stories, they agreed, for she was ‘a defamer of her neighbours’, ‘a busy body’, ‘meddling’, ‘distracted’, and 80

Cockburn (ed.), Calendar: Surrey: Elizabeth (1980), 337. See e.g. LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 8/1–11 (divorce); WSRO, Ep1/11/9, fos. 266r–269v (rape). 82 LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 25/60–1. 81

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‘distempered’. Insisting that the plaintiff’s good name had remained intact, they clearly hoped to encourage a peaceful resolution.83 We can also find gossips taking collective action to avert a miscarriage of justice. When Goodwife Taylor of Saffron Walden was presented in 1631 for refusing to receive the communion, probably on the information of the minister or churchwardens, twenty-five local women petitioned in her defence. Assuring the judge of her conformity, they explained that she was simply unable to reach the communion table in its new position upon some ‘lofty and bleak stairs’. If the judge directed it to be moved to a more ‘convenient’ place, they added, every pregnant woman in the town would ‘have good cause to pray for his worship’.84 In another case, in 1622, Sussex villagers felt the wrong person was being prosecuted for defamation, and attempted to put the matter right. The accused, Margaret Squire, had merely repeated Susan Vickers’s allegation that the plaintiff was a drunkard, so a group of women assembled one day to see if Vickers would acknowledge as much before witnesses, ‘thinking thereby’, as one put it, ‘to discharge Margaret Squire from any trouble that might happen to her’; Vickers confirmed that the story had begun with her, and stood by it.85 In the far more serious context of witchcraft allegations, women similarly played a protective as well as persecuting role. Even those seeking to bring a witch to justice would have explained their actions primarily in terms of protecting her defenceless victims. When they believed the supposed witch was herself the victim of malicious accusations, they could be equally assiduous in shielding her from prosecution. The fact that suspicions often lingered for years without leading to a formal charge suggests that friends were frequently able to prevent the development of a local consensus. If a formal allegation did materialize, support by respected women in the parish might still succeed in averting prosecution. Margaret Graeme of Pulham, Norfolk, accused of witchcraft in 1590 by one Robert Cole and his son, was stoutly defended by three women who had known her for twenty-six years and testified to her good character, support which carried all the more weight as they were the sisters of Cole’s own wife. The vicar and seven leading parishioners then petitioned for proceedings to be halted. Men played the decisive role on the public stage, but their assessment had been shaped by the testimony 83

LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 22/23–4. PRO, SP16/205/98 (CSPD 1631–3, 231). For another striking case see A. Flather, ‘The Gendering of Space in Early Modern Essex, c.1580 to 1720’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Essex, 2002), 255-6. 85 WSRO, Ep1/11/13, fos. 171–3, 184–5. 84

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of key women in the community.86 A majority of those charges which did reach the courts failed to produce a conviction, and support for the accused from neighbours was probably a significant factor. Some of those accused of witchcraft even felt able to sue for defamation, confident that friends would rally to their support.87 A few fought back still more vigorously. When Anne Godfrey, a yeoman’s wife in West Ham, accused Elizabeth Edlyn of bewitching her, in 1621, Edlyn turned the tables with dramatic effect, prosecuting her at Chelmsford assizes for seeking to take away her life by false allegations. Godfrey was condemned to sit in the stocks at Chelmsford and Barking, and consigned to the house of correction.88 There could be no stronger testimony to the value of friends and reputation; without them, Edlyn might well have been hanged. Finally, there were circumstances in which women offered physical protection as well as verbal support, and the skimmington at Quemerford in Wiltshire in 1618 offers a striking illustration. It culminated in the ritual humiliation of Thomas and Agnes Wells by a terrifying crowd of over 300 men from nearby Calne who broke into their house, beat and trampled Agnes, and dragged her away to the cucking-stool. But when a small group of young men from Calne had entered the village earlier in the day, beating a drum menacingly, the village women had rallied to Agnes’s defence, attacking the intruders, breaking their drum, and driving them away. They were helpless against the huge numbers who appeared later in the day, but their stand shows that the episode was no straightforward punishment of a couple for flouting communal values; it involved intercommunal rivalry, gender solidarity, and a determination by local women to defend the good name of their neighbour and their community.89 In other circumstances too, as we will see, women proved ready to use force to defend their community and its interests.

HMC, Various Collections,  (1903), 243–4. WSRO, Ep1/11/2, fos. 27v–28v; Ep1/11/8, fos. 73v–75r; Ep1/11/9, fos. 84v–90v; Hardy and Le Hardy (eds.), Hertfordshire County Records, vi. 189; P. Rushton, ‘Women, Witchcraft, and Slander in Early Modern England: Cases from the Church Courts of Durham, 1560–1675’, Northern History, 18 (1982), 126–7; Gowing, Domestic Dangers, 64, 104; Ingram, Church Courts, 300. 88 Cockburn (ed.), Calendar: Essex: James I (1982), 251; M. Gaskill, Crime and Mentalities in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2000), 50–4. 89 B. H. Cunnington, ‘“A skimmington” in 1618’, Folklore, 41 (1930), 287–90; B. Reay, Popular Cultures in Early Modern England 1550–1750 (1998), 158–60. 86 87

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  :    Once politics is redefined to include parish affairs, the role of ordinary people of both sexes becomes at onceapparent.There remains, of course, a huge gulf between the parish politics of gossip, informal pressure, and presentment and the world of high politics, from which women (like most men) were formally excluded. Only in the exceptional circumstances of the civil wars do we find women participating here on a significant scale, through petitions, demonstrations, and pamphleteering, and in the new religious movements which sprang up. The origins of this eruption remain elusive. No doubt much can be explained by the wartime conditions, just as the twentieth-century world wars were to transform female roles and expectations. Many women were probably influenced by the novel concepts of citizenship being voiced by men who were themselves of modest origins and status; radical men and women usually moved in the same circles. Religion too played a crucial role, providing the language through which radical political ideas were generally formulated and expressed. But before concluding that the midcentury phenomenon lacked any deeper roots, we should look for signs of political interest and public participation, of whatever kind, in more normal times. And once we do, it becomes apparent that women were never wholly confined to the informal politics of gossip and local public opinion. Many had some experience of direct contact with the world of local public administration, and a small minority found quasi-formal if modest roles in public life. Others were ready to take direct action to protect communal interests, while some voiced strong opinions over national issues. The remainder of this chapter focuses on these themes, and by widening our understanding of women’s traditional public roles it may throw some light on their remarkable activities in the revolutionary era. There is no need here for more than a brief summary of women’s public and political role in the 1640s and 1650s.90 As we would expect, it was often related to the immediate preservation of their families and communities, and driven by circumstance. All hands were needed in a town under siege, so it is not surprising to find women labouring on defence works and even creating their own organizations for the purpose. A Coventry chronicler has left a vivid description of companies of 90 For recent overviews see Mendelson and Crawford, Women, 394–418; S. Davies, Unbridled Spirits: Women of the English Revolution: 1640–1660 (1998).

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women working on the town’s defences in 1643: ‘being called together by a drum they marched together into the park with mattocks and spades, being led by one goodwife Adderley with a Hercules club on her shoulder, and drew off from work by one Mary Herbert with a pistol in her hand that she shot off when they were dismissed’. Another troop of Coventry women, mustered by the mayoress, pursued and captured the baggage train of a local royalist commander.91 Women on both sides played an active, sometimes heroic role in the defence of towns under siege. Even more striking was the sudden emergence of female petitioning and demonstrations. We find women petitioning parliament over fears of a Catholic massacre, following the Irish rebellion in 1641, demanding religious reform in 1642, and clamouring for peace in 1643. Women Levellers were active in the late 1640s and early 1650s, and an estimated 7,000 Quaker women petitioned against tithes in 1659. There were provincial echoes too, rather less familiar: a hundred angry women confronted the king at York in May 1642 over local grievances, and ‘many women of the best rank’ took advantage of his brief stay in Leicester in July that year to complain about the sheriff.92 Many of the early petitions were concerned with the economic plight of the petitioners and their communities. A petition of 1641 from ‘divers gentle-women, citizens’ wives, tradesmen’s wives’ and others from London and Westminster begged the queen to return to the capital, pleading that their livelihood ‘depends wholly upon the commerce we receive by occasion of your Majesty’s retinue, and the resort of the nobility and gentry to your royal palace, which is the life of trade’. A petition for peace in August 1643, presented by 2,000–3,000 women from London and the suburbs, ‘most of them of the inferior sort’, urged Parliament to reach a speedy accommodation in the interests of trade and prosperity.93 The modest, defensive language of most petitions shows that women understood the novelty of their proceedings, and the suspicions they aroused. Yet the very act of petitioning asserted their right to a voice in matters of public and national concern, and some petitions voiced an embryonic ideology of female citizenship by claiming ‘a very equal share 91 F. B. Burbidge, Old Coventry and Lady Godiva (Birmingham, [1952]), 243; C. PhythianAdams, The Desolation of a City (1979), 273 n; The Malignant Conventicle (1643), 5. 92 P. Higgins, ‘The Reactions of Women, with Special Reference to Women Petitioners’, in B. Manning (ed.), Politics, Religion and the English Civil War (1973); F. P. Verney (ed.), The Memoirs of the Verney Family during the Civil War (1970 edn.), ii. 86; Truths from Leicester and Nottingham (1642). 93 To the Queens most Excellent Maiestie. The Humble Petition of divers Gentle-women [1641]: Mercurius Civicus, 11 (3–11 Aug. 1643), 87–8; Higgins, ‘Reactions’, 188–98.

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and interest with men in the Commonwealth’.94 The politicization of plebeian men in the capital provided a powerful stimulus, while paradoxically the contempt MPs showed even the most humble female petitioners pushed them to develop their own theories of justification. Leveller women, petitioning in 1649, adopted a far more acerbic tone than earlier petitioners.95 It is also noticeable that contemporary reports (admittedly hostile) indicate that women delivering petitions and frustrated by the rebuffs they encountered could be far more assertive than the petitions themselves. During the delivery of a peace petition in 1643 the mood quickly turned violent, with petitioners stoning two troops of horse sent to disperse them, and threatening to have their blood. Among those arrested, allegedly, was one virago ‘with an old rusty blade by her side’.96 The Royale Virgine, a declaration by London women in February 1660 calling for an unconditional Stuart restoration, suggests how far even some conservative women had been politicized. In preferring a declaration to a petition they were implicitly asserting that women’s views carried weight in their own right. In rejecting the current regime as illegitimate, they had been driven to adopt a radical position wholly at variance with their fundamentally conservative beliefs.97

     The drama of the revolutionary period has tended to distract attention from other forms of female participation in public affairs, before and after these decades. Some women had taken a lively interest in national issues long before 1640. Many more participated in public or political life at local level, usually over minor and non-ideological issues which affected their lives more directly. These two strands of political activity provide a broader context which helps to explain the speed of women’s irruption on to the public stage in 1640. The exclusion of women from political life rested on custom rather than law. Many propertied widows and spinsters qualified for the right to vote in parliamentary elections, and a few succeeded in exercising it 94 A. M. McEntee, ‘ “The [Un]Civill-Sisterhood of Oranges and Lemons”: Female Petitions and Demonstrators, 1642–1653’, in J. Holstun (ed.), Pamphlet Wars: Prose in the English Revolution (1992), 92, 94, 98. 95 To the Supreme Authority, the Commons. The Petition of divers Women, . . . affecters and approvers of the Petition of Sept. 11, 1648 (1649) in A. S. P. Woodhouse (ed.), Puritanism and Liberty (1974), 367–9; Higgins, ‘Reactions’, 200–6; McEntee, ‘[Un]Civill-Sisterhood’, 96–105. 96 Higgins, ‘Reactions’, 190–6; Mercurius Civicus, 11 (3–11 Aug.1643), 88. 97 The Royale Virgine; Or, The Declaration of Several Maydens in and about the once Honourable City of London (1660).

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up to the mid-seventeenth century. In some areas women were asked to take the Protestation against popery in 1641, and the fact that officials differed in their interpretation of Parliament’s directions underlines the ambiguities of women’s political status.98 As some contemporaries recognized, women’s formal exclusion from political life did not mean they were necessarily ignorant, indifferent, or indeed insignificant. A forceful wife might play an influential role behind the scenes. Lady Macbeth finds a parallel of sorts in Margaret Cheyne, a Yorkshire woman burned in 1537 for persuading her husband to plot rebellion, and more clearly in the countess of Northumberland, who steeled her husband in the Northern rebellion of 1569, ‘being the stouter of the two’, rode with the rebel army, and pursued a long career of political intrigue in exile.99 Contemporaries knew that similar personal dynamics could be found in the mundane world of local politics. William Crompton, a preacher in Barnstaple, felt obliged in 1632 to defend women’s exclusion from public office, at which ‘some unwisely-ambitious, have repiningly murmured’— a rare glimpse of female aspirations for a place in public life even before the civil wars. William Gouge claimed that ‘more petitions and suits are made to the wives of magistrates in the cases of justice than to the magistrates themselves: and the favour of their wives is more esteemed than their own’. All too often, he thought, local magistrates were no more than ‘the mouths and instruments of their wives, in so much as among the common people the title of their places and offices is given to their wives’.100 Gouge was exaggerating, but it is unlikely that the influence of a forceful wife ‘behind the scenes’ would long remain secret. Many ordinary women had a much broader political awareness. Mingling with men in the streets and markets, they naturally picked up news and rumours of major events. We hear, for example, of London women panicking in 1599 at reports of a Spanish landing in the Isle of a Wight. Edward Thursby, arriving home from London in 1639, was happy to report the latest news of the Scottish crisis to ‘the chief women’ of his Essex parish, who happened to be visiting his wife.101 When we turn to court records, we find some women of very humble status holding strong 98

Mendelson and Crawford, Women, 396–9. S. L. Jansen, Dangerous Talk and Strange Behaviour: Women and Popular Resistance to the Reforms of Henry VIII (Basingstoke, 1996), chs. 1–2; A. Fletcher and D. MacCulloch, Tudor Rebellions (4th edn., 1997), 105. 100 W. Crompton, A Wedding-Ring Fitted to the Finger (1632), 11; W. Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties (1622), 356. 101 The Letters of John Chamberlain, ed. N. E. McClure (Philadelphia, 1939), i. 81; Freist, Governed by Opinion, 279; cf. A. Wood, Riot, Rebellion and Popular Politics in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, 2001), 178. 99

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views on the political issues of the day, and ready to articulate them. A steady trickle were prosecuted for seditious talk from the 1530s onwards, accused of denouncing government policies, commenting on the succession, or attacking the established church.102 Such evidence is hard to evaluate, but it indicates some degree of female politicization long before the civil wars. Women had clearly been discussing public issues both among themselves and with men, while others had felt it their duty to report what they had heard.103 In some cases, women’s political views reflected their gendered experience and assumptions. Reports of their sympathy for Catherine of Aragon suggest a natural resentment against any husband looking to replace an ageing wife. Mary Cleere of Ingatestone, Essex, was burned for treason in 1577 after pronouncing Elizabeth a bastard and no rightful queen. Joan Lyster of Cobham thought that Elizabeth, as a woman, ‘ought not to be governor of the realm’, and was convinced she had been led astray by her evil counsellors. Some women spoke in the same idiom they used against scandalous neighbours, damning the queen as a whore. An Essex widow claimed that Elizabeth had borne several children by Robert Dudley, and accused the couple of infanticide, alleging that Dudley had burned their newborn infants in the fireplace.104 Others employed the bloodier language of sedition. Cecily Burche, speaking in 1589, hoped to see blood running in the streets and another prince on the throne. Joan Bottyng, a Kent collier’s wife, was hanged in 1599 after calling for social revolution and praying for the queen’s death. These were hungry years, and Bottyng declared that nothing would mend until the poor were ready to cut rich men’s throats, a work she was ready to assist. A few years later we find another woman dismissing James I as a foreigner who owed his crown to the English, but had failed to give them justice.105 A generation later Alice Lee looked 102 Jansen, Dangerous Talk, esp. ch. 5; Le Hardy (ed.), Middlesex: Calendar,  i. 193; Jeaffreson (ed.), Middlesex County Records, iii. 103, 119, 126–7, 175–7, 203, 205, 243, 252, 259, 268, 271–2, 303–5, 327, 328, iv. 262; W. J. Hardy (ed.), Middlesex County Records: Calendar of the Sessions Books 1689 to 1709 (1905), 139, 175; J. H. E. Bennett and J. C. Dewhurst (eds.), Quarter Sessions Records, with other records . . . for the county palatine of Chester, 1559–1760 (Record Soc. for Lancashire and Cheshire, 94, 1940), 162; K. Lindley, ‘London and Popular Freedom in the 1640s’, in R. C. Richardson and G. M. Ridden (eds.), Freedom and the English Revolution (Manchester, 1986), 133–7. 103 Jansen, Dangerous Talk, ch. 5; J. Raine (ed.), Depositions from the Castle of York (Surtees Soc., 40, 1861), 118–19, 238, 278; M. Bennett, The Civil Wars Experienced: Britain and Ireland, 1638–1661 (2000), 107–8; Freist, Governed by Opinion, ch. 5, pp. 289–90, 293–8; id., ‘“The king’s crown is the whore of Babylon”: Politics, Gender and Communication in Mid-Seventeenth-Century England’, Gender and History, 7 (1995). 104 Jansen, Dangerous Talk, ch. 5; Cockburn (ed.), Calendar: Essex: Elizabeth (1978), 157, 355; id. (ed.), Calendar: Surrey: Elizabeth, 276, 282. 105 Cockburn (ed.), Calendar: Surrey: Elizabeth, 345; id. (ed.), Calendar: Kent: Elizabeth (1979), 437; id., Calendar: Kent: James I (1980) 26; cf. Jansen, Dangerous Talk, 81.

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forward as eagerly as many men to the downfall of the hated royal favourite, Buckingham.106 Outbursts reached a peak during the civil-war era, with women of different political persuasions heaping abuse on the king, parliament, or Cromwell.107 By no means all welcomed the king’s return, and seditious talk continued after the Restoration. A Newcastle woman demanded to know if there was no Englishman to wear the crown, instead of a profane Scot loved by none but whores and whoremongers. ‘God’s curse light on him,’ she railed. ‘I hope to see his bones hanged at a horse tail, and the dogs run through his puddings [entrails].’ A London cordwainer’s wife called him a bastard, and another woman insisted that Charles I had been lawfully executed and that his son would survive for less than a year. Jane Blunstone pronounced Henrietta Maria, the queen mother, ‘the great whore of Babylon’.108 A generation later we find Deborah Hawkins vowing to die rather than see James II crowned: ‘He is no king but an elective king, and if there were wars as I believe there will be, I will put on breeches myself to fight for the duke of Monmouth.’ A Deptford labourer’s wife, who also supported Monmouth, hoped he would beat the king, and warned loyalist neighbours that ‘if he doth, I will hang twenty of you’.109 At the very end of our period we can find some equally militant Jacobite women, one of them vowing to ‘stick’ King George if ever she met him.110 Women of humble status can thus be found, throughout the period, speaking out on major political issues with strong views that covered the entire political spectrum. These outbursts, forming a continuous stream throughout the period, suggest that the explosion of women’s political activity in the midseventeenth century had roots in an older if largely invisible tradition of interest and awareness. It would be rash, of course, to treat seditious words as in any way typical of women’s thinking, either in content or intensity. Many women probably took little interest in such matters. Many others doubtless held conventional views, perhaps as strongly as the militants. That would explain how seditious words came to the 106

Jeaffreson (ed.), Middlesex County Records, ii. 167. Lindley, ‘London and Popular Freedom’, 133–7; Jeaffreson (ed.), Middlesex County Records, vol. iii, passim; Raine (ed.), Depositions from the Castle of York, 67. 108 Raine (ed.), Depositions from the Castle of York, 83 and n.; Jeaffreson (ed.), Middlesex County Records, iii. 303–5, 309, 327, 328; T. Harris, London Crowds in the Reign of Charles II (Cambridge, 1987), 193 n. 109 Jeaffreson (ed.), Middlesex County Records, iv. 285; Cockburn (ed.), Calendar: Kent: Charles II 1676–1688 (1997), 237; Raine (ed.), Depositions from the Castle of York, 278. 110 N. Rogers, Crowds, Culture and Politics in Georgian Britain (Oxford, 1998), 215; cf. 35, 55, 221; Bennett and Dewhurst (ed.), Quarter Sessions Records . . . of Chester, 205. 107

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authorities’ attention, for women needed some level of political engagement in order to feel any obligation to report them. Two London women who were scandalized to hear a man boasting of his part in the king’s execution on the very day it occurred, waited eleven years until the Restoration for an opportunity to denounce him.111 Collectively, the prosecutions confirm what we might have expected: that women, living alongside men, absorbed some knowledge of political issues, discussed them, and in some instances developed strong opinions of their own.112 The proportion from London and its environs probably reflects a higher level of politicization among ordinary men and women alike, as well as the authorities’ sensitivity. A tradition of political awareness and engagement also helps to explain the ability of the female pamphleteers of the 1640s and later, across the whole political spectrum, to understand and debate the main constitutional issues that divided male writers.113

    We find a very different political tradition in women’s routine participation in public life at local level. This took a surprising variety of forms. In a few places, they were able to engage in public affairs in a formal capacity. At St Peter’s, Cornhill, in London, which had an open vestry, eight women joined male parishioners in voting for a new minister in 1644.114 Some women held minor parish offices. In a few parishes they were appointed to major positions such as churchwarden or overseer, and though they rarely served in person, those serving by proxy still carried some responsibility for the proper discharge of the office. Anne Rolfe, a Wiltshire widow and ‘tithingwoman’, was listed among a group of officials fined in 1582 for failing to punish vagrants. By contrast, Mrs Dukes, who apparently served in person as sexton of St Augustine’s, Watling Street, in the early 1700s, received an annual bonus ‘for extraordinary service’.115 Other women held salaried civic positions. Sarah 111 CSPD, 1660–1661, 67; Raine (ed.), Depositions from the Castle of York, 118–19. Edward Matthews, an Epsom painter, was convicted of seditious words in 1684 on the testimony of two women, who said he had predicted the death of Charles II and vowed to fight against James if he ascended the throne. Had they come forward within six months, he would have been tried for treason. A True Account of the Proceedings . . . at the Lent Assize . . . in Southwark (1684), 2. 112 For similar conclusions see Jansen, Dangerous Talk, passim, and Freist, Governed by Opinion, 278–98. 113 L. G. Schwoerer, ‘Women’s Public Political Voice in England: 1640–1740’, in Hilda Smith (ed.), Women Writers and the Early Modern British Political Tradition (Cambridge, 1998). 114 GL, MS 4165/1, fo. 274. 115 H. C. Johnson (ed.), Wiltshire County Records: Minutes of Proceedings in Sessions 1563 and 1574 to 1592 (Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Record Soc., 4, 1949), 72; GL, MS 635/1, 200,

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Cave was appointed keeper of the house of correction at Hertford in 1645, in succession to her late husband, while two widows petitioned in 1660 to succeed their husbands as postmasters of St Albans and Waltham.116 At a humbler level, it was standard practice in Tudor and Stuart Liverpool for a woman to hold one of the two positions of ‘boardsetter’, responsible for regulating the market stalls.117 At Norwich, Christian Nickolls, a married woman, was appointed in 1630 to provide work for the poor in the workhouse, at 4s. a week. Women were frequently employed by borough councils as matrons, nurses, keepers, or cleaners, and sometimes as healers.118 We can find female teachers similarly employed, usually teaching practical skills to poor and orphaned children. Norwich provided for ‘a knitting schooldame’ in every parish in 1630, while women were appointed to teach girls to spin and knit in the Dorchester Hospital, and one was hired to teach reading to young boys. Such menial employments were hardly political, of course, for they conferred no status or authority; but as Diane Willen has argued, civic practice repeatedly undermined the principle that women were wholly excluded from the public sphere.119 Many other women had direct experience of local councils and courts by appearing before them in a wholly personal capacity. They came to put forward proposals, answer complaints, and strike deals on their husbands’ behalf, or their own. Such women enjoyed no political status, but their participation in the routine business of local authorities afforded them some familiarity with public and political procedures. Thus a brewer’s wife appeared before Southampton magistrates in 1609, offering to take full responsibility for an orphaned baby in return for the council licensing her husband to sell beer in the town. The council accepted the deal. Joseph Coller’s wife appeared before Norwich magistrates in 1631 to complain that the landlord of a house she and her husband had rented 216; Mendelson and Crawford, Women, 56–8; S. Hindle, ‘The Political Culture of the Middling Sorts in English Rural Communities, c.1550–1700’, in T. Harris (ed.), The Politics of the Excluded, c.1550–1850 (Basingstoke, 2001), 134–5. 116 Hardy and Le Hardy (eds.), Hertfordshire County Records, v. 349; CSPD 1660–1661, 98, 100; Mendelson and Crawford, Women, 338. 117 J. A. Twemlow (ed.), Liverpool Town Books, ii. 1571–1603 (Liverpool, 1935), 59, 165, 217 and passim; M. Power (ed.), Liverpool Town Books 1649–1671 (Record Soc. of Lancashire and Cheshire, 136, 1999), 34, 47, 61, 75 and passim. 118 W. L. Sachse (ed.), Minutes of the Norwich Court of Mayoralty 1630–1631 (Norfolk Record Soc., 15, 1942), 109; Mendelson and Crawford, Women, 338–41; Underdown, Fire from Heaven, 224. 119 D. Willen, ‘Women in the Public Sphere in Early Modern England: The Case of the Urban Working Poor’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 9 (1988), 567, 575, and passim; Sachse (ed.), Minutes of the Norwich Court of Mayoralty 1630–1631, 62; Underdown, Fire from Heaven, 110–11, 220, 225–6, 247; GL, MS 4165/1, 15, 125; GL, MS 9680, fo. 71.

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was denying possession, and secured a court order in their favour. Magdalen Duke waited on the mayor of Liverpool in 1671 to ask permission for her husband to dig marl on Liverpool heath, to improve an enclosure he already held from the council. Though married women were barred from entering contracts, she agreed in his name to pay whatever sum the council thought fit, and set her mark to witness the undertaking. Such episodes were commonplace, and apparently aroused no disquiet.120 Other women appeared on the public stage on their own account. Spinsters and widows sometimes rented property from borough corporations, and the better-off might loan them money. In 1638 we find Mary Frost of St Alphage, London, a spinster, lending money to the parish in return for a life annuity, in a deal agreed with the churchwardens and formally endorsed by the vestry. Amy Erickson has also drawn our attention to the huge numbers of widows acting as executrices for their late husbands, and dealing with a range of creditors, debtors, and officials. Such appointments testified to a widespread confidence that widows would possess the ability to discharge such a responsibility.121 Women of modest status might appear on the public stage in several other contexts, promoting or protecting their own interests. Nurse Archer approached the churchwardens of St Augustine’s, Watling Street, in 1714, offering a deal whereby she would take and provide for a young orphan for £3, indemnifying the parish against any further claims; the officers put her proposal to the vestry, which accepted it.122 Other women came forward to report breaches of local regulations. Widow Ferris of Reading, who complained in 1627 that her husband’s former apprentice had set up a shop without serving his full term, was clearly concerned at the potential threat to her own livelihood. A roper’s widow, also petitioning against an interloper, warned that her family would be left destitute if he was allowed to steal her customers. She was playing on the helplessness of a widow with small children while simultaneously appealing to the council’s economic self-interest.123 Most women canvassing local officials belonged to the ‘middling sort’, 120 Horrocks (ed.), Assembly Books of Southampton, ii. 65; Sachse (ed.), Minutes of the Norwich Court of Mayoralty 1630–1631, 224; Power (ed.), Liverpool Town Books, 247. Cf. F. G. Emmison (ed.), Early Essex Town Meetings: Braintree, 1619–1636; Finchingfield, 1626–1634 (1970), 18. 121 GL, MS 1431/2, fo. 157; on women and moneylending see B. A. Holderness, ‘Widows in Pre-Industrial Society: An Essay upon their Economic Functions’, in R. M. Smith (ed.), Land, Kinship and Lifecycle (Cambridge, 1984); A. L. Erickson, Women and Property in Early Modern England (1993), 156–61. For women leasing property see e.g. E. I. Fripp (ed.), Minutes and Accounts of the Corporation of Stratford-upon-Avon (Dugdale Society, 1922–9), i. 111–15. 122 GL, MS 635, fo. 227. 123 Guilding (ed.), Reading Records, ii. 339, iii. 56; LRO, BR II/18/31/407.

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as we would expect. But even the poor did not always appear as humble and helpless supplicants, sometimes demonstrating considerable initiative in their dealings with authority. If parish overseers ignored their pleas for relief, they might appeal over their heads to the county magistrates, accusing the overseers of neglect or of flouting the magistrates’ orders.124 More striking is to find pauper women bargaining with officials, rather than simply pleading for help. Goodwife Watson struck a deal with the vestry of St Alphage, London Wall, in 1661, by which the parish agreed to take care of two of her children in return for her undertaking to leave with her third and free it of any further responsibility. The bargain was agreed on Watson’s bare word, for she had nothing to offer as security. The parish officers were directed to negotiate with another woman, who had been discharged from hospital as incurable, and offer up to 30s. to persuade her to depart.125 Many of the petitioners begging for loans or small grants were careful to present their case in terms of mutual benefit, urging that the parish would be freeing itself from any further charge on the poor rates. The officers of St Bride’s, Fleet Street, handled several requests for money to buy decent clothes for a son or daughter, who, the petitioners promised, could then be apprenticed and would no longer burden the parish. The penniless widow of a former parish officer begged for 20s., pledging to ‘employ it in her trade thereby to maintain herself’, and so free the parish from any need to support her. Others asked for money to fund a lawsuit to recover property, or to cover the costs of joining kin in the country or Ireland. Hannah Hix, destitute because her husband was in prison, begged the vestry to mediate to secure his release, which would benefit ratepayers as well as herself.126 In St Dunstan’s in the West we find Widow Staples asking for a loan of 20s. ‘to put her into a way of trade’, and others requesting advances to pay their rent, get out of prison, or redeem clothes from pawnbrokers; in each case they held out the prospect of long-term benefits for the parish in return.127 A few bolder or desperate individuals negotiated with threats instead of promises, though such tactics were far more likely to backfire. In 1687 Mary Ward of Leamington threatened to run away and abandon her children unless she received help, and her gamble appears to have succeeded; though she was dispatched to the house of correction, the overseers were summoned and ordered to provide for her needs. Anne 124 See e.g. G. A. Chinnery (ed.), Records of the Borough of Leicester, vii. Judicial and Allied Records 1689–1835 (Leicester, 1974), 49–50, 54–6; cf. Hindle, ‘Exhortation and Entitlement’, 114–15. 125 GL, MS 1431/2, fo. 278v. 126 GL, MS 6554/1, fos. 38v, 129v, 137, 160, 164, 165v, 173v, 175, 200, 201v, 206, 222v, 238v. 127 GL, MS 3016/1, 320, 349, 393, 520, 532, 556.

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Willies, a Limehouse widow, trod more carefully. Sentenced to perform penance in 1629 for bearing an illegitimate child, she begged for a commutation, and neighbours warned that she looked after two orphans for the parish, at a very cheap rate, and that if made to perform the penance ‘she would go away and leave the said children to the parish’. The judge agreed to commute it. Joan Cartwright of Wigston Magna was more blunt. When the churchwardens presented her for adultery in 1642, they warned that ‘Joan sayeth that if she be brought into the court for this she will bring in many others besides.’ Whether through this threat or the approach of civil war, the case appears to have proceeded no further.128 This is a poorly documented aspect of parish politics, but the fragmentary evidence reminds us that even the poor might be conscious of possessing some leverage, and ready to exploit it. Attempts to bargain with parish officers were probably far more common than the few cases that have found their way into the written record.

   More respectable women were sometimes drawn into public affairs in a semi-formal capacity. Scholars have long recognized the significance of the ‘juries of matrons’ empanelled to settle matters where propriety demanded a female resolution, giving women some part in the judicial process. Medical historians have similarly recognized the importance of the licensed midwife, who played a crucial role in women’s welfare at the most dangerous juncture of their lives. Neither female juries nor midwives are usually considered in the context of women’s public and political activity, but both played a significant role, and may have encouraged a wider sense of female citizenship, rights, and responsibilities. The most common function of the female jury was to ascertain whether a convicted felon was pregnant, which would secure a reprieve and perhaps a commutation of the death sentence. In such circumstances a jury of respectable matrons would be sworn to examine her for signs of pregnancy, especially the presence of breast milk. Such juries afforded women a temporary position of considerable authority and responsibility, with power over life and death.129 Smaller groups, acting at the request of magistrates or parish officers, might be asked to examine a 128 WRO, CR103, 16; GL, MS 9064/18, fos. 185v–186r; LRO, 1D 41/13/65, fo. 297v; Hindle, ‘Exhortation and Entitlement’, 114–16. 129 J. C. Oldham, ‘On Pleading the Belly: A History of the Jury of Matrons’, Criminal Justice History, 6 (1985); J. S. Cockburn (ed.), A Calendar of Assize Records: Introduction (1985), 121–3.

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suspected witch, searching for blemishes that could be the ‘marks’ where the devil’s familiars had suckled. Such searches, originally informal, achieved official recognition as part of the judicial process from the 1630s. Here too, the participants carried a heavy responsibility, for their view on a growth or blemish might spell the difference between acquittal and hanging. On 21 November 1649 four Leicester women deposed that they had searched ‘Anne Chettle, suspected to be a witch, and say they have diligently searched the said Anne Chettle from the crown of the head to the sole of the foot, and all secret parts, and find her to be clear from any such suspicion as far as they can find’. Anne was subsequently acquitted at her trial at Leicester Assizes.130 Female juries gave women an important if circumscribed role in the judicial process. What makes them of wider significance is that other married women and widows sometimes took it upon themselves to establish informal bodies to investigate similar issues, within the parish. There seems to be no male equivalent; men probably felt no need for unofficial juries when they controlled the formally constituted structures of local authority. Women were appropriating the only formal structure that gave them such authority, and using it to serve their own view of the community’s needs. In most cases, they assumed an authority to search the body of a young spinster or maidservant for signs of pregnancy. Oliver Heywood, the nonconformist minister, tells us, for example, how ‘it was whispered among women’ that a servant girl was pregnant, how she denied it on oath, and how ‘at last women would search her breast, found milk, she then confessed’, and how ‘they’ (probably family and friends) then had her married to the father, by licence, seven weeks before she gave birth. Heywood’s account emphasizes throughout the centrality of female agency, and makes no reference to any court proceedings. The women appear to have been acting on their own authority to restore moral order within the local community, rather than to trigger intervention by the authorities.131 Such searches complement the common practice by which respectable matrons would interrogate a pregnant spinster to establish the father’s identity, and help the midwife verify it during the delivery. Laura Gowing tells the story of six village women in Kent who went much further: hearing that a young spinster had gone into labour, they escorted her to the parish where she had been born, sent for 130

LRO, BR II/18/25/668, 694; cf. Holmes, ‘Women: Witnesses and Witches’, 65–7. The Rev. Oliver Heywood BA 1630–1702: His Autobiography, Diaries, Anecdote and Event Books, ed. J. H. Turner (Brighouse and Bingley, 1881–5), i. 357. For a recent discussion see Gowing, ‘Ordering the Body’, 46–51; cf. M. Jackson, New-Born Child Murder: Women, Illegitimacy and the Courts in Eighteenth-Century England (Manchester, 1996), esp. ch. 3. 131

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a midwife, and guarded her while she gave birth under a tree. The motivation here was more economic than moral; if there was no father to maintain the child, they could at least ensure the burden fell on another parish.132 We can find other informal groups exercising authority in a variety of situations. William Foster of Barking was presented by the churchwardens in 1596 for incest with his young daughter, ‘upon the assertion of honest women who have had the examination of the young wench’.133 Emma Neshe of Churchill, Oxon., accused of fornication with the vicar, admitted that ‘she was searched by divers honest women of Churchill whether that she had burned him [infected him with venereal disease] or not, and whether she herself was sound’. The searchers had acted on their own initiative, their suspicions aroused when she was seen buying some ‘salve’ for him. In 1631 the rector’s wife at Kemscott, Oxon., similarly demanded to have Elizabeth Scoulter searched to see if she had given birth secretly; several other women echoed her call, and Scoulter submitted. This episode, like several others, underlines how clerical wives were emerging from their ambivalent status to become influential figures in their own right in shaping public opinion and regulating neighbourhood morals.134 The initiative behind these examinations is not always clear. In some cases the women appear to have acted independently, while in others parish officers had taken the lead. In 1630, for example, the churchwardens and rector of Great Rollright, Oxon., responded to rumours by asking the midwife and other women to examine a local servant girl for signs of pregnancy. In this instance, unusually, the girl refused to submit.135 Searches and examinations were conceived in a spirit of moral regulation, but they could easily become entangled in parish politics. The examination of Emma Neshe, suspected of fornication with the vicar, would inevitably compromise the minister’s own standing. A search was also likely to breed trouble whenever it involved individuals of higher standing than a maidservant. In 1640 Thomas Stevens brought a defamation suit against two Cambridgeshire villagers, probably the churchwardens, for claiming he had been in bed with the 132 Gowing, ‘Ordering the Body’, 43–4, 52–60; D. Cressy, Birth, Marriage and Death (Oxford, 1997), 75–6, 78–9; Atkinson (ed.), Quarter Sessions Records, i. 129; The Official Papers of Sir Nathaniel Bacon of Stiffkey, Norfolk, ed. H. W. Saunders (Camden Soc., 3rd ser., 26, 1915), 18. 133 Emmison, Elizabethan Life: Morals, 38. They may have acted at the officers’ request, like the Cheshire women sworn to examine a small girl who had been sexually abused: The Life of Adam Martindale, ed. R. Parkinson (Chetham Soc., 4, 1845), 206–7. 134 E. R. Brinkworth (ed.), The Archdeacon’s Court: Liber Actorum, 1584 (Oxfordshire Record Soc., 22–3, 1942–6), i. 64, 69; OAO, diocesan papers, c2, fos. 169–71. 135 OAO, diocesan papers, c2, fo. 103.

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woman he was courting, and for having her searched by six women ‘to see whether she were with child or not, or whether she had committed fornication or not’. Though cleared on both counts, such a virginity test was deeply humiliating and Stevens said he had launched his suit to avenge her ‘great injury and disgrace’.136 And while a servant counted for little, even in the world of parish politics, her disgrace would have implications for her employer or alleged partner. David Cressy has explored the tangled case of Mercy Gould, a Sussex maidservant suspected of killing her baby or taking an abortifacient provided by her former mistress. Though Gould herself was of little account, she had served a wealthy gentleman’s family and the affair was soon caught up in parish rivalries. One group of women, linked to her former mistress, concluded after questioning Mercy in April 1578 that nothing improper had occurred; but another, including the minister’s wife and the midwife, declared after interrogating her that she deserved to be hanged. The affair pitted one of the most powerful families in the parish against the minister, and its reverberations eventually reached the ears of the privy council in London. Whether the feuding between the two groups of women created or merely exacerbated tensions, it contributed to a bitter struggle culminating in the minister’s removal from office.137

     The licensed midwife bore a very different set of responsibilities, but these too extended into the public and quasi-political sphere. Women still dominated midwifery in this period. Though an attempt in the 1670s to create a college of midwives proved unsuccessful, the very idea of professional status for any other female body would have been unthinkable. Midwives enjoyed some degree of official recognition. Like physicians and schoolteachers, they had to be licensed by a bishop and provide evidence of good character and religious conformity. Some achieved a measure of celebrity, like Mrs Mercer, the ‘famous midwife’ despatched to Bohemia to attend the lying-in of Princess Elizabeth. Others became quite prosperous, like the York midwife able to maintain a coach and horses on the strength of her earnings. The respect a good midwife could achieve and the ambiguities of her position were nicely illustrated at Southampton in 1607, when the corporation granted the freedom of the town to an old man on the grounds that his wife had served for many 136 137

CUL, EDR K4/74. D. Cressy, Travesties and Transgressions in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford, 2000), ch. 3.

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years as its ‘chief midwife’, and had carried out her duties to universal admiration.138 The requirement for midwives to obtain a licence reflects their public responsibilities. The whole community had a stake in their good character, for careless, drunken, or irresponsible midwives threatened the lives of mothers and children alike. They were also required to report illegitimate births and interrogate the mother during delivery to ascertain the father’s identity, a highly sensitive task, especially if she had previously named several men, or a minister or gentleman.139 It was this that brought midwives into the public sphere, for their testimony guided magistrates in making maintenance orders, and in proceedings against the father, and was crucial if a mother had died in childbed or absconded. Most midwives took this duty very seriously. Elizabeth Symson informed the mayor of Leicester in 1592 that she had attended the labour of a maidservant accompanied by ‘a great number of women to the value of (80) or thereabouts’, and had charged her ‘upon her salvation or damnation’ to name the true father.140 Though such a massive entourage was extraordinary, midwives and their helpers usually succeeded in making single mothers divulge the father’s name, however reluctantly. Occasionally we even find a married woman confessing that her husband was not the child’s father, after similar questioning.141 The threat posed by a dishonest midwife was all too evident. She might conceal the father’s identity, or the birth itself.142 Worse, she might agree to name an innocent man, exposing him to substantial maintenance charges and perhaps a whipping. Very occasionally we find a midwife attempting to intimidate the mother into swearing falsely, for reasons of her own. According to those attending a birth in Sussex in 1637, the midwife was kin to the man named as father, and held the mother ‘so long in pain before she would deliver her that she was almost dead with extremity of pain’, in an attempt to make her charge someone else.143 As such cases remind us, a midwife’s helpers attended to ensure her good behaviour as well as to assist. Contemporaries feared that unscrupulous midwives might even be willing to collude in the 138 Chamberlain, Letters, ii. 494; ‘Thomas Baskerville’s Journeys in England, temp. Car. II’, HMC, Portland II, 312; Horrocks, Assembly Books of Southampton, vol. i, p. ix. For surveys see H. Marland (ed.), The Art of Midwifery: Early Modern Midwives in Europe (1993), chs. 1–3, 6; D. Evenden, The Midwives of Seventeenth-Century London (Cambridge, 2000). 139 LRO, 1D 41/13/33, fo. 53v; S. C. Ratcliffe and H. C. Johnson (eds.), Warwick County Records (Warwick, 1935–64), ix. 43; GL, MS 9064/15, fos. 115v–17r; MS 9064/16, fo. 67r–v; Ingram, Church Courts, 263; Gowing, ‘Ordering the Body’, 53–4. 140 LRO, BR II/18/3/52a. 141 LRO, 1D 41/13/41, fo. 30; 1D 41/13/58, fo. 3v. 142 LRO, 1D 41/13/46, fo. 86; CUL, EDR K26/67. 143 WSRO, Ep1/11/14, fos. 248v–249r.

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disposal of unwanted children.144 Their worst fears were realized in 1693 when Mrs Compton of Poplar, a midwife for over thirty years to the gentry and better sorts, was exposed as a serial killer. The remains of two infants were found in her cellar, with the bones of six more under its floor.145 A cynical pamphleteer could dub the dishonest midwife as ‘truest friend to lechery’.146 Integrity and judgement were thus essential qualities in a midwife. Her testimony might be crucial in determining paternity and equally in cases of child rape, incest, infanticide, and occasionally other forms of murder. A midwife’s evidence played a central role in the conviction of Rice Evans of Lambeth, charged in 1684 with killing his wife by beating her and making her leave childbed to sell milk through the streets. The midwife’s testimony outweighed Evans’s strenuous denials, and he was hanged for the crime.147 More typical was an Old Bailey trial in 1679 involving a dead infant found under the stairs of a victualling house, where it had apparently lain several weeks. A midwife and her assistants were asked to search the suspected mother, a servant there, and their careful judgement probably saved her from the gallows: the maid had borne a child, they reported, but too long ago for it to be this infant.148 In such cases the midwife’s professional expertise gave her a quasi-official status in court proceedings. Joan Aricke, a London midwife consulted in 1632 over another suspected infanticide, signed a certificate on the case along with the surgeon, coroner, and foreman of the coroner’s jury.149 In particularly difficult circumstances, a panel or jury might be composed entirely of midwives. In November 1693 a panel of London midwives, having sworn ‘duly and truly to inspect the private parts of Anne Hobson alias Bliss’, delivered a certificate that ‘according to the best of our skill and judgement the said Anne . . . is not capable of penetration, nor being carnally known by any man’. A marriage could be declared void if it could not be consummated, and the plaintiff was probably seeking to marry again. The midwives added their own signatures and seals, and were clearly respected figures at the very top of their profession.150 144 T. Dekker, Lanthorne and Candle-light (1608), in A. V. Judges (ed.), The Elizabethan Underworld (1930), 364; Cressy, Birth, Marriage and Death, 77–8. 145 The Cruel Midwife (1693); for ballad accounts see Pepys Ballads, ii. 192, 193; v. 10, 24. 146 R. Head, Proteus Redivus: The Art of Wheedling (1684), 97. 147 A True Account of the Proceedings on the Crown-Side at the Lent Assizes of Surrey [1684], 1; The Last Dying Speeches . . . of Rice Evans (1684), 2. On the role of midwives, female surgeons, and women preparing bodies for burial in detecting foul play see Gaskill, Crime and Mentalities, 255–9. 148 OBSP 30 Apr. 1679, 3. 149 PRO, SP 16/230/66. 150 GL, MS 9657/2, loose papers, certificate of 24 Nov. 1693.

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This quasi-official status helps to explain why midwives occasionally engaged in matters of public concern on a more obviously ‘political’ basis. In May 1610 we find Elizabeth Halliday, a Loughborough midwife, writing with six other women in the name of many more to the mayor of Leicester concerning one Dorothy Cappe, a spinster who had recently given birth there. Having elicited that the father was a baker’s servant in Leicester, they formally asked the corporation to take and provide for the child, ‘as law and equity requireth’. Their letter is couched in the language of Jacobean officialdom, and they styled themselves ‘your worship’s loving friends’ in the manner of other magistrates or office-holders. The midwife signed with a mark and is very unlikely to have composed the letter herself, but she and her friends were acting in a formal and public capacity, negotiating rather than petitioning. Equally striking, Loughborough officials were apparently content for a matter of public importance to be presented in the name of women alone.151 Midwifery had made only uneven progress towards professionalization, however, and we can find wide variations in practitioners’ training, expertise, and character. In London, and some other towns, most served for several years as deputy to a licensed midwife before seeking a licence themselves, and standards were often high.152 In some cases skills had been passed down through the family line; Elizabeth Love of Clerkenwell, for example, had been bred up to midwifery by her mother and grandmother, ‘both ancient and expert midwives’.153 Some midwives were women of considerable standing within the community. Mistress Ward, an Elizabethan midwife in Liverpool, was a ‘gentlewoman born’, and married to a former town bailiff who had served the earl of Derby.154 But we also find far less salubrious figures. An Oxford midwife was barred in 1637 after producing a forged certificate, while Mrs Pepper, operating in Newcastle in the 1660s, combined the roles of midwife and wise woman.155 Many rural midwives had established their position by helping at deliveries and gradually acquiring a reputation for expertise, without ever seeking a licence. Rural churchwardens often had no idea whether local practitioners were licensed or not.156 Failure to seek a licence did not necessarily indicate any lack of skill or integrity, of course, 151

LRO, BR II/18/10/471. For a comprehensive survey of the training, licensing and social profile of London midwives see Evenden, Midwives; cf. Mendelson and Crawford, Women, 314–18; Marland (ed.), Art of Midwifery, 28–31, 121–2; GL, MS 10116/1–13. 153 GL, MS 10116/3, Elizabeth Love, 1663. 154 Twemlow (ed.), Liverpool Town Books, ii. 25. 155 OAO, archdeaconry papers, c13, fo. 157; Raine (ed.), Depositions from the Castle of York, 127. 156 e.g. LRO, 1D 41/13/63, fo. 7; 1D 41/13/65, fo. 296. 152

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and a midwife’s reputation depended primarily on the opinion of her neighbours. Ordinary women thus played a significant role in shaping the career of a midwife, assessing her skill in the light of their own experiences and helping at deliveries. They played an important role in the licensing process too, for alongside the testimonial to her conformity and good character, provided by the minister and churchwardens, we usually find another assessing her professional competence, supplied by women who were, in effect, satisfied customers. Such testimonials might bear the marks or signatures of a dozen or more women, across a wide social spectrum.157 This was a rare occasion when the wife of a humble waterman or shoemaker knew that her opinion counted in a matter of public importance. We thus have a wide range of midwives, some licensed and endorsed by clergymen or surgeons, others lacking any training or formal recognition. There were inevitably also some whose character and competence were fiercely disputed. Women held strong feelings about the local midwives, and this was a dimension of parish politics in which female opinions dominated. The potential ferocity of such disputes is illustrated by a harrowing case at Quorndon, Leics., when nine local women petitioned against one Joan Brandon in 1633, blaming her for the death of an unmarried mother and her twin infants, and declared her unfit to practise. Brandon was prosecuted in the archdeaconry court, accused of telling the mother, Elizabeth Jackson, that she was carrying a freak, twoheaded foetus, having failed to recognize twins. Her clumsy efforts in the delivery room left Jackson ‘mangled and torn’ and crushed the skull of one child so badly that ‘the brains dropped out’, but when one of the assistants, a gentlewoman, called for another midwife to be summoned, Brandon declared angrily that ‘if any laid hand on her, she would thrust her out of door’. When she pronounced the other infant dead in the womb and wanted to pull it out the same way, the assistants rebelled and sent for another midwife who managed to deliver it intact, though stillborn, twenty-four hours after the first. The bare facts were not in dispute, but the case was complicated by social tensions within the village. The complainants called Brandon ‘rude and uncivil’, explaining she had no licence, practised mainly among ‘the meaner sort’, and was a ‘lightfingered’ woman. They accused her of further professional misconduct, saying she had divulged details of the case to several men, ‘to the great scandal and offence of grave and modest women’, and had exposed the mother’s ‘privities’ to ‘divers young wenches’, an almost equally serious 157 GL, MS 10116/3, Isabel Ellis with 27 supporters in 1663; GL, MS 10,116/4, Joan Maxey with 28 in 1665. For a full account see Evenden, Midwives, chaps. 1–2.

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lapse, for the delivery room was strictly the preserve of married women. Brandon was able to produce some defence witnesses, who denounced the petitioners as malicious, while one matriarch pronounced her the best of the six midwives who had attended her various deliveries. The evidence was so damning, however, that Brandon was condemned and forbidden to practise again. In all, twenty women testified in the case.158 It was rare indeed for the death of an unmarried mother to trigger such passions, but neighbours recognized that the case had important implications for public safety and decency. Adding a further dimension to the politics of midwifery, it shows how women might ‘unmake’ as well as ‘make’ a midwife. The episode, which must have generated passionate debate for weeks or months, was dominated throughout by the village women, with the voices of male parishioners for once silent.159 The political dimension of midwifery thus gave some very ordinary women a formal link to the world of public affairs. The midwife was, in effect, a public officer as well as a medical practitioner, with important responsibilities in guiding justices over maintenance orders, and a less frequent but crucial part in other court proceedings. The potential of a dishonest midwife to subvert the execution of justice and good government at local level underlines the significance of her position.

 :  Another strand of female activity is more immediately recognizable as political: the tradition of petitioning and lobbying. This was the most striking feature of women’s involvement during the civil wars, and as the story of Joan Brandon suggests, we can place it within an older, more local tradition. Most petitioners were individuals or members of the same family, and employed highly deferential language to underline their status as humble supplicants. The same humility is found when women appealed jointly over a common predicament or grievance, pleading for compassion. Such petitions reflect nonetheless a first step towards consciously political activity. Sometimes groups of women appealed in person, kneeling before an enclosing landlord in Jacobean Yorkshire, for example, and begging him to leave the villagers’ common rights intact. The wives of some Quakers imprisoned in Ireland also appeared in 158

LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 13/25–34; 1D 41/13/60, fo. 249v. See also a fierce dispute in Westminster in 1612 concerning Mrs Fooks, a gentleman’s wife alleged to be ‘a midwife fitter for a bitch than for a woman’, and to have crushed the brains or gouged the eyes of children she had delivered: Manchée, Westminster City Fathers, 121–2; cf. Cressy, Travesties and Transgressions, ch. 6. 159

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person before Viscount Conway in Dublin in 1678, perhaps aware of his own wife’s leaning towards the Quaker cause. If so, their tactic succeeded admirably; though Conway detested Quakerism, he secured the prisoners’ release to please his wife. Other petitions were more formal. When some Derbyshire lead-miners’ leaders were arrested in 1634, their wives begged the queen, Henrietta Maria, to intercede for their release. They too understood that by invoking the feminine quality of compassion they were more likely to succeed than by approaching the king.160 On other occasions we find women petitioning on their own behalf. The seven mothers convicted of infanticide who petitioned Charles II for pardons in 1660 hardly constituted a ‘political lobby group’ in any conventional sense, but their joint action was political in recognizing that the national mood of celebration offered a unique chance of mercy.161 We can find other petitioners who clearly assumed a right to be heard on matters of public concern, and have a more direct bearing on the development of female political consciousness. Most petitions were tiny in scale, concerned with very local issues of public order, but they confirm nonetheless the readiness of ordinary women to claim a voice in public affairs, as well as their sense of public responsibility. It is not unusual in this period to find the ‘better sort’ petitioning justices against individuals or families they accused of disrupting social order. Women sometimes joined in such appeals, or even led them. Mrs Wilcocke, a Yorkshire villager, led a group of neighbours in 1578 in pressing for action against an innkeeper who harboured rogues and thieves, and a constable who had ignored the problem. The name of ‘Mary Villars, gentlewoman’, similarly headed a petition from nine parishioners of Oadby, Leics., in 1581 against their idle and drunken minister. Many women joined in a petition to Sussex magistrates against one Jane Wood, an allegedly wicked and dangerous neighbour, and more still would have subscribed but for fear. In January 1641 we find Margaret Frith signing a petition from the parishioners of St Mary Cray, Kent, to the House of Commons, accusing their minister of gross negligence. Female 160 J. Walter, ‘Public Transcripts, Popular Agency and the Politics of Subsistence in Early Modern England’, in Braddick and Walter (eds.), Negotiating Power, 133; M. H. Nicolson (ed.), The Conway Letters. The Correspondence of Anne, Viscountess Conway, Henry More, and their Friends, 1642–1684 (rev. edn., Oxford, 1992), 443–4; A. Wood, The Politics of Social Conflict: The Peak Country 1520–1770 (Cambridge, 1999), 257; G. W. Bernard (ed.), The Tudor Nobility (Manchester, 1992), 281 161 CSPD 1660–1661, 429. They had been held at Warwick, Lincoln and Nottingham, having failed to prove their infants had been stillborn. More typical were six widows petitioning the mayor of Leicester for relief, pleading they were ‘almost pined and starved for want of food and fuel’: LRO, BR II/18/33/298.

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signatories were always rare, but their presence was by no means unthinkable.162 On other occasions women took collective action in their own names. In one mid-Elizabethan episode, trivial but suggestive, four Leicestershire villagers had an affidavit drawn up against one Katherine Barton of Bagworth. Headed in formal style, ‘To whom these shall in any wise appertain. Greeting’, it pledged their readiness to prove their allegations ‘before any judge or justice in any court spiritual or temporal’. One denounced Barton as the ‘most wicked, malicious and vexatious scolding neighbour that ever I came near, or heard’, and another accused her of assault.163 Men must have drawn up the document, for the complainants were unable to sign their names, but it appeared in the names of the women alone. If this was parish politics at its most basic, it is striking nonetheless to find the petition employing a language and form that translated women’s petty grievances into an issue of public order. A later case suggests more explicitly women’s sense of their responsibilities within the public sphere. In February 1654 four Leicester women wrote to the mayor and corporation as follows: Gentlemen, We are to acquaint your worships with a business something uncivil to express by words. We are only to testify that one goodwife Hopkinson upon some falling out with widow Andrew her neighbour not only did abuse her in words but followed her in the street and openly on the market day did uncivilly pull up her clothes and uncover her nakedness and laid stripes with her hand on her bare body to the shame of civil women and so we shall testify. Anne Cooke Jane Turlington Elizabeth Coxe Anne Beridg.164

Their language is revealing. Despite a palpable unease, they clearly felt it their duty to monitor the behaviour of disorderly neighbours and notify the borough authorities. By doing so collectively, and in writing, they were formalizing a long-standing practice. Equally striking is their sense of the episode as an affront to all respectable women, and their language 162 J. Lister (ed.), West Riding Sessions Rolls, 1598–1602 (Yorkshire Archaeological and Topographical Association Record Ser., 3, 1888), 118; LRO, 1D 41/13/10, fo. 52a; D. Winch, ‘Sexual Slander and its Social Context in England c.1660–1700’ (D.Phil. thesis, University of Oxford, 2000), 132; L. B. Larking (ed.), Proceedings, Principally in the County of Kent, in Connection with the Parliaments Called in 1640 (Camden Soc., , 80, 1862), 125 (and cf. 237); cf. J. W. Willis Bund (ed.), Worcester County Records: Calendar of the Quarter Sessions Papers (Worcestershire Historical Soc., 1899–1900), i. 67–8, 305; Amussen, Ordered Society, 155–7; G. Walker, ‘Crime Gender and Social Order in Early Modern Cheshire’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Liverpool, 1994), 237–9. 163 LRO, 1D 41/4/339 (c.1582). The paper was presumably handed to parish officers or a local gentleman, with a request for the matter to be pursued in whatever forum they judged appropriate. 164 LRO, BR II/18/27/662.

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confirms the idea of a female collective honour of which women themselves were the primary guardians. Female petitioning was by no means confined to issues of public morality. Some initiatives were humanitarian, for women’s sense of collective responsibility could be protective as well as coercive. A macabre rumour at Rochester in 1646 that a young woman had been buried alive generated such concern, a pamphleteer reported, that ‘for further satisfaction, the women of the town gathered money among themselves to take up the corpse, which was done accordingly’, after they had lobbied the mayor to secure his consent.165 Others joined in petitions on behalf of individuals in need or danger, or petty offenders.166 Occasionally too we find young women pleading for the life of a criminal, usually a highwayman and sometimes on the understanding that he would then marry one of them. Anthony Wood commented of one such case that the proposed bride was a very ‘ordinary body’, and the petitioners may have been hoping to find a husband for a poor woman who might otherwise go without.167 A few of these petitions had a further, political dimension: a Dorset gentlewoman appealed to Judge Jeffreys in 1685, offering to marry one of Monmouth’s rebels if Jeffreys would spare his life.168 Other petitions were triggered by economic grievances. We find London women protesting in the winter of 1633–4 over the newly established soap monopoly, complaining (in language that anticipates modern commercials) that new monopoly soap ‘washeth not so white, nor so sweet, nor goes so far as the old soap’. In January 1634 we have the bizarre spectacle of a royal proclamation to undermine the testimony of the protesters, dismissed as women ‘of mean condition’. Descending to minute particulars, the proclamation solemnly reported that one Mrs Sweeting now conceded that the new soap was satisfactory at least for fine-quality garments, and cited certificates from eighty other women (from countesses to laundresses) who warmly endorsed it.169 We 165 A Strange and Wonderfull Relation of the burying alive of Joan Bridges of Rochester (1646), 4 and passim. 166 The Papers of Sir Richard Grosvenor 1st Bart. (1585–1645), ed. R. Cust (Record Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 134, 1996), 68; Cressy, Travesties and Transgressions, 58; Walker, ‘Crime Gender’, 266. 167 The Life and Times of Anthony Wood, Antiquary, ed. A. Clark (Oxford Historical Soc., 1891–1900), iii. 348; HMC 75, Downshire 1, 242; The Diary of Abraham de la Pryme, ed. C. Jackson (Surtees Soc., 54, 1869), 56–7. 168 The Humble Petition of the Widdowes and Fatherless Children of the West of England [1689], broadside. 169 J. F. Larkin (ed.), Stuart Royal Proclamations, ii. Royal Proclamations of King Charles I, 1625–1646 (Oxford, 1983), 395–408; CSPD, 1633–1634, 316, 337–8, 437, 461.

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sometimes find provincial women too petitioning over economic grievances. In February 1649 five Mountsorrel women, representing many others, petitioned the mayor and corporation of Leicester, accusing their churchwardens and overseers of failing to pay out funds under the terms of a Leicester charity. Several women petitioned the mayor of Coventry in 1656 against an irresponsible employer, a spinder, whom they accused of ‘detaining his work’. Occasionally too we find women making positive proposals. Ten Leicester female stocking-makers demonstrated their economic initiative in 1658 by urging the corporation to admit a male turner to the freedom of the town. Testifying to their experience of his skill, they argued that their trade had been greatly hindered by the want of a good turner.170 Religion might also sometimes push women into protests and petitions. Bishop Grindal was vigorously lobbied in 1566 by sixty London women protesting at the suspension of a puritan lecturer they favoured, and a few weeks later we find him begging protection from another ‘womanish brabble’. We have already seen Essex women petitioning in 1631 over the new position of their communion table, and in 1644 sixteen puritan women of Great Maplestead, Essex, ‘some of the good sort’, petitioned the county committee to remove their immoral minister and appoint one more godly.171 Finally, we can see something of the spirit of civil-war petitioning in appeals over English sailors held captive in Barbary, a perennial problem in this period. Some were on an impressive scale, suggesting considerable organization and determination. In 1626 the distressed and disgruntled wives of almost 2,000 seamen held as slaves in Sallee begged help from the duke of Buckingham, the Lord Admiral, complaining that their earlier petitions to the king had been ignored.172 Some later petitioners went further and demanded specific government action. A petition in 1631 from Mary Farr and other women complained bitterly that a fragile peace between England and Morocco had been destroyed by a shipmaster who had seized a Barbary vessel and sold its crew into slavery, thereby provoking a new spate of attacks on English shipping. They demanded that a royal envoy be dispatched to Morocco to negotiate a new treaty, 170 LRO, BR II/18/24/348, BR II/18/29/591–2; L. Fox (ed.), ‘Diary of Robert Beake, Mayor of Coventry, 1655–1656’, in Miscellany, 1, ed. R. Bearman (Dugdale Soc., 31, 1977), 135. 171 P. Crawford, Women and Religion in England 1500–1720 (1993), 54; J. Sharpe, ‘Scandalous and Malignant Priests in Essex: The Impact of Grassroots Puritanism’, in C. Jones, M. Newitt, and S. Roberts (eds.), Politics and People in Revolutionary England (Oxford, 1986), 270; n. 84, above. For a Cheshire widow signing a pro-episcopacy petition in 1641 see J. Maltby, Prayer Book and People in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England (Cambridge, 1998), 204 n. 172 PRO, SP 16/43/46.

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and that the shipmaster be punished.173 This was a remarkable initiative, an explicit attempt by women to influence royal policy. The wives of the Barbary slaves assumed a right to be heard, and expected the government to address their grievances. The tight-knit seafaring community enjoyed a tradition of quasi-political behaviour, with sailors and their families regularly pushed into action over grievances such as pay, shipwrecks, and piracy. The civil wars exacerbated their problems through impressment and the dislocation of trade, and a pamphleteer in 1643 noted seamen’s wives among the demonstrators clamouring for peace and ‘prattling against the proceedings of parliament’.174 It is unlikely these women regarded their behaviour as in any way novel. Female petitioners before the civil wars offered no theoretical justification for their claim to a voice in public affairs. Their readiness to take collective action in the interests of their families and communities was born of a routine involvement with parish politics, and with local magistrates and courts. And if petitioning failed, or seemed inappropriate, some were ready to take more direct measures.

 :     Petitioning enabled ordinary men and women to present their grievances in an orderly and deferential manner, reminding the authorities of their moral obligations and exerting a pressure all the more effective for remaining implicit. John Walter and Andy Wood have recently explored a range of other tactics by which poor folk sought to exert pressure over social and economic grievances. At the most basic level we find grumbling over food shortages or prices in public places such as bakehouses and markets, where women had of course a particularly prominent role. Such complaints, if sufficiently loud and persistent, would push market overseers to defuse the situation by alerting the local authorities. Should this achieve nothing, the poor themselves might appeal en masse to magistrates and other officials, and if this proved fruitless, then turn to direct action. Protests frequently erupted over grain supplies, common rights, and many other issues. Many involved women, and the widespread if erroneous belief that female rioters were immune from prosecution undoubtedly encouraged their participation.175 173

PRO, SP 16/205/30; CSPD, 1635–1636, 15; cf. CSPD, 1659–1660, 69, on captives in Flanders. The Sea-Mans Protestation (1643), sig. A4. 175 Walter, ‘Public Transcripts’; A. Wood, ‘“Pore men woll speke one day”: Plebeian Languages of Deference and Defiance in England, c.1520–1640’, in Harris (ed.), Politics of the Excluded; Wood, Riot, Rebellion and Popular Politics, esp. ch. 4; J. Walter and K. Wrightson, ‘Dearth 174

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Many so-called ‘riots’ in this period were in fact no more than riotous assaults in the pursuit of family feuds—though such feuds were sometimes entangled with disputes over enclosures and common rights.176 In other contexts too it can be difficult to separate private from public concerns. When Edith Willis told Wiltshire magistrates in 1646 how a group of village women had beaten and almost killed her, she complained of a long-running campaign to drive out her family. The villagers did not deny it, but lodged a counter-petition calling for Willis to be prosecuted as an impossible neighbour.177 Here, as in many disturbances, collective violence had functioned both to intimidate and to trigger intervention by magistrates. Litigation, verbal abuse, and physical violence marched hand in hand.178 Collective violence by women occurred most frequently in attacks on individuals perceived as threats to the local community. We find them attacking keepers of bawdy houses, cheats, and outsiders who had abused the peace and good name of the community. The pamphleteer Robert Greene penned a lively account of women seizing a fraudulent coal-seller, trying him in a kangaroo court, and beating him with cudgels. Though his tale was fictional, Greene’s explicit approval is suggestive. Simon Forman, the philandering astrologer, found himself similarly targeted in 1590 by a crowd collected by a woman he had wronged. On the evening of 28 May, he noted tersely in his diary, ‘there rose a great brawl by Bess Vaughan against me: I was like to have come to much trouble by it, and to have been killed. I changed my lodging often’. Bess’s friends had made him flee for his life. Richard Brathwait’s narrative of the travels of ‘drunken Barnabee’ includes the story of his tipsy assault on a blacksmith at Ingleton, Yorks., whereupon the local women had promptly stoned him out of town. Similarly, when a Welsh lawyer railed at some London shopkeepers in 1620 to vent his frustration over a runaway thieving and the Social Order’ in Early Modern England’, Past and Present, 71 (1976); J. Walter, ‘Grain Riots and Popular Attitudes to the Law: Maldon and the Crisis of 1629’, in J. Brewer and J. Styles (eds.), An Ungovernable People: The English and the Law in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (1980); R. B. Manning, Village Revolts. Social Protests and Popular Disturbances in England 1509–1640 (Oxford, 1986), 96–8, 114–15, 272, 281; R. A. Houlbrooke, ‘Women’s Social Life and Common Action in England from the Fifteenth Century to the Eve of the Civil War’, Continuity and Change, 1 (1986), 178–86; K. Lindley, Fenland Riots and the English Revolution (1982); B. Sharp, In Contempt of All Authority: Rural Artisans and Riot in the West of England 1586–1660 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1980); D. Underdown, Revel, Riot and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England 1603–1660 (Oxford, 1985). 176 For a vivid example see C. M. Fraser (ed.), Durham Quarter Sessions Rolls 1471–1625 (Surtees Soc., 199, 1991), 182–4. 177 Cunnington, Records of the County of Wilts., 166, 188–9, 199. 178 For an example, see GL, MS 9731/101/13.

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servant, ‘All the women in the street hard by Holborn conduit did beat him very sore and abuse him vilely.’179 We also find attacks on so-called ‘spirits’, unscrupulous individuals who kidnapped young people to labour in the American plantations. Margaret Robinson stirred up a riot against one such in 1645, and a contemporary noted that ‘spirit’ had become ‘so infamous a name that many have been wounded to death’ by angry crowds.180 Violence might also be triggered by outsiders threatening a neighbour’s freedom or property. When Richard Heywood of Bolton was arrested over a lawsuit, ‘a great company of women rescued him’, and though many were indicted, their intervention helped to secure a satisfactory resolution to the dispute. Four officials who arrested Peter Finch of Wolviston, Durham, on 6 May 1622 were promptly attacked by nine of his female kinsfolk and friends, armed with knives and stones, who effected another forcible rescue.181 Naval press-gangs frequently encountered protesters, sometimes so intimidating that they effectively turned the tables. Capt. Bartholomew Yates confessed in May 1653 that after pressing fifty keelmen at Newcastle he had been ‘forced to discharge them on account of the mighty clamour of their wives’.182 Contemporaries rarely expressed surprise when women took direct action to defend their homes, families, and communities. When a zealous official arrested the minister at Heddon-on-the-Wall, Northumberland, in 1629, Thomas Reede, a bailiff, hinted that he would stir up violence against the intruder, and allegedly declared ‘that it had been well done of the wives of the town to have joined together and have stoned him forth of the town in regard of his hindering divine service’.183 Stoning was a favourite form of attack, intimidating, anonymous, and offering safety in numbers. Reede’s outburst, all the more significant given his own position, suggests a readiness to encourage violent defiance which might have been too provocative for men to risk. Religion might also inspire direct action, usually when protesters were defending their traditional form of worship. Such incidents can be found 179 R. Greene, A Notable Discovery of Coosenage (1592) in Judges, Elizabethan Underworld, 146–8; A. L. Rowse, The Case Books of Simon Forman (1976), 291; Brathwait, Barnabae Itinerarium, 33; K. W. Swett, ‘“Born on my land”: Identity, Community, and Faith among the Welsh in Early Modern England’, in M. McClendon et al. (eds.), Protestant Identities: Religion, Society, and Self-Fashioning in Post-Reformation England (Stanford, Calif., 1999), 252. 180 Jeaffreson (ed.), Middlesex County Records, iii. 182, 255, 278. 181 Heywood, Autobiography, i. 25; Fraser (ed.), Durham Quarter Sessions Rolls, 306; cf. 303–4. 182 CSPD, 1652–1653, 353. 183 W. H. D. Longstaffe (ed.), The Acts of the High Commission Court within the Diocese of Durham (Surtees Soc., 34, 1858), 18–19.

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throughout the period, and in a wide variety of circumstances. Women at Exeter reacted with outrage in 1538 when commissioners arriving to suppress St Nicholas’s priory ordered a workman to demolish the roodloft. Armed with staves and pikes, the women broke into the building, forced the offending workman to jump from the tower to escape, and assaulted an alderman who came to remonstrate. They barricaded themselves in the church, and defied the mayor and his men until the building was taken by storm. There was a happier outcome in 1577 when thirty women similarly barricaded themselves inside a chapel threatened with demolition at Brentwood, Essex, and defied the sheriff’s men with pitchforks, bows and arrows, and boiling water. Their action brought the issue to the attention of the privy council and eventually succeeded in saving the chapel, whereas efforts to defend it through the law courts had failed.184 The Edwardian reformer Edward Underhill provoked equal fury from Catholic parishioners when he removed the pix from the altar at Stratford-le-Bow. ‘For this act,’ he tells us, ‘the justice’s wife with the women of the town conspired to have murdered me.’185 During the Northern rebellion of 1569, Barbara Collyng, a churchwarden’s daughter, organized the women of Long Newton, Co. Durham, ranging in age from 18 to 75, to help set up the old stone altar once more in the parish church.186 In the mid-1640s, women with similarly traditional values reacted angrily when the militant puritan Richard Culmer was intruded at Canterbury Cathedral by the county committee. Culmer found himself jeered in the street, while menacing rumours circulated. ‘It was given out’, his son later complained, ‘that a band of women should meet him at Sarwall, and throw him into a ditch’, a public humiliation that would have rendered his position almost untenable.187 A few years later in 1652, we find James Lancaster’s wife hurling stones at the Quaker George Fox, who she believed had bewitched her husband, and assembling a crowd of ‘forty rude fellows, fishermen and the like’ who beat him with clubs and staves.188 And at the very end of the period, during the Sacheverell riots in London in 1710, old women urged on a mob to attack the nonconformist meeting house of Dr Burgess, while ‘the young ladies of the Exchange gave 12d a piece to dress up a figure of Dr B[urgess] with a gown and a band, and burned it in a tub resembling a pulpit’.189 184

J. Youings, The Dissolution of the Monasteries (1971), 164–5; Capp, ‘Separate Domains?’, 121. J. G. Nichols (ed.), Narratives of the Days of the Reformation (Camden Soc.,  77, 1859), 160. 186 J. Raine (ed.), Depositions and other Ecclesiastical Proceedings from the Courts of Durham, Extending from 1311 to the Reign of Elizabeth (Surtees Soc., 21, 1845), 193–5. 187 R. Culmer, A Parish Looking-Glasse for Persecutors of Ministers (1657), 12. 188 The Journal of George Fox, ed. J. Nickolls (Cambridge, 1952), 130. 189 HMC, 10th Report, Appendix 6, Braye Mss, 186. 185

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Women of more radical views could prove equally resolute. When Sir John Lambe suspended two Buckinghamshire ministers in 1635, for refusing to read the king’s Book of Sports, he was ‘banned and cursed to the pit of hell’ by outraged puritan women, who complained that he would reduce the country to ‘popish . . . fopperies’. ‘Thus the women talk (as I hear) up and down all these parts,’ a Laudian official informed Lambe. ‘But the men pull in their horns, and their tongues too.’190 A generation later the nonconformist minister Adam Martindale described how his wife and three other women had sallied forth in the night to saw down a maypole erected by ‘the rabble of profane youths’ to celebrate the Restoration. Some London nonconformists adopted a different approach in 1682 when a local constable disturbed their conventicle: they threatened to boycott his shop unless he left them alone.191 The most serious riots of the period, especially in the provinces, erupted over taxation, food supplies, and the defence of common rights. While major tax riots were uncommon, attempts to collect money or distrain goods provoked numerous minor skirmishes, in which prisoners or confiscated goods were forcibly rescued by irate female neighbours and kin.192 Neighbours might well see high-handed bailiffs and collectors as a threat to the whole community, and women once more took advantage of their sense of relative impunity. When officials descended on Litchborough, Northants., in 1637 to distrain goods from two families for non-payment of Ship Money, the householders vanished, while their wives locked the doors, armed themselves, and held the officials at bay until a clamorous throng of other women and children arrived to drive them away empty-handed.193 Women played an especially prominent role in protests over the hated excise, a levy on basic household commodities introduced in the 1640s. Some protests assumed alarming proportions. In 1644 ‘a company of the poorest sort of women’ at Milford Haven drove the excise commissioners out of the town hall and besieged them for several hours in their lodgings. At Derby in 1645 women again led the agitation. Two militants marched through the streets, beating drums and calling on the townsfolk to help them drive away the commissioners, while other women disrupted county committee meetings with noisy rallies outside 190 PRO, SP16/207/31; J. Davies, The Caroline Captivity of the Church: Charles I and the Remoulding of Anglicanism (Oxford, 1992), 193–4. For physical violence by puritan women against Laudian ministers, see Flather, ‘Gendering of Space’, 247, 250. 191 Life of Adam Martindale, 157; Harris, London Crowds, 72. 192 Fraser (ed.), Durham Quarter Sessions Rolls, 297; Atkinson (ed.), Quarter Sessions Records, vii. 53; J. Tait (ed.), Lancashire Quarter Sessions Records (Chetham Soc.,  77, 1917), 188; Twemlow (ed.), 193 Liverpool Town Books, 296, 298. PRO, SP 16/351/21.

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the mayor’s house.194 Other fiscal innovations provoked similar anger, on a smaller scale. When officials arrived in Newcastle in 1663 to collect the hearth tax, Sarah Walker, a yeoman’s wife, declared indignantly that ‘There was never a king in England that was a chimney-sweeper but this [Charles II]’, and vowed to ‘raise an army to fight against his Majesty and all his officers that came to demand any such thing’.195 Many of the most serious protests in the period were over grain supplies and common rights, and they were accompanied by numerous lesser incidents. Only by chance, for example, do we hear of a disturbance at Thorpe, near Norwich, in 1664 when local women assaulted an outsider they found gleaning without permission.196 Women often took an active part in protests over food supplies. In 1608 a group of women at Southampton boarded a ship being loaded with grain for the London markets, and seized its cargo. At Dorchester, women rioted in 1630 and again in 1631 over the supply of corn and other provisions.197 It was natural for them to play a prominent role in riots over grain supplies, for they were the main buyers in the local markets, and the first to notice when stocks were diverted to London or overseas. Resentment might escalate very quickly from grumbling to direct action. Women had an immediate stake too in the protection of common rights, for collecting firewood and tending animals were also their responsibility. Seventeen women, part of a larger crowd, were prosecuted in 1604 for a riot at Garstang, Lancs., where they had destroyed hedges belonging to Lord Gerrard. In Yorkshire ‘Captain Dorothy’ Dawson and her band of thirtyseven women fought in 1607 to defend common rights at Thorpe Moor against a landowner who had brought in miners to exploit the mineral deposits of the area. Captain Dorothy and her band brandished knives and hurled stones at the intruders. Women also rioted on several occasions against fenland drainage works in the Isle of Axholme in the late 1620s and early 1650s, and again in the 1680s and 1690s. On one occasion Catherine Popplewell, a gentlewoman, recruited a crowd of men, women, and children at Belton to destroy fences and crops belonging to the newcomers.198 It is clear that rioting women were often emboldened by the belief that they could not be prosecuted for peaceful protests over food supplies, 194

J. S. Morrill, The Revolt of the Provinces (1976),182–3; Bennett, Civil Wars Experienced, 30, 199. Raine (ed.), Depositions from the Castle of York, 99. 196 Doughty, Notebook, 41; for a vivid later parallel see B. Bushaway, By Rite: Custom, Ceremony and Community in England 1700–1880 (1982), 139. 197 Horrocks (ed.), Assembly Books of Southampton, i. 61–3; Underdown, Fire from Heaven, 87. 198 Tait (ed.), Lancashire Quarter Sessions Records , 207; Lindley, Fenland Riots, 72, 75, 77, 92, 94, 100, 120, 123, 127–8,173, 219, 245–6, 248; Wood, ‘Poore Men’, 77. 195

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and would be treated more leniently in any criminal proceedings that did result. On the latter point they were generally right, but they enjoyed no legal immunity and could face savage retribution if their protests overstepped an unwritten boundary. The best-known example is the fate of ‘Captain’ Anne Carter, a butcher’s wife hanged after the unusually serious grain riots at Maldon, Essex, in 1629. Carter’s brief career shows how far a determined woman might assume a leadership role in such situations. She had toured clothing towns in the region to drum up support, and had allegedly offered to lead the Maldon men into action.199 Magistrates, like historians, were eager to establish whether female rioters had been acting independently or at the behest of their husbands, but the surviving evidence is often inconclusive. Anne Carter appears to have acted independently. The exploits of ‘Captain’ Dorothy Dawson, by contrast, seem to have been orchestrated by men, and her opponents claimed that many of the poorer women had only taken part under the threat of eviction or refusal of alms.200 In practice, uncertainties over the law and the nature of the women’s involvement often worked to the advantage of all parties. Magistrates always feared that riots might swell into open rebellion, as happened on several occasions during the Tudor period, and felt their authority would be undermined unless they were seen to suppress them. Rioting women posed no such threat, for a female rebellion was literally unimaginable, and this enabled magistrates to make concessions and defuse the situation without losing face. There were unwritten rules of engagement, and on some occasions we can find women deliberately signalling the non-threatening nature of their action. Protesters demolishing a Yorkshire enclosure in 1642 brought along a bagpiper, cakes, and ale, sending a clear message that they had no seditious intent.201 In episodes like this, women could turn their legal disabilities to advantage, and enjoyed greater room for manoeuvre than their menfolk. Whether the men were complicit usually remains impossible to determine, and female protesters probably felt confident their husbands would approve even if they had not already done so. There appears to have been a much smaller female role in urban protests, which were usually over issues affecting craftsmen more directly than their wives. But some women took part in the London weavers’ riots of 1675, and one had previously called for a collective assault by women to destroy the hated new engine looms.202 199 200 201 202

Walter, ‘Grain Riots’, esp. 55–8, 72, 76–7; Manning, Village Revolts, 96–8, 115–16. Manning, Village Revolts, 281; Wood, ‘Poore Men’, 76–7. Verney, Memoirs of the Verney Family, ii. 86. Harris, London Crowds, 196.

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Despite appearances, petitioning and rioting were closely related forms. Many riots are best understood as ‘petitioning by force’, and had often been preceded by representations which the authorities had ignored. Riots enabled the poor to present their grievances in a manner that could still be condoned if they had not been too long or too violent. Most protests over grain supplies were intended to trigger official action, while many over common rights were designed to bring an enclosure dispute before the courts. Neither mindless nor revolutionary, riots were an attempt by the disenfranchised to connect with the political and administrative structures of the state.

 The story of women’s engagement with the political world is thus multifaceted. It is by no means one of steady advance. Mass petitions and demonstrations disappeared after the Restoration, the tide of civil-war radicalism largely spent. The story was not wholly one of retreat, however, and some women continued to speak out. Women remained much readier to appear in print than in the pre-war period, and a generation later we find even conservatives such as Mary Astell and Eleanor James publishing outspoken commentaries on contemporary issues. It is striking that James chose to lecture rather than petition the Convention of 1688, telling members they should have saved the Church by abolishing the king’s dispensing power, not dethroning him. She ended with the barbed comment that they had behaved more like fickle women than ‘men of wisdom’.203 The Revolution of 1688 prompted several petitions, pamphlets, and demonstrations by women, suggesting they had by no means disengaged from political life. Early in 1689 the wives and widows of over a thousand men condemned by Judge Jeffreys at the Bloody Assizes, following Monmouth’s rebellion, petitioned the Convention for retribution. In a petition seething with rage, they denounced Jeffreys as a bloodthirsty monster and asked for him to be sent down to the west country, ‘where we the good women in the west will be glad to see him, and give him another manner of welcome than he had three years since’. It was a barely disguised proposal for a public lynching.204 The bitterly contested parliamentary elections of the 1690s and early 1700s opened up 203 E. James, To the Honourable Convention [1688], broadside. On James, a printer, and her milieu see P. McDowell, The Women of Grub Street: Press, Politics, and Gender in the London Literary Marketplace 1678–1730 (Oxford, 1998). 204 The Humble Petition of the Widdowes, broadside; L. G. Schwoerer, ‘Women and the Glorious Revolution’, Albion, 18 (1986).

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some new opportunities for female political activity. Gentry women such as Elizabeth Verney in Buckinghamshire played a key role in wooing voters on behalf of their husbands, and contemporaries recognized that ordinary women too might sway the votes of their husbands and neighbours. ‘If their wives don’t keep them tight,’ Edmund Verney told an agent, ‘you must go among the other women.’ At Coventry we find a ‘Captain Kate’ boldly addressing an election meeting. And women still sometimes resorted to more direct forms of action. In 1697 four or five thousand lobbied parliament in support of a bill to protect the silkweaving industry against foreign competition, and other women petitioned against new taxes. Jacobite women at Kingston-on-Thames, even more direct, threatened in 1716 to scratch out the eyes of the Whig mayor. Women’s role in food riots reached new heights, and continued throughout the Hanoverian period.205 In the early part of the eighteenth century, at least, women were still very much engaged in political life. This chapter has ranged widely, from women’s gossip and scurrilous verses, through their quasi-official roles as jury members and midwives, to seditious talk, petitions, and violent protests. Women’s political history remains largely uncharted territory, its boundaries uncertain as we rethink our definition of politics. It is clear, however, that their role cannot be contained within the structures and concerns of traditional ‘high politics’ or its institutions. Their primary interest lay in defending the welfare of their local community, its moral and religious order, and its good name, and this chapter has explored some of the methods they employed to this end. Through their informal networks women could shape local public opinion and sometimes trigger action by the parish authorities. Many participated in the routine business of local courts and councils, while jurywomen and midwives achieved a more formal role in public affairs. In the face of an immediate threat, others turned to petitioning or violent protest. Generations were to pass before women regained the political prominence they achieved in the mid-seventeenth century, but that period represents a high tide, not an inexplicable anomaly. Their engagement in the political process was long-standing, and whatever the official discourse of the period, many ordinary women appear to have assumed throughout that they possessed both rights and duties as citizens. 205 S. Whyman, Sociability and Power in Late-Stuart England: The Cultural Worlds of the Verneys 1660– 1720 (Oxford, 1999), 173; Mendelson and Crawford, Women, 418–30, esp. 427–8; Rogers, Crowds, Culture, and Politics, ch. 7, esp. pp. 221, 225.

8 Recreation, Religion, and Female Culture

T chapter begins with a question posed far less often than we might expect: what opportunities did ordinary women enjoy for recreation in early modern England, and what forms might it take? Proverbial wisdom insisted that ‘a woman’s work is never done’, sports were generally restricted to men, and alehouses and taverns were regarded as primarily male sites for recreation. What space, if any, remained for women’s recreational activities?1 The importance of religion in women’s lives, by contrast, has long been recognized. But though we can examine the piety of educated individuals, and of radicals and visionaries, the religion of ordinary, conforming women—and indeed men—remains largely hidden. Of little interest to the authorities, their beliefs and attitudes have left almost no trace in the historical record, forcing us to speculate on the limited basis of the popular printed fare that was produced for their benefit.2 We know almost nothing about the social dimension of women’s religious lives, the aspect most relevant to this book. We have seen that women often sat together in church, but we have little idea whether their religiosity could find any collective expression outside the regular services of their church or congregation. The claim that women possessed a greater innate religiosity was familiar in that age as in ours, but remains unproven. And what of the larger proposition, that women shared a culture distinct from men’s and transcending their own social, economic, and ideological differences?3 This chapter will address all these issues, though the evidence poses intractable problems.

1 For some discussion of recreation and gender, over a longer timescale, see R. B. Shoemaker, Gender in English Society 1650–1850 (1998), ch. 7. 2 See e.g. P. Crawford, Women and Religion in England 1500–1720 (1993); M. Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories (1981), ch. 8; T. Watt; Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (Cambridge, 1991); C. Haigh (ed.), The Reign of Elizabeth I (1984), ch. 8; I. Green, Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2000). 3 Mendelson and Crawford, Women, ch. 4.

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,  ,   The modern separation of work and recreation had only limited relevance for our ancestors, and newer patterns of working from home are once more blurring the distinction.4 Early modern patterns provided plentiful opportunities for social interaction, despite the long hours of toil. Markets and fairs served recreational as well as economic needs, providing opportunities for young and old alike to mingle with friends once their business was done. Even at home, distinctions between work and recreation were blurred by women’s ubiquitous practice of sitting at their doors to spin or knit, which enabled them to chat to neighbours and passers-by.5 Men enjoyed rather more clearly defined leisure times and spaces, meeting their friends in the evening and in venues primarily associated with leisure, such as the alehouse. Female sociability typically centred on neighbourly visits and casual encounters during the day. Contemporaries never doubted, however, that most women did enjoy an active social life, whatever the constraints. Satirists and preachers complained endlessly about women ‘gadding’ abroad for idle recreation. The good wife, by contrast, would devote herself to domestic duties, as an early Tudor writer explained: From the tavern, dances, and common players And wanton May games, she keepeth her always; Pleasant pilgrimages, Willesdon and Crome She seeketh not, but tarrieth still at home.6

If we substitute sermon-gadding for pilgrimages, this list of diversions would serve for generations. Early biographies of virtuous women stressed how they had resisted such temptations, proof of their exemplary sense of duty.7 But no one imagined that most women could ever be made to conform to conduct-book ideals of narrow domesticity. Popular proverbs that ‘women will have their will’ and that England was a paradise for women suggest a grudging recognition that cultural traditions were too deeply embedded for men to uproot. It would be wrong, of course, to see women’s recreational activities as wholly gendered. Many were bound up with the daily routines of family 4 5 6

K. V. Thomas, ‘Work and Leisure in Pre-Industrial Society’, Past and Present, 29 (1964). See Ch. 2, above, and nn. 10 and 51, below. R. Copland, The Seven Sorrowes that Women Have when theyr Husbands be Dead (c.1565 edn.), sig.

C2. 7

See e.g. The Christian Life and Death, of Mistris Katherin Brattergh (1641), 1.

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life. At the most basic level, stories circulating within male or female networks also provided material for couples to share with one another. A Leicestershire woman, accused in 1633 of spreading rumours about the paternity of a neighbour’s child, was said to have remarked, ‘I and my husband . . . have often laughed to think of it and talked thereof as we have lyen in bed together’.8 Many couples would indulge in light-hearted banter amidst their daily toil. Samuel Pepys’s diary for 18 June 1662 shows him enjoying ‘some merry discourse in the kitchen with my wife and maids, as I nowadays often do’, and even the dour Cheshire minister Henry Newcome confessed on 12 July 1649 that he and his new wife had ‘spent this morning very idly, in throwing water one at another’.9 Couples as well as young folk viewed Sunday as a day of rest, and many enjoyed shared forms of relaxation. A Jacobean pamphleteer complained of Londoners spending the day ‘sitting idly at their doors, gaping and gazing’ at passers-by. The more energetic might walk in the fields or take the air on the river. One typical July afternoon in 1667, for example, Pepys, his wife, and their maid Jane crossed the river, strolled to Chelsea for a drink, and returned ‘in the cool of the evening back again, and sang with pleasure upon the water’.10 Many ordinary folk attended church services in the morning but devoted the rest of the day to pleasure. A Dorset preacher, lamenting in 1571 the neglect of the sabbath, complained that ‘the multitude call it their revelling day’. Many of the larger and more communal forms of merrymaking were held on that day, despite increasing disapproval from the authorities. A Lancashire puritan railed in 1590 that ‘wakes, ales, greens, maygames, rushbearings, bearbaits, doveales, bonfires, all manner unlawful gaming, piping and dancing, and such like, are in all places freely exercised upon the sabbath’. A Newcastle preacher echoed his words in 1659, lamenting that the sabbath was neglected ‘by the generality of the nation’, and that threequarters of the town’s inhabitants stayed at home or went about their pleasures; ‘methinks I am amongst the Indians’, he wailed.11 Hospitality too played an important role in the lives of most householders, except the poorest. A smith’s wife described in 1618 how for 8

LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 12/105. Pepys, Diary, iii. 113; The Autobiography of Henry Newcome, ed. R. Parkinson (Chetham Soc., 26–7, 1852), 295. 10 A Wonder Woorthy the Reading, or a True and Faithfull Relation of a Woman, now Dwelling in Kentstreet (1617), 9; Pepys, Diary, viii. 325; cf. e.g. 167. 11 D. Underdown, Revel, Riot and Rebellion (Oxford, 1985), 47; ‘The State, Civil and Ecclesiastical, of the County of Lancaster, about the Year 1590’, in Chetham Miscellany 5, ed. F. R. Raines (Chetham Soc.,  96, 1875), 2; S. Hammond, Gods Judgments upon Drunkards, Swearers, and Sabbath-Breakers (1659), 93. 9

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many years she and her ‘friends and countrymen and cousins’, some from her native Yorkshire, would meet at a house in Holborn ‘to be merry’.12 Moralists objected when sabbath dinner parties clashed with services, but even Nicholas Bownd, the sabbatarian reformer, thought it acceptable to ‘entertain honestly and comelily some of our friends’ to dinner later in the day.13 Such gatherings generally left no trace in the historical record, and we usually hear of them only when something went wrong.14 A widow who entertained her two sisters and their husbands in Whitechapel, for example, was presented by some zealous parish officers for providing drink in service time.15 We learn of a ‘merry making’ in Haslemere, Sussex, in 1613 because it was disrupted by a quarrelsome intruder, and of a blacksmith’s wife inviting friends to share her furmenty (spiced porridge) only because a neighbour took offence at not being invited.16 Hospitality among the middling sorts could be far more ambitious. Richard Ferbourne of Whitechapel invited so many guests to celebrate his wedding anniversary in October 1613 that the dinner party spilled over into his neighbour’s house, and the Essex clergyman Anthony Walker and his wife celebrated their anniversary each year in similarly lavish style.17 Samuel Pepys was a predictably generous host and so, it appears, were his friends, for he dined at other houses on forty-eight occasions in 1666 alone, roughly once a week.18 There is no reason to suppose the pattern was in any way untypical. Many ordinary couples found relaxation too in alehouses and taverns, especially when they offered music and dancing. Such occasions drew people of all ages, not merely the young. A Leicestershire village piper attracted 120–140 adults one Sunday in April 1612, with only six parishioners attending evening prayers, and another musician proved equally successful a few days later in ‘drawing the people from church to 12 GL, MS 9065A/5, Wyborne v Coventry, 1618, deposition of Cecily Anderson; see generally F. Heal, Hospitality in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1990), chs. 8–9. 13 N. Bownd, Sabbathum Veteri et Novi Testamenti (1606), 206; D. Rogers, Matrimoniall Honour (1642), 35; Wonder Woorthy the Reading, 9. 14 Such gatherings might include card-playing: see W. Rye, England as Seen by Foreigners (1865), 72; D. Freist, Governed by Opinion: Politics, Religion and the Dynamics of Communication in Stuart London 1637–1645 (1997), 255; Underdown, Revel, Riot and Rebellion, 47. 15 GL, MS 9064/17, fo. 203. 16 WSRO, Ep1/11/12, fo. 55; The Witches of Huntingdon (1646), 8–9. Exclusion from social gatherings was quite often linked with suspicion of witchcraft: see K. V. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971), 556. 17 GL, MS 9064/17, fo. 89v; A. Walker, The Holy Life of Mrs Elizabeth Walker (1690), 143–5. 18 I. Archer, ‘Social Networks in Restoration London: The Evidence of Samuel Pepys’s Diary’, in A. Shepard and P. Withington (eds.), Communities in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2000), 77–8.

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dance after the fiddle’. Alehouses were also a venue for sports and games, both inside and out. Peter Merrick of Narborough, Leics., presented in 1620 for keeping unlawful games in his house on Sundays, drew such ‘great store of company’ that on one occasion only a single parishioner turned up for evening prayer.19 More sedate couples might stroll to a nearby village or pleasure resort for a meal.20 Londoners looking for more professional entertainment could choose from a wide range of options. Andrew Gurr estimates that by 1620 the six playhouses in the capital could cater for up to 25,000 people every week, and that 15–20 per cent of the population within their orbit attended regularly. A Jacobean preacher railed that men and women alike flocked to ‘stage-plays, the very theatres of lust’, in preference to sermons.21 The Bear-Garden in Southwark attracted huge audiences to see animals baited, while acrobats, shows, and puppeteers were equally popular; so many spectators crowded into a puppet show in St John’s Street in 1599 that the building collapsed, killing five and injuring several dozens.22 Similar amusements were available in the provinces. In the early sixteenth century, miracle and mystery plays had provided public entertainment in a number of provincial towns, mixing scriptural history with bawdy humour, and drawing crowds from miles around.23 These had largely disappeared by the middle of Elizabeth’s reign, but in their place came touring professional companies, and players sponsored by local landowners who performed at holidays and other festive occasions. Most townsfolk had some opportunities to see them, and so, more surprisingly, did many villagers. Parishioners at Birstall, Leics., walked out of a church service en masse in 1582 to see some players performing in a barn, while two years later Fulke Griffen’s men were presented for staging a play in the chapel of the tiny hamlet of Wibtoft. A medley of other travelling entertainers wandered the land, acrobats, rope-dancers, puppeteers, and showmen with exotic or performing animals.24 19

LRO, 1D 41/13/53, fo. 44v; 1D 41/13/35, fos. 44v, 153v–154r. GL, MS 9065A/7, Fisher v Luckins, deposition of E. Bodye, 9 Oct. 1637. 21 A. Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage, 1574–1642 (2nd edn., Cambridge, 1987), 196; T. Barnes, The Court of Conscience (1623), 55. 22 The Letters of John Chamberlain, ed. N. E. McClure (Philadelphia, 1939), i. 85. 23 R. Carew, The Survey of Cornwall, ed. F. E. Halliday (1969), 144–5. 24 LRO, 1D 41/13/11, fos. 19v, 115; see also the Toronto series Records of Early English Drama; S. Rosenfeld, Strolling Players and Drama in the Provinces 1660–1765 (Cambridge, 1939), chs. 1–2. Nicholas Blundell saw a play at Liverpool and a puppet show at Durham in 1707, and notes ‘The Soldier’s Fortune’ performed in a tenant’s barn in July 1708: The Great Diurnal of Nicholas Blundell, ed. J. J. Bagley (Record Soc. of Lancashire and Cheshire,1968), i. 110, 114, 180, 186. For the variety of entertainments at Norwich see W. L. Sachse (ed.), Minutes of the Norwich Court of Mayoralty 1632–1635 (Norfolk Record Soc., 36, 1967), 30, 81, 100, 102, 116, 141, 161, 183, 212, 213. 20

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The affluent often celebrated holidays by combining private and commercialized forms of recreation, sometimes on a lavish scale. When Charles II appointed a Thanksgiving Day in August 1666 for peace with the Dutch, Pepys responded with typical energy and style: he took his wife and her companion to the Bear-Garden, brought friends home for a venison supper, accompanied more friends to a fireworks party, and finally returned for drinks and dancing, with several of the men dressing up as women, and the women donning male attire. ‘Mighty mirth we had’, till three or four in the morning, he recalled happily. He and his wife celebrated Twelfth Night in January 1668 by visiting the theatre with friends and returning to a lavish dinner with music, singing, and dancing. Neighbours attracted by the noise joined in, swelling the numbers to twenty.25 By this period some well-to-do couples were also beginning to take ‘holidays’ in the modern sense of an extended visit for relaxation and diversion. In the summer of 1669 Pepys took his wife on a short tour through northern France, Holland, and the Spanish Netherlands, to see the sights.26 That was unusually ambitious, but holiday jaunts were by no means uncommon among prosperous mercantile and professional families. As early as 1566 we find Alice Kinder grumbling because her husband would not hire a horse for her to join him on a trip from London to Stourbridge Fair, near Cambridge.27 James Yonge, a Plymouth surgeon, took his wife on a business visit to London in 1681 and showed her many of the traditional tourist sights, such as Bethlem hospital, the Exchange, the Monument, and the traitors’ heads on London Bridge. They made time to visit Windsor Castle too. Similarly, a fictional account of two London newly weds in 1682 shows them making a honeymoon tour to see the sights of Oxford, Cambridge, and several other towns.28 Some women of the middling sort enjoyed another convivial world through the official positions of their menfolk. Office-holders in London and provincial towns participated in a range of ceremonies and social functions which their wives might also attend. At St Botolph’s, Aldgate, for example, the parish officers and their wives, along with some guests and their wives, attended a dinner at the King’s Head in 1595 to mark the Archdeacon’s Visitation. Thomas Baskerville, passing through Newbury a century later, reported a flourishing culture of guild feasts and festivi25

Pepys, Diary, vii. 246; ix. 13. Ibid., ix. 462 n. 27 GL, MS 9056, fos. 39v–40r. 28 The Journal of James Yonge, 1647–1721, ed. F. N. L. Poynter (1965), 168–73; A. Marsh, The Ten Pleasures of Marriage (1682), 63. 26

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ties, especially among the clothiers and hatters. He describes one procession leaving the church with the town musicians playing before them, the men in their best clothes and their wives processing behind, ‘finely dressed all in steeple-crowned hats, which was a pleasant sight to behold’—though his pleasure in the scene suggests such customs were no longer common.29 Alongside the weekly pattern of sabbath recreation came the more ambitious festivities associated with the changing seasons and the Christian calendar. Rural life was punctuated by a cycle of sheep-shearing feasts, harvest suppers, and similar events, eagerly anticipated and fondly remembered for many weeks. Henry Best, a Yorkshire yeoman, said it was ‘usual in most places’ at harvest time for farmers to invite labourers and their wives to a feast of puddings, beef, apple pie with cream, hot cakes, and ale.30 The ecclesiastical year furnished an equally important cycle.31 At Whitsun and on summer holidays ‘multitudes’ of Londoners and their wives would go boating on the river, or walk out to Islington or other resorts for cheesecakes and seasonal treats.32 Many rural parishes continued to hold church-ales and parish wakes, especially popular in the midlands and north, and occasions for communal feasting, drinking, and sports which often drew friends and kin from considerable distances.33 Fairs too occupied an important place in the recreational calendar, for people of all ages and stations. Ben Jonson captured brilliantly the boisterous atmosphere of London’s Bartholomew Fair, in late August, and fifty years later we find life imitating art as Pepys and his wife joined the crowds to eat roast pork, watch a puppet play and rope-dancing, and see a performance of Bartholomew Fair in the Fair itself.34 A few years later, Margaret Smith, who sold caps in the Exchange, persuaded her landlord and his wife to accompany her to Southwark fair, promising that ‘she 29 GL, MS 9234/5, fos. 22r–v; ‘Thomas Baskerville’s Journeys in England, temp. Car. II’, in HMC, Portland . (1893), 286. At Coventry, officers’ wives processed and dined separately from their menfolk: C. Phythian-Adams, ‘Ceremony and the Citizen: The Communal Year at Coventry 1450–1550’, in P. Clark and P. Slack (eds.), Crisis and Order in English Towns 1500–1700 (1972), 59. 30 The Farming and Memorandum Books of Henry Best of Elmswell, 1642, ed. D. Woodward (1984), 98; cf. R. Herrick, ‘The Hock-Cart, or Harvest Home’, in The Complete Poetry of Robert Herrick, ed. J. M. Patrick (New York, 1963), 141–2. 31 R. Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year 1400–1700 (Oxford, 1994). 32 Yonge, Journal, 171–2; J. Taylor, All the Workes (1630), ii. 239; N. Ward, The London Spy, ed. K. Fenwick (1955), 36. 33 WSRO, Ep1/11/9, fo. 84v; Carew, Survey of Cornwall, 140–1. On wakes and ales see Heal, Hospitality, 358–61; S. Hindle, ‘Custom, Festival and Protest in Early Modern England: The Little Budworth Wakes, St. Peter’s Day, 1596’, Rural History, 6 (1995); Hutton, Merry England, passim; Underdown, Revel, Riot and Rebellion, ch. 3. 34 Pepys, Diary, ix. 293, 299.

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would make them merry’; perhaps she did, though in a ruse Jonson would have admired, she had also arranged for the maid guarding the house to rob it while they were out.35 In some communities the festive calendar included still more exciting customs. In 1646 the former town clerk of Stamford described with obvious relish its annual bull-running festival, held six weeks before Christmas, in which ‘men, women and children of all sorts and sizes, with all the dogs of the town’, chased a bull through the streets armed with clubs, whips, and stones. The tradition appears to have survived the civil wars unscathed.36

 :   Female recreation was thus bound up with patterns of family and communal life, as we would expect. But we also find many other aspects which were gender-specific or at least gender-related, and have remained largely unexplored. Most commentators were content to grumble about women ‘gadding’ and ‘gossiping’, without investigating further. Earlier chapters have demonstrated the importance of ‘gossips’ and ‘gossiping’ in women’s lives, and the layers of meaning contained in both terms. The noun ‘gossip’ reflected the central position of childbirth and its attendant rituals, christening and churching, in the physical, social, and emotional lives of married women. For a woman well integrated into an average-sized parish, such events formed a cycle as important as the church calendar. Their place in female experience was vividly captured in a tirade against the ‘unseemly’ play of little girls, placed in the mouth of the misogynist Jacobean pamphleteer Joseph Swetnam: But mark their natures, And from their cradles you shall see them take Delight in making babies [dolls], devising christenings, Bidding of gossips, calling to up-sittings, And then to festivals, and solemn churchings, In imitation of the wanton ends Their riper years will aim at.37

Merrymaking after a safe delivery, or a churching, was a favourite topic for contemporary writers and has been fully explored by David Cressy and Adrian Wilson. While the scale varied according to wealth, status, and taste, several features appear to have been almost universal. Both 35

OBSP 11–12 Dec. 1678, 12. R. Butcher, The Survey and Antiquitie of the Town of Stamford (1646), 39; for bull-running at Tutbury, Staffs., see R. Plot, The Natural History of Staffordshire (Oxford, 1686), 434–40. 37 Swetnam, the Woman-hater, Arraigned by Women (1620; facs. edn., New York, 1970), sig. Fv. 36

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occasions were dominated by women. The midwife, her helpers, and other friends ate, drank, and made merry in the chamber of the newly delivered mother, the father’s role being mainly to provide refreshments. He was absent from most of the merrymaking, and other men were strictly excluded. Contemporary accounts speak of bawdy talk and drunkenness, and after allowing for male exaggeration and prurience, we can accept that these could be boisterous occasions. Expressions of both joy and relief, they were an assertion of pride by the group as well as the mother that she had come safely through her ordeal.38 The recreational world of ‘gossips’ was by no means limited, however, to conviviality surrounding the rites of passage. Preachers and satirists complained that women were always ‘gadding’ to their friends, and such visits were clearly recreational as well as functional. A neighbour calling to borrow a household item would often tarry to drink and exchange news, sometimes the real occasion for her visit.39 Such gatherings provoked numerous domestic quarrels, and sometimes wider concerns. Daniel Rogers, more agitated than most, lamented that ‘we now have meetings of women-drinkers, tobacconists [smokers], and swaggerers, as well as men’, and saw them as tokens that doomsday was nigh.40 Other moralists worried about women addicted to cards and dice.41 But contemporaries recognized that it was impossible to curb ‘idle’ visits, for a wife could easily pretend she was going to the market or bakehouse, or to attend a neighbour in labour. Visiting friends featured prominently in women’s lives in town and country alike, and men were generally resigned to the fact. Among the more prosperous middling sorts, and their gentry superiors, social visits were also a mark of status, signalling a degree of leisure that only the affluent could afford. As such, a husband might even encourage them, in moderation. ‘My dear,’ one indulgent (if fictional) husband remarked, ‘it is a curious fair day, go walk abroad, and give a visit to some or other of your acquaintances; I shall tarry at home . . . and in the evening come and fetch you home.’42 Such a scene was quite plausible, 38 D. Cressy, Birth, Marriage and Death (Oxford, 1997), chs. 7, 9; A. Wilson, ‘The Ceremony of Childbirth and its Interpretation’, in V. Fildes (ed.), Women as Mothers in Pre-Industrial England (1990); see Ch. 2, above. 39 See Ch. 2, above. 40 Rogers, Matrimoniall Honour, 290. 41 D. Cawdrey, Reformation Promoted (1656), 55; M. K. McIntosh, Controlling Misbehavior in England, 1370–1600 (Cambridge, 1998), 122–3. 42 Marsh, Ten Pleasures of Marriage, 70–1; id., The Confession of the New Married Couple (1683), 102–3; cf. T. Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York, 1925) on ‘vicarious leisure’. On gentry visiting see Susan Whyman, Sociability and Power in Late-Stuart England: The Cultural World of the Verneys 1660–1720 (Oxford, 1999), ch. 4.

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and not only in the metropolis. The Cheshire minister Henry Newcome noted in his diary one day in 1663, ‘My wife had some friends with her in private’, while in Lancashire Josiah Stout allowed his young wife to entertain her friends at her own discretion.43 In the late seventeenth century, tea-drinking came to play a significant role on such occasions, sometimes with additional treats such as tarts, pancakes, fritters, custards, and stewed prunes.44 If the man of the house was away, the company might also indulge in more lively pleasures. A scandalized contemporary reported that when Bishop Bridgeman of Chester was absent one day, ‘there came some wives of Wigan to visit Mrs Bridgeman, which wives made breeches of their coats, so seeming to dance like men in a private chamber’.45 We can find some women of the middling sort arranging far more ambitious outings. One day in June 1665, for example, Elizabeth Pepys took her mother, two maids (and two male attendants) on a boat-trip to Gravesend, ‘to refresh themselves on the water’; they had risen at 2 a.m. and arrived back home at five the next morning. After a few hours’ rest, the women were sufficiently recovered to set off alone for a dinner engagement. In spring 1667 Elizabeth made a similar trip to Woolwich, staying overnight to gather ‘May dew’ as a cosmetic.46 She also visited the playhouse independently, like other women of her station. On at least fifteen occasions during the diary period Elizabeth went to the theatre accompanied by only female friends. On one occasion she and Samuel attended the same performance, unaware of each other’s presence.47 Provincial women could show equal independence. One of Thomas Deloney’s stories features five wealthy provincial merchants’ wives on a pleasure jaunt to London to buy the new fashions, each attended by a manservant.48 Several diaries show real women making similar journeys, for business, pleasure, or both. In the 1670s Jane Josselin, an Essex clergyman’s wife, visited London without him on several occasions, to take their younger daughters to boarding school in Hackney, or to stay with older, married children. In 1677 she took £20 for some serious 43 The Diary of the Rev. Henry Newcome from Sept. 30 1661 to Feb. 29 1663, ed. T. Heywood (Chetham Soc., 18, 1849), 161; The Autobiography of William Stout of Lancaster 1665–1752, ed. J. D. Marshall (Manchester, 1967), 159, 223. 44 Marsh, Confession, 53. 45 G. T. O. Bridgeman, The History of the Church and Manor of Wigan, ii (Chetham Soc., , 16, 1889), 357. Bridgeman was bishop 1619–52. 46 Pepys, Diary, vi. 119–21; viii. 240. 47 Ibid., viii. 443; D. Roberts, The Ladies: Female Patronage of Restoration Drama 1660–1700 (Oxford, 1989), ch. 2 (‘Elizabeth Pepys, Play-goer’), esp. pp. 60–1; cf. H. Peacham, The Art of Living in London (1642), sig. A4; P. Earle, A City Full of People (1994), 234; Roxburghe, ii. 36. 48 The Works of Thomas Deloney, ed. F. O. Mann (Oxford, 1912), 233–8.

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shopping, and in 1681 remained in the capital for over two months, returning home, her husband remarked, ‘very plump and fat’. Jane Yonge of Plymouth travelled much further, going up alone to London in 1693 to fetch her daughter home from school in Stepney.49 The social independence of these middling-sort women should not surprise us. Like poorer women, they were used to travelling considerable distances alone to markets and fairs, and such visits often combined pleasure with business.50 The recreational lives of women married to small tradesmen and husbandmen are predictably less well documented. Few could write, and none kept diaries, so we have to rely on literary accounts and incidental light shed by court records. It is clear that for ordinary women recreation was bound inextricably to their working lives. We repeatedly hear of them sitting at their doors, knitting or spinning, and chatting to neighbours. Sunday afternoons might find them there again, as a contemporary remarked, ‘decked out in fine clothes, in order to see and be seen by the passers-by’.51 Chance encounters with friends at the well, pump, market, or bakehouse further blurred the distinction between working and recreational time. But court records also confirm the contemporary charge that women of every station liked to visit their friends to eat, drink, or simply talk. Hospitality was by no means confined to couples. In the late 1560s, for example, a Newcastle glazier’s wife recalled how two other wives had come to drink with her while the three husbands were away working. A defamation case in 1579 originated in some bawdy talk at a house in Cambridge on Candlemas Day among ‘the women that made merry there that day’. A Chipping Norton man, presented in 1584 for failing to keep company with his wife, insisted ‘that she was never from him any otherwise but that she hath been with her friends to make merry’. And a Whitechapel man presented in 1599 for profaning the sabbath explained that he had gone to church while his wife stayed at home to bake a cake, ‘to entertain her friends that came to dine to her that day’.52 Such cases could be multiplied many times. 49 The Diary of Ralph Josselin 1616–1683, ed. A. Macfarlane (1976), 578–9, 585, 601, 615, 634–5, 637, 644; Yonge, Journal, 205. 50 See e.g. Adam Eyre, ‘A Dyurnall, or Catalogue of all my Accions’, ed. H. J. Morehouse, in Yorkshire Diaries and Autobiographies in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Surtees Soc., 65, 1875), 56, 58; Newcome, Diary, 209. 51 Rye, England as Seen by Foreigners, 72; H. Parrot, Cures for the Itch (1626), sig. A8; E. Ward, A Frolick to Horn-Fair (1700), 13. 52 J. Raine (ed.), Depositions and other Ecclesiastical Proceedings from the Courts of Durham, extending from 1311 to the Reign of Elizabeth (Surtees Soc., 21, 1845), 87; CUL, EDR D2/11, fo. 294; E. R. Brinkworth (ed.), The Archdeacon’s Court: Liber Actorum, 1584 (Oxfordshire Record Soc., 22–3, 1942/47), i. 85; GL, MS 9064/15, fo. 5.

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It is clear that ordinary women, like their betters, might also sometimes arrange independent social outings, at least in London. In 1623 John Taylor the water-poet was surprised to encounter a group of oysterwomen who had hired a coach to carry them in style to the Whitsun Green-Goose Fair at Stratford-le-Bow.53 We hear of another jaunt in August 1708, when a lowly waterman’s wife and two spinsters took a boat from the Tower to Chelsea, dined there, and then called at several alehouses before rounding off their day by going to view the duke of Beaufort’s mansion. Their trip lasted from six in the morning till nine at night, and reminds us that such excursions were not restricted to women of Elizabeth Pepys’s class.54 The role of the alehouse in female sociability is more problematic. On market days, country women often stayed to drink with friends after their business was done. In London and perhaps other large towns women might drink together in alehouses or taverns on any day of the week, though at night their presence would arouse suspicion. Ballads, chapbooks, pamphlets, and court records all show women drinking together, with no suggestion that this was in any way unusual. Tolerance was always conditional, of course, on respectable behaviour. An Old Bailey judge, sentencing a group of notorious shoplifters in 1678, launched a fierce attack on their idle way of life, and their ‘impudence to smoke tobacco, and guzzle in ale-houses’.55 Usually, as far as we can tell, women drinking together appear to have done so in a room or section separate from male customers.56 But London street sellers, an independent breed, clearly enjoyed an alehouse culture which paralleled that of men. Donald Lupton’s lively picture of fishwives and other hawkers, published in 1632, depicted ‘creatures soon up, and soon down’, happiest when their stock was sold and they could meet to be ‘merry in a drinking house’. ‘If they drink out their whole stock,’ he remarked sardonically, ‘it’s but pawning a petticoat in Long-lane, or themselves in Turnbull-street, for to set up again.’ At the end of the century Ned Ward penned an equally vivid account of a ‘smoky boozing-ken’ of Billingsgate fish-wives, ‘where, round the fire, sat a tattered assembly of fat motherly flat-caps, with their fish-baskets hanging upon their heads instead of riding hoods, with every one her nipperkin of warm ale and brandy, and as many rings upon 53

Taylor, All the Workes, ii. 239. GL, MS 9731/101/13, Neagle v Swaby, deposition of Mary Russell. 55 OBSP 11–12 Dec. 1678, 35–6; cf. OBSP 24–6 Feb. 1686, 2; GL, MS 9189/1, fo. 74; A. Copley, Wits Fittes and Fancies (1595), 127; W.P., The Gossips Greeting (1620), sig. Bv; J.W., Vinegar and Mustard; or, Wormwood Lectures (1673), 7. 56 S. Rowlands, Tis Merrie When Gossips Meet (1602), in The Complete Works, ed. S. J. H. Herrtage (Glasgow, 1880), i. 16; P. Clark, The English Alehouse: A Social History, 1200–1830 (1983), 311. 54

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their thumbs as belongs to a set of bed-curtains’.57 In rural parishes, by contrast, the alehouse remained primarily a milieu for men, courting couples, and sometimes mixed groups of friends. Respectable women might buy drink to take home for their families, but did not generally linger, either alone or together.58 If men felt uneasy about the world of gossips, they worried far more about their wives drinking or socializing with other men. Numerous Stuart ballads show feeble husbands complaining that their wives haunt playhouses and bowling alleys, or drink in taverns and alehouses at night, with their ‘good fellows’ or a ‘bully spark’. A London ‘hostess’ in a Jacobean city comedy asks a courtier whether he could arrange for ‘a company of wives’ to view the revels at court ‘without their husbands’ knowledge if need were’.59 Nor were such tales merely projecting male anxieties, for court records show some married women seizing or creating opportunities to indulge in illicit pleasures. In 1578 the wife of John Smyth, a London weaver, drank with a joiner’s wife and two other men, before they all went on to a play at the Bell, and Smyth’s apprentice hinted at illicit sex after the performance.60 A century later, in 1676, we hear of a common council man’s wife visiting plays and taverns with her gallant, returning home in the coach he had hired for her.61 A balladeer described sailors’ wives quaffing brandy in an alehouse while their husbands were away at sea, and picking up men there.62 Other adventurous women followed similar courses, both from choice and necessity. London’s suburban pleasure resorts, in Knightsbridge, Chelsea, Spring Gardens and Barn-Elms, attracted not only courting and married couples but people of all social classes pursuing illicit pleasures. Jane Lambert, a sailor’s wife taken in a doorway with a man at night in 1608, confessed she had gone on a jaunt to Tottenham with a poulterer’s wife and two men, and had spent most of the day drinking at the White Hind in Hogsdon.63 57

D. Lupton, London and the Country Carbonadoed (1632), 91–4; N. Ward, London Spy, 30–1. Clark, English Alehouse, 131–2. At Martock, Somerset, gossips taking infants to be christened at the remote parish church would stop at the alehouse in winter to warm themselves and the infant: E. H. Bates Harbin (ed.), Quarter Sessions Records for the County of Somerset (Somerset Record Soc., 23–4, 28, 34, 1907–19), ii. 34. On women and alehouses, see also A. Flather, ‘The Gendering of Space in Early Modern Essex, c.1580 to 1720‘ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Essex, 2002), 177–90. 59 See e.g. Pepys Ballads, iv. 143, 153; Everie Woman in her Humour (1609), sig. F3v. 60 BCB 3, fo. 267v . 61 Cruel and Barbarous News from Cheapside (1676), 2; cf. OBSP 18–20 Feb 1691, 4. The Humble Petition of Many Thousands of Wives and Matrons (1643), 6, a satire, refers to women being taken to plays by their gallants, or stealing from their husbands to pay for themselves. 62 Pepys Ballads, iv. 184–5. 63 BCB 5, fo. 267v. 58

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Later in the century Richard Head described the extraordinary throng of pleasure-seekers he had found at Tunbridge Wells, where gentlefolk, ‘chandlers,egg-bacon-women, and sempstresses | Were mixed together’. A German visitor in 1710 described coffee houses and dancing rooms at Epsom and other resorts thronged by prostitutes and pleasure-seekers alike.64 People frequenting these pleasure resorts often paid little heed to the standards of respectable society, and observers complained of some women abandoning all sense of decorum. At Hockley the German visitor found women as well as men watching the prizefighting, and was shocked when one told him she herself had fought there in public.65 Fairs in the capital encouraged similar licence. We hear of three unruly women, suspected prostitutes, arrested in 1609 for ‘singing bawdy songs’ in Bartholomew Fair at midnight.66 Horn Fair, held each year at Cuckold’s Point at Charlton, on St Luke’s Day (18 October), was still more notorious. Ned Ward complained of women hurling abuse at strangers, and Daniel Defoe regarded its disorder as insufferable in a civilized nation. ‘The women are especially impudent that day,’ he grumbled, ‘as if it was a day that justified the giving themselves a loose to all manner of indecency without any reproach’. The reformation of manners, always a slow and patchy process, did not reach Charlton until the nineteenth century.67

    Most contemporaries accepted that married women, as family governors, were entitled to some measure of social freedom. By contrast, recreational opportunities for spinsters living at home or in service depended on the indulgence of parents and employers, and their own ability to circumvent restrictions. Single women are the social group least visible to historians, and their patterns of recreation have been largely overlooked.68 The evidence, though fragmentary, suggests a culture in which 64 R. Head, Proteus Redivivus: The Art of Wheedling (1684), 96–7; W. Congreve, Love for Love (1695) in Complete Plays, ed. H. Davis (1967), 246; W. H. Quarrell and M. Mare (eds.), London in 1710: From the Travels of Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach (1934), 109, 120. 65 Uffenbach, London in 1710, 90. 66 BCB 5, fo. 378. 67 ‘Hey for Horn Fair’ (1685), in Pepys Ballads, iv. 128; E. Ward, Frolick, 11–12 and passim; D. Defoe, A Tour Thro’ Great Britain (1742), i. 125–6; J. Brand, Observations on the Popular Antiquities of Great Britain, ed. J. O. Halliwell (1848), ii. 194. 68 P. Griffiths, Youth and Authority: Formative Experiences in England 1560–1640 (Oxford, 1996), 208–13; I. Krausman Ben-Amos, Adolescence and Youth in Early Modern England (1994),

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custom, indulgence, and ingenuity allowed most at least some recreational time, both inside and outside the home. Those living at home with comfortably-off parents generally fared much better than servants. When Leonard Wheatcroft, a Derbyshire yeoman-tailor, called on his girlfriend one summer’s day in 1656, he found she had gone out for a walk, ‘it being’, he remarked, ‘a fine warm evening for maids to delight themselves in’. Francis Lenton’s sketch of ‘A country girl or darling’ depicts a farmer’s daughter ‘pranked up like a peacock by her doting parents . . . for every feast and fair’, where young ploughmen buy her small treats in return for kisses. Jane Ratcliffe, a professional man’s daughter in early Stuart London, loved dancing and stage plays, while Mary Harrison enjoyed an equally vigorous social life in Hampshire, delighting in ‘frothy company, at weddings, and merry-meetings, or going to feasts, as young people use to do’.69 Young folk bent on pleasure were a familiar target for moralists. The minister Thomas Hilder complained that many young women possessed ‘a frolic disposition’, and warned readers contemplating marriage to ‘beware of those who are gadders abroad to fairs, and every meeting of pleasure’.70 One wit told how ‘a countrywoman shent [scolded] her daughter for gadding up and down among ale-houses’, warning her of the dangers, whereupon the daughter riposted that she was already well aware of them, for had she not been conceived out of wedlock by her mother following the very same course?71 We have no journals or diaries by young spinsters, but much can be gleaned from those of contemporaries like Roger Lowe, a Lancashire apprentice preoccupied with the local ‘wenches’ he befriended and sometimes wooed. Lowe’s diary, covering the 1660s, shows spinsters living at home receiving and visiting male friends, and arranging meetings at home or in an alehouse.72 If one had a father less accommodating, she might arrange covert meetings while he was away, or contrive ‘accidental’ encounters.73 The diary confirms that maidservants too were generally ch. 6. A. Froide, ‘Single Women, Work and Community in Southampton, 1550–1750’ (Ph.D. thesis, Duke University, 1996), T. Meldrum, Domestic Service and Gender 1660–1750 (Harlow, 2000); and B. Hill, Women Alone: Spinsters in England 1660–1800 (New Haven, 2001) do not address this aspect. 69 The Courtship Narrative of Leonard Wheatcroft, Derbyshire Yeoman, ed. R. Houlbrooke (Reading, 1986); F. Lenton, Characterismi: or Lentons Leasures (1631), sig. C6r–v; J. Ley, A Patterne of Pietie. Or the Religious Life and Death of . . . Mrs. Jane Ratcliffe (1644), 21; 61; C. Nicholetts, A Burning yet Unconsumed Bush, Exemplified in the Dolorous Life and Glorious Death of . . . Mrs Mary Harrison (1700), 70 42. T. Hilder, Conjugall Counsell (1653), 53. 71 Copley, Wits Fancies, 154. 72 The Diary of Roger Lowe of Ashton-in Makerfield, Lancashire 1663–74 , ed. W. L. Sachse (1938), 13–14, 20, 34, 41, 43, 44, 68. 73 Ibid. 21–2, 28, 35, 37, 41, 42.

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allowed to go abroad on Sundays or invite friends back to their employer’s house. One Sunday in July 1663, for example, Lowe passed an enjoyable day with several young servants who appear to have been wholly at liberty. One invited him to stroll to a neighbouring village, where they attended church, dined with her mother, and then looked round Ashurst Hall, at the invitation of another maid who worked there, before rounding off their day at an alehouse with two other maidservants. The initiative for this programme appears to have lain entirely with the young women.74 Lowe’s circle included both servants and spinsters living at home, an overlap which almost certainly enlarged the leisure opportunities of those in service. In February 1665 we find him taking both the daughter and maidservant of one Mr Woods to an alehouse, and arranging another meeting with them both.75 Sometimes he and his friends devised ingenious schemes to help servants win permission to leave the house, once adopting a disguise and false identity to con an employer. Some servants also found weekday opportunities to enjoy a drink with Lowe in an alehouse, while running their errands.76 As Lowe’s diary illustrates, the recreational lives of the young revolved round Sundays and holidays. When the Elizabethan divine Nicholas Bownd urged that servants be made to devote the whole of the sabbath day to God, he felt obliged to answer the objection that none would be found willing to serve on such terms.77 Most employers were more indulgent, and many appear to have been indifferent whether their servants attended church or not.78 Many gave their servants leave on special occasions too, whether to visit a sick relative or attend a fair. When Elizabeth Pepys went to see her parents in Westminster one day in October 1664, she took along her cook and another maid so they could visit their own families there.79 Young women living ‘at their own hands’ naturally enjoyed far greater freedom. Joan Tucker, arrested in London in 1618, was described as ‘an idle, vagrant, masterless wench, a frequenter of taverns and alehouses’. The aptly named Dorothy Merry and a friend were arrested in May 1619 at the Fountain Tavern in Fleet Street, ‘with many gentlemen, where many gallons of wine were drunk’.80 But the Bridewell minutes show 74 The Diary of Roger Lowe of Ashton-in Makerfield, Lancashire 1663–74 , ed. W. L. Sachse (1938), 23; cf. 22, 26, 44, 58, 79. 75 Ibid. 79. 76 Ibid. 33–4, 45, 72. 77 Bownd, Sabbathum, 181–2, 463. 78 Ingram, Church Courts, 106; Wonder Woorthy the Reading, 9. 79 Pepys, Diary, iv. 354; cf. 173; Blundell, Great Diurnall, i. 304. 80 BCB 6, 6 June 1618, fo. 117.

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that some young women living at home were able to enjoy almost equal freedom by throwing off parental control, not difficult if they were living with a widowed mother in poor health. Mary Wene, whipped in 1625, was characterized as one who ‘followeth and haunteth playhouses and will not be ruled by her mother that is an honest woman’.81 For young women ready to dabble in adventure or casual prostitution, London’s taverns, playhouses, and pleasure resorts offered an almost unlimited supply of potential clients, gallants, or victims. Servants could not hope to match this degree of liberty, but many found ways to supplement the free time they were officially allowed. Left to mind the house on Sundays while their employers attended church, they might slip out or invite in their friends. Elizabeth Fielding of Hackney was sentenced in 1617 to sit in the stocks for keeping ‘disorders’ in the house while her mistress was at church.82 On weekday evenings many also enjoyed some recreational time when their chores were done, with or without their employers’ knowledge. We hear of frolics and horseplay in a London house in 1598, ‘when the maids would be merry in the kitchen and the children were gone to bed’.83 Many carved out additional time for themselves during working hours by loitering on errands. Margery Arnold was beaten in 1598 for taking her master’s small children into the street to play and then abandoning them for an hour at a time to ‘go at her pleasure’. Judith Snow, a tailor’s servant, found time while running errands for fleeting sexual trysts with her lover, also a servant.84 Others would slip out without permission. Pepys and his wife were furious in 1663 with their cookmaid Susan, ‘who gets out of doors two or three times a day without leave to the alehouse, did go before 5 a-clock [in the morning] . . . she said to warm herself’. Elizabeth Pepys was equally vexed when her servant-companion Mary Mercer chose to ‘gad abroad to some Frenchmen that were in the town’, without permission.85 Other servants contrived to slip out at night. An Essex parish constable woke one night in 1621 to discover that his servants had gone out as soon as he was in bed, and eventually located them at midnight, roistering with other servants in a neighbour’s house. A wealthy London merchant who regularly retired to bed before eight o’clock was almost inviting trouble. His manservant and maid slipped out one evening in January 1663 to spend several hours at a dancing establishment, 81

BCB 6, 30 Apr. 1625; cf. BCB 7, fos. 224v, 233v. W. Le Hardy (ed.), County of Middlesex: Calendar to the Sessions Records,  (1935–41), iv. 221; see also Ch. 4, above. 83 BCB 4, fo. 20. 84 BCB 4, fo. 36; BCB 5, fo. 204v. 85 Pepys, Diary, iv. 154; vi. 206. 82

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where they supped and played cards, before returning home to find that the house had been burgled in their absence.86 Employers who stayed away for several days, leaving servants in charge, knew they ran greater risks, and even aristocrats might suffer. The earl of Clare grumbled in 1626 that his servants had let a homeless family squat in the wash-house, and allowed all ‘the world to fetch water, that the house was as common as Fleet Street conduit’. Others fared much worse. One London maid, left unsupervised in 1698, was persuaded to accompany a scheming friend to a music house, where a bogus fortune-teller assured her that the first man to enter the room would marry her. In a typically Jonsonian scam, a man promptly appeared, professed his love, and took her boating on the Thames next day while his friends burgled the empty house.87 It is clear, moreover, that some servants were determined to enjoy an active social life whatever the consequences. Daniel Ashe of Walthamstow, it was reported in 1590, had often beaten his sister Elizabeth, who lived as his servant, ‘for being abroad in the night and keeping ill company’, but had been quite unable to reform her. Similarly, Joan Bridges, who lived as a servant with her married sister in Rochester, drank heavily in alehouses on weekdays and the sabbath alike, ignoring her family’s complaints.88 Employers were especially concerned when servants invited friends or casual acquaintances into the house without permission, which they feared would encourage pilfering, robbery, and illicit sexual liaisons.89 Pepys was furious in May 1667 to find his maids ‘letting in watermen and I know not who, anybody they are acquainted with, into the kitchen to talk and prate with them, which I will not endure’. He was equally angry to learn that his maid Bridget had brought her brother to sleep in the house.90 If Pepys could be deceived, it is not surprising that more easygoing employers might be hoodwinked for considerable periods. Elizabeth Hill allowed her lover to slip into her master’s house for two or three hours at night over a period of nine months in 1607–8, while he was supposedly serving with the watch, and they were never discovered.91

86 W. Hunt, The Puritan Moment: The Coming of Revolution in an English County (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), 81; A True Impartial Account of the Arraignment . . . of Col. James Turner (1663), 15, 26. 87 Letters of John Holles 1587–1637, ed. P. R. Seddon (Thoroton Soc., 31, 36, 36, 1975–86), ii. 323–4; OBSP 20–5 July 1698, 3. 88 GL, MS 9064/13, fo. 50v; A Strange and Wonderful Relation of the Burying Alive of Joan Bridges (1646), 2–3. 89 BCB 2, fo. 110v; OBSP 15–16 May 1684, 3; OBSP 23–5 Feb. 1687, 2; Ch. 4, above. 90 Pepys, Diary, viii. 202; ix. 165. 91 BCB 5, fos. 360v–361r.

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     How did young folk employ the free time they were allowed or took for themselves? As we would expect, most used it to meet their friends. Simon Forman recalled that when he was a young apprentice in Salisbury a citizen’s daughter, Anne Young, would come to the shop on holy days and ask his master to let him come out and ‘go to pastimes with her’. Sometimes they found as many as forty youngsters playing near the shop, and joined in their games. A century later, in 1662, officials in Leeds complained about servants and children playing in the streets on the sabbath, ‘sitting in public places in great companies’. A young Sussex villager, giving evidence in 1616, spoke of ‘a place in Funtington street, called the Cross, where people commonly gather to pastime or to converse and talk together’. Such gatherings would involve games, banter, dancing, horseplay, and flirting.92 Other ‘merry meetings’, as they were known, took place in alehouses or private houses. In 1615 Agnes Fiven, a farm servant in Cerne Abbas, Dorset, was invited to join a group of young people who met on Sunday afternoons to ‘drink and make merry’. Going along one day when her master was away, she found them playing cards and flirting.93 Young women sometimes took the initiative in arranging such gatherings, like the Oxfordshire servant who sent to her friends to come and make merry one Sunday after evening service.94 ‘Merry meetings’ usually featured eating and drinking. We hear of one unusually lavish feast at the Reindeer in Worcester, organized by the innkeeper’s daughter after her betrothed had died leaving her his entire estate of £20. She chose to spend the substantial sum of £6 treating their friends to a hearty supper in his memory.95 But employers suspected that the food and drink consumed on such occasions had usually been pilfered from their own stores. Defoe complained bitterly that servants would steal without any sense of guilt ‘for a junket, a merry bout or so’.96 Though his tirade was exaggerated, he had a point. Sussex villagers described in 1638 how Anne Thorne of Cold Waltham would revel with ‘mates’ who visited her late at night and whenever her employer was away, ‘drinking up her master’s beer and consuming his meat and provisions’. Several 92 A. L. Rowse, The Case Books of Simon Forman (1976), 279; J. G. Clark (ed.), The Court Books of the Leeds Corporation January 1662–August 1725 (Thoresby Soc., 34, 1936), 7–8; WSRO, Ep1/11/12, fo. 155v; cf. Wonder Woorthy the Reading, 9. 93 The Casebook of Sir Francis Ashley JP Recorder of Dorchester 1614–1635, ed. J. H. Bettey (Dorset Record Soc., 7, 1981), 12–13. 94 H. Burton, A Divine Tragedie lately Acted (1641), 17–18; nn.72, 74, above. 95 ‘Baskerville’s Journeys’, 292. 96 D. Defoe, Everybody’s Business is Nobody’s Business, in Works, ed. W. Scott et al. (1881), 501.

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Norfolk maidservants were accused in 1665 of pilfering pork, flour, and other items and gathering at a widow’s house in a neighbouring village, ‘intending a merry meeting there with some fellows’.97 When employers were away for an extended period, servants might seize the opportunity to party on a still more ambitious scale, and ‘so merry are they that they possess their own freedom, and keep open table,’ one observer complained, ‘that the whole neighbourhood hears their laughter’.98 At Over Tabley, Cheshire, two maids took advantage of their employer’s absence at Christmas 1665 to steal the keys to the cellar and storeroom, help themselves to beer, meal, flour, cheese, apples and nuts, and prepare a feast for their friends.99 As we might expect, dancing too featured prominently in the social gatherings of young people.100 Some dances drew young folk from miles around. An alehouse-keeper at Normandy, North Yorkshire, prosecuted for allowing drinking and dancing at his premises on two Sundays in June 1606, was said to have attracted up to a hundred people dancing to pipes and drums. The churchwardens of Yapton, Sussex, reported in 1623 that a fiddler had played on the village green most Sundays that summer, drawing thirty to forty young people from several villages to spend the day dancing there. ‘Now whether this be lawful or no we refer to the court to judge’, they added.101 The churchwardens of Queniborough, Leics., less indulgent, complained that music and dancing on the sabbath had also attracted young folk from far afield, to the ‘grief’ of the ministers and the ‘best of the congregation’.102 Many clergy and parish officers saw dancing as encouraging drunken disorder and sexual licence, as well as profaning the sabbath. The presentment of one villager in 1597 for allowing ‘dancing and disorder’ on the sabbath was typical of many throughout the country.103 Dancing at night in alehouses and taverns aroused particular concern. Villagers in Norton, Staffs., reported in 1590 97 WSRO, Ep1/11/16, fo. 143; The Notebook of Robert Doughty 1662–1665, ed. J. M. Rosenheim (Norfolk Record Soc., 54, 1989), 49, 80. 98 Marsh, Ten Pleasures, 63. 99 J. H. E. Bennett and J. C. Dewhurst (eds.), Quarter Sessions Records, with Other Records of the Justices of the Peace for the County Palatine of Chester, 1559–1760 (Record Society for Lancashire and Cheshire, 94, 1940), 177–8. 100 P. Collinson, The Religion of Protestants (Oxford, 1982), 206–7, 224–30; Ingram, Church Courts, 156–7. 101 J. C. Atkinson (ed.), Quarter Sessions Records (North Riding Record Soc., 1884–92), i. 50; H. Johnstone (ed.), Churchwardens’ Presentments (17th Century), Archdeaconry of Chichester (Sussex Record Soc., 49, 1949), 65, 75; OAO, archdeaconry papers c12, fo. 291. 102 LRO, 1D 41/13/37, fo. 77. 103 LRO, 1D 41/13/22, fo. 35v; 1D 41/13/33, fo. 24r–v; 1D 41/13/49, fo. 26; 1D 41/13/53, fo. 138; LRO, BR II/18/13/511; Sachse (ed.), Minutes of the Norwich Court 1632–1635, 15.

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that half-a-dozen servant girls who liked dancing at a disorderly alehouse had become pregnant within the space of three years. A London girl who ‘fell’ in similar circumstances found little sympathy: ‘Being young and silly, she would gad abroad with idle wenches who indeed were the ruin of her, by carrying her to hops and musick-houses where loose company resort.’104 For the young, of course, such dances provided an opportunity to enjoy themselves out of sight of their parents and employers. Adam Martindale, a Lancashire yeoman’s son, recalled how his elder brother had been swept off his feet by ‘a young airy girl, between fifteen and sixteen years of age; an huge lover and frequenter of wakes, greens and merry-nights, where music and dancing abounded’. Despite a wide discrepancy in age and fortune, he determined to marry her, and did so in the face of his family’s vigorous opposition. The fact that dances might enable young folk to choose a partner without parental advice or consent was one of the many objections puritan reformers brought against them.105 Young women not only flocked to dances; some took the initiative in organizing them. Joan Flower, servant to the minister of Cossington, Leics., exploited his absence at Easter 1618 by inviting a local musician to play for her friends in the parsonage. A Reading musician described in 1623 how he had been ‘hired by two maids of Shinfield’ to play at a ‘milking feast’ at the farm where one of them worked, and had played there one Sunday till midnight. And a few years later a young Northamptonshire woman, delighted to hear the Book of Sports had authorized Sunday leisure, promptly used the 3d. in her purse to summon a minstrel from the next town for some dancing.106 Dancing was popular with both sexes, an occasion for energetic fun and flirting. For young women, especially, it held a further significance. While organized sports were largely confined to men, dancing too possessed a competitive dimension, whether performed by individuals, couples, or young women together, offering an opportunity to display their grace, skill, and stamina. Will Kemp’s account of his famous morris dance to Norwich includes the intriguing episode of a 14-year-old girl at Chelmsford who persuaded her employers to let her be fitted with bells 104 S. A.H. Burne (ed.), The Staffordshire Quarter Sessions Rolls (William Salt. Archaeological Soc., 1929–50), ii. 53; Earle, City Full of People, 251; cf. F. G. Emmison, Elizabethan Life: Morals and the Church Courts (Chelmsford, 1973), 16; J. C. Jeaffreson (ed.), Middlesex County Records (1886–92), iii. 259. 105 The Life of Adam Martindale, ed. R. Parkinson (Chetham Soc., 4, 1845), 16; H. Roberts, An Earnest Complaint of Divers Vain, Wicked and Abused Exercises (1572), sig. E8v. 106 LRO, 1D 41/13/46, fo. 38v; J. M. Guilding (ed.), Reading Records: Diary of the Corporation (1886–96), ii. 160; Underdown, Revel, Riot and Rebellion, 95; Burton, Divine Tragedie, 3.

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and dance in a chamber alongside him. When she held out for a whole hour, Kemp remarked that he might ‘have challenged the strongest man in Chelmsford, and amongst many I think few would have done as much’. There was a parallel incident at Sudbury, in Suffolk, when a ‘lusty country lass’ taunted a butcher for failing to keep up with Kemp and declared, ‘If I had begun to dance, I would have held out one mile though it had cost my life.’ When the crowd laughed, she fitted bells, turned up her petticoat, and danced with him all the way to Melford, exhausted but triumphant.107 We can find dancing as a display of stamina among the elite too, at least in the earlier part of the period. Sir John Oglander of Nunwell, in the Isle of Wight, recalled how in Elizabethan times, when ‘there was more innocent mirth than now’, two local gentlewomen ‘would dance after a poor tabor and pipe from Heasley House to the foot of the hill’.108 Whenever young women danced together, we can detect a competitive dimension alongside and underpinning the sexual display. It was most explicit in the old holiday custom of dancing for prizes. John Stow, the London antiquarian, recalled that in his youth (in Henry VIII’s time) maidens would ‘dance for garlands hung athwart the streets’, with their employers looking on. The custom in fact survived, despite attempts to suppress it. We hear of a crowd assembling at the Red Cross in St John’s Street, one Sunday in 1624, ‘to dance for a garland’. Similarly, in June 1659 Marie Miller of St Katherine’s-by-the-Tower was charged with dancing at midnight and carrying home the garland she had won, amidst a crowd of friends; such behaviour was no longer acceptable, and Miller was labelled ‘an idle, lewd and disorderly person, living out of service at her own hand’.109 The most intriguing evidence relates to competitive dancing between rival teams. Some were single-sex occasions; a scene in Thomas Brewer’s play The Countrie-Girle (1647) features a dancing ‘match, upon a wager’, between ‘All the maids of our town Edmonton, | And all the mad wenches of Waltham’, to music by a fiddler. The Edmonton maids dress in a uniform of red petticoats and white starched bodices, and show scant respect for a local squire who fails to appreciate the importance of the event.110 We also hear of dancing matches in seventeenth-century Wiltshire. Susan Kent of Wylye, a young woman devoted to merrymaking, organized one in a neighbouring parish in the early 1620s, paying for the minstrels herself. Another was held on the sabbath at a landKemps Nine Daies Wonder, ed. A. Dyce (Camden Soc., , 11, 1840), 7, 10. A Royalist’s Notebook: The Commonplace Book of Sir John Oglander Kt of Nunwell, 1622–1652, ed. F. Bamford (936), 162. 109 Stow’s Survey of London, ed. H. B. Wheatley (1956), 87; Jeaffreson (ed.), Middlesex County Records, ii. 185; iii. 280–1. 110 T. Brewer, The Countrie-Girle (1647), sig. D, D3r–v. 107 108

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owner’s house in Compton Chamberlin, while in 1640 magistrates had to deal with disorders following an all-night ‘dancing match’ at a mill in Broad Chalk on St John’s Day (24 June). Young men took part at this last event, and perhaps most.111 Indeed, there was often a competitive element in mixed dancing on holidays, reflected in the award of garlands and titles of lord and lady of the May. William Blundell, the Lancashire cavalier, composed a song celebrating a dancing match between several couples, with a cake as prize, and several ballads depict similar occasions. In Rural Recreations, a rustic swain boasts that he and his partner Joan ‘have danced for many a wager’.112 When couples or teams came from several parishes, the dancing ‘match’ or ‘bout’ appears to have paralleled the sporting contests common between young men from rival communities.113 Dancing and ‘merry meetings’ head the list of young women’s recreations. Much less familiar are the ‘frolics’ or practical jokes also popular with some. Many were associated with the festive calendar, but they held a more general appeal for young women and young folk as a whole, and usually featured a temporary inversion of age, social, or gender hierarchy.114 Samuel Pepys was highly amused to hear how his maid Jane Birch had cut off a carpenter’s long moustache as a jest, and ‘how the fellow cried and his wife would not come near him a great while, believing that he had been among some of his wenches’. The barb was far sharper in another jest, a report that Isaac Antrobus, an allegedly lecherous Cumberland clergyman, was once so drunk and insensible that ‘a woman took a cord and tied it about his privy members unto a manger in the stable’. The scandal helped to secure his ejection in 1647.115 Some frolics were in even more dubious taste, like the balladeer’s tale of a group of Poplar maids who served a ‘rabbit-pie’ to some young sailor friends, and then revealed they had made it with a dead cat.116 Most diversions were more innocent. Many young London women liked to visit the playhouse, and William Gouge grudgingly conceded that 111 Underdown, Revel, Riot and Rebellion, 84, 94–5; S. Hammond, Gods Judgements upon Drunkards, Swearers, and Sabbath-Breakers (1659), 111; B. H. Cunnington (ed.), Records of the County of Wilts: Being Extracts from the Quarter Sessions Great Rolls (Devizes, 1942), 131–2. 112 Blundell, Great Diurnal, i. 322–3; Pepys Ballads, iv. 244; M. Walbancke, Annalia Dubrensia (1636), sig. I2. 113 Earle, City Full of People, 228; Blundell, Great Diurnal, i. 322–3; Griffiths, Youth and Authority, 118. 114 See the sect. ‘Women and the Festive Calendar’, below. 115 Pepys, Diary, iii. 198; The Last of the Astrologers. Mr. William Lilly’s History of his Life and Times from the year 1602 to 1681, ed. K. M. Briggs (1974), 38–9; A. G. Matthews (ed.), Walker Revised (Oxford, 1948), 102. 116 ‘The Poplar-Feast; or a Cat-Pasty’, in Pepys Ballads, iv. 183.

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such places were less inappropriate for servants than respectable matrons.117 Shop girls displayed similar tastes. In 1675 a satirist described an ‘Exchange-wench’ persuading apprentices to take her to playhouses and the Spring Garden, and a few years later Richard Head described a ‘handsome seamstress’ wheedling men into similar treats.118 In the provinces, many young folk shared Lowe’s appetite for pleasure jaunts on Sundays and holidays. We hear of two young Dorchester women with their sweethearts strolling to neighbouring Bockington, ‘to eat milk and cream’. A larger group from Derby made an outing to Nottingham Goose-Fair, which allegedly ended with the young men slipping away and leaving the women to settle a substantial bill for cakes, ale, cider, and mead.119 Fairs figured prominently in the social lives of the young, and both sexes liked to dress up for such occasions. Richard Flecknoe poked gentle fun at the simpering wenches at a country fair, ‘spruce and gay’ in their threadbare finery.120 With luck, young men would buy them cakes and ale, and other small treats or ‘fairings’, and perhaps a printed ballad to pin on the wall. Ballad heroines often singled out the pleasure of being treated to cakes and wine at country fairs, and their important role in the rituals of wooing was generally recognized.121 Dancing, drinking, and fairs were all associated with courtship. Though courtship itself falls outside the scope of this chapter, courting couples clearly enjoyed far greater freedom than most young people, provided the relationship was approved by their employers or parents.122 The young man would be allowed, even encouraged to visit his sweetheart’s house, and the two might drink together in the alehouse, beyond the prying gaze of other members of the household.123 Leonard Wheatcroft was allowed to take his sweetheart to a wake several miles away, and to stay overnight at her parents’ house.124 Inevitably some couples went further than was approved, and up to one in five brides was already pregnant by 117 W. Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties (1622), 376; for young women from prosperous homes also addicted to playhouses, see Ley, Patterne of Pietie, 21. 118 The Ape-Gentle-woman, or the Character of an Exchange-Wench (1675), 5; R. Head, Proteus Redivivus (1684), 285. 119 D. Underdown, Fire from Heaven: Life in an English Town in the Seventeenth Century (1992), 81; ‘The Unconsiderable Batchelors of Darby’, Pepys Ballads, iii. 269, cf. 278. 120 R. Flecknoe, The Diarium, a Journall (1656), 46–7. He described their old gloves, tawdry lace, stockings, and blue shoe-ties. Cf. R. Crab, Dagons-Downfall (1657), 3; Lenton, Characterismi, sig. 121 C6–7. e.g. Pepys Ballads, iii. 131; iv. 51. 122 D. O’Hara, Courtship and Constraint: Rethinking the Making of Marriage in Tudor England (Manchester, 2000), passim; Cressy, Birth, Marriage and Death, chs. 10–11; Ingram, Church Courts, ch. 7. 123 GL, MS 9065A/2, fo. 36; cf. Ch.4, above; Spufford, Small Books, 165. 124 Wheatcroft, Courtship Narrative, 52–3.

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the time she reached the altar. Uncertainty about what formally constituted the marital relationship was partly to blame; we find one young woman, charged with fornication in 1585, retorting indignantly that they ‘were man and wife before God and should marry shortly after’.125 The relaxed attitude of many older parishioners towards young couples known to be intending marriage clearly made it easier to find opportunities for intimacy. When the young man courting Agnes Avery, a Leicester victualler’s servant, brought her some bacon one day in 1618, they were able to enjoy sex as well as eggs and bacon together.126 Plebeian courtship was primarily a matter for the young couple themselves and their families or employers. But friends of their own age often played a significant role too, acting as intermediaries. Roger Lowe helped several friends of both sexes with their wooing, and received help with his own.127 Similarly, Leonard Wheatcroft met his future wife at Ashover wake after one of her relations had sung her praises and promised she would be there. Wheatcroft himself helped to promote a match between his brother and an attractive girl he knew.128 Young folk naturally also played a conspicuous part in the wedding festivities. Even relatively poor couples might be able to make a considerable splash, helped by their employers and the practice of raising money through bride-ales, and guests often brought some provisions with them for the wedding feast. Wheatcroft, who celebrated his wedding in May1657 on an epic scale, with feasting spread over eleven days for more than two hundred guests, calculated later with satisfaction that he and his bride had nonetheless gained more than they spent.129 Young women took part in the dancing, in ‘bedding’ the newly weds, and in the feasting. At the meal when the ‘bride-pie’ was eaten, Wheatcroft tells us, almost all the ninety or so guests were women. The sports he organized were mainly an opportunity for the young men to display their strength and agility, but some of the female guests took part in a cross-country horse race. There was even a prize for the first woman home, won ‘very valiantly’ by a servant named Alice Woodward.130 125

GL, MS 9064/12, fo. 58. LRO, BR II/18/13/346. Richard Parsons, a young Leicester carpenter, acknowledged in Jan. 1618 that Joan Palmer, whom he loved and planned to marry, had come to his chamber at 10 one night and remained sitting on his bed till 8 next morning; ‘all that while [we] were in talk together but did not lie together’: BR II/18/12/250. 127 Lowe, Diary, 33–4, 36, 42, 45–7, 48–9, 53, 68, 72, 88, 90. 128 Wheatcroft, Courtship Narrative, 40–1, 71–3; cf. Yonge, Journal, 139. 129 Wheatcroft, Courtship Narrative, 82–6. Guests were served 209 ‘messes’ (836 meals). 130 Ibid. 84–5, 87. 126

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-  While most young folk were predictably drawn to mixed company, they also enjoyed leisure activities with friends of their own sex. Young men turned to physically demanding sports, such as football, cudgels, and wrestling, as well as drinking and gaming, to differentiate themselves from the world of women and children.131 Female activities were generally quieter and more private. A commentator in 1682 assumed that a prosperous London tradesman’s daughter would spend her leisure time visiting friends, drinking tea, discussing fashions, and playing cards.132 Maidservants and shop girls also liked to visit their friends on Sundays and holidays, and some would also venture out at night despite the risk of encountering suspicious watchmen.133 In 1674 we hear of a friend calling on a dyer’s two maidservants, who built up the kitchen fire and locked the door ‘to make merry by themselves’ when the householders retired to bed. A shopworker who called on ‘a shop-mate’ at four o’clock one afternoon, in 1725, stayed till one in the morning, explaining later that she was not usually out so late, ‘but it was holiday time, and we were willing to be a little merry together’.134 One Somerset girl, more ambitious, took some malt to a brewer in 1649 and asked him to brew some beer, for she and some other ‘maidens of her acquaintance had a desire to be merry together’.135 On Sunday afternoons young women might also stroll in the fields with their friends, or visit the local sights. Mary Hurll recalled that as a young servant in late Stuart Wiltshire, she had always ‘rejoiced when the sabbath was come that I might have time for recreations, my business on that day being to walk about to see new places. I had companions like myself, to walk with.’ Servants in the capital naturally enjoyed a far richer supply of diversions and attractions. Phineas Pett, the shipwright, mentions a group of maidservants coming one Sunday afternoon in 1610 to look over the Royal Prince, a warship he was building for the navy, while in 1650 we find a complaint that young maids (and young men) were visiting the Bethlem hospital on the sabbath, and ‘molesting and troubling the poor lunatics under a pretence of doing them good and relieving them’.136 131

Griffiths, Youth and Authority, 136–7. Marsh, Ten Pleasures, 202–4. 133 P. Griffiths, ‘Meanings of Nightwalking in Early Modern England’, Seventeenth Century, 13 (1998); L. Gowing, ‘“The Freedom of the Streets”: Women and Social Space’, in P. Griffiths and M. S. R. Jenner (eds.), Londinopolis (Manchester, 2000). 134 Sad and Lamentable News from Old-Street (1674), passim; Earle, City Full of People, 249. 135 G. R. Quaife, Wanton Wenches and Wayward Wives (1979), 66–7. On maids playing crambo and rhyming games see Congreve, Love for Love, 218. 136 An Account of the Remarkable Conversion and Experiences of Mary Hurll (1708), 4; The Auto132

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We have seen that women looking for more energetic activity found it mainly in dancing. Organized sports were essentially for men, though some young women clearly enjoyed watching football or wrestling.137 One balladeer describes six young women swimming in a river near Canterbury one summer’s day, but there is little to suggest this was a common pursuit.138 Once we cast our net wider to include games, however, we find young women playing a far more prominent role, both in mixed and single-sex contexts. Barley-break, a chasing game, and stool-ball, related to cricket, often featured mixed teams, or male and female teams playing one another. Pasquils Palinodia (1619) described rollicking Shrove Tuesday festivities, When country wenches play with stool and ball, And run at barley-break until they fall, And country lads fall on them in such sort, That after forty weeks they rue the sport.

We hear of young men at Cambridge treating girls to wine in 1602 after losing to them at stool-ball in 1602, and young Lancashire women treating a victorious male team to a tansey in 1715.139 But just as often these were single-sex recreations, with girls and young women playing among themselves. At Kirtling, Cambridgeshire, maidservants and children frequently assembled in the afternoon on the green or in a close to play at stool-ball and running games, while the young men played football.140 Older women might join in too at festival times. Henry Machyn describes the wives of his London parish playing at barley-break on Easter Monday 1557, and then adjourning to a tavern for dinner, while Sidney’s rustic shepherd remarks, biography of Phineas Pett, ed. W. G. Perrin (Navy Records Soc., 51, 1917), 78–9; BCB 9, fo. 462. Cf. maids watching a military display at Richmond, Yorks., in 1660: The Autobiography of Alice Thornton, ed. C. Jackson (Surtees Soc., 62, 1873), 128–9. 137 R. W. Malcolmson, Recreations in English Society 1700–1850 (Cambridge, 1973), 55; Underdown, Revel, Riot and Rebellion, 75; A. J. Williams (ed.), Winchester Consistory Court Depositions 1561–1602 (Hambledon, 1960), 34; Uffenbach, London in 1710, 89–90; Shakespeare, As You Like It, . ii. For a Yorkshire minister’s wife, prosecuted in 1640 with several men for hunting hares with greyhounds, see J. Lister (ed.), West Riding Sessions Records, 1611–1642 (Yorkshire Archaeological Soc., 53, 1915), 189, 191. 138 ‘ The Kentish Frolick’, Pepys Ballads, iii. 243. 139 W. Fennor, Pasquils Palinodia (1619), sig. Dv; A. Shepard, ‘Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England, with special reference to Cambridge, c.1560–1640’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Cambridge, 1998), 179; Malcolmson, Recreations, 42; Underdown, Revel, Riot and Rebellion, 76; The Letter Book of John Parkhurst, Bishop of Norwich, 1571–5, ed. R. A. Houlbrooke (Norfolk Record Soc., 43, 1975), 99. 140 Griffiths, Youth and Authority, 133; J. Brand, Observations on the Popular Antiquities of Great Britain, ed. J. O. Halliwell (1848), i. 180, ii. 394–6; D. Cressy, Bonfires and Bells (1989), 19.

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A time there is for all, my mother often says, When she, with skirts tucked very high, With girls at stool-ball plays.

Such games appealed across a wide social spectrum, with even the aristocratic Lady Anne Clifford happy to play with women at barley-break on the bowling green, at Easter and Whitsun 1617.141 Other ball games had their followings too. Seventeen young women were presented in April 1634 for playing at ‘handball’ in service time at Hungerton, Leics.142 Several others were prosecuted at Wisbech in 1638 for ‘sporting at the bowling green’ in service time. And two generations later Ned Ward expressed disgust at ‘a parcel of wenches fit for husbands, playing at whoop and hide among the pillars [of the new St Paul’s]. This revelling of girls I thought was very indecent.’143 Alongside these traditional pursuits we find far more elaborate activities organized to mark special occasions. The most ambitious were linked to royal visits and coronations. In May 1660 London maids petitioned the mayor for permission to greet Charles II on his return to the capital, dressed alike in ‘white waistcoats and crimson petticoats and other ornaments of triumph’, though it is unclear how far this was their own initiative.144 At Honiton three hundred women and girls marked Queen Anne’s coronation in 1702 by parading in costume through the streets, with three women drummers; the parades lasted all day, and celebrations continued throughout the night. Similarly two hundred young women dressed as Amazons, drawn up in troops with officers and flags, welcomed the queen to Bath in 1702, in a ceremony with clear political echoes of the Elizabethan age. On the Downs near Marlborough the monarch was greeted by more companies of young women, this time with their spinning wheels, a less charged symbolic accompaniment.145 We can only speculate what part the women had played in devising such events. Many young women thus enjoyed an active recreational life, centred on the pleasures of Sunday dancing, fairs, wakes, and weddings, which 141 The Diary of Henry Machyn, ed. J. G. Nichols (Camden Soc., 42, 1842), 132; ‘A Dialogue between Two Shepherds’, in The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. W. A. Ringler (Oxford, 1962), 343 (the attribution to Sidney is uncertain); Griffiths, Youth and Authority, 117, 133; The Diary of the Lady Anne Clifford, ed. V. Sackville-West (1923), 65, 70. 142 LRO, 1D 41/13/61, fo. 63r–v; the one male presented had been a spectator. H. Misson, M. Misson’s Memoirs and Observations in his Travels over England (1719), 307. 143 W. M. Palmer (ed.), Episcopal Visitation Records of Cambridgeshire (Cambridge, 1930), 69; Ward, London Spy, 83. 144 The Diurnal of Thomas Rugg 1659–1661, ed. W. L. Sachse (Camden, 3rd ser., 91, 1961), 85. 145 Yonge, Journal, 210; The Journeys of Celia Fiennes, ed. C. Morris (1947), 21–3.

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played a central part in their lives and distinguished young people of both sexes from older and more sober householders. We should not exaggerate this distinctiveness, however. Many of these pleasures were shared by older folk too, like the festive calendar to which we turn next. Moreover, most young folk eventually aspired to marriage and householder-status themselves; even Martindale’s ‘airy’ 15-year-old turned into a model wife and domestic manager.146 The recreational subculture of youth was highly resilient but most of the individuals who shared it moved on to other patterns as they grew older and looked to settle down.

     Holidays and festivals played a major part in the recreational life of the whole community, as we have seen. Drinking, dancing, and feasting drew in both sexes, and all ages. Though festive celebrations waxed and waned in response to pressure from Protestant and puritan reformers and shifting governmental attitudes, they clearly enjoyed the strong support of a substantial proportion of the population throughout the period. The recent studies of the festive year by Ronald Hutton and David Cressy both focus on the communal aspects of calendar customs.147 But many festivals included customs that prescribed particular roles to women, especially the young and single, and it these gendered aspects of festive traditions that concern us here. The festive year began with Christmas, always a midwinter celebration as much as a religious event. One gendered element was the custom of ‘wassailing’, in which a drinking cup for toasts was passed from hand to hand. Henry Machyn describes a Twelfth Night supper in 1556 at Henley-on-Thames, when the hostess, a wealthy widow, had twelve wassails brought in ‘with maidens singing with their wassails, and after came the chief wives singing with their wassails’.148 More often we hear of young or poor women going from door to door with cups of spiced ale, looking for tips. Pepys, enjoying cakes and a drink in a Moorfields alehouse on St Stephen’s Day (26 December) 1661, noted that ‘a washeall-bowl woman and girl came to us and sung to us’.149 Christmas was also associated with dancing and games. Nicholas Blundell describes his Lancashire servants dancing and visiting friends for ‘a merry night’, while Herrick celebrated milkmaids and servants playing blind man’s 146 147 148 149

Martindale, Life, 16; Ben-Amos, Adolescence and Youth, chs. 6, 8, 9. Hutton, Rise and Fall of Merry England; Cressy, Bonfires and Bells. Machyn, Diary, 99; Hutton, Rise and Fall of Merry England, 177. Pepys, Diary, ii. 239; Brand, Observations, i. 1–8.

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buff, fox’i’th’hole, shoeing the mare, and choosing Twelfth Night kings and queens.150 Not all this merriment was as innocent as Herrick liked to imagine, for Christmas was also a time of licensed misrule. Its spirit was nicely symbolized by an Oxfordshire custom in which a maidservant would steal her master’s breeches and nail them to the gate in the yard if he failed to provide ivy to decorate the house.151 Some of the games were less than decorous too. In ‘hot-cockles’ one player spanks a blindfolded victim, who has to guess the assailant’s identity, a game with obvious potential for eroticism and violence. One boisterous occasion in London in 1650 saw a male player thrashing his victim so hard ‘that it made her whole body to rebound’, whereupon she and her female companions beat him so fiercely on his turn that he could barely move for several days. Their Christmas merriment ended with the young women being prosecuted for assault at the Old Bailey.152 Another tradition associated with the Christmas season was the practice of ‘mumming’, which involved disguises or cross-dressing. Though mainly an occasion for sport among family members and their guests, such rituals were never codified and some young women devised far more elaborate frolics. In January 1634 three London maidservants engineered strange noises in their employers’ house to frighten them into believing it was haunted; when the truth emerged their master prosecuted them at Bridewell, though the governors seem to have regarded it as a harmless prank.153 They looked less kindly on escapades which involved cross-dressing in public. Katherine Jones, taken in Fleet Street early in January 1624 dressed as a man, said she had done it ‘in merriment’ and was lucky to be let off with a warning.154 Margaret Willshire, a servant at Chaceley, Worcs., was more daring. One evening in Christmas 1610 she donned men’s clothes, along with her sister and her mistress, and the trio sallied forth, as she later confessed, ‘having a purpose to be merry’. Picking up a neighbour’s wife, also disguised, they proceeded to the constable’s house where Margaret, armed with a dagger and pikestaff, gave him a piece of paper which she said was an order to raise the hue and cry. Unable to read, and fooled by their disguises, he believed her. In the holiday atmosphere it was clearly possible for servants and married women to join in a frolic, and the two husbands appear to have entered 150

Blundell, Great Diurnal, 158–9, 198; Herrick, Complete Poetry, 172, 418. John Aubrey: Three Prose Works, ed. J. Buchanan-Brown (Fontwell, 1972), 134–5. 152 Strange Newes from Newgate (1651), 4–5; Aubrey, Three Prose Works, 254. John Taylor praised hotcockles and shoeing the wild mare as ‘harmless sports’ for servants: Christmas In & Out (1652), 16, in Works of John Taylor the Water Poet (Spenser Soc., 7, 1870; repr., New York 1967). 153 BCB 7, fo. 359. 154 BCB 6, 3 Jan. 1624; cf. BCB 7, fos. 164v, 211v, 212v. 151

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into the spirit of the occasion. The humiliated constable took a different view, and the escapade landed Margaret in court. Three sisters and another young woman were similarly charged in an Essex church court in 1596 for ‘going disguised a-mumming’, along with their father for allowing it.155 Such frolics enabled spirited young women to escape their humble station, however briefly, and create a stir. A few of the boldest even ventured into the parish church, where they would be seen by the whole congregation. Shortly before Christmas 1667, for example, Anne Glover, a servant in Aylestone, near Leicester, borrowed an elaborate costume from her mistress (a ‘gown, petticoat, shoes and galloshes, velvet mantle, black hoods and vizard mask’), and swept into church to sit in a chancel-seat reserved for the families of the rector and church officers. Some parishioners walked out in disgust. Ann herself relished the commotion, before leaving with a triumphant flourish; ‘I think I have made sport enough’, she remarked. The rector disagreed and presented her for ‘high misdemeanour’.156 Other festivals also possessed a gendered dimension. Nicholas Blundell, the Lancashire squire, noted on Shrove Tuesday 1704, that ‘Some good wives came to toss pancakes’.157 We have seen that games such as barley-break and stool-ball, popular at Easter and holidays throughout the summer, might be played with mixed teams or by women alone. The rituals of Hock-tide, on Easter Monday or Tuesday, could be far more dramatic, with bands of men and women capturing stray members of the opposite sex, and holding them hostage until they paid a forfeit. A rowdy tradition at Hexton, Herts., featured a tug-of-war between rival teams of men and women, with the men pushed into ditches if they lost, and smeared with dirt. There was feasting and drinking too, with the proceeds used for poor relief.158 Hock-tide customs had spread in the fifteenth century to become a significant source of parish revenue, though by 1600 this role was being superseded by the rise of parish rates, and local authorities increasingly disapproved of such disorderly customs. In some areas, however, they were appropriated by ordinary parishioners and survived for another three centuries. Women seem often to have been the more enthusiastic performers, partly no doubt because such customs allowed them to reverse conventional 155 J. W. Willis Bund (ed.), Worcester County Records: Calendar of the Quarter Sessions Papers (Worcestershire Historical Soc., 1899–1900), i. 161. 156 LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 32/64; 1D 41/13/76, fo. 165; cf. Emmison, Elizabethan Life: Morals, 18l. 157 Blundell, Great Diurnall, 52. 158 S. Hindle, ‘A Sense of Place? Becoming and Belonging in the Rural Parish, 1550–1650’, in Shepard and Withington (eds.), Communities, 106–7.

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patterns of authority and hierarchy. While Hock-tide was often simply an occasion for good-natured merriment, the Hexton tug-of-war and the evidence that has survived on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century customs show that the ritualized inversion could also encourage sexual and social intimidation.159 Festivities in May, a secular holiday, reflected its central themes of new life and fertility, and young people naturally played a leading role in the dancing and games. The fevered polemicist Philip Stubbes has left a celebrated description of crowds ‘gadding overnight to the woods’, gathering branches and greenery, and hauling back a tree to set up as a maypole, activities he saw as cover for wild promiscuity. Painting and decorating the pole provided further opportunities for fun; we hear of ‘divers young people of the town of Skeffington [Leics.] gathered together in one Goodman Nutts barn in Skeffington, and being merry together and dressing of a maypole’, on Ascension day 1634.160 May festivities were suppressed by the puritans during the Revolution, only to return in 1660 with renewed vigour. The nonconformist Oliver Heywood was appalled by the rowdy scenes at Halifax in 1680, which began before dawn with large bands roaming the streets, hanging up garlands and branches, and demanding money from passers-by. There was dancing to drums, fiddles, and pipes, and heavy drinking, and by evening the crowds were ‘mad and drunk’. Heywood concluded gloomily that hell had broken loose. The Catholic squire Nicholas Blundell took a far more positive view of festive traditions, and was happy to see the young folk of Crosby arranging music and a bonfire on 3 May 1710. Such rural merriment was much less threatening than the anonymous, intimidating crowds roaming the streets of Halifax. A few weeks later Blundell noted sixty young folk ‘playing in a ring’ on the green, and dancing and ‘merry-nights’ were a regular seasonal feature in the area.161 A familiar and much quieter spring tradition featured milkmaids dancing through the streets. On May morning 1667 Pepys describes milkmaids in London ‘with their garlands upon their pails, dancing with a fiddler before them’. Unlike the holiday dancing we saw earlier, this seems to have been celebratory rather than competitive, though there was also a pecuniary aspect. At the end of the century a French traveller noted milkmaids dancing from door to door and collecting tips from 159 Hutton, Rise and Fall of Merry England, 59–60; B. Bushaway, By Rite: Custom, Ceremony and Community in England 1700–1880 (1982), 170–6; Brand, Observations, i. 181–91. 160 Hutton, Rise and Fall of Merry England, 115–16; LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 16/49. 161 The Rev. Oliver Heywood BA 1630–1702: His Autobiography, Diaries, Anecdote and Event Books, ed. J. H. Turner (Brighouse and Bingley, 1881–5), ii. 271; Blundell, Great Diurnal, i. 253, 255, 288, 290; Hutton, Rise and Fall of Merry England, ch. 7.

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their customers, attended by a bagpiper or fiddler and a troop of small children.162 The custom reflects the strong sense of collective identity among milkmaids, evident in a host of ballads and encouraged by their sociable work patterns. The May ritual appears to have found echoes throughout the year. On a visit to his father at Brampton, Hunts., in October 1662, Pepys saw milkmaids working in the fields, and remarked ‘with what mirth they come all home together in pomp with their milk, and sometimes they have music go before them’.163 Whitsun was associated with processions, rush-bearing, and churchales, all designed to raise funds for the parish. These customs too were increasingly frowned on by the local authorities, but parishioners often clung on tenaciously and women sometimes played a prominent role in the fight to maintain them. In 1617 Middlesex magistrates complained that despite several prohibitions women were still assembling in the street ‘in large companies’ to demand money from passers-by for Whitsun ales, claiming a long-standing custom. Many householders reported that their servants and children had stolen goods or money for the games that formed part of these festivities.164 The ‘silver games’ popular in some areas were probably related to church-ales, combining dancing, drinking, and games intended to raise money for the local poor. An Elizabethan minister railed in 1572 that people came from ten or twelve miles away, leaving the churches empty but for a handful of the old and lame.165 There were many other traditions of more local significance. At Kirtlington, Oxfordshire, the young spinsters of the parish would chase after a fat lamb, their thumbs tied behind them, with the one who caught it proclaimed ‘the Lady of the Lamb’ and borne in triumph through the village, with music and dancing. Next day she presided over a village feast where the lamb was served to her companions.166 Far more widespread was the custom of rush-bearing, with young women bringing new rushes to strew on the church floor, amidst music and merrymaking, a tradition explicitly endorsed by Charles I’s Book of Sports. But again, a symbol of communal harmony often appeared to the parish authorities as an occasion for profanity and disorder, and sometimes with good cause. A rush-bearing procession of forty young women at Fuston, Yorkshire, in July 1619 ended disastrously when fighting broke out among male parishioners gathered in the church porch, over the order of precedence 162 163 164 165 166

Pepys, Diary, viii. 193; OBSP 1–2 June 1677, 1–2; Misson, M. Misson’s Memoirs, 307. Pepys, Diary, iii. 221. Le Hardy (ed.), Middlesex Calendar,  iv. 283–4. Roberts, Earnest Complaint, sig. D1–4. J. Strutt, The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England, ed. J. C. Cox (1903), 282.

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in which the young women should enter. The minister, preparing for a service, regarded the episode as an outrageous profanity, and it ended in a Star Chamber suit.167 Many of these calendar customs were survivals or adaptations of old traditions. One striking novelty in the late seventeenth century was the rise of foot races between young women, especially in the north, sometimes for prizes offered by a local gentleman. On 1 September 1681, the nonconformist Heywood noted ‘a strange unheard of race on Karsey Moor near Manchester in Lancashire. It was run by 3 or 4 women stark naked only their privities covered with a rag, amongst thousands of people, oh unparalleled insolence.’ Huge crowds flocked from Manchester and other towns to watch.168 These ‘smock races’ (a new smock being often the prize) became popular, not least with male spectators, and featured in the famous Cotswold Games organized in the 1630s and revived after the Restoration. One race at Maidenhead featured five young women, all under twenty. A late Stuart ballad reported another in which four young women ran two miles at Temple Newsham Green, in Yorkshire; the victor, one Ann Clayton, had allegedly beaten a man in an earlier race in London.169 Such mixed-sex races were not unknown, and Nicholas Blundell noted one arranged in 1703 between a tenant’s wife and a male competitor.170 Smock races probably originated in more informal occasion, such as the family outing in the summer of 1667 when Pepys describes his maidservants racing over a bowling green for small wagers. The far more ambitious races of the eighteenth century represent the commercialization of leisure rather than the survival of tradition.171

   Most writing on the cultural world of early modern women has focused on spiritual rather than secular themes.172 Yet it remains an open question how far piety featured in the lives of most ordinary women. The private devotions of pious gentlewomen are familiar through their personal 167 PRO, STAC 8/180/11; cf. Hutton, Rise and Fall of Merry England, 118; H. J. Morehouse and C. A. Hulbert (eds.), Extracts from the Diary of the Rev. Robert Meeke (1874), 29, 43, 53. 168 Heywood, Autobiography, ii. 284; Brand, Observations, i. 210; ii. 9. 169 D. Brailsford, Sport and Society, Elizabeth to Anne (1969), 113, 236; ‘The Virgin Race; or, York-shires Glory’, Pepys Ballads, iv. 26. 170 Blundell, Great Diurnal, i. 33. 171 Pepys, Diary, viii. 167; Malcolmson, Popular Recreations, 21, 31, 77. 172 For general surveys see P. Crawford, Women and Religion; Claire Schen, ‘Women and the London Parishes 1500–1620’, in K. L. French, G. C. Gibbs, and B. A. Kümin (eds.), The Parish in English Life 1400–1600 (Manchester, 1997).

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writings, but there is no reason to assume they were in any way typical. What part did religious activities play in the lives of ordinary women? What opportunities did they have to be more than passive ‘consumers’ of religion? And what evidence, if any, can we find of more collective expressions of religious faith? Such questions invite frustration. Ordinary, law-abiding churchgoers of either sex were of little interest to the authorities, and their religious lives have left few traces. It seems clear that on balance the Reformation reduced opportunities for religious participation for ordinary women. Traditionally they had joined in processions on saints’ days, and especially on the Feast of Candlemas, dedicated to the Virgin Mary; some had gone on pilgrimages, often to a shrine of Mary or a female saint; and many belonged to parish guilds and confraternities. In some minor guilds women even held office, while other parishes and guilds identified separate groups such as the ‘maidens’, ‘wives’, or even ‘the wives of the western end of the parish’, who took responsibility for maintaining chapel lights and assumed a collective identity. At Morebath, in Exmoor, widows served their turn as wardens of the parish stock, which included a flock of sheep. Women also played a significant part in decorating the parish church and its side chapels and images.173 This world was swept away by the Protestant Reformation. The strength of the old order had rested in part on its ability to fuse religious devotion with sociability, and we see a late echo at Morebath in 1554, following Mary Tudor’s accession, when twenty-seven of the village wives took a collection from female parishioners to buy a manual setting out the restored Catholic services for the rites of passage. The money left over they kept to lay out on other church provisions at their own discretion.174 For conforming Protestants, little survived of this religious legacy except the custom of rush-bearing, itself under attack, and women’s part in the rites of passage. Here they did retain an important role. The new mother’s gossips would carry her baby to be christened, while at churchings the midwife would often precede the mother into church, carrying the ‘chrisom’ in which the baby had been wrapped at the 173 E. Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580 (New Haven, 1992), 147–8, 150–1; id., The Voices of Morebath: Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village (New Haven, 2001), 26, 28–9, 34, 81–3, 101–2; J. J. Scarisbrick, The Reformation and the English People (Oxford, 1984), 3, 25, 165–6; K. L. French, ‘Parochial Fund-Raising in Late Medieval Somerset’, in French, Gibbs, and Kümin (eds.), Parish in English Life, 125–6; and on women, Hocktide, and fund-raising, ead., ‘To Free Them from Binding: Women in the Late Medieval English Parish’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 27 (1997). On Candlemas see Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 15–22. 174 Duffy, Voices of Morebath, 160–1.

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baptism ceremony.175 Women also played a distinctive role in some funeral customs, and a spinster’s funeral might see other young women, her friends and kin, carry the pall as the coffin was borne to the church.176 Gender could also influence patterns of attendance. Oliver Heywood and his wife were both invited to the funeral of a female neighbour in January 1701, but as Heywood noted in his diary, ‘my wife went . . . I stayed at home’. Where a bond had existed primarily between two women rather than the families as a whole, it was natural for this pattern to continue to the very end. It seems likely that the funerals of small children and elderly widows were often dominated by women. The refreshments served after the ceremony reflected and reaffirmed the social bonds between mourners, and a Dutch resident in Elizabethan England could describe funerals as an integral part of female ‘merry making’.177 His comments underline women’s prominent role, and though he chose to emphasize their social aspects, they also possessed an important spiritual significance. The impact of the Reformation was not wholly negative from the perspective of female participation. The new liturgy allowed and indeed required women to join in public prayers, psalm-singing, and hymns, and receive the communion, and we should not underrate the significance of these Protestant innovations.178 Pious women were also encouraged to take an active role in family prayers, especially if their husbands were apathetic or absent, and it may be that women were responsible for many of the religious pictures, painted cloths, and biblical texts used to decorate private houses.179 We find more affluent women providing food and hospitality for visiting preachers, and sometimes helping to support them financially.180 Evidence of strong religious feelings and independent action among women generally surfaces, however, in the context of dissatisfaction, whether with the minister, services, or ecclesiastical 175 D. Beaver, Parish Communities and Religious Conflict in the Vale of Gloucester, 1590–1690 (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), 147; Cressy, Birth, Marriage and Death, ch. 9. 176 C. Gittings, Death, Burial and the Individual in Early Modern England (1988), 117–18; Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death, 437; cf. R. Houlbrooke, Death, Religion and the Family in England 1480–1750 (Oxford, 1998). 177 Heywood, Autobiography, iv. 245; Rye, England as Seen by Foreigners, 72; cf. Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death, ch. 19. 178 But note the role of kissing the pax in the pre-Reformation church: Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 125–9. 179 Watt, Cheap Print, ch. 5; Crawford, Women and Religion, ch. 4. 180 S. Wabuda, ‘Shunamites and Nurses of the English Reformation: The Activities of Mary Glover, Niece of Hugh Latimer’, in W. J. Sheils and D. Wood (eds.), Women in the Church (Studies in Church History, 27, 1990); R. C. Richardson, Puritanism in North-east England (Manchester, 1972), 134–8.

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authorities. At the individual level this might be a puritan refusal to be churched, or kneel for communion, while traditionalists with Catholic sympathies might spit out the communion bread or cling to ‘superstitious’ practices, such as placing candles by the dead.181 Dissatisfaction occasionally triggered collective protest and action. In 1566 a crowd of two or three hundred women showed their support for the puritan ministers being expelled from the city, for refusing to wear vestments, by meeting them on London Bridge to hand them provisions and urge them to remain steadfast.182 The most dramatic evidence, noted in the preceding chapter, reveals angry women petitioning, lobbying, or even resorting to violence over religious grievances.183 It was far more common, however, for zealous or dissatisfied parishioners to respond by seeking out supplementary forms of worship. The godly might gather in a private house, for example, to repeat and reflect on a sermon, a practice frowned on by the authorities as close to conventicling.184 It is clear that women sometimes played an active role in initiating such meetings. In 1632 Richard Richardson’s wife hosted two gatherings in their house in Leicester, ‘though full sore against his will’, where Jacob Bauthumley (notorious twenty years later as an alleged Ranter) repeated sermons to a largely female auditory.185 Equally important was the Elizabethan and early Stuart practice of ‘gadding to sermons’, which met an urgent spiritual need and strengthened bonds between like-minded people in different parishes, building an ‘imagined community’ that played a central role in their lives.186 ‘Gadding’ was a gender-related term, and its use in this context suggests that contemporaries recognized both the social dimension of such practices and the prominence of women within them.187 Satirists often claimed that it was mainly women who flocked to weekday sermons in London and other towns, while their husbands were at work. As with medieval pilgrimages, it is impossible now to separate the social and spiritual motivation in sermon-gadding. The practice is generally associated with puritan sympathies, though some of the women attending weekday services may well have seen them as supplementing the sabbath provision rather than compensating for services they 181 Crawford, Women and Religion, 54, 60; Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death, chs. 6–7, 9, 18–19; W. Coster, ‘Purity, Profanity and Puritanism: The Churching of women, 1500–1700’, in Sheils and Wood (eds.), Women in the Church. 182 P. Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (1967), 82. 183 See Ch. 7, above. 184 Collinson, Religion of Protestants, 248–9, 264–7. 185 LRO, 1D 41/13/60, fos. 217v, 223, 224. 186 Collinson, Religion of Protestants, 242–9. 187 Ibid. 241.

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regarded as unsatisfactory. These weekday congregations represent one of the few pieces of evidence we have for collective, voluntary activity within the established church. Preaching itself remained a strictly male preserve. The nearest women could approach was in private religious assemblies, especially family prayers. These were an important daily routine in godly households, and a pious mistress often assumed a general spiritual oversight of her maidservants. Elizabeth Bury, who died in 1720 aged 76, would always seek God’s guidance before hiring new maids, taught them how to memorize the main points of a sermon, and examined them on sermons they had heard together.188 Equally important were the private fasts and prayer meetings organized by layfolk to supplement the public worship of their church or nonconformist congregation. Oliver Heywood noted in his diary for 25 June 1666, a weekday, ‘I preached to a number of good women [in Manchester] who there kept a private fast.’ Such fasts often marked a significant event in the lives of one of their number, such as a safe delivery, and were a common feature in the puritan and nonconformist milieu.189 On some occasions women held separate meetings, with no minister present. Heywood, for example, recalled that his aunt Isabel had ‘kept up meetings of prayer, conference with other women her companions’. Ralph Josselin in Essex noted an occasion in 1651 when the local godly divided by sex and held prayer meetings in different houses.190 Pious women sometimes also helped to organize religious gatherings of young folk, reflecting their traditional role in family devotion. A discussion group of young people which Heywood joined at the age of 14 had been founded, he tells us, ‘by the instigation of an ancient godly widow woman’.191 Pious women might also provide spiritual help and guidance to troubled souls. One suicidal depressive in Jacobean Yorkshire sought out a godly woman near Leeds for spiritual advice, and decades later still treasured the comfort she had received. Other women fulfilled their sense of religious mission by promoting the gospel message through their everyday lives. Celia Fiennes, touring Cornwall in 1698, attended parish worship at Truro but was more edified by the pious conversation of her landlady, ‘an ordinary plain woman’ with a solid 188 S. Bury, An Account of the Life and Death of Mrs. Elizabeth Bury (1721), 23–6; cf. J. Birchall, The Non-Pareil, or the Virtuous Daughter (York, 1644), 17. 189 Heywood, Autobiography, Diaries, i. 228; ii. 101. Heywood often preached at fasts kept at women’s houses, but seldom specifies their composition. See also Diaries and Letters of Philip Henry MA of Broad Oak, Flintshire, ed. M. H. Lee (1882), 83. 190 Heywood, Autobiography, Diaries, i. 95; Josselin, Diary, 250. 191 Heywood, Autobiography, Diaries, i. 156; H. Walker, Spirituall Experiences of Sundry Beleevers (1652), 37.

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religious understanding, who regarded her ‘public employment’ as an evangelical opportunity.192 It is not hard to see how sermon-gadding, fasts, and prayer meetings might eventually lead strong-minded and pious women to varying forms of separatism or semi-separatism. Women often outnumbered men in the gathered churches established in the 1640s and later, sometimes by a large margin. Scandalous reports in the early and mid-1640s of women preaching at female conventicles in London and Kent were probably no more than garbled accounts of prayer meetings. But some women did play a leading role in the establishment of gathered churches, such as Dorothy Hazzard at Bristol, Katherine Chidley at Bury St Edmunds, and several women at the Bedford church to which Bunyan later belonged.193 Dorothy Hazzard’s career is particularly suggestive. On the eve of the civil wars she made her house a refuge for pregnant women reluctant to undergo the ‘superstitious’ churching they would have to perform if delivered in their own parishes. Hazzard, married to a puritan minister, later took the lead in breaking away from his church to form a separatist congregation, and she and other women played a prominent role in recruiting ministers to serve it. In 1671 almost three-quarters of the members were women, and the church officers included a deaconess.194 Even among the militant Fifth Monarchists, we find the congregation in Swan Alley, off Coleman Street, containing a separate women’s meeting, entrusted in 1657 with the task of distributing seditious declarations throughout the city and country, while a Mrs Marshall was recorded as their ‘agent’ at Lincoln.195 The pattern of female preponderance in the gathered churches survived for many years. The Baptist community at Tewkesbury in 1663 contained twice as many women as men (86 to 43), while at Olney, Bucks., it was reported in 1669 that nearly all the 240 Baptists and Quakers were women, including one of the Quaker teachers.196 Female leadership developed furthest among the Quakers, 192

The Journeys of Celia Fiennes, ed. C. Morris (1947), 266. K. V. Thomas, ‘Women and the Civil War Sects’, Past and Present, 13 (1958); C. Cross, ‘“He-Goats before the Flocks”: A Note on the Part Played by Some Women in the Founding of Some Civil War Churches’, in G. J. Cuming and D. Baker (eds.), Popular Belief and Practice (Studies in Church History, 8, 1972); A. Laurence, ‘A Priesthood of She-Believers: Women and Congregations in Mid-Seventeenth-Century England’, in Sheils and Wood (eds.), Women in the Church. For a recent survey see S. Davies, Unbridled Spirits: Women of the English Revolution: 1640–1660 (1998). 194 Cross, ‘He-Goats’, 195–8; E. B. Underhill (ed.), The Records of a Church of Christ meting in Broadmead, Bristol, 1640–1687 (1847), passim. 195 A Collection of the State Papers of John Thurloe, Esq., ed. T. Birch (1742), vi. 187. 196 J. Broad (ed.), Buckinghamshire Dissent and Parish Life 1669–1712 (Buckinghamshire Record Soc., 28, 1993), 54–5; Beaver, Parish Communities, 242. 193

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where women played a prominent role in the missionary drive both in Britain and overseas, and published numerous pamphlets. As evangelists they generally worked in pairs, and a complex and supportive female network developed within the Society. The establishment of separate Women’s Meetings marked an important step in the recognition that women might after all enjoy a formal role in religious life, although its long-term effect was to marginalize their contribution.197 Paradoxically, women also found a significant role in the postReformation Catholic community, despite the priestly and sacramental character of their church. Catholicism had become, perforce, a household religion, and we find brave and devout women, sometimes of quite modest standing, sheltering priests and providing temporary facilities for them to say mass and hear confessions.198 Others publicly championed their faith, urging neighbours or servants to stay away from parish worship, or luring them to clandestine Catholic services.199 Two recusant women in Lancashire, prosecuted in 1605, were accused of persuading ‘young folks’ to follow their example, while in 1623 the churchwardens of Sidlesham, Sussex, reported a married woman who ‘scorns our church’ and had stood in the churchyard urging others not to attend services.200 We find female pedlars selling religious ballads and other ‘Romish wares’ in Staffordshire, and occasionally a Catholic schoolmistress, teaching surreptitiously.201 The importance of religion to the great mass of silent conformists remains far more imponderable.202 The proposition that women possess a greater innate religiosity divided contemporaries as it has divided modern scholars.203 Even its champions, of course, have never suggested 197

P. Mack, Visionary Women (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1992), esp. chapters 8–10. M. B. Rowland, ‘Recusant Women 1560–1640’, in M. Prior (ed.), Women in English Society 1500–1800 (1985); Crawford, Women and Religion, 58–65. 199 The Official Papers of Sir Nathaniel Bacon of Stiffkey, Norfolk, ed. H. W. Saunders (Camden Soc., 3rd ser., 26, 1915), 177; The Papers of Nathaniel Bacon of Stiffkey, iii. 1586–1595, ed. A. Hassell Smith and G. M. Baker (Norfolk Record Soc., 53, 1988), 147–8; Crawford, Women and Religion, 62; G. A. Chinnery (ed.), Records of the Borough of Leicester, vii. Judicial and Allied Records 1689–1835 (Leicester, 1974), 44; W. J. Hardy (ed.), Middlesex County Records: Calendar of the Sessions Books 1689 to 1709 (1905), 300. 200 J. Tait (ed.), Lancashire Quarter Sessions Records (Chetham Soc.,  77, 1917), 269; Johnstone (ed.), Churchwardens’ Presentments, 85. 201 Spufford, Small Books, 11; LRO, 1D 41/13/64, fo. 124v; Crawford, Women and Religion, 62. 202 It is striking that Crawford, Women and Religion, and Margaret Spufford, Contrasting Communities: English Villagers in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Cambridge, 1974), both give far more space to nonconformists than conformists. 203 For a range of views see J. Dod and R. Cleaver, A Godly Forme of Householde Governement (1614), sig. P3v; C. Marsh, Popular Religion in Sixteenth-Century England (1998), 30, 81; Crawford, Women and Religion, 73–5; P. Collinson, The Birthpangs of Protestant England (1988), 74–7; B. Rich, 198

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that all women cared deeply. The godly, of whatever persuasion, always recognized that most people, of both sexes, were driven primarily by worldly concerns, and puritans took pride in seeing themselves as an embattled minority. Young women were often as reluctant as their male peers to attend catechism, and sometimes flatly refused. When Isaac Archer complained in 1663 of poor attendance at his afternoon catechizing, he lamented that most servants received no religious teaching at all, for they stayed away from his morning sermons too, along with some of their mistresses.204 Elizabeth Walker, a minister’s wife, judged it necessary to march her maidservants to church, ‘that they might not stay loitering idly at home, or by the way’.205 Young people who did attend sometimes made their boredom all too plain. Susan Kent, a Wiltshire villager, preferred to sleep through catechisms. Young folk in a Gloucestershire village, returning from catechism in 1610, quickly turned to drinking, dancing, and poking fun at the doctrine they had just heard delivered. Mary Barrett was presented in 1617 for throwing dirt down men’s necks, and laughing. Joan Goodman slipped out of an Essex church before morning service had ended, and made her way to the alehouse with some friends; they came back for evening prayer, but Joan was now drunk and slept through the sermon.206 Instances of such indifference could be multiplied, and not only among the young. Some contemporaries complained that many older women attended less diligently than their husbands, partly because of competing domestic obligations. Elizabeth Baker, a Leicestershire villager charged in 1637 with repeated absences, explained that she could not attend regularly, ‘having three small children to look to’ and presumably no servant. Recognizing her predicament, the judge dismissed her with a warning.207 Others were simply uninterested. And as a puritan preacher wailed in 1656, ‘When the husband shall call to prayers and the wife to playing, carding, and dice; what hope of reformation, or religion there?’208 This evidence is suggestive, but hardly conclusive. It shows there were worldly young women throughout the country, but also that their The Honestie of this Age [1614], ed. P. Cunningham (Percy Soc., 1844), 26; Spufford, Contrasting Communities, 307. 204 M. Storey (ed.), Two East Anglian Diaries 1641–1729: Isaac Archer and William Coe (Suffolk Record Soc., 36, 1994), 92; LRO, 1D 41/13/57, fo. 91; Marsh, Confession, 193. 205 Walker, Life of Elizabeth Walker, 43. 206 Ingram, Church Courts, 121; Underdown, Revel, 58–9; LRO, 1D 41/13/46, fo. 16; Griffiths, Youth and Authority, 199–200. 207 LRO, 1D 41/13/64, fo. 208; Bownd, Sabbathum, 458–9; Dod and Cleaver, Godly Forme, sig. C2; Underdown, Fire from Heaven, 75–6. 208 D. Cawdrey, Reformation Promoted (1656), 55.

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behaviour was regarded as abnormal and unacceptable by the parish officers. There remains a plausible case for seeing religious commitment as more widespread among women, reflecting in part the nature of female experience. Though sickness was common to all, women played a far more prominent role in caring for the sick and dying. Moreover only women faced the prospect of repeated childbirth, with months to reflect on the dangers awaiting them. We hear of an early eighteenth-century custom for pregnant women to act as pall-bearers for friends who had died in childbirth, and it is hard to imagine a more blunt reminder of the dangers they too were facing.209 Women were thus constantly reminded of the fragility of human life, and perhaps more conscious of their need for divine help and protection. Oliver Heywood notes a revealing incident in 1673 when he reluctantly agreed to baptize a baby in an alehouse; its father, a Quaker, was opposed to the ceremony, but the mother and grandmother were anxious for it to be done. Though the two women were ‘not serious Christians’, in Heywood’s view, they probably felt the ritual would offer the child some spiritual or physical protection.210 Over 90 per cent of women underwent the ceremony of churching, and though both contemporary commentators and scholars have focused on its social dimension, for many of the women involved this rite too was charged with religious meaning. One Bedfordshire villager ‘churched herself’ when the minister failed to appear, and a group of Rutland women angrily confronted an Elizabethan puritan minister who refused to church them.211 Religion’s appeal for women was also related to their social inferiority, and its inherent frustrations. They could feel an equality before God that was in stark contrast to their secular lives. It is surely no coincidence that many of the women who joined gathered churches were forceful individuals, sometimes ready to stand up for their own views against church leaders and even their husbands. We can trace obvious parallels between the men and women arguing volubly in the 1580s over the sermons they had heard at puritan gatherings and the strong-minded women of the 1640s and 1650s.212 Lack of education proved no obstacle here, for simplicity was held to make a woman all the more receptive to the divine 209

Gittings, Death, Burial and the Individual, 118. Heywood, Autobiography, iii. 122; cf. K. V. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971), 36–7, 56. 211 Cressy, Birth, Marriage and Death, ch. 9; J. Boulton, Neighbourhood and Society: A London Suburb in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 1987), 276–9; J. Maltby, Prayer Book and People in Elizabethan an Early Stuart England (Cambridge, 1998), 63–4; W. J. Sheils, The Puritans in the Diocese of Peterborough 1558–1610 (Northamptonshire Record Soc., 30, 1979), 63. 212 Spufford, Contrasting Communities, 262–3; Crawford, Women and Religion, 86. 210

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spirit. The mid-century saw a flood of female prophets and visionaries, some of whom, such as Anna Trapnel and Sarah Wight, attracted huge public interest, not least among other women.213 The story of Martha Taylor is less familiar. The deeply pious, probably anorexic teenage daughter of a Derbyshire lead-miner, Taylor was bedridden for years, and from 1667 allegedly survived for sixteen months on sips of water and milk. Her case too attracted widespread interest, and for some time a roster of between forty and sixty women maintained a constant vigil at her bedside. Neither Martha nor her parents were religious radicals, and the episode raises the possibility that the female visionaries of the period represent an extreme manifestation of religious emotions and sensibilities more widely spread.214 If few women experienced visions, religion offered a social and emotional freedom that appealed far more widely. A weekday service or sermon, like a medieval pilgrimage, released women from their domestic constraints and provided an experience both spiritual and social. Some clearly found in God or a powerful preacher a far more satisfying figure of male authority and love than their inadequate husband or father. Every woman was brought up from infancy to honour and obey the appropriate male figure of authority, and if marriage failed to provide someone satisfactory the church might fill the emotional vacuum.215 The besotted devotion of some Quaker women to the preacher James Nayler may again be only the most extreme example of more widespread patterns.216 When a Leicestershire schoolteacher took to ‘repeating’ sermons for his pupils, in 1627, some of the village women became devoted auditors too, including one allegedly so obsessed that she could ‘hardly be kept from him, but did neglect her husband and household affairs, and was more often in his company than at home’.217 A Restoration pamphleteer explained the predominance of women in conventicles by claiming they were for the most part ‘discontented wives, melancholy widows or stale maids’, adding that ‘as in Italy, such run into cloisters, so in England into conventicles’.218 We have an Anglican (and suitably low-key) parallel in the story of Edward Stephens in 1706, ‘with his little congregation of daily 213

Mack, Visionary Women, passim. H.A., Mirabile Pecci, or the Non-Such Wonder of the Peak in Darby-shire (1669). For a (disputed) Catholic parallel see B. Rich, The True Report of a Late Practice Enterprised by a Papist, with a Young Maiden in Wales (1582). 215 S. H. Mendelson, ‘Stuart Women’s Diaries and Occasional Memoirs’, in M. Prior (ed.), Women in English Society 1500–1800 (1985), 194–5; Crawford, Women and Religion, 74. 216 B. Reay, The Quakers and the English Revolution (1985), 54–5 (though cf. Mack, Visionary 217 LRO, 1D 41/4, Box 4/15. Women, 197–208). 218 The Life and Death of Ralph Wallis the Cobler of Gloucester (1670), 31. 214

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communicants, consisting of five or six women’, who chose to build their worship around the 1549 Prayer Book.219 Far more typical was the situation of Ralph Josselin, wondering in 1648 whether to remain in Earl’s Colne, and conscious that while some female parishioners were pressing him to stay, the men appeared quite indifferent.220 Catholic women could develop equally powerful feelings towards their spiritual guides. When Bishop Bonner was released from prison on Mary’s accession in 1553, a crowd of admirers gathered round him and, a chronicler reported, ‘as many of the women as might kissed him’.221 From 1559 such devotion was heightened by the knowledge that priests were risking their lives to pursue their ministry. We find women going on secret ‘pilgrimages’ to the gallows where priests had suffered, risking prosecution and possible mob-violence.222 Such intense devotion might be in defiance of a husband’s wishes. In some respects we can see the behaviour of the Elizabethan Catholic martyr Margaret Clitheroe as paralleling the Protestant separatists, as she happily swallowed her confessor’s assurance that she had the moral right to harbour priests without her husband’s knowledge or consent. She smuggled her eldest son abroad to a Catholic seminary without telling him, used invitations to weddings and dinners to visit priests in secret, and solicited invitations to fictitious deliveries. All these details come from an early life by an admiring Catholic priest, and his puzzled remark that some Catholics as well as Protestants resented her behaviour can easily be explained by her blatant subversion of contemporary family values.223

  ‘’ Contemporaries believed that women were also more likely to turn to other forms of supernatural help, protection, and explanation. The evidence is once more inconclusive: magicians, astrologers, and cunning folk appealed to large numbers of both sexes, and while maidservants were the largest single group consulting the London astrologers Lilly and Booker in the 1650s, the overall gender balance among their clients 219 Remarks and Collections of Thomas Hearne, i. 1705–7, ed. C. E. Doble (Oxford Historical Soc., 2, 1885), 108. 220 Josselin, Diary, 138. 221 J. G. Nichols (ed.), Chronicle of the Grey Friars of London (Camden Soc., , 53, 1852), 82. 222 M. B. Rowlands, ‘Recusant Women, 1560–1640’, in Prior (ed.), Women in English Society, 156–60; Le Hardy (ed.), Middlesex: Calendar, , i. 70; Underdown, Fire from Heaven, 197–8; ‘Mr. John Mush’s Life of Margaret Clitherow’, in J. Morris (ed.), The Troubles of our Catholic Forefathers, iii (1897), 395. 223 ‘Mush’s Life of Clitherow’, 396–7, 404, 409–10.

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was almost even.224 Pepys’s comments on fortune-telling reveal similar ambiguities. When his wife Elizabeth and two servants visited some gypsies at Lambeth in August 1669 to have their fortunes told, Pepys chose not to ask them about the outcome. Yet a few years earlier, in 1663, he had had his own fortune told by gypsies. Had his sceptical rationalism grown in six years? Or was he simply uneasy that his wife might hear, or worse invite, unwelcome speculations about their marriage?225 Disgruntled wives often visited astrologers and fortune-tellers to ask if they would outlive their spouses, and it is not hard to see how men could discern a threat to themselves in such encounters. By the end of the period, the evidence for differential levels of belief looks considerably stronger, as astrology and magic lost social and intellectual respectability among the middling sorts as well as the elite.226 The Spectator, launching an attack on ‘superstition’ in 1711, presented it as a largely female phenomenon at every social level. When Abraham de la Pryme mocked a young fortune-teller whose extravagant predictions had landed him in trouble at Halifax in 1695, he acknowledged that the man had found a widespread following among women. ‘The women were always his best friends’, he grumbled, for the young man was handsome, genteel, and plausible; they had petitioned for his release, and helped him escape from prison. When Ned Ward poked fun at a ‘famous wise-woman’ in Whitechapel, said to receive forty or fifty clients each day, he too remarked that her reputation was mainly among women, ‘servant wenches and poor ignorant people’.227 Many of the ‘superstitions’ preserved mainly by women reveal customs and beliefs which blurred the boundaries between magic and Christianity. Early antiquarians collected a mass of data on such matters, mostly concerned with divination. John Aubrey describes rituals popular among maidservants and other spinsters to know their future husbands, such as ‘dumb-cakes’, poking the ashes (a form of geomancy), and placing figurines in cracks in the church wall to see which way they would lean.228 On Midsummer’s Eve in 1694 he came across twenty young women in a field, digging for ‘coals’ under the roots of plaintains to put under their pillows that night, so ‘they should dream who would be their 224 Thomas, Religion and Magic, 319 and n.; cf. B. H. Traister, The Notorious Astrological Physician of London: Works and Days of Simon Forman (Chicago, 2001), 59–67. 225 Pepys, Diary, iv. 284, 296; ix. 278. 226 Thomas, Religion and Magic, pp. 349–57, 641–68. 227 D. F. Bond (ed.), The Spectator (Oxford, 1965), i. 31–4, 53–4; The Diary of Abraham de la Pryme, ed. C. Jackson (Surtees Soc., 54, 1869), 56–7; Ward, London Spy, 272, 323. 228 Aubrey, Three Prose Works, 207–8, 212, 214; Brand, Observations, i. 34–8; A. Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England 1500–1700 (Oxford, 2000), ch. 3.

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husbands’.229 By the later seventeenth century, women appear far more likely than men to practise such divinatory and magical rituals. Ned Ward notes how barren women would visit the Tower of London to stick a pin in Henry VIII’s codpiece, displayed there and regarded paradoxically as an infallible aid to conception.230 We hear too of Elizabeth Osborne, a London servant, slipping a love potion into the drink of a man she fancied—though its only effect was to make him complain about the taste.231

 -   Magic survived throughout the eighteenth century, and beyond, as a largely oral and female tradition. That brings us back to the final question posed at the start of this chapter: how far can we identify a distinctively female cultural world?232 We have seen that many women found in religion a consolation for their social constraints as well as personal misfortunes, and that some found the strength to step outside their traditional roles in the separatist congregations that emerged in the 1640s. But this was also true for many men of humble status, and any gendered differences were a matter of degree rather than kind. What of the suggestion that women’s culture remained essentially oral, and so differentiated from the increasingly literate world of men? Female literacy in early modern England, if measured by the ability to sign, certainly trailed far behind male rates.233 Contemporaries sometimes commented on the oral character of women’s cultural world. The satirist John Stephens could dismiss the ‘plain country bride’ with the patronizing remark that her accomplishments consisted of no more than ‘the several tunes of ballads and songs beside half a dozen tales and riddles’.234 She would in fact also possess, or quickly acquire, a far more substantial body of oral wisdom on household management and medical treatment, passed on by older neighbours. When the husband proves unable to give his young wife a child in The Ten 229

Brand, Observations, i. 329–34, 373, 387–8; Aubrey, Three Prose Works, 83. Ward, London Spy, 243–4. 231 N.B., A Compleat Collection of Remarkable Tryals (1718–21), iv. 377. 232 For recent discussions see Mendelson and Crawford, Women, ch. 4; R. B. Shoemaker, ‘Separate Spheres? Ideology and Practice in London Gender Relations, 1660–1740’, in M. C. McClendon, J. P. Ward, and M. MacDonald (eds.), Protestant Identities: Religion, Society, and SelfFashioning in Post-Reformation England (Stanford, Calif., 1999). 233 D. Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order (Cambridge, 1980), ch. 6; B. Reay, Popular Cultures in England 1550–1750 (1998), ch. 2. 234 J. Stephens, New Essayes and Characters (1631), 357; Fox, Oral and Literate Culture, ch. 3. 230

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Pleasures of Marriage (1682), her gossips can immediately suggest a wide range of potential remedies.235 As the written word exerted an ever greater impact on male culture, much of the corpus of traditional lore, and perhaps storytelling skills too, came to be seen increasingly as plebeian female possessions. George Peele’s play The Old Wives’ Tale (1595) turns on the assumption that Madge, the smith’s wife, is armed with a stock of tales which will see some stranded gentlemen through the night in her cottage. Though her husband joins in a song, they do not look to him for a story, and offer none of their own. Westward for Smelts (1620), which depicts a company of London fishwives in a Thames barge, similarly describes them telling stories to pass the time. Such stories might feature ghosts, murders, love, or tales from history. In the late seventeenth century John Aubrey observed that ‘in the old ignorant times, before women were readers, the history was handed down from mother to daughter’, adding that his nurse knew the outline of English history from the Conquest to Charles I ‘in ballad’. Aubrey thought the spread of reading skills had already eroded these oral traditions, but the process proved far slower. Over a century later John Clare could still see village women as the repositories of such lore.236 Margaret Spufford has established, however, that plebeian women were by no means wholly excluded from the printed word, even before Aubrey’s time. Literacy rates calculated from signatures conceal the fact that many women acquired elementary reading skills without going on to master writing, and so had at least some exposure to printed texts.237 We can find humble families where the wife could read but not her husband, and by 1700 even some labourers’ wives could write their names.238 Moreover the world of ballads, jests, and riddles shows print interacting with oral culture rather than supplanting it. Elizabeth Osborne, the servant who employed a love potion to no avail, had initially turned for advice to a friend, who said she had read of such things in ‘Mother Bunch’.239 The country woman’s book of tales and riddles, mentioned by a satirist in 1684, would offer much the same fare as Stephens’s country bride had acquired orally half a century earlier, as would the book of riddles borrowed by Alice Shortcake in Shakespeare’s 235

Marsh, Ten Pleasures, 76–82. Aubrey, Three Prose Works, 289–90; J. Clare, The Shepherd’s Calendar, ed. E. Robinson and G. Summerfield (Oxford, 1964), ‘January’. 237 Spufford, Small Books, ch. 2; Reay, Popular Cultures, ch. 2. 238 GL, MS 9731/101/17; Doughty, Notebook, 57. 239 This interrelationship is the main theme of Fox, Oral and Literate Culture. For Osborne see N.B., Compleat Collection; on Mother Bunch’s Closet see Spufford, Small Books, 61–2. 236

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The Merry Wives.240 Such books were intended for readers to amuse their friends as well as themselves; The Canterbury Tales, a chapbook, promised young men and maids that its stories and jokes would provide rich entertainment for ‘merry meetings’ and holidays.241 Printed ballads, enormously popular and designed to be sung and memorized, similarly blurred the distinction between written and oral forms. The fact that a significant minority of ordinary women possessed some degree of literacy rules out any simple equation of female culture with oral culture, but opens up new avenues of enquiry. What did ordinary women read? And how far were their choices gender-related? Pious and educated women read the Bible assiduously, while many works of edification also reached readers of both sexes. More worldly women of the middle sorts and above were fond of plays and poetry.242 Humbler folk with limited reading skills relied heavily on broadside ballads, with a simple text in verse and woodcut illustration, and on the cheap prose booklets known as chapbooks. Both covered a wide range of subjects, including religion, and some were clearly aimed at women. Of course they were almost always written and published by men, so we are dealing with material aimed at women rather than created by them. Nonetheless, women and maidservants with little cash to spare would choose carefully, making this a highly reader-sensitive market. Contemporary accounts suggest that customers liked to hear a piece performed by the balladeer before parting with their penny, and items not to popular taste would quickly vanish. 243 In her study of Pepys’s chapbook collection, Margaret Spufford identified a number of categories that would have similarly appealed only to female readers, such as cookery and cosmetics, and many of the love stories and simple fictional accounts of wedding preparations and festivities. We can probably see in the latter a commercially astute combination of practical guidance and fantasy aimed at young single women.244 The gender categories are still more pronounced in ballads. Though many titles would have appealed to both sexes, others seem firmly targeted at a single-sex readership. Ballads placed in the mouth of a young woman who praises the single life as best and warns of the tyranny of husbands would have appealed mainly to readers in the same position, whether from choice or necessity. The Merry Maid of Shoreditch shows a S.P., A New Song: or the Old Woman’s Wish (1684), brs; Merry Wives, . i. Spufford, Small Books, 67. 242 D. McKitterick, ‘Women and their Books in Seventeenth-Century England: The Case of Elizabeth Puckering’, Library, 7th ser., 1 (2000), addresses these questions from the perspective of educated women. 243 Jonson, Bartholomew Fair, . v; Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, . iii; Watt, Cheap Print, 298. 244 Spufford, Small Books, chs. 3, 7. 240 241

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feisty heroine quipping ‘that she will never tie herself to a crab-tree [the symbol of wife-beating] so long as she has a whole wood to range in’.245 In many cases, as with ballads celebrating bachelorhood, such pieces served to reconcile readers to a condition they were for the present unable to change.246 A substantial number of ballads tell of lecherous men foiled and shamed by quick-witted maids, stories with an obvious appeal to young women all too familiar with unwanted sexual overtures and pressure from older men.247 The popular tales of Amazonian heroines and female ‘frolics’ are less easy to define in terms of their intended readership. Young women who disguise themselves as men to rob or press-gang feeble tailors may have delighted female readers with a sense of empowerment and solidarity, but may also have appealed to men as carnivalesque merriment, reinforcing the conventional wisdom that defined true men by the traditional attributes of courage and strength.248 We are on clearer ground with melancholy ballads describing young women seduced and deserted by their faithless lovers, and ballads on married life which explore the themes of the drunken, violent, or feckless husband from the wife’s perspective. A number of more problematic pieces depict wives successfully challenging and overpowering their violent or tyrannical husbands, with the narrator’s explicit approval. These were open to several readings, probably deliberately; they could be seen as upholding conventional values, by showing the disastrous consequences of unsuitable marriages between old men and young wives. At the same time they invited more subversive readings, all the more intriguing because their message flatly contradicted all official teaching. Religious ballads, another important group, were seldom addressed explicitlytoa gendered audience, though popular stories on the Henrician martyr Anne Askew and the duchess of Suffolk, a religious refugee in Mary’s reign, may well have appealed primarily to female readers.249 Astrological almanacs, which also circulated in huge numbers, were 245

Pepys Ballads, iv. 94. See e.g. ‘The Countrey Lasses Good Counsel to all her Fellow-Maids’, Pepys Ballads, iv. 51. Cf. Nancy, in The London Chaunticleers (1659), . ii, who vows to remain single but secretly longs to be wed (repr. in R. Dodsley (ed.), A Select Collection of Old English Plays, rev. edn. by W. C. Hazlitt (1875), xii. 326–7). 247 See e.g. P. Fancy, This is call’d, Maids looke well about you [?1655]; The Crafty Maid of the West [n.d]; ‘The Crafty Miss; or the Excise man well fitted’, Pepys Ballads, iii. 274; ‘The Biter Bitten’, Roxburghe, iii. 446–8; ‘The Subtil Miss of London’, Pepys Ballads, iii. 253. 248 See Pepys Ballads, iv. 276, 277, 283, 294, 368; v. 161; A Leicester-shire Frolick [c.1680]; ‘The Life of Long Meg of Westminster’, in C. Mish (ed.), Short Fiction of the Seventeenth Century (New York, 1968) (on the real Meg see B. Capp, ‘Long Meg of Westminster: A Mystery Solved’, Notes and Queries, 243 (Sept. 1998), 302–4. 249 Watt, Cheap Print, 90–5. 246

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mainly targeted at men, but Sarah Jinner compiled a successful almanac for women in the late 1650s, and The Ladies Diary, by a Coventry schoolmaster, proved still more successful at the end of the century.250 Any truly distinctive subculture should be visible in terms of behavioural patterns as well as values and taste.251 Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford have argued persuasively for a female culture based on cooperation and mutual support, rooted in the experience and traditions surrounding childbirth. They suggest that women, conscious of the dangers and needs shared by all their sex, were moulded by a powerful bonding force that could override differences of status and even belief. Gentlewomen often helped at the deliveries of the poor, and we find the puritan Ralph Josselin’s wife ready to help save the life of a Quaker woman in childbirth, in 1657, despite the bitter religious animosities of the period.252 Women’s central role in caring for the sick reinforced this culture of mutual support, and female healers often acted in a spirit of good neighbourliness. Dorothy Moore, charged in 1618 with ‘ministering of physick and telling of fortunes’, acknowledged supplying ointments for sore eyes and throats, and herbal preparatives for agues, but insisted that she did so without charge, ‘as women do in like cases’. Leonard Wheatcroft paid tribute in similar terms to his mother Anne, who died in 1692, aged 87: Who e’er was hurt, if this old matron knew Haste would she make, and presently them view Either in head or foot, or arms, or shoulder; A rare chirurgeon and the poor’s upholder. All that she did was done for charity: Come poor or rich, they all to her were free.253

This culture of mutual support was constantly reinforced by domestic need, for women relied on their neighbours to a far greater extent than men. The bond between fellow craftsmen or tradesmen was inevitably weakened by the fact that they were also, and primarily, competitors. Gossip networks played such a prominent role in women’s lives because they would find it difficult to manage their homes and families without access to these vital support structures. 250 B. Capp, Astrology and the Popular Press (1979), 87, 126, 242–3, 245–7; on Jinner see also Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, forthcoming). 251 Lorna Weatherill found no clear evidence of a female sub-culture on the basis of her analysis of material possessions: ‘A Possession of One’s Own: Women and Consumer Behavior in England, 1660–1740’, Journal of British Studies, 25 (1986), 155–6. 252 Mendelson and Crawford, Women, ch. 4; Josselin, Diary, 399. 253 GL, MS 9064/17, fo. 254v; C. Kerry, ‘Leonard Wheatcroft, of Ashover’, Journal of the Derbyshire Archaeological and Natural History Society, 18 (1896), 80.

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Another example of female solidarity is the readiness of many women to give refuge to a destitute single mother, especially kin, close to her time of delivery. It was forbidden to harbour an unmarried mother, and prosecutions were common. Officers usually presented the householder, who generally pleaded that his wife had taken in the woman, without his knowledge or consent, because she was a relation or acquaintance or simply ‘through pity’.254 No doubt this plea was sometimes an attempt to shuffle off responsibility, but the men were often able to establish that they had been away at work, or even at sea, at the time. Some had clearly been furious to discover what their wives had done. Margaret Bacon of Whitechapel, who took in a pregnant woman in 1590 ‘being moved by nature to comfort her because she was her sister and in that extremity, not knowing where to be delivered’, said her husband was so enraged that he threatened to turn them both out. The pregnant sister had fled, not wishing to plunge the household into deeper turmoil.255 When a man did admit to taking in a pregnant woman himself, she was nearly always a very close blood relation, usually his sister or daughter.256 Recent writing on women has confirmed that sexual ‘honesty’ remained the fundamental prerequisite for a good name, and that this code was internalized and often enforced by women themselves.257 Susan Amussen has suggested, however, that women did not share men’s equal insistence on the ‘virtue’ of wifely obedience. There is plentiful evidence, from conduct-books, court records, personal writings, and ballads, that many regarded obedience as conditional rather than absolute, and readily complained when they felt their husbands—or indeed male neighbours—had abused their authority or failed to meet their own obligations. Robert Snawsell explored this theme in 1631 in a fictional conversation between several women. When one declares she will defer to her husband only if he treats her well, another protests that such behaviour will make ‘all the world to exclaim on our sex’. Not so, retorts Margery, ‘a proud malapert’, for ‘none but men will speak against us’. Rounding on the godly, deferential wife, she demands, ‘Are you a woman, and make them such dish-clouts and slaves to their husbands?’ If so, ‘you are a small friend to your own sex’. Snawsell does not suggest 254 See e.g. GL, MS 9064/14, fos. 24, 42, 55, 220v; MS 9064/15, fos. 117v, 165v, 187; MS 9064/16, fos. 56v, 62v; MS 9064/17, fos. 71, 224v. 255 GL, MS 9064/13, fo. 50. 256 e.g. GL, MS 9064/15, fo. 62v. 257 See esp. the writings of Amussen, Ordered Society; Fletcher, Gender; Gowing, Domestic Dangers; E. Foyster, ‘Male Honour, Social Control and Wife Beating in Late Stuart England’; L. Gowing, ‘Women, Status and the Popular Culture of Dishonour’; and G. Walker, ‘Expanding the Boundaries of Female Honour in Early Modern England‘, all in TRHS, 6th ser., 6 (1996).

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that Margery speaks for all women, but clearly saw her code of limited obedience and gendered values as one significant strand in contemporary female attitudes.258 More striking still is Joseph Hall’s assertion that many respectable women held highly subversive views on the issue of abortion: I fear want of true judgment renders too many of the weaker sex grossly culpable in matter of willing abortion; . . . they think it not unlawful, or at least, venially so, whether out of the fear of painful childbirth, or for the avoidance of too great a charge, to prevent the fullness of their conceptions; and therefore, either by over vehement motions, or unwholesome medicines, are not unwilling to forestall nature, and to free themselves easily of that which might in time prove their burden.

We know that information on abortifacients was widespread, and that pregnant spinsters frequently resorted to them. There is also evidence to suggest that some married women may have done likewise. Hall was perhaps right in suspecting they rejected or simply brushed aside conventional moral values.259 In attempting to define a distinctively female subculture, however, we run the risk of imposing an artificial uniformity. In many areas of their lives, women were just as likely to display different and sometimes conflicting values and patterns of behaviour. The culture of the period was splintered by a multitude of social, economic, regional, political, and religious factors. David Underdown has argued for a more individualistic and less deferential culture in pastoral regions than in corn-growing areas, and sees this as reflected in women’s greater economic and social freedom.260 The confrontation between the godly and devotees of festive tradition represented a far more dramatic cultural clash, and contemporaries were well aware of other tensions, between rich and poor, and metropolitan and country values. All of them cut across gender divisions. Studies that emphasize women’s role as victims, or the supportive nature of their networks, run the further risk of sentimentalizing and idealizing their subjects. Contemporary commentators, of both sexes, often pointed to the divisive and competitive aspects of the female world. William Crompton devoted part of a wedding sermon in 1632 to this 258 S. Amussen, ‘Gender, Family and the Social Order’, in A. Fletcher and J. Stevenson (eds.), Order and Disorder in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1985), 208–9; R. Snawsell, A LookingGlasse for Married Folks (1631), 36–8, 55–6. 259 J. Hall, Resolutions and Decisions of Divers Practical Cases of Conscience (1654), 89; cf. L. A. Pollock, ‘Embarking on a Rough Passage: The Experience of Pregnancy in Early-Modern Society’, in Fildes (ed.), Women as Mothers, 55–8. But men too were often ready to press abortifacients on women they had impregnated outside marriage: Quaife, Wanton Wenches, 118–120. 260 Underdown, Revel, Riot and Rebellion, ch. 3.

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theme: ‘we see many contend for superiority and place, who shall stand, sit, and go before; we may observe women strive with their neighbours, who shall excel in decking and trimming their bodies, adorning and setting forth their houses, following new fashions, and outstripping one another in excessive feasting’.261 Court records confirm that family loyalties often overrode those of gender, and in local disputes a woman was far more likely to identify with her husband than with his opponent’s wife. Economic interests might take precedence too. Katherine Lowe of Withington, Staffs., aged 90, saw little evidence of gender solidarity when she was assaulted and beaten in 1602 by Anne Aston and her three daughters (and a son), who were trying to oust her from a tenancy.262 We now understand better the role women played in local disputes that might end with a neighbour being accused of witchcraft. Few disputes went so far, of course, but personal animosities were often sufficient to dissolve female solidarity and Christian charity alike. Judith Rush, a villager admonished in 1635 ‘for taking away violently the garters and shoestrings of Alice Goodman in the church’, stands for a multitude of others who lost their tempers even in church.263 When two women began quarrelling in a Sussex village church in 1613, another intervened to ask one ‘How she said the Lord’s Prayer’ (with its invocation to forgive those who trespass against us), only to receive the stinging reply that ‘when she prayed she did always except that whore’.264 Such brawls could even disrupt the administration of the sacraments. Eamon Duffy cites a woman in 1494 who threw the paxbred to the floor in contempt, ‘because another woman of the parish had kissed it before her’. A century later, in 1599, the Easter communion in a London church was similarly disrupted when one worshipper ‘thanked God that she did drink of the cup before Phillippes his wife’, and another exclaimed that ‘she would never drink of the cup that Phillippes his wife drank of’.265 We saw earlier how personal rivalries often triggered disputes between women over church seating arrangements.266 Such evidence does not undermine the crucial importance of mutual support in women’s lives. This remains the clearest evidence for a distinctively female subculture, not least because such support provided the most effective means for women to negotiate a patriarchal world. But the 261

W. Crompton, A Wedding-Ring Fitted to the Finger (1632), 28–9. S. A.H. Burne (ed.), The Staffordshire Quarter Sessions Rolls (William Salt Archaeological Soc., 1929–50), iv. 436, 443. 263 LRO, 1D 41/13/63, fo. 5v. 264 WSRO, Ep1/11/12, fo. 51v. 265 Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 126; GL, MS 9064/14, fos. 223r–v. 266 See Ch. 5, above. 262

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social and cultural world of women contained equally pervasive elements of rivalry and exclusion. Women were competitive as well as supportive, and if some values were almost universal, others were fiercely contested, as in society at large. Understanding the complex balance between cooperative, competitive, and antagonistic elements remains one of the toughest challenges to our understanding of the cultural world of women.

9 Conclusion

H are primarily concerned with change, and early modern England offers plenty: demographic explosion, rapid inflation, religious strife, rebellions, and revolution. But it does not appear that gender relations underwent any such dramatic upheaval, or that the position of women in society altered in any fundamental way. Patriarchy found ways to adjust to changing circumstances, and women proved equally adept at finding ways to accommodate and negotiate it. There is very little to support any general progress in women’s position, except a greater emphasis on the companionate nature of marriage. Even here we may be seeing the effects of expanding literacy rather than any dramatic change in marital relations, though commentators’ increasingly hostile stance on domestic violence does suggest a shift in attitudes.1 Economic historians find women’s position throughout the period characterized by marginality, low wages, and low esteem.2 Many social and cultural historians have painted a similarly gloomy picture, with male anxieties triggering the persecution of single mothers, spinsters living independently, scolds, and witches. The flood of female writers, activists, and prophets during the 1640s and 1650s remains the most striking feature of women’s history in this period, but its long-term significance remains doubtful. Did they generate a new sense of self-confidence and potential, or were they counter-productive, identifying women’s voices with ‘fanaticism’ and pushing even independent spirits on to the defensive? The first seems true for the 1640s and 1650s, but the second may well be true for the Restoration era. And by the end of the century women in the expanding professional and mercantile classes were finding their lives increasingly restricted, their new ‘leisure’ the badge of affluence but also its price. 1 See Ch. 2 n. 23, above; cf. Kathleen M. Davies, ‘Continuity and Change in Literary Advice on Marriage’, in R. B. Outhwaite (ed.), Marriage and Society: Studies in the Social History of Marriage (1981). 2 A. Vickery, ‘Golden Age to Separate Spheres? A Review of the Categories and Chronologies of English Women’s History’, Historical Journal, 36 (1993); J. M. Bennett, ‘Medieval Women, Modern Women: Across the Great Divide’, in D. Aers (ed.), Culture and History 1350–1600: Essays in English Communities, Identities and Writing (1992).

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Historians’ instinctive search for change may be unhelpful in the context of women’s lives and gender relations. Cultural change often came at a glacial pace, and assumptions and relationships lived on for generations with a persistence hard for the modern mind to accept. Judith Bennett argued in 1992 that women’s economic history was characterized far more by continuity than change, and that explaining continuity poses the primary challenge to modern historians.3 The challenge has been taken up by several scholars, some working outside the confines of economic history. Anthony Fletcher has explored the resilience and flexibility of patriarchal values, which continued to shape the social, political, legal, religious, and economic structures. Patriarchy accommodated even the cultural reversal in the eighteenth century that replaced the old view of women as lustful and passionate with one characterizing them as more gentle, refined, and pious than men. Both theories could serve male interests: the old paradigm required women to be kept in check, while the new (where it prevailed, in the middle and upper reaches of society) required men to protect the weak and innocent.4 My concern in this book has not been with the question posed by Bennett and Fletcher—how did patriarchal control adapt and survive?— but with the other side of that coin: how did ordinary women negotiate it? How might they create some space and autonomy despite laws and customs that consigned them throughout the period to a position of subordination and inferiority? That position was so deeply entrenched that even the most independent-minded saw no real prospect of change. Yet we also find agreement among contemporaries and modern scholars alike that a significant gulf existed between patriarchal ideal and social practice, both inside and outside the household. It was summed up in a wellknown text on women’s legal position, published in 1632, which acknowledged their miserable situation but added casually that nonetheless ‘some women can shift it well enough’.5 Several scholars have pursued this hint. Mendelson and Crawford stress throughout their work the importance of female agency in shaping women’s own lives, and their solidarity in the face of male domination. Laura Gowing, exploring female agency from a different perspective, has shown how women in London discovered in the ecclesiastical courts an effective means to defend their good name in the face of slander. This book has explored some of the strategies available to ordinary women in confronting a range of common problems, whether as 3 4 5

Bennett, ‘Medieval Women’, 164. Fletcher, Gender, passim. T.E., The Lawes Resolution of Womens Rights (1632), 6.

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spinsters, wives, or widows. They include strategies of evasion, accommodation, negotiation, and resistance. In some situations women looked for solutions through their own unaided efforts. Yoked to a wastrel husband, a woman would try to provide for herself and her children by generating a separate income, and concealing it from his knowledge. Though some commentators disapproved, necessity proved far more compelling. Servants pursued a variety of individual strategies to negotiate, evade, or resist the authority of their employers. In many situations, however, women could draw on the networks of support that have featured throughout this study. Women found their own times and places to meet; the kitchen, well, washing place, and bakehouse were largely female spaces, and so, to a lesser extent, were the common and parts of the market place. Local networks provided them with both moral and practical support, invaluable in the context of disputes with violent husbands and abusive or predatory neighbours. Their significance extended much further, as we have seen. They formed a vital component of women’s social and cultural world, often hidden from us because preachers and commentators alike focused on the domestic scene and mentioned them only to condemn or ridicule. Gossip networks played an essential role in the exchange of small loans, favours, and advice, oiling the wheels of household management and family care. They offered a sense of belonging, and a social identity that balanced a woman’s identities as wife and mother. They furnished advice, help, support, diversion, companionship, relief, a safety valve, and in extremis a place of refuge. Given such a list, it is not surprising that men often saw them as a potential threat. Among their gossips, women were temporarily unsupervised and ungoverned. Men predictably wondered what they discussed, imagining older women teaching the tricks of deceit and subversion, and wives complaining or, still worse, deriding their husbands’ behaviour and sexual performance. What evidence we have of female conversations confirms that women did indeed complain about the violence, infidelity, meanness, or drunken profligacy of bad husbands, and that their friends might offer advice as well as a sympathetic ear. Even worse, from a bad husband’s point of view, was their readiness to shame him, shelter his wife, or pressure the parish officers to intervene. Gossips also linked personal issues to the world of neighbourhood politics, through their ability to influence local public opinion. As well as providing a defensive shield for a friend under attack, gossip networks functioned as an effective weapon to protect and defend communal values and interests—defined of course in terms of their own. They

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exerted collective pressure against hostile outsiders, or neighbours whose behaviour they judged unacceptable, and if offenders ignored it, they might be able to push parish officers into action, using their collective voice for leverage. Women sometimes had their own agenda in ‘regulating’ the neighbourhood, but their politics of gossip, pressure, and ostracism was likely at some point to impinge on the formal structures of parish government. The spheres of informal pressure and official action constantly overlapped. If the structures of patriarchy display remarkable continuity, so do the strategies women had evolved to accommodate it. Much of what we know about gossip networks is drawn from court records, especially depositions in the ecclesiastical courts, rich and voluminous for the Elizabethan and Stuart period. But there is little reason to suppose that such networks were an Elizabethan novelty. The medieval Chester pageant of Noah’s Flood, for example, shows Noah’s wife refusing to board the Ark unless her gossips come too.6 It is likely that gossips featured prominently in the lives of ordinary women long before the midTudor period, and that this book has often been exploring a world made newly visible rather than new. Changes there were, of course, and some inevitably impacted on gender relations. The general sense of crisis over social order almost certainly fuelled more specific anxieties about the perceived threat from ‘disorderly’ and ‘unruly’ women, creating a more repressive atmosphere, even if female behaviour itself had changed little. This was partly offset by the emergence of a literate, newly respectable ‘middling sort’, subscribing to novel values of civility. These were the people most likely to read domestic conduct-books, and to share their views. Such people were likely to endorse the ideal of the companionate marriage, within a patriarchal framework, and to view wife-beating as barbaric. It is less clear how far this affected the labouring poor, whose outlook was arguably shaped more by the jocular misogyny of proverbs and alehouse humour, while the effects of grinding poverty could quickly extinguish the fragile shoots of companionate marriage. London’s dramatic expansion also affected gender relations. Contemporaries often remarked on the freedom that women of all social strata enjoyed in the capital, with better employment and leisure opportunities, higher literacy, and better conditions for domestic servants.7 6 ‘Noah’s Flood’, in A. W. Pollard (ed.), English Miracle Plays, Moralities and Interludes (Oxford, 1890), 14. 7 Peter Earle found that 78% of London female deponents in the period 1665–1735 appear to have been involved to some extent in the labour market: P. Earle, ‘The Female Labour Market

378

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Women throughout the country were influenced by this image, and thousands of mainly young spinsters migrated to the capital to pursue it. It was in London too that women first came to dominate the defamation business of the ecclesiastical courts. Physical proximity obviously helped, but their greater social and financial autonomy may have been equally important; they were more likely to possess the money and confidence to turn to the courts, even when their husbands proved reluctant to help. Equally important, a defendant could more easily stand firm when her husband urged her to settle the dispute privately; patterns of litigation, after all, reflected a defendant’s ability to resist pressure to settle as much as the plaintiff’s determination to sue. The rise and eventual decline of defamation litigation across the country constitutes in itself one of the most striking developments of the period. Its dramatic rise testifies to women’s ability to appropriate existing structures for their own ends, as well as their vulnerability in a period when authorities everywhere were waging war on sexual misconduct. The subsequent decline can be linked to the declining authority of the ecclesiastical courts. Revived after 1660, they never fully regained their vigour, and the Restoration church pursued a different agenda; Celia Fiennes complained that its obsession with dissenters had led the church to ignore the most flagrant sins.8 If one motive in suing for defamation was to avert the threat of presentment, there was clearly less pressure to do so as that threat receded. Moreover it was increasingly difficult to make defendants attend, and still more so to make them submit to public penance; there was no religious uniformity after the Restoration, and after 1689 no legal obligation to attend the parish church at all. Robert Shoemaker, analysing falling levels of defamation business in London, places more weight on what he calls ‘the decline of public insult’ from the late seventeenth century. People cared less about their good name within a ‘community’ that was increasingly fluid and anonymous, and far more about their standing within the narrower worlds of occupational group, class, or voluntary society. The public insult was no longer likely to hurt, and so unlikely to be combated through court action. The first part of this argument, the anonymity of life in the capital, is more persuasive than the claim that by the eighteenth century defamatory words no longer ‘automatically destroyed reputations’. They had never done so, even in the sixteenth. The impact of public insult and malicious gossip had always depended on the strength of the individual’s reputation, and the level of in London in the Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries’, EcHR, 2nd ser., 42 (1989), 328–53. 8

The Journeys of Celia Fiennes, ed. C. Morris (1947), 313.

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support from friends and neighbours. We have seen that bystanders often turned angrily on people hurling insults or spreading damaging gossip.9 Shoemaker is on firmer ground in linking the decline of insult and litigation to advances in civility. Respectable householders increasingly came to perceive it as unseemly to harangue each another in the street, or to have their private affairs dissected in court; and parish officers may have felt it unseemly to subject neighbours to the public shame of penance. Most suits in the later period did not advance even as far as calling witnesses, and served merely to trigger a private accommodation. The decline of the ecclesiastical courts proved a mixed blessing for women. Parish officers were now far less likely to present them ‘on a fame’ of immorality, freeing respectable women from the constant risk of disgrace. But the erosion of the traditional system of communal selfregulation, based on the active participation of concerned parishioners, also reduced women’s ability to influence parish affairs.10 Moreover, the parish authorities were now also much less likely to present a violent husband, and if they did so he was probably less likely to submit. The growing practice of having abusive husbands bound over, especially in urban areas, compensated in part for the decline of the ecclesiastical courts and the diminished influence of churchwardens. The eighteenthcentury shift that saw ‘rough music’ targeting violent husbands instead of wives also provided some relief in extreme situations. But it would be naïve to imagine that binding over or rough music provided much protection to most women in labouring families crippled by poverty and drink. The importance of gossip networks, a theme throughout this book, has a bearing on the final issue, the search for a separate female culture or more accurately, subculture. Mendelson and Crawford pose the question in stark terms: ‘Did ordinary women have a culture of their own, or were they mere onlookers or passive sharers in male popular culture?’11 They advance a forceful argument that we can identify a distinctive female culture of mutual help and support, the product of women’s shared biological and social circumstances: ‘women were creative in their friendships, loves, and strategies for survival’.12 Some difficulties remain, however, both with the formulation of the question and this answer. 9 R. Shoemaker, ‘The Decline of Public Insult in London, 1660–1800’, Past and Present, 169 (2000), 210 and passim. 10 For a case study see F. Dabhoiwala, ‘Sex, Social Relations and the Law in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century London’, in M. J. Braddick and J. Walter (eds.), Negotiating Power in Early Modern Society (Cambridge, 2001). 11 Mendelson and Crawford, Women, 2–3. 12 Ibid. 255.

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Conclusion

Women were undoubtedly far more than onlookers or passive sharers in male culture. They did indeed develop strategies for survival, based on close cooperation with their friends or gossips, and we might see the negotiation of patriarchy as a central element in a female culture. Women created their own networks and spaces, and it is clear that many possessed a general sense of the behaviour appropriate to their sex, and felt responsible for enforcing it. Many also felt some sense of collective female identity, ‘an awareness of themselves as a social entity distinct from men’.13 It is reflected in the private letters of the educated, in tracts by proto-feminists from ‘Jane Anger’ to Mary Astell, and in the popularity of ballads dealing with the battle of the sexes, the tyranny of husbands, and the fickleness of lovers. It could surface too in casual remarks: when Elizabeth Greenwood discovered in 1612 that her late husband had apparently signed away part of his estate at Tewkesbury to another woman, before their marriage, she exclaimed angrily that if this were true, ‘then all women might take an example by her’.14 It remains an open question, however, how far all this constitutes a separate culture, using the common definition of a system of shared meanings within which people lived their lives. For women’s sense of collective identity and mutual support had to compete with many other ties and values that gave meaning to their lives, such as loyalty to family, to a socio-economic identity (e.g. the ‘middling sort’), to place, and to religion and sometimes politics. All these introduced rival and often divisive elements into women’s lives. Maria Thynne, an Elizabethan gentlewoman, was in playful mood when she promised her husband, ‘I will be inferior to none of my Deverill neighbours in playing the good housewife, though they strive till they stink’,15 but her words remind us that even housewifery entailed competition as well as cooperation. Friction between female neighbours generated the mass of raw material that Martin Ingram, Laura Gowing, and others have used in their studies of defamation. It is true, of course, that court records convey an unduly pessimistic view of social relations, but also that disputes which reached the courts represent only a tiny fraction of neighbourly brawls. This was a noisy and quarrelsome culture, with both sexes quick to take offence, if usually also ready to patch up their differences once tempers had cooled. 13

Mendelson and Crawford, Women, 231. D. Beaver, Parish Communities and Religious Conflict in the Vale of Gloucester, 1590–1690 (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), 41. 15 Suzanne Trill, Kate Chedgzoy, and Melanie Osborne (eds.), Lay By your Needles, Ladies, Take the Pen: Writing Women in England 1500–1700 (1997), 76. 14

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Personal conflicts were a feature of women’s social and cultural world, and gender solidarity often proved a frail reed when it had to compete with the pull of family loyalties or economic rivalries. The gossip network was thus a social construct at once supportive and divisive, creating boundaries and based on exclusion as well as inclusion. It provided a valuable tool for survival, but was equally important as an offensive weapon against personal adversaries, neighbours who refused to conform, and outsiders. In celebrating the creative and supportive values of women, we should not forget the tensions and conflicts that divided them. Moreover the sense of public responsibility that drove respectable women to police the behaviour of their neighbours underlines cultural division as well as identity. What sober, pious, selfdisciplined householders saw as proper values for all decent women might appear to others in a very different light. Many of the young, many of the poor, and indeed many of the middling sort preferred a set of values that celebrated the rival claims of neighbourly good cheer. Cultural values, and concepts of community, were contested among women as strenuously as among men. Early modern England reveals no steady march towards female emancipation. Some individuals, such as Mary Astell, possessed a powerful sense of women’s exploitation and oppression, and doubtless many others felt intensely frustrated by the constraints which bound their lives. None, however, attempted a direct challenge to the gender order in which they had been raised, and which they probably saw as unshakeable. Some scholars have stressed the continuities of female subordination, exclusion, and marginalization. Others have found a more positive theme by charting women’s history in terms of female agency within a maledominated social order. That has been the approach here, as in the work of Mendelson and Crawford. My account, however, has been less celebratory. Women often worked together and provided mutual support, but they were also as quarrelsome and competitive as men, and the harsh discipline some mistresses imposed on their young servants cautions us against exaggerating their innate gentleness. Yet this account too has been celebratory, in a broader sense. Women created a parallel world of gossip networks which offered them an identity beyond the narrowly domestic, a temporary escape, a means of coping with patriarchal pressures and alleviating them, and a powerful weapon for both defence and attack. Female networks helped women to withstand their enemies, both in the street and court-room, and to pursue an active agenda within the public and ‘political’ life of their neighbourhood and some-

382

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times beyond it. Tis Merrie When Gossips Meete might suggest a world of innocent merriment, but Rowlands’s text recognized it as a site of female empowerment too.16 16 The theme of gossips’ subversiveness is far more pronounced in Rowlands’s reworking of this piece as A Whole Crew of Kind Gossips, All Met to Be Merry (1609), in Works, ed. S. J. H. Herrtage (Glasgow, 1880), vol. ii.

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Berkshire Record Office D/A c155 Archdeaconry instance cause papers, 1594–1601 D/A2 c40 Archdeaconry instance cause papers, 1597–1601 D/A2 c46 Archdeaconry instance cause papers, 1601–10 Bodleian Library, Oxford Ashmole 418 Case-book of Jeffrey Neve Rawlinson B381–2 Ecclesiastical cause papers (?Court of Arches) Bridewell Hospital (consulted on microfilm in the Guildhall Library) BCB 1–11 Court Minute Books, 1559–1664 (now renumbered as GL MS 33011/1–11) Cambridge University Library Ely Diocesan records B2/20–1 office cause papers, 1600–6 D2/3–7, 9–11, 19, 23, 25 instance cause papers, 1572–1606 K1 instance cause papers, 1609–36 K2 instance cause papers, 18th century K4–8, 10, 11, 13, 15, 17, 20, 26, 42 instance cause papers, 17th century Corporation of London Record Office MC6 Mayor’s court, interrogatories Guildhall Library, London 635/1 St Augustine, Watling St., V(estry) M(inute) B(ook), 1601–1737 1175/1 St Margaret, New Fish St., VMB 1578–1789 1431/2 St Alphage, London Wall, VMB 1608–1711 3016/1 St Dunstan in the West, VMB 1588–1663 4069/1 Cornhill wardmote inquest book, 1571–1651 4165/1 St Peter upon Cornhill, VMB 1570–1717 6554/1 St Bartholomew, Fleet St., VMB 1644–68 9056 Archdeaconry court deposition book, 1566–7 9057/1 Archdeaconry court deposition book, 1632–7 9064/11 Commissary court, act book, 1511–16

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9064/12–21 Commissary court, act books 1582–1641 9065A/1–9 Commissary court, testamentary cause papers 1562–1704 9189/1–2 Commissary court, instance cause papers 1622–4, 1627–8 9234/7–8 St Botolph without Aldgate, memorandum books 1597–8, 1616–25 9583/1 churchwardens’ presentments, 1637–8 9585 Commissary court, deposition book 1581–93 9587/2 Royal peculiar of St Katherine by the Tower, instance cause papers 1702– 23 10,116/1–14 midwives’ licences, 17th century Leicestershire and Rutland Record Office 44’28/1321 act book of Rothley peculiar, 1622–6 1D 41/4/1–1298 Archdeaconry court, instance cause papers 1533–1621 1D 41/4, Boxes 1–81 Archdeaconry court, instance cause papers 1623–1750 1D 41/13/3–83 Archdeaconry court, act books, office causes, 1561–1702 1D 41/21 churchwardens’ presentments, 1635, 1640 1D 41/46/1 act book of St Margaret’s, Leicester, peculiar BR II/18/1–35 Hall Papers, 1582–1685 BR IV/3–108 examinations before the mayor 1536–1614 London Metropolitan Archives DL/C/193 Consistory Court, instance papers 1621–31 DL/C/230–2 Deposition books, 1625–34 Oxfordshire Archives Office Archdeaconry and diocesan papers Oxf. b1a Churchwardens’ presentments c2 Diocesan act book, office causes 1630–1 c4, 5, 9 Diocesan act book, office causes 1662–9 c11 Diocesan act book, instance causes 1632–40 c12–13 Diocesan act book, office causes, 1633–4, 1637–8 c31–3 Depositions, instance causes, 17th century c118–19 Vicar-General’s court, deposition books, 1616–20, 1665–72 d9, 11 Diocesan act book, office causes, 1606–7, 1621–3 d12, Diocesan act book, office causes, 1664–5 Public Record Office, Kew SP 16 State papers, domestic, Charles I STAC 8 Star Chamber papers, James I Warwickshire Record Office CR103 Notebook of William Bromley, JP, 1693

Bibliography of Manuscript Sources

385

West Sussex Record Office Ep1/11/1–22 Chichester Archdeaconry deposition books, instance causes, 1557–1694 Ep1/22/1 Churchwardens’ presentments, 17th century

Index

Abbott, Robert 8, 28 abortion 148, 301, 371 Adams, Grace 117; Mary 187; Sarah 144 Addams, Joan 258 Adderley, Goodwife 289 adultery, female 41, 90, 211, 244–6, 298 male 92–103, 112, 115, 254–5, 262, 276, 282 Alderidge, Katherine 1 alehouses and taverns 1, 49, 52, 62, 83–4, 87–90, 95, 97, 108, 111, 212, 260, 265, 280, 321, 323, 331–2, 334–40, 343 alewives 47, 64, 77, 79–80, 90, 95–7, 260 Allam, Mary 199–200 Allan, Joan 195 Allein, Joseph 73; Mary 82 Allen, Jane 226 Alleyn, Edward 69 Amussen, Susan 204, 370 Andrewes, Mary 265 Andrews, Bethaline 214; Elizabeth 197; Joan 57; Magdalen 56 animal insults 101, 190, 200, 230–1, 257 Anne, Queen 17, 347 Anglesey 47, 99 Antrobus, Isaac 342 Apthorpe, Joan 196 apprentices, female 10, 133, 135–6, 143, 149, 176, 178–9 male 155–7, 160, 170, 175, 271, 284 Archer, Isaac 72, 75, 360; Nurse 296 Arden, Thomas 119 Aricke, Joan 303 Armesonne, Joan 96 Arnold, Margery 336 Arrowsmith, Stephen 238 n. 63 arson 99, 178, 202 Arundel 99, 274 Ascue, Mary 91 Ashe, Daniel 337; Elizabeth 337 Ashemore, Alice 145–6

Ashton, Anne 115–16; John 115–16 Ashwell, Mary 152, 158, 171 Askew, Anne 34 assault, see violence Astell, Mary 19, 318 Aston, Anne 372 astrology 363, 368–9 Atkins, Audrey 230 Atkinson, Elizabeth 140; Thomas 246 Attoway, Anne 181 Aubrey, John 364, 366 Austen, Christian 187 Austin, William 16 Avery, Agnes 344 Aydon, Agnes 201 Aylestone, Leics. 350 Bachelor, Mary 215 Bacon, Margaret 370 Bagley, Agnes 113 Bagwell, William 245 Bagworth, Leics. 308 Bairstow, Martha 139 bakehouses 52, 281 Baker, Elizabeth 360 Balam, Frances 198–9 Ball, George 227–8, 249 ballads 11–13, 63, 75, 77–9, 83, 85–6, 89, 105–6, 124, 158–60, 244–5, 266, 278–9, 332, 342–3, 353, 359, 365–8, 380 Banbury 18 Banckes, Anne 209; Robert 245 Banks, Peter 85 Barbary 310–11 Barker, Ann 1 Barrett, Mary 360 barter 55–6, 65–6 Barton, Katherine 308 Baskerville, Thomas 46, 52–3, 325 Bath 347 Batten, Lady 170

Index Battersby, Susan 264 Bauthumley, Jacob 356 bawdy houses 80, 100, 183, 264, 279 Bawme, Mary 265 Baxter, Margaret 62, 71; Richard 8, 62, 71 Baynes, Elizabeth 90; Ralph 90 Baynham, Ann 175 Beattie, John 247 Beaumont, Agnes 213; Joan 121 Beazly, Mary 169 Beech, Elizabeth 139 Bell, Susanna 73–4 Ben-Amos, Ilana Krausman 128 Bennett, Judith 11, 375 Bent, Mrs. 91; Thomas 92 Beridg, Anne 308 Best, Elizabeth 200; Henry 44, 127, 132, 134, 168, 326; Jane 176 bestiality 274 Bethell, Ann 115 Betsworth, Elizabeth 249 Bettes, William 40 Betts, Lettice, 119; Mary 173 bible, and women 3–5, 8, 10, 16, 18 biblical characters: Abraham 3, Adam 3, 5, 12, 16, Elizabeth, 287, Eve 3, 12, 16, Holofernes, 15, Judith, 15, Mary, 15, 28, Noah’s wife 377; Peter 3, Paul 3, 4, 15; Sara 3 bigamy 39, 59, 117, 160, 196, 263 Bigg, Susan 222 Birch, Jane 142, 153, 158–9, 170, 182, 342 Bird, Mary 219 Bishop, Elizabeth 58; Robert 207–8 Black, Richard 245 Blackesley, John 262 blackmail 68 Blackstone, Margaret 137 Bladon, Oxon. 55 Bland, Mrs. 71 Blofeild, Alice 272 Bloudworth, George 102; Margery 102 Blundell, Nicholas 47, 151, 348, 350–1, 353; William 342; Winifred 139 Blunstone, Jane 293 Blythe, Anne 102 Bodgyard, John 119 Bolter, Randolph 250 Bolton 313 Boneham, Elizabeth 277 Bonner, Bishop 363

387

Bookey, Hannah 176 Bottyng, Joan 292 Bourne, Immanuel 153 Bownd, Nicholas 323, 335 Bowreman, Susan 45 Brabant, Alice 172 Braby, Elizabeth 214 Bradbourne, Elizabeth 172 Bradgate, Margaret 96 Bradshaw, Elizabeth 183 Brandon, Joan 305–6 Brasbridge, Mary 203 Brathwait, Richard 312 Brent, Margery 202 Brentwood, Essex 314 Brewer, Thomas 341 Bridge, William 101 Bridges, Joan 337 Bridgman, Bishop 329 Briggs, Frances 196 Brightred, Petronella 121 Brinsley, John 3, 22 brokers 132, 154, 168 Brown, Judith 160 Browne, Agnes 99; Anne 97; Margery 257; Priscilla 134 Bryers, Mary 213 Bullocke, William 108 Bunche, Joan 137, 285 Burbadge, Agnes 116; William 116 Burche, Cecily 292 Burdett, Anne 191; Elizabeth 280 Burges, Lawrence 211; Margery 220; Mary 113 Burgess, Daniel 314 Burlington, earl and countess of 177 Burnam, Robert 11, 76, 119 Burton, John 86; Margery 191 Bury, Elizabeth 37, 61 n. 163 Bush, Richard 44 Byworth, Katherine 43 Cadman, Mary 167, 173 Caldwell, Elizabeth 123 Cale, Mary 117 calendar customs 326–7, 348–53, 364 Camper, Joan 182 Campin, Mary 58 Cappe, Dorothy 304 Carer, Mary 151 Carew, Richard 269

388 Carowe, Grace 258 Carrington, Mary 49 Carter, Alice 179; Anne 317 Cartwright, Joan 298 Cary, Mary 133 Castle, Sarah 138 Catherine of Aragon 292 Catholics 82–3, 136, 314, 359, 363 Cave, Sarah 294–5; Sir Thomas 213 Cawdrey, Daniel 11 Cawkett, Joan 263 Cawton, Thomas 70, 73 Centloe, Goodwife 37 Chaceley, Worcs. 349 Chamberlain, John 170 Chamberlen, Libbeus 123 chapwomen 47 Charles II 316 charwomen 42 Chelmsford 340–1 Cheshire 223 Chester 204 Chester, James 263 Chettle, Anne 299 Cheyne, Margaret 291 Cheyney, Thomas 83 Chidley, Katherine 358 childbirth 4, 50–1, 328–9 children 72, 77, 169, 181, 187, 228–9, 297, 338 christenings 51, 63, 327–8, 354, 361 Christmas 35, 348–9 church ales 326, 352 Church, Joan 208, 276; Margaret 211 churching 51, 61, 327, 358, 361 Clare, earl of 337; John 366 Clark, Constance 143 Clayton, Ann 353 Cleaver, Robert 5, 8, 31 Clere, Mary 292 Clifford, Anne 347; George 109 Clitheroe, Margaret 34, 64, 82, 363 Coe, Winifred 198 Coffyn, Joanna 209 Cole, Anne 159; Robert 286 Coleman, Robert 93 Collens, Isabella 119 Collier, Joseph 295; Mary 20 Collins, Mary 251 Collyng, Barbara 314 Colyton, Devon 43

Index Commin, Matthew 157 communion 356, 372 community, and reputation 268–72 companions 152, 157, 161, 163, 336 Compton, Mrs 303 compurgation 58–9, 101, 209, 240, 247, 254, 261 n. 180 conciliation 107, 203–5, 207–8, 213–14, 216, 219, 226, 235–6, 285 conduct-books 5, 11, 28, 31–5, 77, 86, 130–1 Congreve, William 67 conventicles 356–8, 362 Conway, Viscount 307 Cooke, Anne 308; Richard 271 Cooper, Thomasine 282 Cotes, William 88 courtship 141–2, 343–4 Coventry 288–9, 310, 319 Cover, Alice 89 Cowper, Agnes 198 Coxe, Alice 162; Elizabeth 308 Coxere, Edward 39 Cradock, Samuel 130 Crafthole, Cornwall 269 Crane, Benjamin 40 Cranmer, Thomas 21 Crawford, Patricia 2, 8, 267, 369, 375, 379 Cressy, David 301, 327, 348 criminality, female 59, 64–8, 187, 194, 292, 331 women and male, 6, 34–5, 57, 169 Crofton, Zachary 6, 23, 173 Crompton, Anne 167; William 291, 371 Crookes, Mary 195 Crosley, Elizabeth 221; Michael 261 n. 180 cross-dressing 293, 325, 349–50, 368 cuckoldry, cuckolds 21, 95–6, 172, 193–4, 196, 212, 229, 231–2, 251, 255, 262, 274 Culmer, Richard 314 Cundall, Elizabeth 179 Cupper, John 160 Curtis, Elizabeth 179 Dale, Etheldreda 208; Katherine 282; Margery 56; Mary 121 dancing 323–5, 329, 336, 339–42, 344, 348, 351–2 Daniel, Agnes 207 Darling, Eleanor 220 Dashfield, John 276 Davey, William 246

Index Davies, Juliana 240 Davis, John 122; Natalie 2; Susan 122 Davison, Barbara 59 Dawkins, Hamlet 249 Dawson, Dorothy 316–17 Day, Anne 241; Joan 282 Deane, Anne 174 death 58, 82, 136–7, 139, 176, 284 debt 40–1, 90–1, 118–19 defamation 60, 185–217, 225–33, 249–52, 254–60, 279–80 defamation suits 204–7, 279–80, 377–9 by men 226, 254–63, 274–6, 300–1 by spinsters 141, 215–17 by women 95, 100, 170, 199, 203–15, 250–2, 273, 285 Defoe, Daniel 105, 135, 137, 154, 183, 333, 338 Dekyn, Sarah 168 Deloney, Thomas 61, 329 Dent, Widow 43 Derby 315 Dexter, Christopher 261 dildoes 13 Dilke, Anne 106 Dilkes, Richard 109 divorce 41, 91, 114–17, 120, 141 Docker, Emm 167 Dod, John 5, 8, 31 Dodridge, Alice 56 domestic finances 29, 40–6, 63, 66, 71–2, 76–7, 79, 90–2, 112–13 Doncaster 46 Dorchester 295, 316 Dorey, Widow 65 Dorman, Grace 258 Dorrell, Alice 121 Downton, John 90; Thomas 77 Draper, Anne 243; Frances 257; Margery 141 Draycott, Lucy 199 dress 28, 75, 237–8, 151, 162, 169, 180–1, 187, 192, 194, 198, 230, 297, 341, 347, 350 drunkards, female 14, 77, 83–4, 195, 264 male 87–8, 90–1, 104, 225 Dudley, Margaret 281; Robert 292 Duffy, Eamon 372 Dugress, Mrs 199 Duke, Magdalen 296 Dukes, Mrs 294

389

Dunton, John 17 Dutton, Richard 114; Lettice 114 Eales, Sarah 223 Earle, Peter 135 Easton, Joan 190 Eden, Margaret 47 Edlyn, Elizabeth 287 Edwards, Catherine 215; Sibyl 194 Elizabeth I 15, 17, 292 Elliott, Elizabeth 143 Ellis, Elizabeth 168; John 94 Ellison, Anne 41 Elston, Sarah 88, 124 enclosures 306, 316 English, Mary 176 Erickson, Amy 2, 30, 296 ‘Eugenia’ 18 Evans, Elizabeth 145; Oliver 281; Rice 303 Exeter 314 extortion 261, 281 Eyre, Adam 75 Fairchilds, Cissie 128 fairs 326–7, 331, 333, 343 Farmer, Katherine 278 Farr, Mary 310 Farthing, Judith 242 Fawkener, Elizabeth 181 Featly, Joice 15 female culture 19, 284, 365–73, 379–82 female households, 36–7 Fenton, Anne 40; Edward 40 Ferbourne, Richard 323 Fernell, Margaret 176 Ferris, Widow 296 feuds 59, 221–2, 312 Fielding, Elizabeth 336 Fiennes, Celia 52, 357, 378 Finch, Anne 71; John 71, 94; Peter 313 Finney, Elizabeth 193 Fisher, Susan 80, 264 Fiven, Agnes 338 Fixall, Bridget 171 Flavell, Alice 198, 202 Flecknoe, Richard 343 Fleming, Lucretia 204 Fletcher, Anthony 2, 13, 375 flight, by wives 117–19 by servants 147, 161, 178–81 Flower, Elizabeth 122; Jane 157; Joan 340

390 Folkestone 57 Forde, Margery 160 Forman, Simon 155, 157, 165, 175, 312, 338 fortune-tellers 85–6, 364 Foster, Joan 95; Thomas 95; William 300 Foulds, Mary 55 Fowley, Cecilia 234 Fox, George 314 Foyster, Elizabeth 108 Frances, Christian 201 Francis, Katherine 121 Franklin, Honor 101; Moses 101 Franklyn, Thomas 222 Fraunces, Margaret 234 Freeman, Elizabeth 282; John, 58–9; Mary 59 Fries, Nicholas 39 Frith, Margaret 307 frolics 140, 342, 349–50, 368 Frost, Mary 296 Fry, Elizabeth 57 funerals 58, 86, 254, 355, 361 Fuston, Yorks. 352 Fyddy, Agnes 146 Fynch, Elizabeth 169 gadding 9, 27–8, 156, 328, 334, 340, 356 games, female 346–50, 352, 360 Gary, Elizabeth 133 Gataker, Thomas 9, 15, 28, 32 ‘gender crisis’ 20–4 Genge, John 244 gestures 4, 197–8, 201, 232, 245 ghosts 77 Gibbon, William 165 Gibbons, Anne 190; John 198 Gibson, Elizabeth 154; Margaret 264 Gilden, Henry 250 Glen, William 170 Gloucester 159 Glover, Anne 350 Goates, Mary 198 Godfrey, Anne 287 Gooditch, John 255 Goodman, Cecily 187; Joan 360 ‘good neighbourliness’ 27, 56, 64, 107, 125 Goodspeed, Widow 284 Gorse, Mary 91 Gorton, Elizabeth 211; Thomas 211 Gosport 270 gossip, gossips 7, 49–64, 96, 98–9, 123,

Index 125–6, 170–2, 200–203, 211–13, 242, 248, 272–8, 280–1, 285–7, 327–30, 366, 376–7, 379–82 Gouge, Elizabeth 15, 72 William 4, 9–11, 24, 29, 32–4, 62, 69, 72, 81, 85, 125, 130, 151, 154, 156, 160, 165–6, 169–70, 175, 291, 342 Gough, Richard 49, 70, 74, 84, 124 Gould, Mercy 301 Goulsborough, Ellen 118 Gowing, Laura 204, 214, 231, 251, 299 Grace, Elizabeth 65 Graeme, Margaret 286 Grantham, Alice 214 Gray, Richard 279 Great Maplestead, Essex 310 Green, Margaret 170 Greene, Alice 35, Bethia 161; Elizabeth 146; Robert 312 Greenwood, Elizabeth 380 Griffith, Matthew 3, 33, 88, 105 Griffiths, Paul 128 Grindal, Edmund 310 Grocock, Mary 174 Grovett, Margaret 199, 206, 212 Grumbolde, Alice 169 Gurr, Andrew 324 Hale, Sir Matthew 5, 35 Halifax 351 Hall, Joseph 371; William 241 Halliday, Elizabeth 304 Hamton, Anne 123–4 Hancks, Joan 100 Hanging Highton, Northants. 115 Hannam, Anne 85 Hannay, Patrick 50, 131 Harding, Edmund 82; Margery 135 Hardy, Nathaniel 32 Harmar, Thomas 83 Harold, Thomas 274, 276 Harper, James 41 Harris, Robert 80 Harrison, Elizabeth 258; John 140; Mary 334 Harrogate 46 Hart, Theophilus 244 Harwood, Joan 57 Hawkins, Deborah 293 Hayes, Mary 56 Hayward, Thomas 121

Index Hazzard, Dorothy 82, 358 Head, Richard 183, 333, 343 Headache, Frances 37 Heartley, Christian 67 Heath, Thomas (i) 35; (ii) 56 Heddon-on-the-Wall, Northumberland 313 Hemmynge, Dorothy 274 Henrietta Maria, 293, 307 Henry VIII 365 Henry, Philip 27, 69–71 Herbert, Mary 289 Herreson, Margaret 216 Herrick, Robert 348 Hertford 295 Hertfordshire 134 Hetherington, Jane 139 Hewer, Will 94 Hewes, James 238 Hewetson, Milcha 58 Hexton, Herts. 350 Heylyn, Peter 73 Heyricke, Jane 278; Mary 174 Heywood, Isabel 357; Oliver 27, 139, 148, 299, 351, 353, 355, 357, 361; Richard 313 Hicknell, Joan 281 Higham, Leics. 272 Hilder, Thomas 10, 29, 89, 166, 334 Hill, Anne 180; Bridget 128, 150; Elizabeth 337; Frances 149; Henry 109 Hindle, Steve 223 hiring fairs 129, 132 Hix, Hannah 297 Hobry, Denis 123; Mary 123, 125 Hobson, Anne 303 Hodskins, Martha 133 Hodson, William 228 Hogsflesh, Grace 195 Holbrooke, Margaret 143 Holland, Dionise 259 Holles, Sir John 153 Hollinsworth, Ellen 241 Holly, Ann 58 Holman, Elizabeth 42 homilies 7, 11–12, 87, 106 Hooton, Elizabeth 230 Hopes, Margery 58 Hopkins, Alice 96 Horton, Ambrose 240 Hose, Thomas 196 Hoskyns, Margaret 241

391

hospitality 322–3, 330 housewifery 9, 11, 27, 50, 61–2, 380 Howes, John 30–1; Katherine 31 Howicke, Richard 251 Howsdon, Mary 191 Huggins, Joan 117 Hughes, Charles 87; Susannah 87 Hunt, Elizabeth 118; Tabitha 285; Thomas 118 Hurll, Mary 149, 345 Hutchinson, Lucy 17 Hutton, Mary 161; Ronald 348 Huxley, Suzanne 140 Hynde, Ellen 103; William 103 Hysplitt, Elizabeth 265 Ibell, Dorothy 258 incest 277, 300 infanticide 148, 174, 202, 271, 281, 292, 301, 303, 307 Inglestone, Yorks. 312 Ingram, Martin 83, 263, 267 inns 99 insults 87–9, 95–7, 100, 188–204, 210, 216, 228–32, 252–60, 378–9 Isham, Sir Justinian 115 Ives, Esther 121 Jackson, Dorothy 160; Elizabeth 305; Mary 111 James I 292 James II 293 James, Eleanor 318; Mary 265 Jarman, Alice 192 Jarmin, Margaret 95 Jarrold, Frances 144–5 Jebbitt, John 145 Jeffrey, Frances 48 Jeffreys, Judge 309, 318 Jenkinson, Alice 182 Jesserson, Susanna 28, 86 jests, female 198–9, 220, 254, 274 male 12–14, 21, 198, 215, 239, 251, 255, 263 Jevon, Thomas 87 Jinner, Sarah 369 Johnson, Cecily 105; Dorothy 210; Johanna 175; John 83; Thomas 246; William 240 Jolly, Thomas 72, 80, 85

392

Index

Jones, Griffin 110; Katherine 349; Margaret 141 Jonson, Ben 326 Joyner, Mary 216 Josselin, Mary 150; Jane 329, 369; Ralph 48, 70–1, 74, 87, 133, 140, 149, 238, 275, 357, 363 juries of matrons 298–301 Kelly, Robert 151 Kemp, Elizabeth 144; Will 340–1 Kendall, Jane 140; Mary 174; Susan 181 Kennet, Mary 212 Kent, Susan 341, 360 Kerchin, John 254 Kiffener, Judith 103 kin, help from 85, 105, 114, 116, 147, 215, 242 Kinder, Alice 325 King, Martha 157; Mary 256 Kingston, Margaret 1 Kirby, Joan 215, 280; Richard 256 Kirk, Joan 162 Kirtling, Cambs. 346 Kirtlington, Oxon. 352 Knight, John 151; Simon 56 Knowsley, Margaret 275 Kussmaul, Ann 127 Lacey, Jane 226 Lambe, Sir John 315 Lambert, Jane 332 Lancaster, James 314 Lane, Anne 45 Lashley, Mary 264 Laslett, Peter 36 Latimer, Hugh 21 Law, Joan 137 law, relating to women 5–6, 23, 29–30, 35, 67 Lawrence, Joan 281 Lea, Henry 261 Lee, Alice 292; Elizabeth 251; Prudence 122 Leeson, Randall 262 Leicester 55, 59, 102, 123, 169, 299, 302, 304, 308, 310 Leigh, Dorothy 15, 17 Lenton, Francis 334 Levellers 290 Levett, Edward 255 Ley, Anne 187

Liverpool 296, 304 Locke, John 199; Mercy 212 Lockwood, Thomasine 141 Loddenham, Helen 171 Lodesman, Thomas 41 lodgers 36–8 London, crime in 66–8, 261 defamation litigation 204, 251 entertainment in 324, 326, 332, 342–3 flight to 117, 191 position of servants in 128, 134–5, 153–5, 182–3 places in: Bartholomew Fair 326; Bethlem 92, 345; Bridewell 14, 37, 84, 93, 100, 102–3, 110, 174, 179, 219, 249, 349; Cornhill 54, 132, 294; Covent Garden 53; Old Bailey 1, 65, 87, 92, 132, 138, 145; St Alphage 297; St Botolph’s, Aldgate 325; Stratford le Bow 314, 331; the Tower 365 Long Newton, Derbys. 314 Loughborough 304 Love, Elizabeth 304 Lowe, Katherine 372; Roger 155, 250, 334–5, 344 Lucas, Rebecca 176 Lupton, David 331 Lydford, Devon 270 Lyster, Joan 292 Lyvings, Ellen 250; Robert 250 MacDonald, Michael 85, 149 Machyn, Henry 346, 348 magic 85, 241, 364–6 Magick, Dorothy 120 Maldon, Essex 317 Manchester 37 Manners, Ralph 102 Mannyng, John 41; Margaret 41 Mansell, Elinor 49 Manwaring, Mary 219 Mare, Jane 165 marital breakdown 38–42, 80–1, 83–4, 87, 112–14, 118–19, 121–4, 141, 157, 210–11 marital relationships 10–12, 22, 23–4, 26–36, 38–42, 60–4, 228–9, 235; 240–2, 245, 250, 322, 368 Market Harborough 248 market-women 43, 46–7, 53–4 Markham, Gervase 27

Index Marrow, Brian 161 Marsh, Elizabeth 257 Marshall, Cisley 167; John 77 Martindale, Adam 73, 182, 315, 340 Martins, Margaret 90; Thomas 90 Mason, Martha 215; Samuel 112 Massam, Richard 114 Matheu, Margaret 40 Mathew, Susan 148 Mattock, Walter 257 Maunder, Elizabeth 278 May, George 263; Susan 271 Mayo, Richard 130 maypoles 315, 351 Meade, Elizabeth 228, 250 Meeke, Robert 46 Meldrum, Tim 128 Melton, Alice 159 Mendelson, Sara 2, 8, 267, 369, 375, 379 Mercer, Mary 152, 336; Mrs 301; William 227 merkins 278 Merne, Dorcas 284 Merrick, Peter 324 Merry, Dorothy 335 ‘merry meetings’ 334, 338–9 Middlesex 223 Middleton, Judith 197 midwives 48, 123, 300–6 Milbank, Isabel 46 Milford Haven 315 Miller, Marie 341 Millikin, Alice 117 Milward, Isabel 73; Robert 73 ministers, abused/defamed 18, 257, 259–60, 264–5, 274–6 abusive 230, 260 complaints against 307 drunk 342 pastoral/conciliatory role 213, 226, 242, 259 promiscuous 83, 95, 145, 242, 300 violent 106, 108–9 ministers’ wives 15–16, 70–5, 80, 82, 95, 100, 106–9, 187, 192, 211–12, 229, 256, 274, 276, 300–1, 329, 360, 369 misogyny 12–14 Mitchell, Henry 72, 91; Joyce 277; Lucy 72 Mobbs, Christopher 263; Elizabeth 157 mocking rhymes 232, 249, 270, 278–9 Moncke, Phillis 98–9

393

money-lending 296 Monmouth, duke of 293 Moore, Dorothy 48, 369; Frances 266; John 259–60; Peter 155 More, Mary 18, 23 Morley, Audrey 196 Morris, Elizabeth 107 Mosely, Sir Edward 68 ‘Mother Bunch’ 366 Moulsworth, Martha 70, 78 Muckleston, Rowland 74–5 mumming, 349–50 murders, by women, of children 81, 83, 303; see also infanticide of employers 160, 169, 177 of husbands 119–25, 173, 220 of other men 221, 234, 264–5 of servants 136–7, 158 n. 163, 285 of women 1, 222 murders, by men, of employers 170 of men 108, 174, 235, 244, 250 of servants 164–5, 285 of wives 79, 86 n. 83, 87–9, 160, 172–3, 284 of other women 227 music 323–6, 339–40, 351–2 Mustian, Alice 279 mutilation 98, 164, 227, 238 Napier, Richard 85, 149, 266 Nayler, James 362 Naylor, Mary 177 neighbours, support by 94–5, 106–11, 115–16 Neshe, Emma 300 networks, see gossips Newcastle 313, 322 Newcome, Daniel 71; Elizabeth 75; Henry 48, 71, 75, 81, 138, 322, 329 Newell, Mary 241; William 241 newspapers 13 Newton, Alice 147 Niccolls, Bridget 141 nicknames 69–70 Nickolls, Christian 295 Normandy, Yorks. 339 Norrice, Widow 123 North, Alice 190 Northumberland, countess of 291 Norton, Staffs. 97 Norway, Elinor 77 Norwich 40–1, 44, 46, 136, 295

394

Index

nose-slitting 94, 97–8, 116, 163–4 Nottingham 90 obedience, limits of wifely 10, 29, 31, 33–6, 83, 370–1 office-holding, female 9, 291, 294–5 Oadby, Leics. 272, 307 Oglander, Sir John 341 Olding, Ann 153 Oliver, Anne 102; John 155; Robert 102; William, 59 Olney, Bucks. 358 Orson, Elizabeth 146 Osborne, Dorothy 53; Elizabeth 365–6 Osgood, Margaret 124 Owen, Joan 112; William 112 Page, Susan 259 Pageter, John 67 Painter, Anne 199 Pallate, Elizabeth 147 Palmer, Richard 260 Pannett, Elizabeth 222 Parker, Ann 133, 149; George 119; Katherine 276; Martin 12, 105–6 Parnell, Elizabeth 113; Henry 113 Parrott, Henry 161 Partridge, John 119 Passe, Anne 216 Patchett, Anne 216 patriarchy 1–36; 374, 377 challenged 18–25 Paul, Margaret 133 pawning 55–7, 65, 331 pawnshops 48, 64 Peele, George 366 Peirce, Mary 167 penance 206, 214, 271–2, 298 Penard, Jane 140 Penn, Sir William 170 Pepper, Margaret 145; Mrs 304 Pepys, Charles 119; Elizabeth 93–4, 104, 132, 142, 152, 156–9, 171–3, 329, 335–7, 364; Pall 150; Samuel 71, 104, 134–5, 141–3, 150, 152–3, 156–9, 162–3, 170–3, 179, 245, 322–3, 325, 329, 336, 342, 348, 351–3, 364 Perrin, Elizabeth 68 petitioning, female 100, 289–91, 305–11, 318 Pett, Phineas 345 Petty, Edmund 251

pewing 54, 188, 221 Phillipps, Anne 264 Phillips, Thomas 100 physicians, female 48, 369 physiology 4 Pigeon, Elizabeth 74 pilfering 132–3, 166–9, 179–80, 337–9 Pinchbeck, Margaret 123 Pippin, Matthew 229 plague 57 plays, play-going 13, 33, 67, 87, 164, 324–5, 329, 332, 336, 341–3, 366–7 Pleasance, Alice 46; William 46 pleasure trips 321–2, 325, 329–32, 343, 345 Pole, Alice 147 Poley, Katherine 80 politics, women and 9, 288–94, 318–19 Pollard, Judith 107 Pollet, Mary 107 Poole, Susan 120 Popplewell, Catherine 316 pornography 232–3 Porter, Catherine 200; Mary 273 Portsmouth 153 Pott, Emily 264 Powell, Walter 48 pox 59, 98, 119, 191–2, 230, 233, 261, 263, 300 Pratt, Lucy 277 Prescot, Lancs. 109 puritans 356–8, 361–2 Purser, Anne 234 Purslowe, Dorothy 86 Pratt 14, Emmatt 95–6 Preist, Dorothy 136 Price, Elizabeth 261; Grace 238 Pricke, Robert 5 property, women and 29–30, 81 prostitution 36–7, 39, 67, 80, 88, 180, 190–2, 197, 331, 333 proverbs 6–7, 13, 80, 270, 274 Pryme, Abraham de la 364 public opinion 59–60, 248–9, 273–4, 277, 279–81 Purkiss, Diane 283 Pyerson, Helen 258 Pyne, Joan 216 Pywell, Anne 260 Quakers 17, 306–7, 314, 358–9, 361 Quemerford, Somerset 287

Index Queniborough, Leics. 339 Quorndon, Leics. 305–6 races 344, 353 Ragge, Anne 136 Ralphs, Andrew 82 Randall, Matthew 171 Ranew, Lawrence 77 rape 5–6, 68, 135, 144–6, 157, 226, 228, 237–9, 241, 246, 258, 260–1 Ratcliffe, Jane 334; Katherine 264 Ratcliffe, Leics. 278 Read, Joan 212 Reading 37, 340 recognizances 101–3, 107, 110–12, 120, 123, 223–4, 235–6, 244, 260, 262 recreation, female 28, 49–50, 55, 59, 63, 321–53 of servants 150, 154, 157, 333–53 Redgway, Elizabeth 137 Reede, Thomas 313 religion, women and 34, 81–3, 195, 260, 286 , 310, 313–15, 322, 324, 353–63, 367–8, 372 Remnant, Elizabeth 39 Reniger, Avis 223 reputation, female 61–2, 186–217, 225, 228–34, 249–51, 272–81, 285–7 male 252–63 Reyner, Edward 32 Reynolds, Dionys 168 Rice, Agnes 175 Rich, Richard 40 Richardson, Alice 190, 241; Ellen 240; Joan 249; Richard 356 Riddington, Anne 80 Ridhall, Margaret 14 riots 221, 311–19 Roberts, Dorothy 179; Mary 165 Robins, Mary 182 Robinson, Margaret 313 Rogers, Daniel 3, 5, 9–11, 28–9, 33–4, 61, 89, 114, 120, 328; Judith 96 role-models, female 15–16 Rolf, Mary 161 Rolfe, Anne 294 Rothwood, Robert 109 rough-music 83, 234, 379 Rowe, Isabel 112 Rower, Joyce 132 Rowlands, Samuel 49, 62, 64, 69, 171, 382

395

Rownde, Thomas 145 Rush, Judith 372 Ryse, Elizabeth 144–5 Sackville, Eleanor 89 Sadd, Mary 96 Sadler, John 71 sailors, sailors’ wives 38–9, 140–1, 310–11, 332 Salford 218 Salisbury 165, 251, 279 Salisbury, Mary 239, 246 Sammeway, Joan 225 Samuel, Elizabeth 111 Sampson, Richard 262 Saunders, John 112 Savage, Mary 216; Thomas 165 Sawis, Elizabeth 39 Sawnders, Alice 241 Scarborough, Jervis 143 scolds, scolding 87–90, 95–6, 203–5, 208, 214, 220, 232, 282 Scott, James 24 Scoulter, Elizabeth 300 Seal, Anne 179 Secker, William 72 seditious talk 289–90 separatists 82, 358–9 servants, female 37, 92, 104, 106, 127–84, 187, 201, 210, 280, 299–301, 357, 360, 363–4 as kin 150–1 defamation suits by 216–17 discipline of 14, 33, 72, 131, 135, 152, 154, 166–7, 175–6, 336 violent 171, 175–6 ill-treated 136–7, 143–4, 146, 178–9, 220, 284 marry employers 78, 159–61 sexual abuse/liaisons 135, 144–6, 158–64, 167, 173, 242, 249, 271–2 slander employers 171–5, 209 see also pilfering servants, male 163–5, 193, 284 servants, wages and conditions 129–5, 137–9, 142, 146, 153–4, 166–7 sexual assault/harassment 196, 225–8, 233–4, 236–48; see also servants sex, wives’ refusal of 74–5, 79–80, 121 Seymour, Dennis 59 Shakespearean characters: Alice Shortcake

396

Index

366; Macbeth 70; Orsino 52 shaming rituals 198–9, 232–4, 278–9 Sharpe, Alice 37; James 110, 204, 218, 283; Pamela 44 Shatton, Elizabeth 38 Shaw, Dorothy 70; John 71 Shepard, Alexandra 253 Sheriff’s Lench, Worcs. 280 Shilton, Anne 196 Shoemaker, Robert 221, 223, 378–9 shoplifting 66–7 Short, Isabel 140 Sidlesham, Sussex 359 Sidney, Philip 346 Sillby, Joan 239 Sills, John 100, 244 Simkins, Anne 233; Henry 237 Simpson, John 173 Sims, Helen 277 skimmingtons 287 Slanning, Susan 140 Sleeth, Elizabeth 255 Smith, Agnes 183; Henry, preacher 8, 10, 31–2, 131; Henry, of Wigston 40; Margaret 326; Thomas 84; Sir Thomas, 9 Smyth(e), Alice 227; Ellen 97; John 332; Ralph 146 Snawsell, Richard 114, 370 Snow, Judith 336 soap 309 sociability, see gossips; recreation Somerset 134 Southampton 54 Sparks, Nathaniel 264 Spence, Janet 148 Spenser, Mary 177 Spinkes, Elizabeth 122 spinsters/singlewomen 20, 36–8, 58, 127–8, 182–3, 215–17, 219, 223–4, 333, 335–6 spirits 313 Spray, Anne 261 Sprigge, Dorothy 95, 228 Springett, Lady 48 Sprint, John 18 Spufford, Margaret 366–7 Squire, Margaret 286 Stamford 327 Stanby, Henry 261 Stanley, Mary 133 Stapleford, Jane 65

Staples, Mary 113; Widow 297 Stapleton, Dorothy 227 Star Chamber 14 Starke, Robert 157 Starkey, Eleanor 260 Statutes: act of Artificers (1563) 26, 37, 129, 131 infanticide (1624) 148 against facial mutilation (1670) 164 n. 193 against shoplifting (1699) 67 Steele, Richard 53 stepchildren 80–1 Stephens, Edward 362; John 61–2, 365; Mary 37, 183 Stephenson, Margaret 43 Stevens, Thomas 239, 300–1 Stevenson, Cicely 46; Ralph 46 Steventon, St John 153 Stibbes, Amy 138 Stitch, Jane 175 Stokes, George 246; Honour 58 Stone, Margaret 194; Susan 215 Stoneleigh, Warwicks. 233 Stout, Ellen 150–1; Josias 74, 329; William 74, 150–1, 161 Stowe, John 341 Strafford, Elizabeth 76 Stratton, Joan 197 Street, John 76 street-vendors 43–5, 54 Stretton, Alice 144 Stubbes, Philip 351 Stutville, Agnes 246; Roger 246 Strudwicke, Robert 254 Styrke, Theophany 192; Theophilus 211 suicide 85, 149, 170 ‘superstition’ 363–5 surgeons, female 48–9, 369 Surrey 233 Swain, Richard 241 Swetnam, Elizabeth 188; Joseph 327 Symson, Elizabeth 302 Tailford, Robert 145 Taunton 137 taverns, see alehouses Tawley, Jerome 92 taxation, protests over 315–16 Taylor, Alice 118; Elizabeth 97; Goodwife 286; Isabel 264; John 35, 104, 331; Martha 221, 362; Thomas 33

Index Tebbutt, Melanie 57 Tewkesbury 358 Thanet, earl and countess of 177 Thomas, Alice 244; Robert 244; William 4, 31 Thomson, Elizabeth 139 Thorne, Anne 338; Ethelbert 249 Thornton, Alice 157; Elizabeth 120; Henry 120 Thursby, Edward 291 Thynne, Maria 380 Tichon, Maudlin 282 Todd, John 180; Richard 82 Tompkins, Anthony 244 Tompson, Eleanor 202; Isabel 221 Toms, Dorcas 101 Toope, Bernard 76 Townsend, Margaret 90 Towres, Mary 151 Toy, Anne 45 Trapnel, Anna 362 Trayford, Margery 160 Trevor, Dorcas 138 Trigge, Mary 188, 195 Tucker, Joan 335 Tunbridge, Anne 252 Turlington, Jane 308 Turner, Mrs 57 Turville, Elizabeth 259–60; William 59 Tusser, Thomas 61 Twisse 78; Bess 78 Underdown, David 20, 371 Underhill, Edward 314 Vann, William 229 Varney, Anne 241; Thomas 248 Vaughan, Bess 312; Joan 163 Vauts, Moses à 33 Verney, Edmund 319; Elizabeth 319; Mary 267 Vickers, Susan 286 Villars, Mary 307 violence, female, against husbands 77–8, 84, 368 against other men 67, 108, 234, 259–60, 263–6, 312–14, 368 against women 66–8, 97–9, 106, 217–24, 238, 308, 312, 372 see also servants

397

violence, male, against women 226–7, 233–43, 247, 249 against men 244–5, 250, 262 see also wife-beating Virginia 149 visionaries 362 Wade, Grace 276 wakes 343–4 Walker, Anthony 70, 323; Elizabeth 139, 234, 265, 360; Garthine 64, 223; Sarah 65, 316 Wallen, Anne 116 Wallington, Nehemiah 11 Walter, John 311 Walton, Elizabeth 232 Wandesford, Mary 20 Wanswell, Gloucs. 270 Ward, Agnes 257; Anne 247; Geoffrey 157; Mary 297; Mrs 304; Ned 106, 331, 333, 364, 347, 364–5; Sarah 192 Warner, Francis 56 Warren, Elizabeth 17 wassailing 348 Wastell, Margaret 95 Waters, Helen 168 Watson, Ellen 220; Goodwife 297; Mary 107 Webb, Anne 148; Joan 191 wedding anniversaries 33 weddings 61, 140, 142, 249, 262, 278, 344 Welch, Dorothy 64 Wellow, Somerset 279 Wells, Agnes 287; Thomas 287; William 263 Welsh, Elizabeth 198; Katherine 57 Welton, Alice 84 Wene, Mary 336 West, Jane 240; Richard 61 Westminster 282 Weston, James 235 Whately, William 5, 8, 22, 33, 69 Wharrowe, Thomasine 42 Wheatcroft, Anne 369; Leonard 334, 343–4, 369 Wheeler, John 111; Thomasine 111 White, William 108 Whitefield, Jane 92, 95 Whitehall, Robert 23 Whitshall, Anne 115 Whittaker, Dorothy 141

398 widows 36, 38, 43, 80 wife-beating 13, 40, 74, 79, 84–9, 103–16, 211, 303, 377 condemned 10, 32–3, 368 defended 13–14 Wight, Sarah 362 Wilcocke, Mrs 307 Wilcox, Clare 97; Marjorie 111 Wilford, Anne 176 Wilkes, Agnes 176 Willen, Diane 295 Willet, Susan 97 Willett, Deb 93–4, 152 Williams, Morrice 76 Willies, Anne 298 Willis, Anne 180; Edith 312 Willowes, William 245 Willshire, Margaret 349–50 Wilson, Adrian 327; Alice 100; Faith 192; John 254; Richard 92; Susan 79–80; Thomas 113; Ursula 113 Wilton, Rosamund 95 Winstanley, Gerrard 16 Wiseman, Thomas 254 Withers, Lettice 211; Thomas 211; Mrs 48 witchcraft 120, 195–6, 212, 230, 266, 276, 283, 286–7, 299 witnesses 206–8, 210–11 Wodnott, Elizabeth 259

Index Wolfe, Jane 135 Wolley, Hanna 130–1 women ‘at their own hands’ 36–8, 128, 150, 180, 182–3 Wood, Andy 311; Anthony 309; Jane 307; Rowland 225 Woodbridge, Margaret 233 Woodhouse, Anne 154 Woods, Jane 139 Woodward, Alice 344; Anne 213 work, women’s 10, 60, 90 alongside husbands 42–3, 71–3 waged 28–30, 37–9, 41–9, 52–4, 310 see also alewives Wright, Richard 93 Wrightson, Keith 267 Wroth, Sir Robert 40 Wylye, Wilts. 341 Wynes, Jane 231 Wynnes, Elizabeth 227 Yapton, Sussex 339 Yates, Bartholomew 313 Yaxley, Isabel 193 Yonge, James 74, 325; Jane 330 York 204 Yorkshire 131, 134, 218, 270, 306, 316–17, 353 Young, Anne 187, 210, 338; Anthony 141