Andy Wood

Custom and the social organisation of writing in early modern England.

Social historians of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England have tended to see literacy as a modernising force which eroded oral tradition and overrode local identities. Whereas the increasing literacy of the period has long appeared an important constituent element of Tudor and Stuart Englands early modernity, custom has been represented as its mirror image. Attached to cumbersome local identities, borne from the continuing authority of speech, bred within a plebeian culture which was simultaneously pugnacious and conservative, customary law has been taken to define a traditional, backward-looking mind-set which stood at odds to the sharp forces of change cutting into the fabric of early modern English society. 1 Hence, social historians have sometimes perceived the growing elite hostility to custom as a part of a larger attack upon oral culture. In certain accounts, this elite antipathy is presented as a by-product of die standardising impulses of early capitalism. 2 Social historians have presented the increasing role of written documents in the defence of custom as the tainting of an authentic oral tradition, and as further evidence of the growing dom-nation of writing over speech. Crudely stated, orality, and hence custom, is seen as ‘of the people’; while writing was ‘of the elite’. In this respect as in others, social historians have therefore accepted all too readily John Aubreys nostalgic recollections of late seventeenth century that Before printing, Old Wives tales were ingeniose and since Printing came in fashion, till a little before the Civil warres, the ordinary Sort of people were not taught to reade & now-a-dayes Books are common and most of the poor people understand letters: and the many good Bookes and the variety of Turnes of Affaires, have putt the old Fables out of dores: and the divine art of Printing and Gunpowder have frighted away Robin-good-fellowe and the Fayries.

Poore men woll speke one daye': plebeian languages of deference and defiance in England, c. 1520-1640

In May 1525, the Suffolk town of Lavenham became the site of a remarkable encounter between noble authority and plebeian resistance. Over the spring of that year, Cardinal Wolsey’s demands for an ‘Amicable Grant’ intended to finance Henry VIII’S foreign adventures had faced growing hostility across East Anglia and southern England.2 Opposition was most public in the textile region of southern Suffolk and northern Essex. Here, negotiations between the wealthy clothiers and the Duke of Suffolk had highlighted the government’s weakness after the Duke had suggested that the clothiers disregard the formal assessments made of their wealth and instead pay what suited them.3 News of the negotiations leaked out and by 9 May a crowd of some thousands, composed of weavers, farmers and labourers, had gathered at Lavenham. According to the later narrative compiled from gentry eyewitnesses by the courtier Ellis Griffith, the ‘folk of … Lavenham … had … agreed, in common with the men of the towns of Kent, Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk, to rise at the sounding of bells.’4

Custom, Identity and Resistance: English Free Miners and Their Law c. 1550–1800

Recent historical interpretations of the role played by the law in early modern English society have tended to emphasise its incorporative and consensual nature. While some historians have chosen to stress the hegemonic qualities of the law, whereby the ruled were reconciled to their station through a legalistic and libertarian discourse which emphasised the inalienable ‘rights of the freeborn Englishman’, while actually operating in the interests of a ruling class, 1 in more recent interpretations the law has been seen to stand outside society and class relations, as a neutral arbitrating force.2 In its practical operation, the criminal law has been seen as a force for social harmony and consensus in a society undergoing rapid structural change.3 Access to legal redress, it has been argued, was available to all inhabitants of early modern society, while litigation allowed for an equality between rich and poor before the law.

Social Conflict and Change in the Mining Communities of North-West Derbyshire, c. 1600–1700

Increased demand for lead on both domestic and international markets spurred on technological and organizational innovation in Derbyshires lead mining industry. Population expanded due to immigration into the mining areas, and problems of poverty and proletarianization were created as the traditional small producers were marginalized by new capitalized mineworkings owned by aristocrats, merchants and gentlemen. Social conflict intensified over the ownership of mining rights; in particular, this dispute revolved around popular and elite notions of property and legality. This conflict engendered new forms of popular resistance and provides evidence of a language of class in the seventeenth century. The eighteenth century saw the marginalization of the independent free miner, but memories of lost liberties conditioned the class consciousness of Derbyshires new working class at the end of the century.

Matrix elements for hole-phonon scattering in a semiconductor quantum well

Matrix elements for hole-phonon scattering in a quantum well are calculated using a four-band k.p method. The method provides a realistic description of the quantum confined valence states, including the effects of heavy-light hole mixing. This mixing precludes the operation of any symmetry rules for phonon scattering, and the matrix elements are dependent on the specific character of the scattering states involved. For optical phonons, the matrix elements exhibit a strong dependence on the in-plane wavevectors of the scattering states, especially for states lying near the so-called anticrossing regions of the valence subbands. For acoustic (deformation potential) phonons, the matrix elements for intrasubband processes are relatively independent of the in-plane wavevector. In both cases, the larger matrix elements are generally those for intrasubband scattering, with the dominant intersubband processes being those involving adjacent and anticrossing bands.

‘Some banglyng about the customes’: Popular Memory and the Experience of Defeat in a Sussex Village, 1549–1640

This article deploys a body of remarkably detailed witness statements to interrogate the nature of popular memory and social conflict in Petworth, Sussex. These depositions are located in two specific contexts: a struggle between the tenants of Petworth and the ninth earl of Northumberland (1591 – 1608) and the broader pattern of resistance and negotiation in the village between the ‘commotion time’ of 1549 and the calling of the Short Parliament. The essay presents a micro-history of local struggles over land, rights and resources and the findings open up questions within the recent historiography of early modern social relations, undermining the notion that authority was flexibly negotiated between ruler and ruled. Instead, it locates negotiation within social structures that gave a powerful advantage to the gentry and nobility. In this respect, the essay builds upon the return in social history to questions of economic inequality and imbalances of political agency.

The Deep Roots of Albion's Fatal Tree: The Tudor State and the Monopoly of Violence

Building upon some classical debates in historical materialism, this essay proceeds to a critical appreciation of the coercive capacities of the Tudor state. Balancing evidence for coercion against that for more subtle processes of negotiation and persuasion, it shows that when faced with substantial opposition, the Tudor state was capable of exercising massive organized violence. From this flow two key points: first, that the extreme violence of which the Tudor state was capable needs to be read alongside tentative evidence suggesting that in the mid- and late sixteenth century very high levels of capital punishment were quite normal; and second, that in its reaction to popular rebellion, the Tudor state fell back upon extra-legal, informal but nonetheless tightly focused repression. In all these ways, then, there is a profound need for English historians to consider the Tudor state as not only the institutional focus of class power, but also to appreciate it as labouring at its worst: within the theatre of Ireland, the English state worked in the late sixteenth century as a repressive monster, gaining the potential to crush the interests, livelihoods and lives of people of Ireland into the bloody earth. Not for the last time, then, the repressive habits of the English ruling class found their most brutal expression in the things they did to Irish people. There are lessons here, Wood implies, for the present. Studies of the internal repressive capacities of the English state need – historically – always to be tied to its conduct within the island of Ireland.

Phonon scattering and mobility of holes in a GaAs/AlAs quantum well

Rates for hole-phonon scattering in a GaAs/AlAs quantum well are calculated using an eight-band k.p method. The method includes the effects of heavy hole-light hole mixing on the scattering metrix elements, subband energy dispersions and densities of states. The scattering rates exhibit distinct structure; arising on the one hand, from the strong k/sub /// dependence of the matrix elements (due to band mixing), and on the other, from large peaks in the densities of states at subband energy minima which are displaced from the zone centre. The rates for intrasubband scattering by both optical and acoustic phonons are larger than the principal intraband rates for holes in bulk GaAs. However the rates for intersubband scattering are reduced by band mixing effects, and are all considerably smaller than the principal bulk interband rate. The scattering rates are used as a database for Monte Carlo simulations of steady state hole transport in the GaAs/AlAs quantum well. The low field 2D hole mobility at 77 K is estimated to be some 30% lower than the phonon-limited bulk mobility, and this is attributed to the stronger acoustic phonon scattering in the quantum well. At higher fields, strong intrasubband polar optical scattering is evident, giving rise to an anomalous repopulation of the highest valence subband.

Afterword: Landscapes, Memories and Texts

This volume forms a powerful antidote to the view that human life is determined by apparently impersonal forces such as price movements and demographics. Rather, it represents a decisive statement as to the political agency and cultural creativity of working people over five hundred years of English history. Throughout, the radical imagination is at work. Memory appears as politicised: detailed examples of early modern commoners and nineteenth-century radicals mustering memories of earlier struggles in the legitimation of their own conflicts demonstrate the point.

Collective Violence, Social Drama and Rituals of Rebellion in Late Medieval and Early Modern England

Rituals of rebellion, protest and resistance deserve a book-length study.1 This would be a demanding enterprise. The author of such a work would need the skills of a folklorist, an ethnographer and a social historian; and the work would have to transcend traditional chronological divisions between the medieval, early modern and modern periods.2 This need to break down conventional periodization stems from the widespread recognition amongst historians that some rituals of rebellion persisted over long periods. These included, for instance, the rituals of inversion known to the French as charivari, or in the English West country as skimmingtons, in which men dressed as women and marched in rowdy processions while other members of the crowd beat pots and pans in what was known as ‘rough music’. This particular ritual form endured in some villages into the early twentieth century. Such rituals were intended to indicate that the social or moral order had been infringed or transgressed in some way — such as common land being enclosed, or men being beaten or scolded by what were regarded as inappropriately assertive wives. Some skimmingtons might end in a collective assault upon the transgressive individual.3