Steve Hindle

The experience of authority in early modern England

Preface - List of Figures - List of Maps - The Politics of the Parish in Early Modern England K. Wrightson - Reformation of Manners in Early Modern England M. Ingram - Custom, Memory and the Authority of Writing A. Fox - Separate Domains: Women and Authority in Early Modern England B. Capp - Masterless Young People in Norwich, 1560-1645 P. Griffiths - Disruption in the Well-Ordered Household: Age, Authority and Possessed Young People J.A. Sharpe - The Keeping of the Public Peace S. Hindle - Custom, Identity and Resistance: English Free Miners and Their Law, c. 1550-1800 A. Wood - Employment and Authority: Masters and Men in Eighteenth Century Manufacturing J. Rule - Notes on Contributors - Index

Power, poor relief, and social relations in Holland Fen, c. 1600-1800 (Lincolnshire, population, policy, Britain, history)

In a recent contribution to the debate over the operational significance of the Old Poor Law, Peter Solar has argued that ‘the local financing of poor relief gave English property owners, individually and collectively, a direct pecuniary interest in ensuring that the parishs demographic and economic development was balanced’. His survey of the implications of the attempt to maintain this equilibrium, however, fails to take account of the social and political relationships between rate-payers, rate-receivers, and parish officers. In seeking to integrate considerations of power into the analysis of the relief of the poor, by contrast, this paper locates social welfare provision in the context of the authority structures of several parishes in Holland Fen (Lincolnshire) over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It emphasizes the role of the parish vestry in regulating and relieving the poor; demonstrates the extraordinary scale of poor relief in the local context; and argues that even in the open parishes of the Lincolnshire fenland, hostility to poor migrants could be marked, resulting even in the prohibition of the marriages of the poor. The politics of the poor rate implied the exclusion of poor strangers in the interests of relieving the ancient settled poor.

Disordered lives : eighteenth-century families and their unruly relatives

List of Plates. Introduction. 1. Confinement Requested. 2. Unruly Living. 3. Rich Kids, Street Boys and Little Whores. 4. Marriages Made in Hell. 5. The Eyes of Others. 6. The Language of Authority. 7. Sledge-Hammers and Treadmills. Epilogue: Power and Powerlessness. Notes. Sources and Literature. Index.

Exclusion Crises: Poverty, Migration and Parochial Responsibility in English Rural Communities, c. 1560–1660

‘Community’ is ubiquitous in the historiography of early modern England. Although the term is almost universally employed and appealed to, however, its meaning remains controversial, and its use by historians much criticised. Part of the difficulty lies in the fact that the very concept of ‘community’ is not the creation of modern social scientists: its origins lie in traditional notions of communitas , that quality of oneness claimed by mediaeval associations of various kinds. Consequently, modern historians and sociologists tend to agree only on two issues: first, that ‘community’ implies geographical propinquity, common ties, and focused interaction between and amongst its members; and second, that these characteristics have generally undergone a historical process of decline or disintegration. Rather vaguely-defined as this common ground is, it is sufficiently clear to render modern users of the term vulnerable in turn to two criticisms in particular. It is argued, first, that the mythic status of community begs both historical and sociological questions, relying merely on untested assumptions; and, second, that the strongly emotive overtones and inherent value judgements of such a nostalgic term introduce confusing elements of normative prescription to social-historical analysis. From this perspective, community is not only an elusive concept but also a flawed ideal, and calls for its abandonment have increased.

Custom, Festival and Protest in Early Modern England: The Little Budworth Wakes, St Peter's Day, 1596

The myriad forms of ‘popular culture’ have attracted an increasing amount of attention from historians of early modern and modern England. Students of English social relations are now familiar with several episodes of ‘cultural conflict’ in which there was putative friction between ‘elite’ and ‘popular’ (or ‘patrician’ and ‘plebeian’) notions of acceptable behaviour. As the epigraphs to this article suggest, two particular era of ‘cultural polarisation’ have attracted considerably more attention than any others. On the one hand, historians of the Reformation, and especially of its ‘enforcement’ in late Elizabethan and Jacobean local communities, have identified the suppression of traditional, festive culture as one of the ‘cultural reverberations’ of the spread of protestantism. On the other, Edward Thompson has encouraged students of eighteenth-century England to think in terms of a tension between ‘patrician society’ and ‘plebeian culture’, and of the possibilities that this ‘field of force’ raised for ‘class struggle without class’.

The Reformation of Manners

It is a historiographical orthodoxy that the late Elizabethan and early Stuart period was characterised by the widespread promotion of ideals of moral reformation, with attacks on drunkenness, fornication, swearing, blasphemy, gaming, dancing, revelling and profaning the sabbath. From the floor of the House of Commons to the ale-bench, contemporaries wrestled with the tension between order and good fellowship. This dialogue was not without practical consequences, as the whipping of pregnant brides, the shaming of common drunkards, the fining of swearers and the sawing down of maypoles suggests.2 Both secular and ecclesiastical courts were preoccupied with ‘the reformation of man-ners’.3 So much, it seems, can be taken for granted. There is, however, an emerging consensus that this episode was neither entirely novel nor unique. The 1290s, the 1470s, the 1660s, the 1690s and the 1750s were all periods in which personal morality was subjected to public scrutiny.4 It has become apparent that a very wide range of institutions might control and punish misbehaviour, and that the balance of responsibility between them changed over time. The church courts had long held jurisdiction over such matters, of course, and the secular courts of later medieval England also sporadically made presentments about them.5

Review of Periodical Literature Published in 2001

There is provided a mitt for use in cleaning and polishing. The mitt comprises a first and second portion, oppositely facing, peripheral edges stitched together except for an opening for inserting a users hand, a thumb receptacle extending from the first and second portions, a forefinger receptacle extending from the first and second portions and having an aperture at an end remote from the first and second portions, the aperture of a size to permit passage of the forefinger therethrough and a receptacle for the remaining fingers extending from the first and second portions. The mitt is constructed so as to be suitable for use on either hand.

The Enforcement of Social Policy

The same peculiar combination of fear and confidence which fostered the insistence on exemplary punishment also brought forth the Elizabethan Poor Laws. Serious structural problems had emerged in the English economy by 1580 and their perceived providential origin provoked a flood of governmental and ecclesiastical exhortations to charity by the rich and repentance among the poor.2 Because the debate over the causes of poverty turned on perceptions of human failings, the need for a discriminatory classification of the poor was all the greater. The age-old distinction between the deserving and the undeserving was therefore reinforced by sixteenth-century thinkers to whom it was axiomatic that the impotent and physically afflicted should be maintained. Their attitude to sturdy beggars was, however, complicated by an emerging awareness of distinctions among the idle, especially when the urban censuses of the 1570s and 1580 produced evidence of the labouring poor, those who were willing but unable to find work. By the late sixteenth century, therefore, a tripartite classification of the poor – the impotent, the thriftless, the labouring – had become orthodox. Remedies for poverty flowed directly from this understanding: an act of 1572 both established compulsory poor rates for the relief of the impotent, and stipulated severe punishments including whipping, boring in the ear and (in the case of recidivists) death for vagrants.

Social Change and Public Policy

Sir Christopher Yelverton’s closing speech to parliament perfectly encapsulates the sense that the 1590s were troublesome and tempestuous times. The corpus of social legislation introduced in 1597–8 is only the most visible measure of the considerable lengths to which the late Tudor regime was driven in the pursuit of stability. Harvest failures, lengthening gaol calendars, grain riots, seditious talk and threatened mutinies not only restored poverty to the top of the parliamentary agenda, they also encouraged the crown lawyers to engage in creative and controversial judicial construction of the Elizabethan treason statute. But the dreadful conjuncture of 1594–7 was only one of a sequence of crises which exacerbated the deteriorating economic trends of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. There were several other periods of acute distress, especially in the years 1622–3 and 1629–31, during which the regime was forced to consider exceptional measures. As the Earl of Bath informed the Privy Council in October 1596, social strain and social dislocation required ‘good circumspection’ amongst the ruling elite.2

Introduction: the State and Local Society

On 6 December 1609, James I and his Privy Council wrote to the sheriffs and justices of the peace of all the counties of the realm, severely criticising the endemic negligence of provincial governors.1 Even when prompted by ‘extraordinary directions derived from the prerogative power of his Majesty by proclamations, letters, and commissions’ or by conciliar ‘orders in his name’, there was a general failure of ‘good correspondence between direction and expedition’, especially in those ‘greatest and most important causes that concerne state and common wheele’. Although bombast was not entirely uncharacteristic of early Stuart governmental correspondence, the Council’s analysis of the dangerous implications of this breakdown in political communication was particularly vivid.