Phil Withington

Company and sociability in early modern England

One day in June 1673 Thomas Squire, a 33-year-old civil lawyer in York, ‘alighted at the house of one Widow Webster situate[d] in [Market] Weighton in which house were then drinking in company together one Mr John Robinson, Mr Reginald Hopwood, clerk, Thomas Webster of Weighton and some other persons into whose company this examinant (being invited) did go’. Squire later testified to the court of the Dean and Chapter that ‘he did then very well see and observe . . . that the said Mr Hopwood was very much distempered and overtaken with drink’. He knew this ‘insomuch that [Hopwood] vomited upon the table standing in the room where this examinant and the rest of the company then were, and laid his head down in the place where he had so vomited, being not then able (as this examinant conceives) to support the same’. Squire further testified that ‘the said Mr Hopwood then acted several commonly tricks and in particular this examinant says that he observed that . . . the said Mr Hopwood suffered his yard or prick to hang naked out of his britches being (as this examinant conceives) either insensible thereof or not able to put the same up again’. It did not end there. Squire recollected that ‘whereupon one of the company held his hot pipe to the said Mr Hopwood’s yard or prick which being somewhat hot (as this examinant believes) made him cry out, but for all that he did not put it into his breeches’. When Squire finally ‘left the room, he also left the said Mr Hopwood having his head upon the table being so drunk that he was not able to stir from the same without the help of some person’. John Robinson, a 23-year-old attorney based in Beverley, told a slightly different story. He recalled that ‘at Widow Webster’s house . . . and being concerned for the said Mr Hopwood in some suits at law as his attorney, the said Mr Hopwood came then to speak with this examinant at the said house’. He testified that ‘so being sat together one Thomas Squire came into the same room and sat down in company with them where after a while they began to be merry, and the said Thomas Squire began to speak Latin to the said Mr Hopwood and did convince or at least urge that the said Hopwood did then speak falso latine, and gave him then very reflecting words and did as this examinant remembers press several cups upon him the said

INTOXICANTS AND SOCIETY IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND

The article considers the rapid increase in the English market for alcohol and tobacco in the 1620s and the set of concurrent influences shaping their consumption. It suggests that intoxicants were not merely a source of solace for ‘the poor’ or the lubricant of traditional community, as historians often imply. Rather, the growth in the market for beer, wine, and tobacco was driven by those affluent social groups regarded as the legitimate governors of the English commonwealth. For men of a certain disposition and means, the consumption of intoxicants became a legitimate – indeed valorized and artful – aspect of their social identity: an identity encapsulated by the Renaissance concept of ‘wit’. These new styles of drinking were also implicated in the proliferation (in theory and practice) of ‘societies’ and ‘companies’, by which contemporaries meant voluntary and purposeful association. These arguments are made by unpacking the economic, social, and cultural contexts informing the humorous dialogue Wine, beere, ale and tobacco. Contending for superiority . What follows demonstrates that the ostensibly frivolous subject of male drinking casts new light on the nature of early modern social change, in particular the nature of the ‘civilizing process’.

Agency, Custom and the English Corporate System

Urban historians have long regarded the cities and boroughs of early modern England as ‘deeply rooted’ in a ‘complex of tradition’—a ‘complex’ that not only survived into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries but ‘witnessed a renewed emphasis’.1 This idea of the traditional urban community has informed the assumption, still common to local historiography, that, until the onset of urbanisation in the last decades of the seventeenth century, towns were ‘pre-modern’ rather than ‘early modern’.2 More recently, it has been argued that urban ‘tradition’ was invented rather than immutable. Robert Tittler has noted that, in the course of the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, provincial townsmen constructed historical narratives that consolidated the autonomy of urban communities and the oligarchies that governed them.3 Whether in their compilation of civic genealogies, transcription of civic record, or display of civic artefacts, the historical energies of civic elites were living proof of Keith Thomas’s dictum that ‘the most common reason for invoking the past was to legitimise the prevailing distribution of power’.4 Jonathan Barry has discerned a later tradition of independent chronicling that differentiated (for example) inhabitants of Bristol from genteel ‘foreigners’, ‘urbane’ interlopers, and county antiquaries, the creation of civic memory contributing, in effect, to a sense of civic distinction.5

Introduction—Citizens and Soldiers: the Renaissance Context

This introduction has two concerns. It outlines how urban citizens and professional soldiers have been relatively neglected by social historians of England, Scotland, Ireland, and the wider world and shows why both social groups should be taken much more seriously. It then traces the cultural antecedents which shaped idealizations of citizens and soldiers in Britain, Ireland and the wider world from the later sixteenth century. Recent accounts have positioned soldiers and citizens at opposing ends of the cultural spectrum: soldiering is seen as chivalric and neo-feudal, urban citizenship as an incubator for modern capitalist values. This article argues, in contrast, that “ancient” templates were crucial to modern constructions of both social types, contemporary theorists drawing on the same repertoire of classical and biblical learning to idealize citizen and soldier alike. The result was that citizens were encouraged to behave like soldiers and soldiers like citizens. In this way, the corporate practices of citizenship and soldiering were crucial conduits for the dissemination of Renaissance humanism across England, Ireland, Scotland, and the wider world.

THE SEMANTICS OF ‘PEACE’ IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND

This paper begins to consider the meanings of a word that was ubiquitous in early modern culture, but which has been surprisingly neglected by historians. Focusing on printed sources and taking advantage of recent advances in digital technology, it outlines the changing uses of ‘peace’ between 1500 and 1700 and its predominant meanings at particular moments in time. The paper suggests that while these meanings were clearly derived from Christian and civic republican sources, the political conflicts of the seventeenth century saw the term politicised, appropriated and popularised in new and unexpected ways. It also argues that the semantic confusion which often attended ‘peace’ – most evident, perhaps, in its capacity to legitimise and sanction violence after 1640 – stemmed from its simultaneous role as a descriptor of society and self, and of spiritual and civil life. As a result, who should define, police and enforce peace became deeply contested issues of the course of the period. In tracing the semantics of the term in this way, the article serves as a contribution to the burgeoning historical literature on the paradigmatic vocabularies of the early modern era. It also illuminates the complicated relationship between words and concepts and the importance of both in motivating and legitimising social and political action.

Revel, Riot and Rebellion and The Social History of Politics

Reading Revel, Riot and Rebellion now (after first reading it as an undergraduate in 1988), my first impression is that it sits on a cusp. On the one hand, it feels like the end of something, or, m...

Starting the Conversation

Substances that alter the mental and physiological state of the person – here termed intoxicants – are a modern obsession. Debates over licensing and ‘binge drinking’; the categorization and policing of ‘addictive’ substances; the rights and wrongs of smoking in ‘public’ places; the relationship between intoxicants and notions of the self; the aesthetic and symbolic signifi cance of intoxicants: all testify to the central place of intoxicants in contemporary society. They also demonstrate that the problem of intoxication transcends the boundaries of any single academic discipline. It is trans-historical and trans-cultural and also traverses the divide between the natural and social sciences since the physical characteristics and effects of intoxicants only take on signifi cance within particular social contexts. For example, modern concepts of ‘addiction’ depend as much on medical and legal discourses as on a substance’s molecular structure; ‘taste’ is something learnt, practised and displayed as well as biologically embedded; and the meaning and signifi cance of substances are always representational as well as innate. Likewise, the peculiar relationship between intoxicants and medicine clearly illustrates how the history of medicine is integral to the history of societies (and vice versa). New intoxicants commonly derive their initial legitimacy from medical theory and practice. This was true for tobacco in the sixteenth century and cocaine in the nineteenth century. This book canvasses these various dimensions of intoxication in a single volume and provides readers with a more panoramic understanding of the dynamic relationship between intoxicants and society than is normally available in studies rooted in a particular disciplinary framework. It is our hope that by bringing together multiple perspectives on the study of intoxication we might begin to foster a richer and more inclusive dialogue regarding the causes, characteristics and consequences of intoxicant use in modern 1 Starting the Conversation