Peter Rushton

Women, Witchcraft, and Slander in Early Modern England: Cases from the Church Courts of Durham, 1560–1675

EUROPEAN WITCHCRAFf has provided the means for the exploration of many fundamental aspects of early modern society, from the progress of rationality to the status of women.! While most studies, with a few honourable exceptions,2 have concentrated on the secular criminal courts, this paper will examine the light cast on witchcraft beliefs by the cases concerning witchcraft brought under ecclesiastical law. The church court records can provide revealing glimpses of two aspects of witchcraft. Firstly, the types of persons presented, and their alleged practices suggest that the ecclesiastical authorities were using a very different definition of witchcraft from that prevailing in the criminal courts. One purpose here will be to see if this was so in Durham and Northumberland. Secondly, the virtual monopoly by the church courts of slander cases in this period raises the question of whether there were opportunities at the local level for private suits against accusers that could defeat witchcraft accusations.3 An examination of the substance and circumstances of the slander cases involving witchcraft will, it is hoped, establish the extent to which this was so. Cohn has demonstrated the importance of penalties for false accusations in the medieval period, and it is of critical interest to discover if there were any such deterrents operating in England during the era of the witch craze. 4 Church court proceedings may therefore permit a more detailed examination of the range of official attitudes on the one hand, and of the tactical possibilities of defeating or deterring accusations on the other.

Texts of Authority: Witchcraft Accusations and the Demonstration of Truth in Early Modern England

Historians may no longer see themselves as storytellers, despite the return to narrative styles of writing, but they have always relied upon stories from the past for their sources. The interpretation of these recorded stories has become problematic in the years since the ‘linguistic turn’ in historiography. This is not the place to review the problems of treating history as text, nor deal with the uncertainties and dilemmas this new direction caused.1 However, one useful outcome was that the production and reception of historically recorded statements became a major focus. In research into the legal system, however, the new linguistic or literary perspectives had a limited impact. Clearly, literary analysis can enrich the understanding of some judicial sources, as Natalie Zemon Davis showed in Fiction in the Archives.2 However, she has been criticized for attempting the impossible task of recovering the authors’ original intentions, rather than trying to uncover the ‘meaning the text or story can produce in particular contexts’.3 Intention is naturally difficult to establish given poor or fragmentary evidence, but equally meanings within the judicial context cannot be easily inferred from a simple outline of the legal processes and courtroom setting.

THE RISE AND FALL OF SEDITIOUS WORDS, 1650 TO 1750

‘THE SEDITIOUS MAN IS A MADMAN . . . and therefore ought to be restrained’, said one judge in the case at the Star Chamber of a group of men in 1627 who sang rude songs about the government in the streets of the Surrey village of Staines. Expressions of political criticism, contempt or insult — the essence of sedition — were a matter of great anxiety to early modern English rulers. Though the new technology of print caused alarm — Francis Bacon viewed distributing seditious books as being ‘very near a kin to raising a tumult’, threatening the very existence of government — spoken words were the most common form of attack in the early modern period, and constituted the main focus of prosecution. Public performances of loyalty, faith, obedience and deference in a hierarchical society were all customarily verbal. It is therefore not surprising that their opposites, insulting or disloyal speeches, were subject to legal restraints. As Brooks notes, ‘throughout early modern society the limits of acceptable speech were set a good deal more narrowly than they are today, even though the boundaries were constantly being tested and defined’.1

Austerity—A Critical History of the Present

Uniquely, of the four economic recessions of the last sixty years, this ‘recovery’ is based on cutting the state, and the scope of its services. In all the others the temporary slump in tax receipts, and the rise in the proportion of GDP spent by the government were passing phases that were quickly ameliorated by the return to economic growth. Only in this recession, the first since 1929 to be created by financial institutions’ speculation, has government expenditure been the sole focus of politics. The argument this chapter takes supports an argument that this unique choice of austerity in a time of growth, taken as the economy has gradually returned to the 2008 level, is the outcome of political compulsion not economic necessity.

Mary Dunn, From mother to son: the selected letters of Marie de L’Incarnation to Claude Martin

privileged role in overcoming controversy because it moves the affections directly, bypassing reason; what we see in Sierhuis’s analysis, however, is rather the breakdown of restraint or decorum in the various literary attacks on opponents, an inability to bridle the satiric muse, as Sierhuis puts it, and the necessities of plot and dramatic form forcing, as often as not, a portrayal of characters (and of their real-life counterparts) in a more divisive and libellous light than straight debate would have done. As an aside to all this, the book aims to rescue figures such as Coster and Telle from near oblivion, and to show that Vondel’s writing, for example, is more interesting because more polemical and theologically literate than is usually thought, but I’m not sure how many new readers will be interested in literary texts which seem quite so enmeshed in the topical issues of their day. Be that as it may, another would-be shaping theme of the book is the debate on liberty of conscience. It comes and goes through the text, but I admit that I found it difficult to grasp the issues at base: how the questions of liberty of conscience, toleration and consensus would interact for any given thinker, for example; or how they were playing out in the literature; and it seemed to me that in the end the debate surrounding Frederik Hendrik’s policy of toleration (involving its and his various and varying opponents or supporters) lost itself, appositely enough, in discussion of the divisions over the peace with Spain. This interaction of issues is perhaps the leitmotif of the book: one cannot ask whether a play is a didactic work on political thought or a satire; it is often both. One cannot ask whether a work is a tragedy on Palamedes or Oldenbarnevelt or a satire of Agamemnon or Maurits; it is all at once. Satire, achieved through the moving of the affects, is an indispensable tool in showing the audience what threatens the well-ordered society, or rather, tellingly, who threatens it. I mentioned earlier the loss of the rhetorical restraint of a Coornhert or an Uytenbogaert; with this was lost also the possibility of attracting moderate Contra-Remonstrants to the cause of religious tolerance, as well as many of the finer contours of pro-Remonstrant apologetics. It was this coarse partisanship, often in the name of the ever-elusive-andcontradictory consensus, that poisoned Dutch society for so long and that, as this book shows, animated so much of its writing. On a technical note, the index is somewhat hit-and-miss: on a random check, François van Aerssen and Reinier Pauw are both absent, though very present in the book itself. The proofreading in general also could have been better. On a very positive note, outweighing these reservations, the Dutch originals of quotes are always provided in the footnotes, which is much appreciated.

Vagrancy in English culture and society, 1650-1750, by David Hitchcock, London, Bloomsbury Academic, 2016, xii + 236 pp., £65.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-4725-8994-1

agreements in the late-seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to satisfy the hunger of copyand lease-holders for more land. One does also wonder whether, if a reader is interested in the Brenner material, they might too be interested in how the author’s arguments relate to those of other great scholars of early modern agrarian society. Naturally, Joan Thirsk comes to mind: mentioned only fleetingly in this work, Thirsk’s ideas on the innovatory and adaptable character of small farmers were very close to Croot’s own. Beautifully presented by the University of Hertfortshire Press, this is another valuable addition to a very fine series on regional and local history. It is to be hoped Croot’s substantial and significant archival work will now reach a much wider audience than before.

The First Century of Welfare: Poverty and Poor Relief in Lancashire, 1620–1730

means that we cannot take the text itself as an accurate reflection of the words or even the sentiments of the ostensible petitioner. The sections which deal with Cumberland make an important contribution to the understanding of rural history in northern England, though it is emphasised that the north-western counties had a particularly significant element of copyhold or the distinctive forms of customary tenure, in which they differed not only from the other areas analysed but also from the rest of England, and that the tenant rights attached to this tenure, being confirmed by the courts in the early seventeenth century, greatly altered the balance of the landowner-tenant relationships on the great estates of the region. But a major strength of the book is its comparative analysis between the case study areas, a dimension which is not excessively laboured but is always present. It is a constant reminder of the lack of standardisation not only between the component countries of the British Isles but also within them, and of the degree of regional and sub-regional diversity which shaped patterns of ownership, management and rural society at different levels of the hierarchy. Houston also makes a valuable point in drawing attention to the powerful influence of individuals, whose attitudes and perceptions shaped policies of management and estate development within and beyond the generalised frameworks of legal and financial circumstances. In short, the book reminds us of the importance of looking at people as people, not simply as social classes or statistics or blandly anonymous groupings. The second half of the book mainly comprises the case studies, highlighting the key themes by statistical analysis (for example, of the gender of petitioners and the topic of their plea) and showing how style and approach varied between areas — those of Cumberland, for example, were much more legalistic and formal in their phraseology. The narrative is enlivened by numerous brief examples and quotations, not only from the petitions but also from letters and other sources generated by landowners, agents and external observers. The section on Northern Ireland is placed within the context of an increasingly tense and unstable society, where the endemic low-level but vicious violence, the growing destitution of the tenantry, and the non-payment of rent loomed ever larger in estate management. In contrast, the Cumberland case study highlights the evolving legal relationship between landlord and tenant, the pressures and opportunities for enfranchisement, and the role of the manor court as the place for the receiving and processing of petitions. In contrast again, the circumstances of the Breadalbane petitions include large-scale military recruitment, the determined post-1745 campaign of Highland ‘improvement’, the enormous importance of inter-personal relationships and ties in the community in the context of lordly obligations and, among the later petitions, clearances, depopulation and estate reorganisation. The final sections look at the issues of poverty and self help, petitioning for relief and the role of estates in the context of the English and Welsh poor relief system via the legislation of 1601 and its actual or virtual absence in Scotland and Ireland. What, if any, were the obligations and responsibilities of landowners and estates to help with poor relief, and was paternalistic support ever much of a reality? Issues such as paternalism and deference, legal and political rights and struggles, and the texture and reality of rural society in the period from 1600 to 1850 provide a fitting coda for an innovative and imaginative book which raises many issues, poses many questions, and provides some very interesting answers or potential scenarios.

Arson, Treason and Plot: Britain, America and the Law, 1770-1777

The problems of arson, treason and national security became entangled in the politics of Britain and its Atlantic empire between 1770 and 1777. Fears of French military terrorism were compounded by the increasingly violent resistance of the American colonies. Two dockyard fires in Portsmouth, in 1770 and 1777, and the attack on, and burning of, the royal navy ship Gaspee off Rhode Island in 1772, provoked both legal and political difficulties for the British government. New laws on arson and treason were passed yet proved almost impossible to implement in full outside England.

Risk, Identities and Recognition: A History of Dangerous Categories and Categories of Danger

Ulrich Beck’s model of ‘risk society’ has attempted to establish a sense of discontinuity with previous stages of modern society. We are still ‘modern’, ‘advanced’ and ‘industrial’, but not as we knew it 50 years ago. This modernity is ‘late’, ‘high’, or even ‘post-’ modernity. Yet it is not clear what has changed: like many definitions of the present, the theory of risk society is essentially an historical interpretation of modernity which seeks to identify the nature of a break — or breaks — with the recent past. To some extent, the novelty has just been assumed rather than argued and demonstrated from evidence, as a number of commentators have noted (Marsh and Melville, 2011; O’Malley, 2000). As global economic and other problems have increasingly dominated, Beck suggests we accept ‘the new historical character of world risk society’ (Beck, 2009, p. 7). In what follows, the newness of risk in global society is evaluated for its historical assumptions and theoretical parallels, and then a critical historical exploration of a few selected areas of social concern is undertaken. In both discussions, the key aim is to assess whether risks have changed as much as theorists suppose in the context of the unpredictable effects of globalisation. As the introduction to this collection makes clear, the meaning of the word ‘risk’ in social theory has changed drastically. This is not risk as conventional techniques of risk-assessment define it. Rather, according to Beck, risk is now ‘manufactured risk’, the often unexpected outcomes of collective human actions.

Flight, Escape and Return

When John Poulter and an accomplice held up a post-chaise belonging to Dr William Hancock on Claverton Down near Bath one Wednesday evening in March 1753, he set in motion a chain of events which led not only to his own execution and a nationwide hunt for his former accomplices, but also to the publication of The Discoveries of John Poulter, alias Baxter, one of the best-known and most remarkable of eighteenthcentury criminal biographies1 The Discoveries of John Poulter, alias Baxter purported to reveal, as nothing had before, the existence of a complex network of professional criminals who operated at will across the length and breadth of England. Published by the same West Country printer as An Apology for the Life of Bamfylde Moore Carew, Poulter’s Discoveries catered to the seemingly insatiable public appetite for criminal narratives. In notices placed in the Bristol and London press in January and February 1754, Robert Goadby informed the reading public that Poulter was ‘expected to receive a pardon on account of the great discoveries he has made’ and that, though the press had been kept constantly busy, he was unable to satisfy the demand for orders. He promised a ‘proper supply for the future’.2