Crowds and Popular Politics in Early Modern England 9781847793973

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Crowds and popular politics in early modern England

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Politics, culture and society in early modern Britain General editors professor ann hughes dr anthony milton professor peter l ake This important series publishes monographs that take a fresh and challenging look at the interactions between politics, culture and society in Britain between 1500 and the mid-eighteenth century. It counteracts the fragmentation of current historiography through encouraging a variety of approaches which attempt to redefine the political, social and cultural worlds, and to explore their interconnection in a flexible and creative fashion. All the volumes in the series question and transcend traditional interdisciplinary boundaries, such as those between political history and literary studies, social history and divinity, urban history and anthropology. They contribute to a broader understanding of crucial developments in early modern Britain. Already published in the series Leicester and the Court simon adams Black Bartholomew

david j. appleby

Ambition and failure in Stuart England ian atherton The 1630s ian atherton and julie sanders (eds) Literature and politics in the English Reformation tom betteridge ‘No historie so meete’

jan broadway

‘Republican learning justin champion Home divisions thomas cogswell A religion of the Word: catharine davies Cromwell’s major-generals christopher durston The English sermon revised lori anne ferrell and peter mccullough (eds) The spoken word adam fox and daniel woolf (eds) Reading Ireland raymond gillespie Brave community

john gurney

Londinopolis paul griffiths and mark jenner (eds) ‘Black Tom’ andrew hopper Inventing a republic sean kelsey The boxmaker’s revenge peter lake Theatre and empire tristan marshall The social world of early modern Westminster j.f. merritt Courtship and constraint diana o’hara The origins of the Scottish Reformation alec ryrie Catholics and the ‘Protestant nation’ ethan shagan (ed.) Communities in early modern England alexandra shepard and philip withington (eds) Aspects of English Protestantism, c. 1530–1700 nicholas tyacke Charitable hatred alexandra walsham Political passions rachel weil

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. Crowds and popular politics in early modern England

. JOHN WALTER

Manchester University Press Manchester and New York distributed exclusively in the USA by St. Martin’s Press

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Copyright © John Walter 2006 The right of John Walter to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester m13 9nr, UK and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, ny 10010, USA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk Distributed exclusively in the USA by Palgrave, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, ny 10010, USA Distributed exclusively in Canada by UBC Press, University of British Columbia, 2029 West Mall, Vancouver, bc, Canada v6t 1z2 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for Atherton, Ian. Ambition and failure in Stuart England : the career of John, first isbn 0 7190 7475 4 hardback ean 978 0 7190 7475 2 First published 2006 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Typeset in Scala with Pastonchi display by Koinonia Ltd, Manchester Printed in Great Britain by CPI, Bath

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For Keith, who has read it all before …

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Contents

. preface —ix acknowledgements—xi list of abbreviations —xiii

Introduction: Reconstructing popular political culture in early modern England—1 1

Crown and crowd: popular culture and popular protest in early modern England—14

2 Grain riots and popular attitudes to the law: Maldon and the crisis of 1629—27 3 The geography of food riots, 1585–1649—67 4 A ‘rising of the people’? The Oxfordshire rising of 1596—73 5 The social economy of dearth in early modern England—124 6 The impact of the English Civil War on society: a world turned upside-down?—181 7 Public transcripts, popular agency and the politics of subsistence in early modern England—196 index—223

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Preface

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am indebted to the editors of this series for their invitation to republish these essays. They were written over some twenty-one years (1980–2001). I have resisted the temptation to revise them, but I have taken advantage of the opportunity to silently correct errors and, very occasionally, to clarify points. I have included a new introduction which provides a context for this body of work. Spellings that reverse the ‘v’ and ‘u’, e.g. ‘themselues’ or ‘vnto’, follow the original journal in which the text appeared, and have not been standardised. I am grateful to Mrs Belinda Waterman of the Department of History, University of Essex, for her help in recovering the texts of my previously published essays. All of these essays were written during my time at the University of Essex, and what clarity they have owes much to those who first heard them – my students on HR 278 in its various incarnations. I am glad to be able to thank them here for all that they have taught me. JW University of Essex

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Acknowledgements

. T

he essays which appear in this volume first appeared in the following places and are reprinted here by kind permission of the original publishers.

1 Sotsial’naia istoriia: problemy sinteza [Social History and the Problem of Synthesis] (Institute of General History, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, 1994), pp. 235–49. By permission of the Institute of General History, Russian Academy of Sciences. 2 J. Brewer and J. Styles (eds), An Ungovernable People: The English and Their Law in the 17th and 18th Centuries (London, 1980), pp. 47–84, 315–26. By permission of Hutchinson & Co. (Publishers) Ltd. 3 A. Charlesworth (ed.), An Atlas of Rural Protest in Britain 1548–1900 (London, 1983), pp. 72–80. By permission of Croom Helm Ltd. 4 Past & Present 107 (1985), pp. 90–143. By permission of the Past and Present Society, 175 Banbury Road, Oxford, England. 5 J. Walter and R. Schofield (eds), Famine, Disease and the Social Order in Early Modern Society (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 75–128. By permission of Cambridge University Press. 6 John Morrill (ed.), The Impact of the English Civil War (London, 1991), pp. 104–22, 147–8. By permission of History Today Books, Collins & Brown. 7 J. Walter and M. Braddick (eds), Negotiating Power in Early Modern Society: Order, Hierarchy and Subordination in Britain and Ireland (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 123–48. By permission of Cambridge University Press.

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List of abbreviations

. AgHR Agricultural History Review AHEW The Agrarian History of England and Wales, iv, 1500–1640, ed. J. Thirsk (Cambridge, 1966) APC Acts of the Privy Council ASSI PRO call number for Assize records BL British Library Bodl. Bodleian Library, Oxford CKS Centre for Kentish Studies, Maidstone CLRO City of London Record Office CSPD Calendar of State Papers, Domestic CSPV Calendar of State Papers, Venetian DRO Dorset Record Office, Dorchester EcHR Economic History Review ERO Essex Record Office, Chelmsford ERO(C) Essex Record Office, Colchester HMC Historical Manuscripts Commission LPS Local Population Studies NRO Norfolk Record Office, Norwich ORO Oxford Record Office, Oxford P&P Past & Present PRO Public Record Office, London RO Record Office SP State Papers SRO Somerset Record Office, Taunton STAC PRO call number for Star Chamber STC A short-title catalogue of books printed in England, Scotland and Ireland, and of English books printed abroad, in 1475–1640. First compiled by A. W. Pollard and G. R. Redgrave. Second edition (revised and enlarged) begun by W. A. Jackson and F. S. Ferguson; completed by K. F. Pantzer (3 vols, London, 1976–91) TRHS Transactions of the Royal Historical Society VCH Victoria County History WRO Wiltshire Record Office, Trowbridge

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Introduction

. Reconstructing popular political culture in early modern England

The meaner sort of people [are] always apt to rebel and mutiny on the least occasion.1

W

hen I began my doctoral studies on popular protest in early modern England, the received wisdom was that there was a lot of it about, but that – major rebellions aside – this did not amount to much in terms of broader political significance. Echoing contemporary comments, this relative neglect reflected a belief that such small-scale protests were endemic to early modern society and, as background noise, needed little explanation. Collective protest was both a reflection of the impact of largely social and economic change and an expression of the political powerlessness of the victims of those and other political and religious changes. Because they spent most of their time struggling to secure their subsistence, the commons lacked political knowledge, and their participation in the public affairs of the kingdom was slight. For most of the people most of the time, political matters scarcely existed. At best, ‘when starvation threatened, the poor were capable of using violence to secure food for themselves, but they made little contribution to the political radicalism of the time …’. As the introduction to what was intended to provide ‘a useful introduction to the social context of the English Civil War’ declared, ‘the great majority of the people lay not only below the level of political participation but below that of political consciousness as well’.2 In 1971, there was little detailed study of popular protest in early modern England. What there was reflected a fundamental division in the historiography. Political and religious historians had long had to acknowledge the frequency of rebellion in the sixteenth century (though by contrast its decline by the end of the sixteenth century generally attracted less explanation). The prominence of rebellion was such that almost every one had been the subject of much earlier studies, whose origins often lay outside a formal academic historiography and were often to be explained by the importance of episodes of

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Popular politics in early modern England rebellion within local histories. By the late 1960s, new studies directly revisiting individual rebellions had begun to emerge. These studies opened up conflicting interpretations regarding, inter alia, their causes, composition and character. (These competing interpretations perhaps might seem at less remove from one another if greater recognition is given to the fact that, in order for rebellions to mobilise support and negotiate effectively, they needed to represent themselves as both monolithic and univocal, while in reality also needing to draw on a variety of groups and grievances to achieve critical mass.) Nevertheless, it was possible to recover a common core to these studies, to which most, with famous exceptions, might subscribe. There was a politics to rebellion. Rebellions manipulated the symbols and rhetoric of violent conflict but, reflecting medieval precedent, spoke a political language of misgovernment and justice. Actual violence, at least against persons, was usually very limited and, where it did occur, it was more often the result of military engagements triggered by government forces. The control that ‘rebels’ sought to secure and publicly display (paradoxically swearing followers not to oppose Church and Crown and punishing maverick elements who broke their vows or plundered) reflected their concern to avoid the label and punishment that this brought as rebels. In so doing, they registered the early successes of royal authority in promoting a culture of obedience, which drew on the powerful conjoined sanctions of treason and divine damnation. It was this culture of obedience that made it crucially important to have legitimation for expressions of political dissent. Despite the presence of ‘war parties’, in some, perhaps most, sixteenth-century rebellions (about which we need to know more), most rebellions sought to negotiate with, not overthrow, royal government, cloaking their grievances against royal authority – within the conventions of the Mirror for Magistrates – in complaints of ‘evil and base ministers’ and (local) misgovernment. Though, post-Reformation, confessional strife (especially when entangled with dynastic disputes) threatened something more radical, this threat was largely contained. Thus, it is not too much of an exaggeration to see sixteenth-century rebellions, in the words of one of their leaders, as ‘a strong petition’. The pioneering work of M. E. James was important for my own thinking in all this.3 Though not now without their critics, James’s elegant essays offered breathtaking examples of how exacting scholarship could be combined with a willingness to bring theory to the archive, to say new and interesting things about familiar episodes. What made James’s work especially exciting was his insistence that rebellion needed to be understood in the context of a political culture, and his demonstration, drawing on interdisciplinary studies, of the range of institutions and sources that needed to be considered in the recon-struction of that culture. But an unintended consequence of the focus on individual examples of rebellion was the construction of what I have called a ‘steppingstone history’, in which popular political involvement with the state might too

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Introduction easily be seen in terms of a series of spasmodic episodes, discontinuous in time and space. The focus on major episodes of rebellion tended to neglect the underlying history of smaller-scale conflicts (which were themselves often the building blocks in even the larger rebellions). Moreover, historians of rebellion remained divided as to how far the politics of rebellion accurately reflected the depth of political awareness amongst their humbler followers. In the early 1970s, there was much less work on smaller-scale crowd actions – at least for early modern England. What there was reflected that division in the historiography. By and large, smaller-scale protests were treated as an appendix to the economic history of the period. But, for a later period, the combined impact of the turn to social history in the 1950s and, in particular, of labour history, had seen an exciting explosion of work that regarded ‘the crowd in history’ as a serious subject for historical analysis. Here the familiar names of Charles Tilly, George Rudé, Eric Hobsbawm, Richard Cobb and, of course, Edward Thompson, were important figures.4 Their approach (despite differences of emphasis) brought significant gains. Crowds were seen as purposive, ‘rational’ in their actions and objectives, and ‘respectable’ in their composition – in that they represented those with some claim to have their voices heard. This also was an important body of work for me. However, these studies too posed something of a problem for someone wanting to study crowds in an earlier period. There was of course the familiar problem of looking-glass history, which encouraged some eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century historians to take as their starting point an earlier ‘preindustrial’ society too little changed by the forces of capitalism, market and industrialisation to be recognised as accurately reflecting the harsher early modern reality. But more important was the fact that this body of work was informed, either explicitly or implicitly, by two meta-narratives of modernity: the emergence of class and the political enfranchisement of the people. These narratives – whig and marxist – were both celebratory and condemnatory. They traced the lineages of democracies through the development of formal political participation by ‘the people’ as citizens. They charted popular reactions to modernisation, experienced as the loss of the ‘traditional community’ in a process of social and economic change that witnessed ‘the disappearance of the peasantry’ and the mutation of the ‘labouring poor’ into the working class. Since much of this important early work on crowds reflected the importance of a marxist historiography, these narratives could become fused in explicitly classed readings of the trajectory of popular protest as an immanent working class came to realise the need to secure formal political power in its struggles against and within a developing capitalist economy. Something of the damage that these narratives have produced was captured in the labelling of the earlier period as ‘pre-modern’. This tended to bring an implicit teleology to earlier studies of popular protest. Crowd actions might

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Popular politics in early modern England be judged not by what they achieved in their own terms and context, but by what they failed to achieve or to exhibit – a tendency again captured linguistically in the (otherwise bizarre) use of the quasi-historical category ‘pre-political’. Such use of the term capitalises ‘the political’. In restricting its use to formal participation in and engagement with the high politics of the state, it reflects the influence of a whiggish narrative of popular politics centred on the winning of the vote. Crowds might similarly be interrogated for evidence of the imminence of class. Edward Thompson’s work, offering the most subtle and acute analysis of the meaning and power of crowd actions, could hold this in productive tension. But crowds were in danger of being found wanting – according to how far they failed to exhibit class-consciousness. In the context of the historiography of early modern England, this same privileging of crowds as surrogates for ‘the people’ and bearers of class formation, was reflected in the early 1970s in the work of Christopher Hill and some of his students. For them, the concern to detect in ‘riot’ and ‘rebellion’ evidence of the formation of class, played an equally important role. As I have tried to show, this privileging of ‘the crowd’ – itself a problematic term in attributing a homogeneity of belief to popular politics – as surrogate for the people, can produce bad history.5 Hill’s attitude to crowds had in fact been somewhat ambivalent, welcoming what he saw in them of the evidence of class conflict, but – as in his celebration of Cromwell’s saving of the Revolution from the Levellers – perhaps worrying about them as examples of a ‘left-wing infantilism’. Even as, under the influence of the shift to the politics of the new left, Hill later celebrated the radical political culture of a ‘world turned upside-down’ in his magisterial study of the same name, he could still write, in language very like that cited earlier, of ‘the existence of a large population, mostly living very near if not below the poverty line, little influenced by religious or political ideology but ready-made material for what began in the later seventeenth century to be called “the mob”’. The persistence of this is also reflected in Brian Manning’s important study of the English people in the English Revolution, which, while eager to argue for the centrality of class in the emergence of ‘the people’ (in reality, for Manning, a more socially restricted group) as a third force in the Revolution, saw him claim that, ‘at the same time the economic distress caused the middling and poorer people to involve themselves in politics and to take part in demonstrations. They would not have become so involved if the crisis had been concerned purely with political and religious questions.’6 As I try to show in chapter 6, there was a sharp discrepancy between elite fears of a ‘popular revolution within the Revolution’ and the possibility of a more general rising of the people. Christopher Hill did not himself undertake original work in this field. It was significant that such studies as then existed of crowds engaged in social protest had, for the most part, tackled the larger agrarian protests that had forced their

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Introduction way into the historical record: the Midlands rising, ‘the Rising in the West’ against large-scale enclosure of the royal forests, and the similar protests in the revolt of the fens. These pioneering studies reflected the influence of R. H. Tawney in his now curiously neglected major work, Agrarian Problems in the Sixteenth Century.7 Within the economic history of which these studies were a part, their analyses tended naturally to privilege the economic in explaining the occurrence of protest. This produced a local variant of Rostow’s ‘social tension’ chart famously excoriated by E. P. Thompson. What we might label, tongue in cheek, as the graph of the ‘four Ps’ – population growth, price rise, poverty and protest – reflected an implicit belief that the level and trajectory of protest might be read directly off the causal chain that ran from population explosion to poverty and on to protest. Of course, nowhere within the literature on early modern England has anything so crude as this graph been produced. But the subliminal power of this ‘model’ helps to explain, for example, the belief of urban historians, against a lack of supporting evidence, that protests over food were common in sixteenth-century London, and the elevation to the roll-call of major European revolts of the so-called ‘Oxfordshire rising’, which saw four young men spend a night shivering on a hillside in the November of 1596 as they waited unsuccessfully for someone else to join them. In retrospect, it is possible to see how these two historiographies of protest, the political and the economic, intersected to produce a picture of early modern protest at the beginning of the 1970s that had yet to register the impact of new emerging work. The people’s presumed political innocence was married with a reading of social and economic change as a series of disinheritances which produced increased immiseration. Without political power, and experiencing the increased poverty that economic change brought, riot and rebellion became almost the only means by which the commons could protest their conditions. As such, protest was reactive and spasmodic, prompted by immediately experienced grievances, concerned with the remedy of specific popular needs, and innocent of any wider political objectives. This was the ‘pressurecooker’ model of popular protest (‘the wage-earners were in a state of abject misery which found intermittent relief in rioting and mob violence’). A sense of popular powerlessness and deprivation, ‘informed’ by the social psychology of collective behaviouralism which highlighted the motors of anger (‘violent men’), emphasised the violent and unplanned nature of such protests.8 Hence, protesters were ‘primitive rebels’; and protests ‘peasant furies’. I had come to the study of pre-revolutionary collective protest, frustrated in my first ambition of writing a historical sociology of the Levellers. Puzzled both by their lack of success in mobilising sufficient popular support and the absence – until late in their history – of a programme designed to mobilise the single largest group in early modern society: the early modern poor, I hoped to be

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Popular politics in early modern England able to look afresh at these problems by reconstructing the tradition of protest in pre-revolutionary England. When I began my work, the absence of studies of small-scale actions in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries necessitated a commitment to intensive archival research. Hours spent trawling book indexes as an antidote to the gentle doubts of my then research supervisor, Donald Coleman (whom I think saw his task in part as a repayment of an obligation to Tawney), taught me the bewildering range of terms under which protest had to be searched for, but yielded little return on this labour. This relative absence was not just a consequence of the ideas discussed above. It also reflected the nature of the archive – while rebellion forced its way into familiar and frequently calendared sources (State Papers, gentry correspondence) or created its own judicial archive – evidence of smaller-scale actions was to be found buried in little or less explored (and often bulky and intractable) archival sources, where the popularity of the Latin tag ‘riotose’ for plaintiffs wanting to involve the state’s criminal justice in what were essentially interpersonal or private property disputes, added another complication in their use. This archival exploration began with, but moved beyond, the familiar but still important sources of central government, to look at criminal courts both at the centre and in the counties – courts whose records had not been systematically examined for that purpose. The initial intention was to try to recover the spatial patterning and chronological incidence of riot, and to establish its morphology – identifying the differing types of ‘riot’ in terms of their targets, the repertoire of their actions, their social composition and leadership. But research moved beyond the criminal archive to exploit a much wider range of printed and manuscript sources. If there was little direct work on early modern English crowds to draw on, there were other significant trends which informed my work. Most immediately, there was the influence of what was then termed the new social history, immediately experienced in what one transatlantic participant recalls of discussions at Cambridge over warm beer in cold rooms. Working alongside and reading other scholars, committed to the identification and systematic exploitation of sources (generally to be found in the archive rather than the library) in order to write a social history that restored an identity to the majority that was not dependent on the (mis)perceptions of their elite contemporaries, had an obvious and direct influence on my work.9 And in trying to answer the call for a history from below there were other current intellectual developments that I found helpful. Rural sociology (in particular, the school of community studies, whose impact on these first stages of early modern history has yet to be adequately acknowledged) and peasant studies offered important theoretical and methodological gains. As did the ‘anthropological turn’, which offered encouragement to read for meaning in the social dramas that crowd actions

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Introduction represented. From 1976, employment in a university that encouraged interdisciplinarity gave me an incentive to widen this reading, and teaching in a department of comparative history gave me the opportunity to read (and meet) historians working on other societies and periods, whose work offered parallel attempts to bring developments in social theory to the new archive. In exploring the morphology of early modern protest, two things became clear fairly quickly. Contrary to what contemporary comment might predict, the level of disorder was generally less than had been thought. Although, as the essays in this volume make clear, ‘measuring upheaval’ is not a dependable guide to the level of collective protest, systematic work on these sources suggested that current orthodoxy about the frequency of riot in this period was some way wide of the mark. The pattern that began to emerge also suggested that the regional distribution of recorded collective protest was uneven, and that this variation in the spatial distribution also reflected the particular form of crowd action under analysis. As my contribution to the attempt to create an ‘atlas’ of rural protests demonstrated, there was a clear patterning to the geography of early modern ‘food riots’ (chapter 3). Nowhere were such protests common, but there were areas where they were more frequent and areas from which they were absent. As chapter 3 makes clear, in the first instance these regional contrasts could be explained in terms of variables in social and economic structures and the impact of the forces of change. However, the emerging pattern also challenged the assumption of a sufficient causal link between economic crisis and collective protest. As chapter 4 (on the so-called Oxfordshire rising) demonstrates, the elevation of an abortive rising to the status of a major agrarian protest, in the face of easily accessible evidence that the ‘rising’ never happened, is to be explained precisely by the belief that the collision of longer-term structural changes with the conjuncture of ‘the crisis of the 1590s’ must have produced major protest. As this case study suggests, a privileging of the economic together with a reactive model of popular protest, can blind historians to the importance of listening for the silence in the record, noting those places where economic stress did not automatically trigger collective protest. Exploring those times and places where protest did not occur can be as revealing as focusing on ‘hot-spots’. My work then moved to an intensive study of groups of selected counties, whose selection was determined both by the emerging map of recorded protest and the quality of surviving records. The challenge that this preliminary work offered to conventional understandings of the frequency and character of early modern protest made it clear that in order to understand the emerging pattern of collective protest (and its absences), it was popular beliefs, attitudes, expectations and experience of the dynamics of change that were the key variables in determining whether or not grievances would lead to open and collective protest. My work

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Popular politics in early modern England came then to focus on the importance of narrowing the field of observation to examine individual episodes of protests, in order to take advantage of the valuable evidence generated by the fact of ‘riot’ and its subsequent investigation in order to explore the mental world of its participants. It is revealing to see how my research terminology has changed over time: from ‘popular disorder’, through ‘riot’ to ‘crowd actions’. However, recovering the inner histories of crowd actions has always been central to my approach. Each of the studies included here arose from that larger and continuing project. Each was designed to support an argument for the importance of contextualising crowd actions. This was to be a double contextualisation. The first was to involve the social dramas represented by crowd action within the immediate context of local social, economic and political structures and relationships. This represented an attempt to get behind the impoverishing and power-saturated records of authority that labelled protest as ‘riot’ in order to recover the fuller meaning of the actions so stereotyped. Replacing ‘riots’ back into the local context from which their reporting often detached them, and recuperating them from their use to support – or sometimes merely decorate – grand narratives, helps to restore the complexity of their meanings. As several of the essays included here show, a failure to contextualise crowd actions within their local context can produce serious misunderstandings about the story that they have to tell. For example, it was the repetition of ‘riot’ within a space of a couple of months, together with the coincidence of an economic crisis (precipitated by an industrial depression against which the authorities were largely helpless) with harvest failure and the political crisis following Charles I’s dismissal of Parliament, that explain the hanging of Ann Carter (chapter 2). This was an exceptional response in the history of early modern food riots. While a local study allows us to recover something of Ann Carter’s character and history and to understand how this both resulted in her leading the protest and subsequently being targeted by Maldon’s rulers, it was the coincidence of economic and political crisis that helped to determine her fate. If I were to write that essay again, I would be tempted to see Ann Carter’s trial and execution also as a piece of sordid street theatre, a plebeian counterpoint to courtly masques, designed to demonstrate to the landed classes the ability of Charles I to maintain social order following his dismissal of Parliament. The label of ‘riot’ is itself a reflection of the fact that it was usually authority that was the first and, sadly, given the unevenness in the preservation of the written record, often the only, ‘historian’ of protest. ‘Riot’ does of course offer a privileged point of access to popular political culture, providing as it does a moment when the opaque surface of the past is punctured, allowing subordinate groups, rendered otherwise silent by the inequalities in literacy, access to print and to the preserved record, to testify to their attitudes and beliefs. Another theme running through my work has been to show how narrowing the focus

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Introduction permits a ‘thickened’ description of what crowds actually did and the creativity that they displayed in fashioning their protests. Even if sometimes silenced from giving direct testimony, they could speak through the often complex and richly symbolic nature of their actions. The paper first presented in Moscow in 1991 (chapter 1) offers a preliminary report of my work on the ability of crowds to appropriate the rituals and symbols of administrative routine, and the way in which early modern festive culture fashioned texts for collective action.10 Restoring crowds to their immediate contexts allows us to see their actions not as isolated events, spasmodic and reactive, but in terms of process: as one, if key, moment, in a history of longer-term negotiations. As my essay on public transcripts and the politics of subsistence sought to show, popular politics might deploy ‘weapons of the weak’ in a form of everyday politics that was less dramatic but more continuous than ‘riot’ (chapter 7). There was an important dialectic between the tradition of protest and this larger repertoire. An understanding that there was a wider repertoire of actions available to subaltern groups in negotiating or critiquing power, helps to avoid framing popular politics in the polarities of either ‘riot’ or political acquiescence. While the memory of crowd actions lent added weight to these other forms, it was often their effectiveness in securing concessions and redress that helped to make exceptional the resort to riot. The effectiveness of both riot and everyday politics takes us to the second contextualisation that has informed my reading of early modern crowds. This contextualisation required an examination of the political meaning of crowd action within the broader context of a political culture in which, contrary to contemporary prescription, the people participated, and knowledge of which extended beyond the conventionally drawn boundaries of the political nation. It was sometimes said in the early days of the new social history that it ignored politics, and in particular that ‘history from below’ was in danger of omitting the role of elites, and the power they exercised over the lives of their ‘inferiors’. While the former criticism seemed a more accurate reflection of the restrictive definitions of the ‘political’ employed by social history’s critics, crowd actions necessarily involved a concern with the analysis of the operations of power. An understanding of the structures of power in early modern state and society provides the context within which to understand the paradox that, in a culture that proscribed protest and prescribed obedience, these same public transcripts could be used to legitimise a popular political agency. The chapters that conclude this book offer early and later statements of my understanding of the context for the exercise of a popular agency provided by the deep structures of the English state. Monarchs, aware of the limited forces of repression at their control and apprehensive about the threat posed by their image of the people as ‘the many-headed monster’, sought to police social and economic change in order to minimise the threat of popular disorder. Moreover, they

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Popular politics in early modern England were anxious to be seen to be doing so within the terms of a public discourse that repeatedly stressed that the rationale for royal policies was to protect their subjects and, in particular, the weak and poor. By so doing, they sought to translate power into authority, securing popular consent to their rule. Thus, the formal weakness of the state’s repressive force, coupled with an acute awareness (and even moral panic) about increasing social tensions, made authority very ready to respond to popular grievances. In turn, the dependence of powerholders – from monarchs to magistrates – on the maintenance of respect for their authority, placed a premium on rule by law (and through the law courts). Lacking a professional bureaucracy, royal government sought to enlist popular support by publicising to the people its policies to police economic change, even inviting their co-operation in the detection of wrongdoing. Paradoxically, the transcript that this created, by which elites sought to present an acceptable public version of relationships between dominant and subordinate groups, could offer a strong sense of legitimation for those who engaged in protest. Thus, while early modern political culture formally proscribed riot, it was also marked by a public acknowledgement of the responsibilities of power. This discourse and the public transcripts that it gave rise to could be appealed to in order to legitimise independent popular action. But, in securing that legitimation, crowds often appropriated those transcripts wilfully and selectively to claim a popular agency. There is evidence to suggest that some – if crucially not how many – of the people were all too aware that this normative order sought to conceal relationships that in reality were marked by conflict. Moreover, it needs to be remembered that popular knowledge of the inequalities of wealth and power also played a part in constraining their agency. In this context, it is worth restating here something that I wrote with Mike Braddick: Subordinate groups could manipulate legitimating languages and ‘performances’ to empower or protect themselves, and did so in ways that punctured the pretensions of power while avoiding the punishments that more overt resistance might provoke. But in doing so they were negotiating the terms, rather than the fact, of their subordination.11

As these essays emerged, they sought to challenge a potential orthodoxy developing among other new and important works on early modern crowds. The fact that the arguments that these advanced seemed to offer to revive a history by negatives – crowds were non-ideological and non-revolutionary and exhibited primitive or pre-political behaviour – was to be explained in part by a concern to disavow the classed readings of crowd actions by Hill and Manning, among others. But they also reflected the continuing malign influence of restrictive definition of what constituted political action to the realm of high politics.12 A consistent theme running through my work, reflected in the essays that follow, is that crowd actions were necessarily political and need to be understood in

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Introduction the context of a popular political culture. Crowds claimed an agency to police the worlds in which they lived and to interrogate the exercise of power. Not only did they represent an attempt to negotiate the exercise of power over their lives locally, but the terms by which they did so, drawing on public transcripts for their legitimation, reflected a larger political awareness. Crowd actions can best be understood as claims to exercise political agency in the context of a popular political culture that was drawn from a dialogue with the discourses of state, Church and commonwealth. As the essays seek to show, it was an awareness of the formal weaknesses of the English state in the face of the reality of large-scale popular protest that rendered government anxious to anticipate and ameliorate popular grievance, so giving protest its force. Even the abortive Oxfordshire rising may have played a larger role than might have been imagined – in helping to form government policy in the crucible of the crisis of the 1590s. Moreover, the actions of a group of women in the small Essex port of Maldon prompted both local and central authorities to introduce measures to deal with the crisis of harvest failure. Such was the context that even individual anonymous letters might trigger similar intervention. However, this book’s emphasis on social and economic conflicts should not be taken to confirm an earlier view that popular politics, where it existed, was largely ‘knife and fork’ politics. The relationship between crowd and Crown in early modern England needs to be understood within what I have termed the politics of subsistence – in which disputes over access to food or land could raise more fundamental questions about the basis of custom, the nature of rights, and the proper exercise, or even provenance, of authority. This is not to claim that this was a political culture to which all subordinate groups were necessarily fully subscribed. There were clearly degrees of engagement and differences in the depth of political awareness, and more work needs to be done on the social and gendered contours of this culture. To claim universal popular subscription would be as damaging as the universal absence of politics (sensu stricto) from contemporary soap-opera representations of everyday life. However, the centrality to the subsistence of the people of the conflicts on which this culture focused, and the political dialogues raised around these by authority itself (both state and Church), meant that the potential was there and that attempts to restrict political awareness to more restricted groups below the level of the gentry are – at least in this area of rights – ill-advised. However, this was also a political culture in which the politics of free-born Englishmen (and women) could underwrite a more formal engagement with the politics of the post-Reformation English state. Given our knowledge of the vitality of this robust pre-revolutionary popular political culture, one of the pressing tasks is to revisit the history of popular activity and inactivity at the climacteric of the English Revolution, a project which my current work addresses.13

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Popular politics in early modern England NOTES 1 F. Bamford (ed.) The Commonplace Book of Sir John Oglander Kt. of Nunwell, 1585–1655 (London, 1936), p. 60. 2 K. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Belief in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England (Harmondsworth, 1971), p. 20; A. Woolrych, ‘The English Revolution: an introduction’, in E. W. Ives (ed.), The English Revolution 1600–1660 (London, 1968), p. 4. 3 James’s essays are conveniently reprinted in his Society, Politics and Culture: Studies in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1986). 4 C. Tilly, The Vendée (London, 1964); C. Tilly and J. Rule, Measuring Political Upheaval (Princeton, 1965); G. Rudé, The Crowd in the French Revolution (Oxford, 1959), The Crowd in History: A Study of Popular Disturbances in France and England 1730–1848 (New York, 1964), and Paris and London in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1970); E. J. Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Manchester, 1959), Labouring Men (1964) and Bandits (London, 1969); E. J. Hobsbawm and G. Rudé, Captain Swing (1969); and R. Cobb, The Police and the People: French Popular Protest 1789–1820 (Oxford, 1970). Thompson’s essays, including his classic 1971 study, ‘The moral economy of the English crowd in the eighteenth century’, are conveniently reprinted in his Customs in Common (London, 1991). 5 J. Walter, ‘Politicising the popular? The tradition of “riot” and popular politics in the English Revolution’, in N. Tyacke (ed.), The English Revolution c. 1590–1720 (Manchester, 2006). 6 C. Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (London, 1972), p. 33; B. Manning, The English People and the English Revolution (London, 1976). 7 R. H. Tawney, The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century (London, 1912); E. F. Gay, ‘The Midlands revolt and the inquisitions of depopulation of 1607’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, hereafter TRHS, 18 (1904); E. Kerridge, ‘The revolts in Wiltshire against Charles I’, Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Magazine, 57 (1958); D. G. C. Allan, ‘The rising in the West, 1628–1631’, Economic History Review, hereafter EcHR, 5 (1952). Allan was the author of pioneering dissertation, ‘Agrarian Discontent Under the Early Stuarts and During the Last Decade of Elizabeth’ (M.Sc. dissertation, University of London, 1950). 8 L. Stone, ‘Social mobility in England 1500–1700’, Past & Present, hereafter P&P, 33 (1966), p. 49; H. Toch, Violent Men: An Inquiry Into the Psychology of Violence (London, 1969). 9 For an example of the collaboration that this produced, see J. Walter and K. Wrightson, ‘Dearth and the social order in early modern England’, P&P, 71 (1976), reprinted in P. Slack (ed.), Rebellion, Popular Protest and the Social Order in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1984). 10 For the symbolic richness that crowds could display, see J. Walter, ‘Abolishing superstition with sedition?’ The politics of popular iconoclasm in England 1640–1642’, P&P, 183 (2004) 11 J. Walter and M. Braddick (eds), Negotiating Power in Early Modern Society: Order, Hierarchy and Subordination in Britain and Ireland (Cambridge, 2001), p. 42.

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Introduction 12 For further discussion, see J. Walter, ‘Politicising the popular?’. 13 J. Walter, Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution: The Colchester Plunderers (Cambridge, 1999); J. Walter, ‘Confessional politics in pre-civil war Essex: prayer books, profanations, and petitions’, Historical Journal, 44 (2001); J. Walter, ‘Popular iconoclasm and the politics of the parish in eastern England, 1640–1642’, Historical Journal, 47 (2004); J. Walter ‘“Affronts & Insolencies”: the voices of Radwinter and popular opposition to Laudianism’, English Historical Review (forthcoming). I am currently working on the role of the 1641/2 Protestation Oath in turning subjects into citizens. For a preliminary prospectus, see J. Walter, ‘The English people and the English revolution revisited’, History Workshop Journal, 61 (2006).

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Chapter 1

. Crown and crowd: popular culture and popular protest in early modern England

I

I

n early modern England, authority was always the first historian of popular protest. This has meant that popular political beliefs have to be recovered from the distorting pen of the contemporary magistrate. It is of course a truism that such records tell the historian more about the attitudes and anxieties of authority rather than the thoughts and actions of those engaged in protest. The dangers of such distortion should be obvious, at least since Richard Cobb exposed them in his witty study of how French magistrates’ reporting of revolutionary crowds was conducted according to a set of already received stereotypes.1 But, in the case of early modern England, this is a lesson that still has to be fully learned. Anybody seeking confirmation of this should turn to the literature on the role of the people in the English Revolution, where exaggerated reports of crowd actions mobilised, it is claimed, by class hatred, are treated as direct evidence, even though it can be shown that they come from the pens of those hostile to, or hired to smear, Parliament with the accusation of sponsoring social radicalism.2 Any reading of the texts produced by authority needs to take into account both the context of socio-economic and political structures and the political culture which informed them. Early modern England was experiencing a series of changes that produced a society where, by the later seventeenth century, just under a half of the population were landless or land-poor. The volatility that this growth in the poor produced informed the gentry’s attitudes to their inferiors, as did the knowledge that the particular structure of the English state, with its lack of standing army or police force, offered limited means of repression with which to meet the threat of collective disorder. Schooled in a Renaissance education which offered too many examples of the disorderly role of the plebs in the classical world, the gentry could regard the people with a mixture of condescension, contempt and fear. References to the people as the

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Popular culture and popular protest ‘many-headed monster’ betray a belief in the people as turbulent and without reason; they were literally ‘brute beasts’ and therefore like the animals – in an intensely hierarchical world-view – subject to the discipline of their superiors. Hence Sir Thomas Smith’s famous pronouncement, ‘The fourth sort of people have no voice nor authority in our common wealth, and no account is to be made of them but only to be ruled, not to rule others’. Taking as axiomatic that ‘the meaner sort of people are always apt to mutiny and rebel on the least occasion’, central and provisional authorities sometimes felt the need to look no further than their shared belief in the propensity of the ‘many-headed monster’ to engage in a spasmodic and spontaneous violence. But, given the limited forces of repression, they could not always afford to believe their own rhetoric. They knew only too well that, in a society where harvest failure or trade crisis could quickly produce widespread distress, they needed to be able to anticipate disorder. However, this also distorts the evidence that their reports provide. An acute awareness of their potential weakness made them too ready to mistake individual discontent for actual collective disorder.3 At best, authority’s reaction to disorder might show an awareness of at least the immediate causes of discontent, though, even here, such reports would continue to talk of such actions as disorder, denying legitimation to the protest. This is best represented in the reports of provincial authorities, though its most subtle exposition comes from a representative of the centre, Francis Bacon’s Essay of Seditions and Troubles. A reading of the evidence of collective protest which pays insufficient attention to these limitations, helps to explain the persistence of a view of the people’s limited role in the early modern polity which sounds suspiciously like an updating of Sir Thomas Smith’s dictum. For some historians of early modern England, the great majority of the people lay not only below the level of political participation, but also below that of political consciousness. Fortunately, this view has begun to be challenged in recent work on the period. Political historians have recognised that sections of the people – notably the ‘middling sort’ – did participate in the formal political process as voters and at the local level as office-holders. County historians have traced the growing political consciousness among sections of the people below the level of the landed class, in response to confessional (religious) strife and the demands of a would-be Stuart absolutist state. Reversing the telescope, social historians have examined how (at least in some regions) the authority of the reformed Church and state came to be accepted by local elites among the people as one response to growing social polarisation in urban and rural communities. There is a developing recognition that the communal, associative character of political rule which England shared with much of western Europe required, as well as promoted, the development of semi-autonomous, self-governing political ‘republics’.4

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Popular politics in early modern England Nowhere has the assault on the older view of the people’s role within the polity been more effective than in the growing number of studies on English rebellions. These have provided an ‘inner history’ of rebellion which shows that those below the level of the gentry were capable of evolving their own leadership and infrastructure – an infrastructure often derived directly from their experience of participation in provincial government – and of evolving programmes which revealed them to be politically well-informed and articulate. Above all, an examination of the rites of rebellion has highlighted the strong sense of legitimacy which the crowds derived from their powerful expectations about the proper exercise of authority from the ‘good king’ or within the discourse of ‘good lordship’. ‘Rebels’, while manipulating the symbols of violence, attempted to engage in a political dialogue with authority. They sought to hold up the mirror to magistrates and monarch and to call upon them to correct their faults or to remedy the grievances that lay at the heart of their protest. The gains from a renewed concern with the historical study of rebellion have been substantial. They are not, however, without their limitations. Focusing on individual examples of rebellion has encouraged the construction of what might be termed a ‘stepping-stone’ history, in which popular political involvement with the state is seen in terms of a series of spasmodic episodes, discontinuous in either time or space. Moreover, while political participation and consciousness has been restored to a section of the people – the ‘middling sort’ (wealthy farmers, traders and artisans), a key group in the articulation of rebellion – the role of those below this group has been discussed in terms of their susceptibility to rumour, etc. More recently, attention has shifted to studies of the crowds involved in smaller-scale, collective actions labelled ‘riot’. This in its turn has brought further gains in our understanding of popular politics. Riot provides a privileged point of access into popular political culture. It provides a moment when the opaque surface of the past is punctured; it allows subordinate groups, rendered otherwise silent by the inequalities of literacy and preservation of the historical record, to testify to their attitudes and beliefs. Since riots – against enclosure, over the price and distribution of food, for and against religious changes, and against fiscal innovation – were more frequent and more representative, they provide a better context for understanding crowd actions in the larger-scale rebellions. They allow us to discern within the tradition of usually – but not always – smaller-scale protest, a more continuous popular politics, and they enable us to explore the greater social depth of participation within such actions. Reconstructing popular political culture from the evidence of riot is, however, not without its problems. Treating the crowd as a surrogate for the people introduces a reification which (as in the case of ‘the Crowd’ in the

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Popular culture and popular protest English Revolution) encourages a tendency to see the people as fickle and changeable in their political beliefs and allegiances. We need to recognise that there were crowds, not crowd, each with differing interests and composition. We need also to deconstruct the ‘popular’. In a society like early modern England, experiencing increasing social polarisation, divisions between what contemporaries referred to as the ‘better’ and ‘poorer’ sort, equally defy the easy identification of crowd with people. Finally, there is a danger in equating riot with popular politics (rather than as a means of access to that politics) that the absence of riot might be taken to indicate an absence of popular political awareness or participation. To do so is to ignore the constraints within the broader economic, political and social structures which might not permit the collective and open articulation of protest. This of course raises the thorny issue of how to exploit the evidence of popular political attitudes found in the rich seams of sedition cases. How representative were these? For example, how are we to interpret outbursts against the monarch in a society where the very unearthing of sedition was dependent upon detection and presentation from a loyal people themselves? Many of the existing studies of riot have produced conclusions which suggest only a modification of older views of the people’s role within the polity. Thus, in recent and well-received studies of agrarian protest, we are told that riots were essentially defensive and conservative. Rioters did not give expression to political feelings, but contented themselves with drawing attention to specific grievances of immediate concern; there was little to suggest any generalised political stance. Similarly, enclosure rioters in the West of England manifested political indifference. Rural disorders there were essentially nonideological [is this a state of grace given to any of us now?] and non-revolutionary in character. By fracturing crowd actions by separating riots into a typology of riot (food riot, enclosure, etc.), these studies emphasise what they see as the limited, specific nature of crowd actions. They suggest that popular politics was ‘instrumental’ politics. Inasmuch then as riots could be said to represent a form of popular action, this was ‘customary’ or even reactionary. In the space permitted by this chapter, I want to question this orthodoxy. To categorise early modern riots as pre-political or primitive forms is to betray the taint of modernisation theory. Although not always explicit about the reasons for their categorisation, some historians of early modern riots feel able to label them as non-political or non-ideological, since they believe that the riots fail to engage with the high politics of the period.5 If, however, we start by abandoning the implicit hierarchy and teleology in such definitions, then we can begin to uncover the political beliefs that informed crowd actions. A better starting point for the attempt to recover the lineaments of popular political culture is to define politics in terms of the process by which power is grounded, exercised, maintained and contested.

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Popular politics in early modern England Secondly, we must place greater emphasis on the forms, repertoires and the symbolic universe which crowd actions reveal. For, where riots are not simply used as a footnote to illustrate reactions to broad historical changes, there is still a tendency to treat as unproblematic the shape of the crowd actions, assuming that form dictates action: enclosure rioters pull down hedges, food rioters seize food, etc. But, as we shall see, the richly ritualised shape that early modern crowd actions in fact took, demands the ‘thick description’ of the historical ethnographer.6 Reading crowds in this way allows more direct access to the ideas that informed their actions. It goes some way to lessening that paradox noted at the outset: that, in attempting to recover those rendered historically inarticulate by the inequalities of power, print and literacy, historians are too often forced to write that history out of what Carlo Ginzburg has called ‘the archives of repression’. II In the 1650s, a disillusioned republican complained bitterly that the common people, ‘care not what government they live under so as they may plough and go to market’. While this might be taken to confirm the historians’ belief in the pre-political nature of the early modern crowd, I would argue that the plough and market are central symbols around which to begin a reconstruction of early modern popular political culture. They were the foci for what I would wish to call a ‘politics of subsistence’, defined in terms of access to land or grain (or, later of increasing importance, the exercise of a craft according to the customs of the trade). Rioters who resisted the collection of taxes in the early sixteenth century or on staples of popular consumption in the mid-seventeenth-century Civil War (a rare form of crowd action in England as compared to continental Europe) also justified their resistance in terms of the threat that it posed to their subsistence. The throwing down of hedges in agrarian riots was the most common form of riot in this period. The enclosure riot represented a challenge to the most visible symbol of the recasting of rural social relationships by the increasing penetration of agrarian capitalism and market forces.7 Enclosure rioters sought to defend rights of common (which among other things gave them the right to pasture animals), rights which were increasingly important to maintain the viability of peasant holdings being splintered by demographic and seigneurial pressures. Similarly, food riots were not the stereotype of collective theft of grain with violence (as depicted in court records). They represented the crowd’s belief in the superiority of their claim to grain for subsistence over the market’s commoditisation of this staff of life. The justification for such actions has been made familiar to us in the works of E. P. Thompson and James Scott.8 In their work, the moral economy was

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Popular culture and popular protest the property of people and peasants. But it is important to emphasise that in the early modern period there was a wider subscription to the ideas that lay at the heart of the moral economy. State, Church and (arguably) significant sections of the old-established landed class too recognised the necessity to police social and economic relationships. English monarchs and their councils, all too aware of the limited forces of repression at their disposal, sought to regulate social and economic change in order to minimise the threat of popular disorder. But, in so doing, they had more subtle aims. By repeatedly stressing in their public discourse that the rationale for their policies was to protect the weak and poor, they sought to transform power into authority and thereby secure popular consent to their rule. Their coronation oath, acknowledging the double source of their power in God and the people, recognised their obligation. Equally, a provincial magistracy, drawn from an English landed class, with generally attenuated seigneurial powers and lacking adequate forces of repression under its control, sought to secure acknowledgement of their authority by a similar policy. The English Church, with its central notion of stewardship – the belief that Man held wealth and property from God and had to answer to him for its correct use – offered an even more powerful reinforcement of the idea that economic relationships9 should acknowledge social and ethical norms. Powerful consequences flowed from this. The English Crown went to considerable lengths to publicise to the people its policies for regulating the pace and process of economic change. Royal proclamations were printed and widely distributed, being read out and posted in the market-place. In early modern England, central and provincial law courts were an important (and very public) arena for the administration of the realm in the absence of a provincial professional bureaucracy. Here policy was publicised and enforced. Charges, in effect a lengthy speech voicing the government’s current concerns (for example, enclosure, the threat of famine, popery or puritan separatism) preceded each meeting of the provincial law courts, as did a reading of the laws in force. On occasion, special commissions toured the provinces to investigate the causes of popular complaint (such as enclosure) and specifically invited popular participation through juries and presentment of offences from below. Whenever the harvest failed, the government required provincial and urban authorities to put into effect the elaborate series of measures required by the Book of Orders: preventing hoarding; banning the export of grain; taking censuses of grain stocks; ensuring the regular supply of the market; being present in the market to ensure that the needs of poorer consumers were met first; or setting up grain stores from which the poor could have grain distributed to them. These again required the active participation of juries and petty officials drawn from the people. Sermons from the pulpit reinforced these policies: reminding magistrates of their responsibilities to the poor; landowners of

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Popular politics in early modern England the sinfulness of oppressing tenants; and holders of grain surpluses of their God-given duty to place people before profit. This was of course a normative order. It would be foolish to assume that it can be read as a blueprint for how social and economic relationships were ordered in early modern England. But it would be equally wrong to minimise the real consequences that this order did have. Of these, the most important here is the strong sense of legitimation it offered to those who engaged in protest. Experience taught the people that relationships with landlords, merchants and employers could be as conflictual as consensual. Active appropriation for their own purposes, rather than passive acceptance, characterised their relationship to the moral economy, since it offered a powerful defence of their interests against the challenge posed by these groups. An examination of the rites of riot in this period reveals the strong sense of rights that informed collective actions. Neither time nor space allows here a full analysis, but sufficient can be advanced to illustrate the powerful sense of legitimacy that ‘rioters’ held, and how it fashioned the nature of their protest. Central to English political culture was the idea of the good king whose rule by definition could not tolerate oppression of his people, since he existed to deliver justice to all his subjects. This was an image and idea variously celebrated, for example in the ballads of popular print culture – where kings-in-disguise went out into their realm to discover and root out corruption and injustice. Protesters might then begin with invoking, rather than challenging, royal authority, petitioning the King (or his provincial representatives) to remedy their grievances. Enclosure rioters claimed frequently that the King, not unlike the king of popular ballads, was kept in ignorance of their grievances, and that therefore they took action only to alert him to their grievances. For example, the Levellers and Diggers in the Midlands rising of 1607 told the magistrates that if they would ‘acquaint his Majesty that the cause of their rising was out of no undutiful mind to his Majesty but only for reformation of those late inclosures which made them of the poorest sort ready to pine for want, and that they might hear answer from his Majesty within 6 days and that his Majesty would promise to reform those abuses they would all depart home and rely upon his Majesty’s promise and performance’.10 Here was a pithy expression of the politics of subsistence and of popular expectations of the King’s role within it. Since this series of riots ended in the issuing of royal commissions to enquire into enclosure, the crowds were not disappointed. Where riot did occur, crowds accompanied their pulling down of hedges with expressions of loyalty, as for example in one 1604 riot, where the cry was, ‘Now for King James and the Commons’. ‘God save the King’ was a common cry in enclosure riots – celebrating the perceived relationship between King and people. (One could draw a parallel here with the repeated reference to Good

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Popular culture and popular protest Queen Bess and the Statute of Artificers (1563) by which eighteenth-century artisans sought to defend their trade.) Far from subscribing to the idea that the people’s role was only to be ruled, enclosure rioters perceived an active alliance between themselves and their monarch. Collective action against enclosure was in their eyes legitimate, both because it threatened their subsistence and because it was proscribed by the King. When challenged, reference by crowds to recent laws or proclamations prohibiting enclosure made explicit this belief, as did their habit of placing constables with their staffs (symbols of the authority that they exercised locally on behalf of the King) at the head of the crowd. Thus, agrarian protesters saw themselves not as rioters, but as obedient subjects. As members of one crowd in 1620 proclaimed, ‘they were good members of a Commonwealth for that they endeavoured and sought to keep land from being enclosed.’ Since government policy did not condemn all forms of enclosure, there was here a creative appropriation by crowds, as we have been taught to see in other areas of cultural exchange (see Roger Chartier and others).11 Captain Pouch, the leader of the Midlands rising, claimed a commission from the King to throw down enclosures, a claim repeated frequently by those who emerged throughout the English Midlands styling themselves his lieutenants. The very celebration of the rites of passage of royalty could be appropriated to provide licence and legitimation for the pulling down of hedges. In forest communities, the right to select timber for a maypole around which to celebrate the accession of a king, was taken as the occasion for asserting popular claims over disputed land. Elsewhere, the bonfires lit by ‘loyal’ subjects to celebrate the escape from popery – annually after 1605 to celebrate the failure of the Gunpowder plot, or in 1623 to celebrate Charles I’s escape from a Spanish marriage – could be fed from fences torn down from unpopular enclosures. (That Charles I was to become a leading encloser in eastern and western England had potentially important consequences for popular allegiances in the English Revolution in these regions.) A belief that the encloser defied the laws of the realm as well as the interests of community and commonwealth, fashioned the form taken by crowd actions. Running through them was an attempt to shame the encloser, recalling him to adherence to what was claimed to be a common set of norms. Where the encloser was the lord of the manor, drawn from the ranks of the nobility or gentry, then appeal could be made to the notions of good lordship or to that generosity by which the landed classes set much store in their own self-definition. Mocking libels would be drawn up, which drew a sharp contrast between the actual behaviour of the encloser and those values or unflattering comparisons with named gentleman who were seen as friends to the commons. These would be widely circulated both among his fellow gentlemen and the people of the district, nailed to the door of the local law court, thrown into the church,

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Popular politics in early modern England or posted in alehouses. Hints of popular vengeance and violence joined coercion to persuasion. At the same time, such threats could derive considerable power from the widespread belief that God intervened directly to punish sins such as greed. Upheld by the Church in its preaching (where sermons sometimes referred to the untimely death of enclosers), this belief was given wider expression in the popular saying that ‘ill-gotten gains ne’er last three generations’. The amusing history, from as late as the 1650s, of one Lincolnshire gentleman’s frightened reluctance to enclose, confirms the potential of the power of the poor’s curse as a ‘weapon of the weak’.12 Legitimation did not only come from the political culture of the State. As important was the legitimation drawn from the claim that the community of commoners opposed enclosure. Even where this was not the case, crowds worked hard to represent themselves as the physical manifestation of community disapproval. To achieve this objective, they drew on the common social and cultural resources. Riots were organised in the twin centres of village life – hatched in the alehouse and announced in the church. They were deliberately public and carnivalesque in character, a colouring emphasised by masking and transvestism. Crowds of men, women and children commonly had ‘their pipe to go before them and their ales and cakes to make themselves merry when they had done’. Broken hedges furnished the material for bonfires around which toasts were drunk and dancing and games took place. With their mutual drinking of toasts and oaths of good fellowship, these junketings were intended to celebrate the corporate identity and neighbourly ideals (a powerful concept in early modern society) which informed the politics of subsistence. The importance of the liminality of the festive community can be seen in the frequency with which important days within the holiday calendar provided the occasion and the ritual text for protest. May Day, with its processions of young men and women going into the fields and woods to gather boughs and greenery, could hardly have been bettered as an occasion to allow the pulling down of enclosures. It was no coincidence that the Midlands rising began on May Eve. Shrove Tuesday, with its customary belief in the suspension of all laws for the day, was another occasion for settling of scores with enclosers. Again, space does not allow a full description of the cultural creativity that crowds displayed. But the neatest blending of traditional ritual and protest was perhaps to be found in the coincidence of enclosure riots with the annual Rogationtide processions. This involved the beating of the community’s boundaries [a procession around the parish] by the ‘ancienter and younger sort’, for the precise purpose of preserving the collective memory of them and in order to prevent encroachment. The procession began with the local clergy pronouncing a biblical curse on those who had interfered with their neighbour’s boundaries. A corporate manifestation of the moral community,

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Popular culture and popular protest as well as of its physical boundaries, the Rogationtide procession was a text for riot – in the double sense that the word conveys in the English language of script and sermon. On occasion, the attempt to persuade the encloser to desist from enclosing took on more elaborate form, drawing on the licence of popular festive culture for both the occasion and text for protest. For example, the plays that were staged at the great festivals of the year could be selectively refashioned to make an effective protest. In Lincolnshire, the Maytide play ending the season of festivity was called ‘the Death of the Summer Lord’. It provided the perfect vehicle for an attack on the Earl of Lincoln, a notorious encloser. The staging of another May Day play – ‘of how a king should rule his realm’ – allowed the actor who played ‘husbandry’ to say ‘many things against gentlemen, much more than was in the book of the play’. In the North of England, where the old form of miracle play lingered on, tenants who were engaged in a bitter and long-running dispute with their landlords staged a play where the leading gentlemen of the region were meeting. In this, they exploited the ‘innocence’ conventionally ascribed to babes and fools to allow these characters to comment derisively on the gentlemen enclosers, who were depicted as being consigned to eternal damnation in hell. (Hell’s Mouth was an essential prop of the miracle play.) To label such complex actions, replete with ritual and the manipulating of symbols, as ‘riot’ is seriously to impoverish the creativity that the people could display in articulating protest. To reduce such protests to a footnote as a reaction to larger historical processes, is to miss the potential insights that they provide into the political beliefs and behaviour of the ‘historically inarticulate’. One final example from agrarian protests will serve to show the conceptual complexity which the people were capable of displaying. From the second to the fourth decades of the seventeenth century, there were a series of riots in the West of England against the enclosure and disafforestation of the royal forests. In these, crowds numbered in their hundreds were led by a labourer who took the title of Lady Skimmington. The riots in one area began with the announcement that the rioters were to bury Skimmington, and they took the form of a procession in which an effigy of the leading encloser was paraded to the accompaniment of popular derision, before being buried in the ditches which had formed the enclosure. What was happening here? The work of historians like Martin Ingram and Natalie Zemon Davis on the charivari (a ritualised shaming action, of which the skimmington was an English variant) has made us familiar with the use of this form of ritualised shaming sanction in the politics of gender.13 On one level, in England it was employed to discipline women who had usurped male authority (and the husband who had failed to prevent this). But, on another level, Ingram and others have also alerted us to the ambiguities of meaning the charivari

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Popular politics in early modern England could contain within itself. At their core was the central notion of inversion of ‘natural’ hierarchies, but at the same time there was also an awareness of the tensions and ambiguities surrounding those hierarchies. Drawing on their work, we can begin to make sense of the use of the skimmington by the enclosure protesters. We need to remind ourselves of the importance of patriarchy as a model of political, as well as domestic, relationships between dominant and subordinate classes in early modern culture – a model that extended to representations of the monarch’s authority over his (or her) people. There was a validating correspondence between ruler and subject and husbands and their wives and children. But there was also ambiguity. Wives ought to obey their husbands, subjects should obey their prince, the people their magistrates, and inferiors their superiors, but given what we are beginning to recover of the structuring of roles within the household, wifely obedience was not necessarily or automatically the case. Similarly, deference towards their betters and the acceptance of their power as authority might also be more reciprocal than these power-holders cared to envisage. Thus, the fashioning of an enclosure protest as a skimmington served several purposes. On the simplest level, this familiar ritual furnished a ready-made text by which to organise a protest in a region where, as the work of David Underdown has suggested,14 the skimmington was well known. But the use of this particular form of ritual procession with shaming sanctions was not accidental. The central role of inversion could be made to express the people’s anger that gentlemen who claimed to act as good lords to their ‘people’ were flagrantly transgressing their own norms, as were magistrates who were allowing enclosure to turn the world upside-down. By their actions, protesters sought to manipulate the common meanings of these inversionary cultural symbols to publicly shame magistrate and encloser to once more right the moral world. Given more time and space, we could apply a similar analysis to the other forms of crowd action in this period. A ‘thick description’ of the food riots of the period defies the stereotype of these forms as collective theft-withviolence. An attentiveness to the actual form and the micro-political context within which they took place brings out the fusion of rite with sense of right: the confiscation, rather than appropriation, of grain; and the mimicking of actions prescribed by the Crown to remedy dearth – the sale of grain at a ‘just price’ with the restoration of the proceeds (and even sacks!) to the owners, and the execution of popular justice, for example, the ‘fining’ of grain exporters. And again there was the attempt to shame magistrates to enforce the laws by returning to them the grain that the people had prevented being moved out of the region (something that under government policy the magistrates themselves should have done), or the issuing of rhyming libels declaring, ‘you that are set in place/see that your profession you do not disgrace’. Similarly, the rites of religious violence suggest an equally developed knowledge of the law:

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Popular culture and popular protest in iconoclastic riots crowds hauled religious images to places of public punishment where they were whipped; and, in the early stages of the English Revolution, crowds who forcibly disarmed catholic households cited administrative precedence and parliamentary ordnance for this popular defence of the faith. III There was then within early modern protest a developing politics of rights, which a social history of politics will need to take into account. Crowds sought to state and defend by rite what they believed to be theirs by right. Their actions derived their force from the broader political, cultural (and even mental) structures within which they took place. The formal weakness of the English state in its powers of repression, coupled with an acute awareness (or even moral panic) about the social tensions produced by accelerating socio-economic change, made authority ready to respond to popular grievances – something perhaps made easier by its relative autonomy from the ruling class.15 At the same time, the dependence of power-holders – from monarch to magistrates – on the maintenance of respect for their authority, put an emphasis on the rule of law which the people could exploit. In the early modern period, the moral economy was as much that of the Crown as the crowd. (This overlap in shared meanings places a further question mark over the binary oppositions implied by a crude elite/popular culture schema.) Reading crowds thus helps to restore agency to the people in the past. But the emphasis should not be allowed to shift too far the other way. There were limitations on the people’s power in protest. These stemmed in part from structural limitations. Of these, not the least important was the growing social polarisation which re-aligned a significant section of the people – the middling sort – with the gentry, in the mutual pursuit of the market and the local implementation of state power (though there remained potentially divisive religious and political differences, as the English Revolution was to show ). But perhaps of equal importance were the limitations which arose from seeking the defence of popular rights within the dominant political culture, which meant that kings, not kingship; and gentlemen, not gentry, were the legitimate objects of attack. There was a tendency within the analysis of the moral economy to identify the moral failings of individuals, not classes, as the cause of popular grievances, rather than structural inequalities or changes. Full analysis of early modern protest needs then to strike a balance between the cultural appropriations of the people and the cultural hegemony of the elite.

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Popular politics in early modern England NOTES 1 R. Cobb, The Police and the People: French Popular Protest 1780–1820 (Oxford, 1970). 2 J. Walter, ‘The impact on society: a world turned upside down’, in J. Morrill (ed.), The Impact of the English Civil War (London, 1991). 3 For the distortions that can be produced when historians fail to recognise this, see the example of the Oxfordshire rising: a failed attempt at a rising, which despite only assembling less than a handful of would-be rebels, has been elevated to the status of a major rising in the European crisis of the 1590s: J. Walter, ‘“A Rising of the People”? The Oxfordshire rising of 1596’, P&P, 107 (1985). 4 D. Hirst, The Representative of the People? Voters and Voting in England Under the Early Stuarts (Cambridge, 1975); K. Wrightson, English Society 1580–1680 (London, 1982); P. Collinson, De Republica Anglorum: Or History with the Politics Put Back (Cambridge, 1990). 5 Though here is not the place to do so, even the view that crowds failed to engage with high politics could be contested. 6 C. Geertz, Interpretations of Culture: Selected Essays (New York, 1973), ch. 1. For a critical evaluation of ‘thick description’, see R. Walters, ‘Signs of the times: Clifford Geertz and the historians’, Social Research, 47 (1980). 7 This is not, however, a description that can be applied to all acts of pulling down hedges, since not a few riots involved a dispute over property rights, and not hostility to enclosure per se. 8 E. P. Thompson, ‘The moral economy of the English crowd in the 18th century’, P&P, 50 (1971); J. C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven CT and London, 1976). 9 A term, of course, in its modern usage, unknown to the early modern world: see the Oxford English Dictionary, sub ‘economy’. 10 British Library, hereafter BL, Landsdowne MS, 90, no. 23, 2 June 1607. 11 For development of the idea of appropriation, see R. Chartier’s collection of essays, Cultural History: Between Practices and Representations (Cambridge, 1988). 12 W. H. Hosford, ‘An eye-witness account of a seventeenth-century enclosure’, EcHR, 2nd ser., 4 (1951); J. C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven CT, 1985). 13 N. Z. Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (London, 1975), ch. 4; M. Ingram, ‘Ridings, rough music and the “reform of popular culture” in early modern England’, P&P, 105 (1984). 14 D. Underdown, Revel, Riot and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England 1603– 1660 (Oxford, 1985). 15 For an example of how effective the threat of popular disorder might be, see Walter, ‘“A rising of the people”’.

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Chapter 2

. Grain riots and popular attitudes to the law: Maldon and the crisis of 1629

Nothing more slackens the reins of government, and the stability of peace, which is upheld by the reverent awe and respect which the people and subjects give to the Magistrate, than when by injustice and unworthinesse, they bring their persons and authority under contempt and dislike; but that they seem not as Gods but Idols, which have eares but heare not, eyes but see not, mouths but speak not true judgement. Against such Magistrates, people are prone to think it, not only just, but meritorious to rebell. (John Gauden, A Sermon Preached Before the Judges at Chelmsford. Italics in the original)1 Where laws are settled there are other remedies appointed for the relief … of the poor, by complaint to the magistrate without violating the established laws of kingdoms or states. (Sir Matthew Hale, Historia Placitorum Coronae (1676).2

I

A

complex historical reality lies imprisoned within the legal strait-jacket defining the crime of riot. Not surprisingly then, ambiguity still surrounds historians’ treatment of popular disorder in early modern England. In the case of the food riot, however, it is perhaps becoming more generally accepted that the pattern of disorder was somewhat different from that suggested by the fear of the authorities, or that posited by a too-simple relationship between poverty, harvest failure and a presumed popular inclination to riot.3 Years of harvest failure in England in this period were not scarred by widespread food riots; disorder was largely confined to the weak points within an as-yet immature national marketing structure.4 Moreover, while there can be no doubting the alarm sometimes shown by the authorities when confronted by the licence of the unruly crowd, their response to riot was more subtle and less clear-cut than might otherwise have been predicted. In their use of the law, the authorities displayed a sensitivity to circumstance and context which casts doubt on some

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Popular politics in early modern England of the more extreme emphases on magisterial helplessness and consequent wrath in the face of popular disorder. The delicacy which could characterise authority’s handling of the crowd appears often (but not always) to have reflected the carefully circumscribed actions that the rioters allowed themselves. The authoritative stereotype of the food riot as a collective form of theftwith-violence rarely captured the reality of such disorder. Riot was seldom, if ever, a simple and unpremeditated response to hunger and starvation. As the ultimate political weapon of the poor, the food riot was often the culmination of a preceding exchange between the poor and their governors, in which the threat of popular violence had been used (unsuccessfully) to coerce authority into action on their behalf. The tradition of riot was itself a constant point of reference in a more enduring relationship between rulers and ruled. The complex relationship between the poor and their governors, with the food riot as its epicentre, forms the subject of this chapter. Using legal records as a point of entry into the mental world of the seventeenth-century poor, this chapter attempts to recover, in the evidence of the food riot, popular attitudes to the law and the proper exercise of authority in early modern England. It does so within the specific context of a detailed reconstruction of events centring on grain riots in the Essex port of Maldon in the crisis of 1629. The pursuit of these themes within the framework of an examination of riot in its local setting is deliberate. The complex meaning of the resort to riot can come only with a knowledge of the context of disorder. Narrowing the focus makes possible the identification and use of a wider range of sources to provide that context. Equally important, it also provides an opportunity to redress the balance of the immediate legal record of riot and to restore to those otherwise anonymous faces in the crowd a less partial, if still fragmentary, history than that imposed upon them by the authorities. The disorder at Maldon has acquired a certain notoriety. S. R. Gardiner was perhaps its first historian.5 Only a handful of historians have referred to it since. Their references have, in the main, been incidental, and their understanding of the disorder has been rather confused. It is, therefore, perhaps advisable to begin by identifying the springs of this confusion and by establishing, albeit briefly, the sequence of events at Maldon in 1629. There were, in fact, two distinct riots there in that year. In March, a crowd of over 100 women with their children boarded a Flemish ship and forced its crew to fill their caps and aprons with grain from the ship’s hold; in May, a much larger crowd, this time dominated by 200 to 300 unemployed clothworkers, again attacked boats that were taking on grain there. While the March rioters escaped scot-free, the second riot ended with the execution of several of the rioters.6 Those drawing on Maldon’s example appear not to have realised that there was more than one outbreak of disorder, or, more seriously, they have taken all the evidence to refer to one riot only: that in May.7 By conflating the riots,

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Maldon and the crisis of 1629 they have obscured the vital fact that it is the repetition of disorder that helps to explain a more gruesome conclusion than the authorities’ usual response to food riots. For Maldon in 1629 appears to provide the only example in early seventeenth-century England of a food riot that ended on the gallows. Events there therefore form an excellent focus for a local study of riot. The two riots, each eliciting a very different response, together provide an example of the full range of the complex interplay between crowd and authority in early modern England. II Industrial depression was one of the nastier nightmares that ruffled the shaky composure of England’s rulers. Where it coincided (as it so often did) with dearth, it provided one of the most testing of challenges to the relationship between the poor and their governors. This was the background to disorder in Essex in 1629. A trade slump in European markets had had a disastrous impact on the cloth industry which dominated much of the county’s economy. Its effects were evidently beginning to be felt very early in the year; they were soon to get very much worse.8 In addition, the plight of thousands of clothworkers denied their only means of subsistence and of the poor generally within the county, was aggravated by an increase in the price of their basic foodstuff. Poor weather at the start of the year signalled a bad harvest, and prices locally were apparently beginning to rise.9 An already fragile situation was further exacerbated by the extensive buying up of grain within the county by English and foreign merchants, for export to European markets.10 It was this last activity that excited most popular comment. Merchants servicing an overseas market were barely tolerated at the best of times by the poor. In the conditions of 1629, they were particularly unwelcome. The merchants competed on unequal terms with the poor for what grain was available – sweeping local markets of their stocks and pushing up prices in the process. In a situation of near-shortage, their large-scale purchases may well have had a decisive impact in driving up prices in the markets in which they operated. This was to be a running grievance within Essex for much of 1629. It led to disorder at the very beginning of the year. Towards the end of January, there was a flurry of riots in the south of the county, in which rioters attempted to put a stop to the movement of grain out of the county. Bands of men and women, armed with pitchforks and pikestaves, had seized grain destined for export along the Thames. Openly ‘swearinge they neither cared for pettye highe Constables or Justices of Peace’, they had proceeded to impound the grain. The rioters intended, apparently, to enforce a policy of taxation populaire (selling the grain at their own popularly determined price) once their own needs had been met. In an attempt to forestall any further movement of

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Popular politics in early modern England grain, they gave out threats ‘to kill the farmors, or anye other factors yt wear imployed to buye or sell any Corne’. As if to underline these threats, they were reported to be trying to hire muskets.11 Clearly, the rioters were trying to p1ay on the fears of their betters. In this they were successful. The local justice, in advising the central government of these disorders, expressed a fear that they would spread. There was, he informed the Privy Council, a need for speedy action to preserve the peace of the country. His letter passed on the threats of the rioters, doubtless amplifying them in the process. Its tone can be taken as the archetypal response of the early modern authorities to popular disorder: alarm, a ready willingness to believe the wilder rumours that deliberately accompanied the crowd’s appearance, and fear that it presaged further, more threatening disorder.12 lf the rioters had as yet failed to act out the roles accorded them in the nightmares of the ruling class, it was only a matter of time before they would do so. The central government’s response to this information comes then as something of a surprise. It was prepared to leave the handling of the affair to a small group of local justices. Although its letter was couched in the conventional, shocked language of a government confronted by those upon whom a century and more of instruction in the sinfulness of disorder seems to have had so little effect, the Privy Council contented itself with calling upon the justices, ‘to punish the offenders for their misdemeanours according to the quality of their offences as the lawes and statutes and the duties of your place doe require’. They were to be careful to suppress any further disorders ‘in their beginnings’. But, at the same time, while stressing the legality of the movement of grain – to allies of the King, by licence and at prices under those set by statute – the government was at pains to publicise that it had issued instructions to the ports to stay further shipments upon first notice of the increase in prices.13 Riot and response fell into a familiar pattern. While calling for the punishment of the riot, the government was careful to respond (and to be seen to respond) to the popular grievances that had prompted disorder. Prosecution of the rioters was not actively pursued. Despite the murderous threats and open expressions of contempt for local social and administrative hierarchies, there remains little, if any, evidence that the justices risked local order by pressing on with the discovery and punishment of the rioters.14 The January riots provide both an example of the conventional pattern of disorder and the immediate background to the first riot at Maldon. The movement of grain out of the county was clearly exacerbating a local shortage and exciting popular comment. Consequently, the activities of foreign merchants at local ports were ill-received by the poor – the more so since they were popularly held to be flouting the laws designed to cope with a situation of impending dearth. For there is evidence to suggest that among the poor at Maldon, as elsewhere, there was general awareness and even detailed knowl-

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Maldon and the crisis of 1629 edge of the body of law and administrative practice prescribed by the government to control the marketing of grain. Operating in an essentially oral public culture, and faced with the possible recalcitrance and corruption of a sketchy bureaucracy, the early modern government was forced to devote a good deal of energy to getting its measures known. Central to this effort was a use of the law and the law courts. The formal but extremely public devices of proclamation, judicial charge and articles of inquiry to special juries, were all clearly intended to publicise the law’s provisions.15 As inhabitants of borough, market town and port, the poor at Maldon were likely to have been especially receptive to this form of tutelage. The borough records confirm that the town’s inhabitants were kept regularly informed by proclamation of government directives regulating the grain trade. In addition to the regular example of control of the market by the borough’s courts of leet and quarter sessions, they had had direct experience of the detailed programme initiated by the central government in previous years of dearth.16 As a port, Maldon also provided a constant reminder of government policy in the proceedings of the vice-admiralty court there. Meeting several times a year, its jury of local men had to answer to prescribed articles of presentment, at the heart of which lay questions concerning the illegal export of grain.17 Any of these courts might require the active assistance of Maldon’s humbler inhabitants as minor officials or members of juries. Popular knowledge of the law could come then through active participation in its enforcement. For example, while the records of the vice-admiralty court do not appear to survive for the period preceding the disorder at Maldon, it is known that, in the 1630s, at least one of the rioters’ husbands was a regular member of its jury.18 There was, therefore, an informed popular expectancy as to what action the authorities should take to curb the activities of Dutch and Flemish merchants when they appeared at Maldon and began buying up grain. This was to be disappointed by the seeming reluctance or inability of those in authority to protect local markets. For despite the warning of the January riots, the outflow of grain was allowed to continue. We need to treat with caution the government’s claim that it had issued general instructions restraining the export of grain. Until early May, no proclamation had been issued banning its export. Letters appear to have been sent to the ports, but it is a commonplace, given the state of early modern administration, that it was one thing to issue a ban, and quite another to secure its enforcement. Corruption was rife at the ports. At the centre, the issue of a ban could have ulterior motives – special licences to export prohibited commodities were part of the spoils of court patronage.19 The registers of the Privy Council reveal that the Council itself continued to license extensive shipments of grain by English and foreign merchants to allies of the King. It was not until towards the end of March that even this licensed export of grain began to dry up. Provincial authorities who did attempt to

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Popular politics in early modern England enforce a ban on the export of grain by reference to the new restraining order seem to have had their actions, on appeal, repeatedly overruled by the central government.20 For the moment, political considerations shouldered aside any concern for the poor. It was undoubtedly this situation of magisterial inactivity that first prompted Maldon’s poor to take action. On 23 March, the magistrates at Colchester, Essex’s leading port, informed the Lord Treasurer of the disruptive activities of one Lucas Jacobs in the town’s market. Jacobs, a leading Dutch corn factor, had been licensed to make extensive purchases of grain in East Anglia. In support of their plea for a ban on his activities, Colchester’s magistrates stressed the popular discontent that these purchases were causing: ‘a greate number of poore people are here verie unrulie by reason much Corne haue benn transported from hence’, they warned the Lord Treasurer.21 Popular discontent was equally marked at Maldon.22 There too, the appearance of foreign merchants excited hostile comment. In the absence of action by the town’s authorities, rumours circulated about the precise nature of the merchants’ cargoes, and helped to heighten popular suspicions. Philip Ewers, a Maldon sailor, was reported to have complained to a gathering of local inhabitants that ‘the owners of the said vessells were dunkirk[er]s and … (that Corne was shipped) yt was pittie they were suffred to lye there’, a sentiment echoed by other sailors in the crowd.23 Ewers’ speech was deliberately inflammatory – to label the merchants Dunkirkers (they were either Dutch or Flemish) was calculated to increase popular antagonism towards them24 – and contained a clear invitation to his audience to take action on their grievances. It met a ready response. On the same day that Colchester’s magistrates were writing to the Lord Treasurer about the threat of disorder there, the poor at Maldon took it upon themselves to put a stop to the unwelcome and seemingly unrestrained activities of foreign merchants (among them Lucas Jacobs) in their market. On Monday 23 March, a crowd of women, animated by the speeches of Ewers and the other sailors, gathered in the streets of Maldon. (Coming two days after the town’s Saturday market, the timing of their action perhaps suggests that post-market grumbles and sabbath-tide discussion preceded the decision to riot.) The crowd processed through the town, calling other women out of their houses to join them as they went. They brushed aside the efforts of the town’s magistrates to stop them and, with their children in tow, made for a place known as Burrow Hills. Here they were joined by women from the adjacent village of Heybridge; from the clothing township of Witham; and off the nearby Totham Heath. Burrow Hills was a deep-water channel just outside Maldon, frequently used by ships to take on cargoes in preference to the town’s hythe; there lay the object of the crowd’s attention – several Dutch and Flemish ships taking on grain. The rioters now formed a formidable crowd, some 100 to 140 strong. An unknown number of rioters boarded one of the

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Maldon and the crisis of 1629 ships and forced its Flemish crew to fill the aprons and bonnets of women and children in the crowd with small quantities of grain from the ship’s cargo of rye.25 The evidence does not reveal how the riot ended. As the response to Philip Ewers’ attack on the authorities’ inactivity suggests, it was undoubtedly this failure to act that impelled the poor to riot. The statements of those rioters who were later apprehended almost unanimously reflect popular impatience with the authorities for failing to prevent the export of grain at the expense of the local market. They drew their examiners’ attention (as the riot itself had intended) to the provocative contrast between the nearby grain-laden ships about to sail and the lack of grain in their own market. All but one of the rioters examined linked this offensive juxtaposition of want and plenty with their own poverty, as the explanation for their presence in the crowd. Margaret Williams, for example, went to Burrow Hills, ‘amongst others of her owne accord’, ‘Corne being deare and … being carried awaie … and she being a poore woeman’; while Ann Spearman went ‘because she cold not have Corne in the m[ar]kett & [because] certaine fflemishe shipps … [lay] at Burrow Hills … there to receiue in Corne to carry beyond sea (for transportacion).’26 Despite the authorities’ insistence (in accordance with elitist preconceptions about the nature of popular political activity) upon discovering the primum mobile of the riot, there was, among those examined, a general stress on the crowd’s solidarity. The women of the neighbourhood had called on each other to join together. Their mobilisation was as much the product of a shared sense of moral outrage as of any prior co-ordination. They had acted as a crowd in the face of their governors’ failure to enforce that law whose explicit justification by the government had been, ‘to avoyde the just offence of the inferyour sort, which cannot but be greeved to see such corrupcions in the better sorte suffered without restraint.’27 ‘The Crie of the Country and hir owne want’ was one rioter’s crisp retort to the question of who had incited her to riot.28 Though the claim of poverty might be expected after riot as a necessary mitigating plea in the delicate relationship between crowd and authority, it would seem to have been a genuine statement of the problems facing the rioters at Maldon. Totham Heath was the classic locus of the squatters’ settlement in marginal agricultural areas – whose freedom from the discipline of landlord, Church and state so alarmed men of property in the seventeenth century. Witham was dominated by the cloth industry: 2,000 inhabitants in and around the town were said to draw their living from it. The presence of a contingent of women from Witham in the crowd almost certainly reflects the impact of the trade depression there. Their involvement presages the role that their menfolk were to play in the second riot.29 Poverty was perhaps less marked in Maldon itself. A rigorous control on in-migration had ensured that the town was not haunted by the numerous poor who scarred other towns in the period. It had little direct involvement

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Popular politics in early modern England with the cloth industry.30 Nevertheless, although we know the names of only a handful of rioters, painstaking research suggests that for all of them poverty was something more than a necessary fiction in the aftermath of riot. All but one of these rioters came from the poorest of the town’s parishes, St Mary’s, which was described in the previous year as ‘much ouer-charged with poore’.31 All were sometime members of that inclusive, penumbral body – the urban poor. Elizabeth Sturgeon, who described herself to her examiners as ‘being in pou[er]tie and wanting victual for her Children’, was married to a labourer too poor to be allowed to stand surety for his wife or to figure much at all in the extant records of the borough.32 Another rioter, Ann Spearman, was the wife of a fisherman. Though described as a cottager in a 1622 listing distinguishing between householders, cottagers and labourers, there is evidence elsewhere of his dependence on occasional day-labour to maintain even this precarious position – without, it would seem, great success. When, in 1633, now described as a labourer, he was fined five shillings for being drunk, the constables reported that he had insufficient goods on which to levy the fine.33 Others hovered on the edge of poverty. Dorothy Berry was married to a recent immigrant to Maldon whose varying occupations over time (shepherd, labourer, fisherman) and by-employments (aleselling and victualling, both of which got him into frequent trouble with the authorities) suggest the nature of their precarious existence.34 Margaret Williams was a widow who had remarried. Her husband was also an immigrant. He too ended up in that peculiar preserve of the poor, as an aleseller, attempting to supplement his income from leatherworking, by practising an urban craft notorious for its poverty.35 The fortunes of Ann Carter, the one rioter not to plead poverty when examined, perhaps provide the best illustration of this group’s uneasy balance between sufficiency and want. Her husband, John Carter, was a butcher who by 1629 showed little sign of the wealth attributed to this often prosperous urban trade. To judge by the lists of butchers entering and failing to enter recognisances against Lent, he appears to have moved out of the trade (at least on his own account?) for several years shortly after his marriage to Ann in 1620. But during this time he held land in the town and continued to be described elsewhere as a butcher of Maldon.36 By 1627, he and his wife had at least two servants, and in 1628 John Carter again appeared among those entering Lenten recognisances. In 1629, he took his place for the first time in the mutual pledging among his fellow butchers that provided their recognisances against Lent.37 Although the evidence suggests a rise and fall in the Carters’ fortunes, there was probably an underlying decline. In 1624, they had transferred their rights in a holding in Maldon, which was then sublet to a local yeoman for a period of four years; he had to give them a penny yearly should they demand it. In 1628 John Carter was being presented to the town’s courts as a common alehouse haunter. By mid-1629, one of their servants had

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Maldon and the crisis of 1629 left, and the other, having had her wages cut by one-third the previous year, had only been taken on again in 1629 for a short period and at no specified wage. By the latter half of the year, John was himself without a residence. He was being presented before the courts as a lodger and harried for his failure to attend church. Shortly thereafter, his name again disappeared from the lists of Maldon butchers.38 Where, then, it is possible to get behind the formal and fossilising descriptions accorded those brought before the law, we can glimpse the tenuous existence of those from whose ranks the crowd was recruited. The picture is one of poverty, not necessarily of overwhelming poverty, but of a constant struggle against the uncertainties and instability of the early modern economy. An understanding of this group’s struggle for subsistence and sensitivity to changes in the price of basic foodstuffs helps to explain their hostility to those merchants whose purchases defied popular norms and prompted a local crisis. Clearly, such a crisis, however temporary and localised, could threaten to have a drastic impact on their ability to subsist. Evidence about members of the crowd that is derived from sources independent of the immediate legal record of riot may have more to tell us. It may help to explain not only the presence of individuals in the crowd, but also the selection of those against whom the authorities chose to take action. Only a handful of the rioters ended up before the magistrates. With the possible exception of Ann Carter (who was suspected by the authorities to have had a hand in the organisation of the riot), the legal record gives little indication why this group should have been the only ones singled out. It does not suggest that they played a particularly prominent part in the riot. But, from their fragmentary biographies, it is possible to put forward a tentative explanation for their unwelcome prominence in its aftermath. For what emerges is that the women (and their husbands) already enjoyed a certain notoriety from being often in trouble with the town’s magistracy. They were, in fact, a thorn in the side of authority. Their frequent appearances before Maldon’s magistrates were to some extent part and parcel of their poverty. There were a whole range of generally petty offences for which they found themselves pestered and presented: attempting to keep animals in the town’s streets and other infringements of its by-laws; frequent failure to perform compulsory work on the highways and to fulfil other obligations; unlawful aleselling; drunkenness; and absence from church.39 There were, however, more serious incidents. Ann Spearman’s husband, for example, appeared before the authorities on at least three separate occasions for assault and violence. In 1617, he had been called to answer for the death of his apprentice. The Corporation had previously scotched Spearman’s attempt to dismiss him. Again indicted for assault at the quarter sessions following the March riot, he was joined later in the year by his wife to

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Popular politics in early modern England answer for their combined attack on a local husbandman, his wife and son-inlaw, in the channel of the port. Since we have only a note of these incidents, we have no way of knowing whether they formed a sequel to the riot.40 This range of offences was not, of course, peculiar to the rioters and their husbands. But what does seem to distinguish at least some of them is that they were marked by a particular antipathy to the exercise of authority. This is perhaps to be explained by the marginal political position experienced by the rioters and their husbands. In step with a fashionable tendency towards oligarchy, power and the spoils of office had been concentrated in the grasp of a small ruling group in Maldon towards the end of the previous century – a process which then had occasioned a good deal of popular animosity.41 None of the rioters’ husbands was apparently a freeman of the borough. They were, therefore, neither eligible for membership of the Corporation nor allowed even a limited say in its election. None apparently had been chosen to serve in any of the town’s minor offices. It was only as ‘decenners’, unfree members of the tithing from which the leet jury was selected, that they participated in the government of the town; and then, to judge from incomplete lists, their appearances were few and sometimes reluctant.42 Their wives were, of course, in a formally even more marginal position. This group experienced authority not through participation in its exercise, but through the unwelcome interference of those officials with whom they lived cheek-by-jowl in a town of little more than 1,000 inhabitants.43 Their enforced political inactivity, when coupled with the irritating attention of the Corporation’s officials, perhaps helps to explain the undercurrent of resentment glimpsed in several of the rioters’ lives. This irksome relationship with authority is probably best seen in the examples of Dorothy Berry and Ann Carter. In the year of the riot, Dorothy Berry (whose husband was repeatedly in trouble in 1629) appeared several times before the authorities for a range of offences. The most frequent was drunkenness. She had been indicted for being drunk at the Easter quarter sessions and sentenced to sit in the stocks for six hours. New stocks may well have been provided for the occasion but, if so, they failed as a deterrent. When, in July, a constable attempted to serve a warrant citing her now two previous convictions for drunkenness, he had little luck. Dorothy Berry displayed her contempt for the magistrates’ authority by informing him that ‘she wold bring her dogg for one of her suerties and her Catt for the other’.44 Ann Carter, the suspected leader of the riot, had a similar, if longer and better-documented, relationship with authority. In 1622 she had been presented at quarter sessions for having launched a verbal assault on one of the town’s two chief magistrates, ‘calling him bloud sucker and … many other unseemely tearmes’. She was again in trouble with authority the following year. When the same hapless bailiff tried to question her about her absence from church,

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Maldon and the crisis of 1629 she contemptuously informed him, ‘that yf he woold prouid[e] wone to doe hir worke shee would goe’, adding ‘that she searued god as well as he’ – a statement which again landed her in court. In 1624, it was the turn of one of the sergeants at mace to experience in more direct form her contempt for authority. He had been attempting to arrest John Carter when Ann had intervened and, stroking him ‘uppon the hed w[i]th a great cudgell divers times’, rescued her husband.45 It is not surprising, therefore, that members of this group should be found expressing hostility towards the authorities, especially when they found themselves being dragged before the courts for offences which were scarcely thought of as such by them and their neighbours. That shortly before the riot Ann Carter and Dorothy Berry were among a group of inhabitants being prosecuted for a relatively minor infringement of the town’s marketing regulations – they had bought up fish before the town-crier called out – while Dutch and Flemish merchants seemingly escaped such attention, can hardly have increased their respect for authority.46 Perhaps, then, the information provided by these fragmentary biographies of the rioters helps to explain the readiness with which they entered or led the riot, and, possibly, why it should be they (and they alone) who ended up before the authorities. It may well be, though it would be difficult to prove, that for at least several of them it was their earlier conflict with authority and the visibility that this brought them, as much as any part in the riot, which determined their selection. Ann Carter’s past relationship with Maldon’s magistrates certainly helps to explain her presence in this and the later riot; perhaps it also cast her for the role she was chosen to play in the judicial aftermath following the May disorder. If we return to the riot and examine the authorities’ response to the appearance of the crowd, then we can attempt to establish their attitude to the food riot. We know that they tried to prevent the crowd from assembling, but thereafter the evidence is scanty. It is not recorded whether it was action on their part that brought the riot to an end. Not until just over a month later is there evidence of action being taken against members of the crowd. If, however, the authorities were slow to move against the rioters, the crowd’s action quickly prompted the sort of response that it seemed designed to achieve. Immediately following the riot, Maldon’s magistrates ordered a search to be made of the ships’ cargoes ‘for Corne’ and ‘to se[e] whethe[r] she were laden with chees butter or baken as it was Reported’. The next day the port searchers, accompanied by the constables and a sergeant at mace, hired boats and searched both Dutch and Flemish ships.47 On 6 April, the full Corporation of bailiffs, aldermen and headburgesses held an extraordinary meeting. At this it was decided, after a vote, that ‘the Corne p[ro]vided by Mr. Jacobs the marchant now lyeing within the Burrow shall be bought at Convenient price if yt maybe had for o[u]r poore and so to make stay of yt from transportinge’. Most members

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Popular politics in early modern England of the Corporation agreed to contribute to the cost of the grain’s purchase out of their own pockets: the bailiffs and aldermen were to pay fifty shillings, and the headburgesses twenty shillings, apiece.48 While the willingness of Maldon’s rulers to purchase the grain at their own expense confirms their anxiety to placate the crowd, the fortnight’s delay between search and vote suggests perhaps that in the interval they had tried other (and less costly) ways of preventing the grain’s shipment. It is possible that, having searched the ships, the Corporation wrote to the Lord Treasurer, the minister responsible for regulating the export of grain. They certainly sent one of the sergeants at mace to him with a letter whose precise date in 1629 is unknown. Although no copy of this letter is to be found, it evidently concerned ‘the staye of the transportac[i]on of Corne’.49 Perhaps the Corporation had hoped that the Lord Treasurer, in accordance with his own restraining order of late January, would order the foreign merchants to dispose of the grain locally. If, as seems likely, the Mr Jacobs referred to in the vote of 6 April was the Lucas Jacobs whose activities had disrupted Colchester’s market, then they were likely to have been disappointed. Jacobs was a Dutch merchant resident in England and one of the leading exporters of grain in the period. His name appears regularly in the registers of the Privy Council. In the previous autumn he had been licensed to export over 2,000 lasts of grain, mostly to northern Europe. As the report from Colchester would suggest, a purchase of this size undoubtedly created problems in Essex (which with Norfolk and Sussex appears to have formed the provisioning area for the purchase). In fact, Colchester’s efforts were apparently only one of a number of attempts made locally to put a stop to Jacobs’ activities. But Jacobs, who seems to have steered pretty close to the wind in his dealings, had friends in high places: in the following year the personal intervention of the Dutch ambassador secured his release from a charge of exporting double the amount of grain specified in his licence. In February 1629 the Privy Council had overruled attempts to restrain Jacobs and called upon local authorities to allow him to ship grain.50 If, in such a context, the crowd’s actions conformed to essentially unwritten and informal conventions mutually accepted by the crowd and authority – in other words, if they were carefully circumscribed, did not question the local power structure and were directed against an intrusive and generally disliked presence – then they were not altogether unwelcome to the local authorities. In the face of the central government’s subordination of local interests to its own ill-informed definition of priorities, the appearance of the crowd provided the local authorities with the necessary proof of the seriousness of the situation. It gave them the most effective means of urging a change of policy upon a government for whom the maintenance of order remained the key desideratum. This unconscious coalition between the poor and authority locally may help to explain the apparent lethargy with which the Maldon authorities pursued

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Maldon and the crisis of 1629 the apprehension and punishment of the rioters. Over a month was to elapse before there was any evidence of such action. The Corporation was quick to hold a special meeting to consider the rioters’ grievances; it was not until after the next quarter sessions (held on 20 April) that they began to move against the rioters, although several had then been before the court for other offences. Though we lack direct proof, it is tempting to see this timing as evidence that the Corporation’s action had been prompted either by advice from the county magistracy – the quarter sessions for the county, at which several Maldon officials were present, had met on 16 April – or by instruction from the central government.51 It was on 25 April that Maldon’s magistrates took their first recorded action against the rioters: they issued a warrant for the appearance before them for questioning of Ann Carter and her husband. Ann Carter appeared two days later. She was examined and released the same day, after admitting to having been a member of the boarding party. Her examiners suspected that it was she who had arranged for the women of Witham to be present at Burrow Hills, but this she denied.52 On 30 April, warrants were issued for the appearance of the other four women on whom the magistrates chose to concentrate their investigations – Dorothy Berry, Ann Spearman, Elizabeth Sturgeon and Margaret Williams. They too were examined and released after confessing their presence in the crowd.53 Over the next few days, all five women were required to enter recognisances for their future appearance. Significantly, the sum demanded as surety for several of the rioters (Ann Carter among them) was set at twice that normally demanded within the borough; and the authorities showed that they expected the sureties to be able to raise this sum by striking out the name of one of the rioters’ husbands before the recognisance’s completion, on the grounds of his poverty.54 At this stage, then, it would appear that the town’s magistrates were concerned to minimise tensions locally by the familiar use of the recognisance, and not to exacerbate the situation by a rigorous prosecution of the riot. Only a handful of rioters had been plucked out of the original large crowd and they, with one exception, were to appear at the next quarter sessions for the borough, more than a month away in late June. In effect, the threat of punishment was being used to discipline the rioters. The one exception was Ann Spearman. According to her original recognisance, she was not bound over to appear at the next quarter sessions, but ‘at such day time and place as shall be appointed unto her by the Lords of his Ma[ jes]:t[ie]s Counsell’.55 This would tend to lend weight to the idea that the central government had been informed of the riot and that the belated prosecution of the rioters was at its prompting. The evidence, however, does not suggest why Ann Spearman should have been singled out for exemplary punishment. Perhaps she played a greater role within the riot than that for which we have evidence, but in the end it was Ann Carter, and not Ann

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Popular politics in early modern England Spearman, who became the sacrificial lamb, and this for her part in the second riot. There is no evidence that Ann Spearman ever appeared before the Privy Council. Instead, she appeared with her fellow rioters at quarter sessions on 29 June.56 Thereafter, despite the second riot in late May, the Maldon authorities’ response became even more formal and perfunctory. The court took no action against the women. Once more, they were bound over to appear at the following quarter sessions. This time only their husbands were required as surety, and even the husband previously excluded on grounds of poverty was now admitted. At the October sessions, the husbands of two of the women appeared and were dismissed; one rioter defaulted; and nothing was entered against the fourth, Dorothy Berry, although she was still living within the borough. No further action was taken against these last two.57 This slow unfolding of events forms a pattern which is itself a revealing commentary on the attitude of authority locally to the food riot. Although there is no evidence that Maldon had a particular tradition of riot which might have accustomed its governors to the appearance of the crowd, its rulers do not appear to have been especially alarmed by the incident.58 Their first and immediate response was to take steps to remove the grievance that had prompted popular action. Only later (and, if the interpretation of the timing is right, only under some external pressure) did they investigate the riot itself. Even then, they confined their attention to a handful of rioters and in the end never brought even those to stand trial. If the leniency with which the urban authorities treated the rioters reflects a certain confidence in their own position, it was certainly made easier by a possibly deliberate policy on the part of the poor in the riot. That it should be the women of Maldon and the nearby villages who staffed the crowd is not in itself surprising. Women were present in almost every food riot in the period, and some riots were exclusively feminine affairs. As the group most involved in the round of face-to-face marketing, they were especially sensitive to price movements and abuses in the market-place.59 As the social group most intimately connected with the everyday life of the community, they were – through the network of the neighbourhood – in an excellent position to gauge popular feelings and able to give voice to these in effective collective action. In this respect, Maldon is only to be distinguished by the size of the feminine presence: it was by far the largest crowd of women rioters to appear in a food riot in the period. Maldon’s example suggests, however, that the presence of women in the crowd was perhaps more deliberate than these explanations would suppose. They may well have felt that the gendered division of labour gave them special licence, as provisioners of their families, to notify authority of its failings in this crucial area of their lives.60 They were probably more aware of the licence

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Maldon and the crisis of 1629 afforded them by their ambivalent legal status at the margins of the law’s competence. Their presence in the crowd (and that of their children, another group to the fore in the riots of the period) again highlights the extent to which popular culture was penetrated by a knowledge of the law. For the legal position of women rioters was very unclear in the early seventeenth century. Lambarde, author of the standard textbook of the early seventeenth-century magistracy, informed his readers that, if a number of women (or children under the age of discretion) do flocke together for their own cause, this is none assembly punishable by these statutes, unlesse a man of discretion moued them to assemble for the doing of some unlawfull act,

an opinion echoed by Dalton, that other justices’ vade-mecum.61 In the riots of the period, women actively demonstrated their awareness of the uncertainties of the law. They consciously exploited the ambiguities of their position within the political culture, and explored the freedom of action this brought them. In rioting, they were able to turn their marginal relationship to the structure of power within the community (of which their legal dependence was only one aspect) to their temporary advantage, since their intervention, if short-lived, was less likely to threaten the underlying relationship between the poor and their governors. The role of the women and children at Maldon, then, parallels the deliberate use elsewhere of their ambiguous socio-legal status to articulate the community’s sense of grievance. If the rioters there did not openly voice the common claim made by their defiant sisters in contemporary enclosure riots, ‘that women were lawlesse, and not subject to the lawes of the realme as men are but might … offend without drede or punishment of law’, doubtless some such reasoning helps to explain their exclusively feminine gathering.62 This was the logic behind the sequence of events in which the equally discontented (but ultimately passive) sailors restricted their participation to mobilising the women of the community to riot. There is, therefore, little that separates the first riot at Maldon from other riots springing from comparable grievances elsewhere in the period. While it serves to emphasise the potential specificity of local crisis, its background was a widely shared one in which the authorities were felt to be failing in their self-proclaimed duty towards the poor and defenceless, by not enforcing those laws designed to protect them. Either Maldon’s market was empty because of large-scale purchases by foreign merchants or because, as was increasingly the case, merchants and vendors had bypassed its market altogether.63 Either action was equally likely to have antagonised the local populace, jealously guarding what it saw as its prior claim on grain within the local market and deeply suspicious of any tendency which threatened this lifeline of the urban poor. That it was foreign merchants who were exporting the grain, doubtless heightened the sense of popular grievance. Xenophobia was a not infrequent

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Popular politics in early modern England element in the popular disorder of the period and it probably contributed to the decision to riot at Maldon: according to the Venetian ambassador there was in the spring of 1629 a widespread murmur against the Dutch who feared ‘some general massacre’.64 But it was popular awareness that the merchants’ activities contravened the necessary laws for dealing with a situation of threatened hunger and the definition of priorities in the marketing of grain that these laws upheld, that informed and helped to legitimise the crowd’s actions. In the face of the authorities’ apparent unwillingness to enforce those laws on whose necessity they repeatedly and publicly insisted, the poor took it upon themselves to enforce a body of law which emphasised abuses in the marketing of grain as the real cause of dearth, and which hinted at bureaucratic inactivity and self-interest as the cause of its persistence. In the short term, the Maldon disturbance, as with other food riots in the period, could be said to have achieved its aims. Forcing the Flemish sailors to distribute grain among the women and children in the crowd probably satisfied the craving for popular justice. It certainly drew the attention of the authorities to their failings and set in motion the necessary exercise of authority designed to remove grievances which the crowd, by its own actions, could never hope to redress. Grain was kept within the local economy and purchased for distribution to the poor. The central government was alerted to the dangerous situation built up by the continued licensing of grain shipments, and official permission to export grain was withdrawn. The restraint on grain exports imposed at the end of January had not stopped the government granting at least forty-three export licences over the next two months; only two such licences were issued in the two months following the riot.65 This response by authority was absolutely essential to the crowd, who could only hope to drive off the purchasers of grain at the risk of also scaring away the provisioners of their market. In the long term, the riot’s success lay in its reminding the authorities of the crowd’s slumbering existence, encouraging them to take action when either the harvest failed or trade ‘became anything dead’, i.e. declined.66 While the authorities displayed a certain energy in attempting to remove popular grievances, they contented themselves with a token show of action against the rioters. This tolerance was in part the product of a feminine crowd’s ability to exploit ambiguities in the enforcement of laws that mirrored popular norms and gave scope for popular initiative. But the muted magisterial reaction, one of negotiation and conciliation, was undoubtedly an implicit recognition of the imperatives of unrelieved poverty. Had matters so remained, then there would have been little to distinguish events at Maldon from the general pattern of popular disorder elsewhere. The exchange between the crowd and the authorities, marked by an absence of violence and by studied restraint, belonged to a tradition observable both long

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Maldon and the crisis of 1629 before and long after this particular incident. But the repetition of disorder in May moves Maldon outside this tradition. Instead of a return to the expected pattern of relationships between governors and governed – an exchange of deference and subordination for good governance – Maldon witnessed the unusual spectacle of a second, larger outbreak of disorder on the exact site of the earlier riot. III In the period between the two riots, the economic situation of the county deteriorated rapidly. The problem was essentially one of deepening depression within the textile industry which dominated the economy of north-east Essex. War had damaged overseas markets and created a major slump in textile exports. At home, the dissolution of Parliament and the conflict between the Crown and its opponents over the contentious issue of the legality of customs impositions contributed to the loss of confidence in the mercantile community. An over-expanded domestic industry, dominated by small employers for whom credit and an ability to turn over capital quickly was essential, and whose work-force formed a large, near-landless rural proletariat, was scarcely in a position to weather the storm.67 A report drawn up sometime in the spring of 1629 – A Breife declarat[i]on Concerning the state of the Manufacture of Woolls in the Countie of Essex – revealed the full extent of the crisis.68 There were twelve to fourteen townships, besides a host of smaller centres, heavily engaged in the manufacture of cloth. A depressingly similar picture emerged for each of the centres mentioned in the report. For example, at Colchester, the leading cloth town where 20,000 in and around the town were said to depend on the industry, there had been alarming slump in production: the weekly production of one type of cloth alone had fallen from 400 to 50 pieces in the previous five to six weeks. In other centres, the production of cloth was anywhere between one-fifth and one-third of what it had been. Much cloth remained unsold. At Coggeshall, where production had used to run at 100 pieces a week, 1,500 cloths were unsold. Since spring was normally the peak period for cloth sales, this lack of buyers was particularly alarming. Bulging warehouses spelt disaster for the numerous small employers who depended on credit and a weekly sale to finance their operations. If the example of Bocking, one of the leading cloth centres, is typical, then it would appear that the depression really began to bite towards the end of March. The town’s clothiers had met at the beginning of February and agreed to provide work for their workers and all the unemployed until Lady Day (25 March). But by that date they found themselves no longer able to guarantee employment. From Witham it was reported that the clothiers ‘bee afraid to goe home beinge not able to pay theire workmen or to sett them any more att worke’.69

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Popular politics in early modern England With little or no land, few savings and no hopes of alternative employment, it was the clothworkers who bore the brunt of the crisis. Still wrestling with the legacy of an earlier crisis in 1623, they were ill-equipped to cope with the events of 1629. Few were able to draw support from the type of dual economy that flourished in other areas of rural industrialisation. Many had long since lost what little economic independence their occupation might have offered, and they were dependent on a wage paid them by the clothier. This, ‘but smale in the best tymes’, had been progressively cut in response to the problems affecting the industry for much of the 1620s, and had been kept low by the fresh supply of labour drafted in during spasmodic spurts of over-optimistic expansion. As the report on the state of the industry concluded of the clothworkers: theire pouertie is exceedinge greate, and lamentable is the beinge of all this Multitude of people which liue by these Manufactures, few or none that Can subsist unlesse they bee paied their wages once a weeke, and many of them that Cannot liue unlesse they bee paied euery night, many hundreds of them hauinge no bedds to lye in, nor foode, but from hand to mouth to mainteyne them selues their wiues and Children.

By early April, the Venetian ambassador was predicting the thousand mischiefs that might follow the threat of starvation among the unemployed clothworkers.70 The records that this crisis occasioned make it possible to follow its impact blow by blow and to reconstruct the process of response and counter-response between the poor and the authorities, a process which ended in further riot. The poor’s first move was to petition authority. A divisional meeting of justices at Bocking, in the heartland of the cloth district, attracted petitioning clothworkers at the beginning of April. When, later in the month, the county’s magistrates met for the Easter quarter sessions at Chelmsford, they found themselves immediately confronted by a large and unruly crowd of some 200 clothworkers who had tramped to the county seat. These presented the justices with a petition in the name of the weavers of Bocking and Braintree, detailing the clothworkers’ distress, ‘with [as the justices informed the government] too many wordes, and outcryes followinge us from place to place, and moueing us for Com:isseration and urginge present answere, being unwillinge allmost to giue anie space of tyme to Consider what was to bee done for them’. The clothworkers would not allow the justices to proceed with the business of the court until they had assured them that they would inform the central government of their distress and agreed to send some of their number to confer with the clothiers and leading townsmen about possible means of relief.71 The county authorities lost little time in informing the central government of these developments, the justices writing to the Privy Council the following

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Maldon and the crisis of 1629 day, 17 April.72 Their letter stressed the fragile situation within the county and their own helplessness when confronted by a crisis whose roots lay outside their jurisdiction. ‘Itt is to be feared’, the justices informed the Council, that ‘without speedie reliefe some thinge may happen which may disturbe the Peace of the Countrie.’ Their promises to the clothworkers had done some good, but ‘there was expressed by diuers of them, soe much distrust that noe Care would bee taken for them in tyme, As wee are of opinion, that our persuations to settle them in quiett and order Could not prevaile Longe’ unless something could be done to answer their needs and complaints. If the justices disliked the manner of the weavers’ disorderly petitioning, they emphasised that their complaints were not without just cause. Their own letter was an attempt to manipulate the threat of disorder to persuade the central government of the need to intervene to prevent ‘the eminent mischiefe which may happen by these poore people and the Inhabitants of many other Clothinge townes pinched with like want and famine’. Thus it ended with the ominous observation that the clothworkers ‘will not longe be quiett, unlesse they haue meanes provided to relieue themselues and families with victualls and other necessaries’. Reports from individual clothing townships underscored the reality of this threat. From Coggeshall (‘beinge a very poore towne and unruly’) it was reported ‘as Certaine the multitudes of the poorer sort must starue, or use unlawfull meanes to support themselues, if pr[e]sent reliefe bee not afforded’.73 The message contained in the reports and petitions coming in from the county was not lost on the government at the centre. The government’s response was quickly forthcoming but sadly inadequate. Only two days after the tumultuous petitioning, the Privy Council wrote to the ministers and churchwardens of Bocking and Braintree, the centres of the petitioning, stressing that the King was taking care of the cloth trade, and blaming the war abroad for the depression. In an attempt to communicate directly with the discontented clothworkers, it ordered that the letter be read in the churches of the district the next day, a Sunday.74 A week or so later, the Council wrote to the justices, ordering them to spread the cost of relieving the clothworkers by rating the parishes bordering on the clothing townships. When the justices informed the government that since all parishes were equally interested in the cloth industry, this policy would ‘insteade of appeasinge the disorders now on foote, in some few of the greate Clothinge townes … thereby infinitely encrease … Complaintes’ throughout the region, the Council wrote again. This time it suggested, unrealistically, the provision of alternative employment, and ordered the justices to rate the whole county for the relief of those for whom no such work was forthcoming.75 At the same time, the central government countered the justices’ use of the threat of popular violence by emphasising local responsibility for the

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Popular politics in early modern England maintenance of order. Thus the Council’s letter of 5 May, while reiterating the personal steps taken by the King in negotiating with the merchants to take up the unsold cloth, ended with this pointed counter-threat: For as the execucion of the lawes and maintenance of the poore are intrusted to you and other subordinate Ministers, so if you shall be found remiss … his Majestie will require and take a strict account thereof from you as those from whome he expecteth … a dilligent care of the preserveing of the peace and quiett of the Country.76

In addition to its emphasis on the King’s solicitude for the sufferings of his subjects and local responsibility for the county’s good governance, the government’s correspondence with the Essex authorities contained yet another theme. This was an elaboration of ideas which were commonplace in propertied circles: idleness was the real cause of poverty, vagrants the real agents of disorder. In its letter of 29 April, the Privy Council, having perfunctorily ordered the justices to spread the burden of poor-relief, moved swiftly on to inform them: we must seriously recomend [sic] unto you the reformacion of a greate abuse, which we understand is committed by some persons who sorte themselves amongst those Clothworkers that are readiest to trouble you with theire often Complaints and doe clamour for wante of worke, though they have noe ymployment [sic] in the trade of Clothing nor would apply themselves to labour or take paines if they should be sett on worke.

Despite the justices’ diplomatic response to these instructions – they had, they informed the government, taken steps to punish vagrants, ‘which as yet doe not fully appeare unto us’ – in its very next letter the Council again emphasised the threat from those who ‘upon this pretence [of unemployment] doe take occasion to assosiate themselves in a disorderly and tumultuous manner, and so unlawfully wander abroad in great and unusuall numbers, which may prove of ill consequence and example if speedie redress be not taken therein’. This harping on what it chose to believe were the real causes of disorder, remained an element within the government’s response to the crisis, right up to the outbreak of the rioting. It surfaced again during the trial of the rioters. Totally inappropriate to the real situation, it casts doubt on the central government’s ability to appreciate the true seriousness of the crisis.77 Disappointed that the promises of the government had so far produced little effective relief, the clothworkers stepped up their petitioning of authority. They addressed the King directly and, under the licence afforded by petitioning, made a more conscious use of the threat of violence, in an attempt to coerce authority into action. The weavers of Bocking and Braintree again took the lead in making the clothworkers’ grievances known. In a petition at the beginning of May, they informed the King that they were ‘growen into that extremitie, that they are enforced to sell theire bedds from under them to buy bread for

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Maldon and the crisis of 1629 themselues and families and are faine to lye in strawe’. Unless some course was taken for their present relief, they and their families were ‘like to perish, for in this declyninge tyme they are not able to subsist any Longer’. Petitioning the justices had brought ‘gratious answere’ from the King. This had put them in great hope and comfort that their wants and necessities should be supplied. But since that time they ‘in hope haue susteyned themselues and families with soe smale a portion of bread as is hardlie to keepe lyfe and soule together … [that] findinge noethinge done, they thinke theire miseries are not Creditted’. Against this background of the authorities’ continuing failure to implement a policy of effective relief, the clothworkers openly hinted at the threat of popular violence that it made all the more likely. The weavers ended their petition with the fervent wish that ‘they may not starue in tyme of plentie … but liue to doe your Ma[ je]tyes seruice according to their duties’, but this did not stop them from warning the King (as loyal subjects) that had not the Lord Lieutenant, the Earl of Warwick, appeased them, ‘many wretched people would have gathered together in a Mutinie and haue beene with your Ma[ jes]tye for they said words would not fill the belly nor Cloth[e] the backe’. 78 This petition was the signal for another round of correspondence between central and local government. The renewed exchange revealed the effects of the depression to be still spreading. On 15 May, the county authorities informed the government that they had met that day to implement its latest orders, but had found no parish within the clothing hundreds able to relieve any other. The effects of the depression had spilled over into other areas, and the justices’ efforts to tax the whole county were met by widespread reluctance to contribute successfully, hiding behind legalist objections. Under the guise of keeping the government informed, the county authorities reasserted its primary responsibility for removing the causes of the crisis. Once again they raised the spectre of violence in an attempt to persuade the government of this, concluding, ‘with all wee hold itt our duties truely to enforme your lordships that wee Cannot possible[y] hope for any quiett amongst the poore people in our Country’ without a speedy resumption of cloth sales.79 The government’s response to this information revealed the full bankruptcy of the King’s efforts. On 17 May, it issued a sententious proclamation for the due execution of the laws for setting the poor on work; advised the justices that the whole county could legally be taxed for this purpose; and initiated another round of local administrative action to prepare for this. Parish officials were to report to the nearest justice on the state of their parish; justices at their divisional meetings were to report to quarter sessions; and the assize judges were to oversee the whole operation, reporting directly to the Privy Council.80 None of these elaborate administrative procedures really got to grips with the central structural problem – depression in the cloth industry. The King might bully and browbeat the merchants to take up the cloth, but in response to the causes of the

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Popular politics in early modern England crisis the government could only reiterate royal concern to end the depression. Thus the letter of 22 May informing the county of the new measures ended with the by now familiar refrain, that ‘such hath bin his Majesties care and personall paines taken to remove theis impediments that of late have bin to trade, and to open a free vent to the commodities of your Country, that yourselves will shortly see the fruits of it to your comforts’.81 On the same day, a crowd of 200 to 300 inhabitants from the clothing townships of Bocking, Braintree and Witham, their credulousness exhausted, rioted at Burrow Hills. Although clothworkers were at the heart of the crowd, Maldon’s second riot was directed against the same highly visible and traditional grievance as its first.82 Grain was again being loaded at Burrow Hills. It was this which drew the clothworkers to the coast. Angered by the apparent breach of the recently renewed ban on the export of grain, the crowd proceeded to administer a rough form of popular justice. They boarded a ship taking on grain, assaulted the crew and took away a quantity of its cargo of grain. The ship was forced to put to sea. Another group of rioters broke open a house (possibly a storehouse for grain waiting to be shipped) and carried off more grain. In a parody of the criminal law’s sanctions, the crowd assaulted the leading merchant, a Mr Gamble, and forced him to purchase his freedom by the payment of a twenty pound ‘fine’. By the time that the sheriff and a fellow justice had arrived on the scene with an ad hoc body of such horse and neighbours as they could readily assemble, they found the crowd, its objectives secured, beginning to disperse. According to a later report, the crowd’s rump greeted their belated arrival with a display of insolence ‘intollerable both in speech and action’. All these representatives of authority could do was to examine those whom the crowd’s victims pointed out to them as leading actors; have them committed to custody at Maldon; and give orders for a strong watch to be kept.83 That the clothworkers formed the main contingent within the crowd should come as no surprise. Their action in Essex in 1629 continued a specific tradition within the county of the clothworkers as a source of disorder, and reflected the response of fellow workers in other areas, in other years, to equally desperate conditions. Neither is the preponderance of rioters from Bocking and Braintree altogether unexpected. Both towns had a history as centres of unrest; distress was particularly acute there; and disorder had long been predicted from their unruly poor. 84 The size of their presence, however, suggests that these two townships may well have taken the lead in mobilising the crowd. Although little is known of the organisation of the weavers’ trade, they would appear to have had wardens who were resident there. It was the weavers of these townships who had been to the fore in putting the clothworkers’ grievances before both justices and King. Perhaps they carried their leadership of the weavers’ cause into the riot. A note in the Maldon chamberlains’ accounts refers to the riot as ‘the disorderly rysinge of the Brayntree & Bocking men’.85

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Maldon and the crisis of 1629 Despite the clothworkers’ obvious grounds for appearing in the riot, there is evidence that some prior organisation from another quarter went into securing their presence. For, whatever her part in the earlier riot, Ann Carter seems to have played a leading role in the making of the May disorder. According to a report of her subsequent trial, she had made a tour of the clothing townships to drum up support, and had had letters sent out in which she styled herself ‘captain’.86 Unable to write herself, she had employed a local baker, John Gardner, to act as her secretary.87 (Unfortunately a copyist’s omission robs us of the knowledge of over what collective this clearly pseudonymous title – ‘Captain of …’ – assumed command.) Captain Carter may well have carried her leadership into the actual riot. In an attempt to mobilise the town’s inhabitants, which apparently met with little success, she had offered to place herself at the head of a contingent from Maldon. ‘Come, my brave lads of Maldon, I will be your leader for we will not starve’, she is reported to have cried.88 If true, it was entirely characteristic of this remarkable virago. In the aftermath of the riot, it was claimed that the crowd’s victims, ambiguously described as ‘Certaine Marchants of the North’, were shipping the grain to Hull and had entered bonds not to transport it overseas. This may well have been the case, although the source for this claim was a member of the special court set up to punish the riot, who consistently attempted to deny the rioters any grounds for their action.89 But, despite the alleged bonds and the proclamation of 2 May banning the export of grain, the poor had no great cause for confidence. There were few customs officials in the outports. As men who had purchased their office, these scattered officials were often less concerned with enforcing the law than with securing a profitable return on their investment by conniving at its evasion.90 The taking of bonds was often an integral part of this evasion. By late May, however, whether or not the grain was being exported under colour (pretence) of a fraudulent bond was beside the point. As far as the distressed clothworkers were concerned, grain was being removed from the local economy at a time when prices were rising and government proclamations received in Maldon91 (and doubtless elsewhere in the county) were stressing the threat of dearth. Grain exports compounded already acute conditions in the heavily populated, grain-deficient economy of the north-east of the county. In so doing, they tended to confirm the government’s prophecies of impending shortage. Here, then, was an aspect of the crisis where people were not helpless in the face of economic forces barely understood. Dearth was a familiar phenomenon, its supposed causes widely understood, the necessary counter-measures commonly accepted. Those in authority should prevent the outflow of grain. If not, then the poor would.92 On this aspect of policing the grain trade, therefore, the consensus between government and people broke down. While the government was concerned to ensure the supply of the poor within the context of a national economy, the

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Popular politics in early modern England rioters’ actions (and Ann Carter’s bold assertion) underlined the essentially local dimension of their own economy. The rioters’ action should not have surprised the government. There had been more than sufficient portents of disorder. Riots in January and March had been followed by frequent warnings from justices, township officials, clothiers and the clothworkers themselves. Towards the end of April, the movement of grain through Colchester, the largest textile centre in the county, had, as its authorities predicted almost a month before, occasioned disorder. If the exact form of this riot by a crowd of weavers and their wives remains obscure, in its composition and in its objectives it presaged the May riot.93 Yet, despite an acute awareness of the threat of disorder, neither local authorities nor members of the central government (for all its emphasis on the King’s solicitous care for the clothworkers) had shown themselves able to solve a crisis whose origins lay beyond their respective jurisdictions. Neither, more importantly, had they shown themselves capable of alleviating the grinding poverty that this crisis had created. For industrial depression presented a twofold challenge to the basic assumptions of a still essentially Elizabethan poor law. It spawned unemployment on a scale which the individual parish was not really designed to encounter, let alone solve. At the same time, it eroded the economic base of the local community, on which the insupportable burden of relieving such poverty was to be placed. If past assessments of the effectiveness of the early modern poor law have been too harsh, recent revisionism has perhaps failed to take sufficient account of that law’s abysmal failure to cope with the poverty produced by industrial depression. ‘Nothing is more agreeable to the true Rules of Charitie and policie, then the relieuing of the truely indigent and impotent poore, and the setting on worke of those who are able to labour’, ran the preamble to the proclamation of 17 May. But, as the clothworkers had boldly informed the King (under cover of reporting what others were supposedly saying), ‘words would not fill the belly nor Cloth[e] the backe’.94 This was the nub of the crisis. The inability of those in authority (for all their promises) to relieve the poor threatened the implicit contract between rulers and ruled. For the deference and subordination of the poor were not a reflection of some divinely ordained cosmos; they were in part conditional upon rulers fulfilling the self-proclaimed obligations of their office which helped to legitimise their authority, namely, administering justice and protecting and relieving the poor. The clothworkers had strained to its limit the poor’s right to petition in order to urge their governors to act. Some, in a move ill-received, had even flocked up to court in an attempt to make their plight personally known to the King.95 As the riot was to confirm, petitioning was one side of a relationship between the poor and their governors which could guarantee social order, but which could only be effective if it met with a response from those in authority. In other crises in the period,

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Maldon and the crisis of 1629 the petitioning of authority had secured responses that had upheld this relationship and pre-empted riot.96 But, in the case of Essex in 1629, conditions required greater decisiveness from the authorities in implementing a policy of relief if disorder was to be avoided. The depression in the cloth trade that had produced such concentrated poverty effectively sabotaged any chance of a realisable poor-relief scheme. In fact, on this occasion, the government’s attempt to implement measures which had previously proved successful in preventing disorder was perhaps counter-productive. While yet another ban on the export of grain offered little prospect of immediate relief for a group whose problem was not so much high prices per se but the lack of the wherewithal to purchase grain, it did draw attention to a grievance the government was powerless to stop completely. Although the government could not help but have been aware of the threat of disorder, indeed, had even used it to badger local authorities, the second riot did shock and alarm it. Of itself, it was far more serious than the previous riot, especially since it differed significantly from the usual pattern of such disorder. Its size was particularly menacing. The crowd of 200 to 300 rioters was much larger than any other operating in the food riots of the period, and it had shown an unwelcome ability to co-ordinate its support over a wide area. Whereas grain rioters frequently contented themselves with staying the grain seized, some of the May rioters had taken away a considerable quantity. Property had been openly challenged. In defiance of the general tradition of riot, a section of the crowd had broken into a house and taken yet more grain. Above all, in rioting a second time, the rioters had rejected the canons of behaviour – contrition and renewed subordination – expected to follow riot. But, whatever its disturbing peculiarities, it was the implications of the second riot that invested it with real menace. There was the alarming possibility that the riot might be only the first in a series of incidents involving angry clothworkers. ‘Rumors are … much spread of an intention to assemble greater numbers speedily, that the Countrie begineth to bee in greate feares’, reported the justices who had suppressed the riot.97 There was also the threat that any future disorder might not be confined to such relatively marginal matters as the movement of grain, but might adopt more alarming forms of insubordination. Some attempt had already been made to redirect the crowd’s attention. A St Osyth’s man, Francis Cousen, committed to Colchester gaol for ‘stayinge of corne by the waterside’, was also charged with ‘animatinge of poore people to the nomber of sixe or seaven score to the Earle of Rivers’ house [not far from Maldon] sayinge there was gold & silver enough’.98 Moreover, at a time when the political situation at the centre was still tense, the disorder could all too readily be seen to have political overtones. The respect shown the Earl of Warwick for his handling of the crisis, and the earlier harping on hopes of parliamentary redress in a county already known for its political

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Popular politics in early modern England opposition, must have been unwelcome to a government momentarily uncertain of its future.99 The rioters’ flouting of the King’s personal efforts on their behalf scarcely provided an auspicious beginning to the period of ‘personal rule’. Even the government’s attempted implementation of its religious policy within the county was encountering opposition from godly clothworkers.100 In Essex, therefore, the second Maldon riot was both a microcosm of, and focus for, the tensions building up in the country in 1629. In language not normally used in ruling circles to talk of grain riots, the government spoke of the riot as a ‘crime being of so high a nature and of so dangerous consequence that it amounteth to little less than a Rebellion’.101 It was the crisis – at once economic, social and political – which prompted this uncharacteristic description of the food riot, as much as the nature of the riot itself, which necessitated firm action by the central government. Once the situation had reached the point of open disorder, the government had little to lose and possibly much to gain by a rigorous proscription of riot. If it was unable to prevent disorder by swift remedial action, it could at least use the weight of the law to enforce order. The central government therefore took a more immediate interest in the suppression and punishment of the May riot than was usually the case in incidents of food rioting. The government’s first concern was to prevent further disorder. On the day following the riot, the Privy Council fired off almost identical letters to the lord lieutenants, to their deputies and to the justices, ordering them to co-operate in mounting a strong guard of horse and foot at Burrow Hills to be ready on any occasion. The Council apologised for this slighting of the normal hierarchy of county government, justifying its action by the need for urgency that the crisis imposed. At the same time, it informed the county authorities that a special legal commission of oyer and terminer was to be sent into the county to punish the riot. Significantly, this decision to set up a special court to try the rioters must have been taken immediately upon notice of the disorder. In a postscript to its correspondence with the county, the Council emphasised that it expected that ‘an exemplarie punishment be inflicted upon the principal offenders for the conservation of the publique peace and the deterring of others to committ the like hereafter.’102 The government clearly intended to use the trial of the rioters to demonstrate the limits of the permissible behaviour allowed the poor. In doing so, it acted with uncharacteristic vigour. The commission of oyer and terminer was issued just four days after the riot, on 26 May.103 Thereafter, this large and formidable body – it was headed by the Earl of Warwick, the most powerful figure in the county, and included among its twenty-three members both assize judges, several other lawyers and most of the leading gentry in the county – moved swiftly to punish the rioters. Maldon’s magistrates had issued warrants for the appearance of Ann Carter and her secretary, John Gardner, on 25 May. Two days later, they, together with the other rioters committed

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Maldon and the crisis of 1629 to Maldon after the riot, were escorted to Chelmsford under a strong guard. On the 29th, only a week after the riot, the commission sat to execute justice there. On the 30th, it hanged four of the rioters.104 Although no formal record of the court’s proceedings appears to have survived, we do have a report of the trial in a letter written by a member of the commission. What is most immediately striking in this account by Sir Thomas Fanshawe is the fact that, as in the case of the first riot, very few of the rioters – only eight of the reported 200 to 300 – ended up in court. None the less, this handful was sufficient for the government’s purpose. In one indictment, four men apprehended coming away from the riot were charged with taking away fifteen quarters of rye, and Ann Carter was indicted with them as an accessory before the fact. All were found guilty. The men, Fanshawe reported, ‘Could not read’ and, together with Ann Carter (whose sex denied her the use of the escape clause offered by benefit of clergy) were sentenced to be hanged. In a further indictment, two tilemakers were charged with breaking into a house in the daytime and taking six quarters of rye. John Gardner was indicted with them, in a piece of judicial symmetry, as an accessory for his office of secretary to Captain Carter. This group was more fortunate. The tilemakers were found guilty of taking the grain, but not of breaking into the house, ‘and soe had the fauor of the Courte for a Psalme of Mercy’. Gardner, despite being indicted (according to Fanshawe) ‘upon a full euidence’, was acquitted by the jury. One of the four men sentenced to be hanged was reprieved (and later broke gaol), but no such leniency was extended to the other rioters. Sentence was carried out against Ann Carter and her companions without delay.105 Although we lack a full report, Fanshawe’s account hints at a careful management of the rioters’ trial. There seems to have been some attempt to deny that the rioters had had grounds for rioting. Sir Thomas made much of the fact that all the prisoners, both at the bar and after their reprieve, had confessed that they were in work at the time of the riot. While emphasis was placed on the legality of the movement of grain, he himself claimed, improbably, that the price of corn was ‘at wonderful easie Rates’. All this minimised the embarrassing real causes of the disorder or, in Fanshawe’s words, ‘did much honour the proceedinge[s]’. The trial was clearly intended to provide a convincing demonstration of the government’s ability to prosecute and punish disorder. This the court’s swift reprisals ensured. As Fanshawe observed, ‘this Justice hath soe terrified them as that wee are satisfied they will finde worke enough rather then runn to outrage againe’. But, at the same time, the court had been careful to temper rigorous enforcement of the law with a judicious display of merciful justice. Although the rioters’ convictions were richly deserved – ‘the insolencies of these people … were [so] intollerable both in speech and action … the perticulers are not to bee Comprehended within the bounds of an ordinarie letter’, choked Sir Thomas – a show of mercy was allowed to soften (and, of course, by contrast heighten)

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Popular politics in early modern England judicial wrath. Three prisoners were reprieved upon favour after conviction, and one was allowed to be acquitted by his peers, despite the evidence against him. ‘Thus was Justice and Mercie mingled alike by the Judges and the Jury’, was Sir Thomas’s satisfied comment on this careful staging of the proceedings. Doubtless, both were accompanied by a visual display of judicial might and punctuated by the moralising of sermon and judicial charge to point up their meaning for the people, a similar process probably being repeated at the place of execution on the following day.106 In concluding his account of the trial, Fanshawe was able to report (with evident satisfaction) that ‘the better sort of people were much pleased with the Justices, beinge before that tyme much dismaied with the insolencie of these people … the proceedinges are much Justified by the Countrie and exceedingly approued by the Lordes here aboue’ (my emphasis).107 There is evidence to suggest that they were less well received among the poor. Two weeks after the executions, James Brownsward, a Maldon fisherman and acquaintance of the Carters, meeting with a draper of Witham who had been a member of the trial jury, spat in his face that ‘Witham men were bloodsuckers, and that hee would spend xxii: but that hee would be revenged of some of the Jury’. In Maldon itself, the professed ignorance of a local jury summoned to discover what goods Ann Carter held – as an attainted person her belongings were now forfeit to the Crown – suggests a certain lack of popular sympathy for the commission’s ‘justice’.108 None the less, the attitude informing Fanshawe’s report showed the authorities’ awareness of the need for such severe action. As he himself observed, ‘itt was a remedie applied with all opportunitie, for wee finde that there was a generall inclination for all who pretended pouerty to rise to do mischiefe’.109 Despite probable unpopularity, the commission’s actions effectively demonstrated the government’s ability (for all the limitations too frequently stressed) to meet, where necessary, the threat of popular ‘violence’ head-on. Its ability to do so was made easier by the lack of opposition after the catharsis of riot. For, despite evidence of a continuing undercurrent of opposition, we are presented with the paradox of a crowd which, whatever its original belief in the legitimacy of its actions, was prepared to accept authority’s redefinition of the situation. No attempt was made to rescue the rioters arrested, and no demonstration reportedly greeted their trial and execution. In the exercise of its legal powers (so ample, if so little used), the government was able to reinforce its definition of the boundaries to the initiative permitted the poor: petitioning was acceptable (at a distance); an open challenge to the authority of their governors was not. A measure of the government’s success is provided by the marked change in the manner of the poor’s petitioning. In a petition to the midsummer quarter sessions, the weavers of Bocking and Braintree were careful to dissociate themselves from the use of violence to obtain their ends:

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Maldon and the crisis of 1629 many of our poore brethren haue runn beyond Compasse by violatinge his Ma[ jes]tys Lawes, and haue suffered therefore, which wee the wardens are much grieued for that they fell to such a Course, for wee always persuaded the Contrary, and that they would take a Legall course in all humble and obedient manner, the which wee are persuaded that they [now] will, for they are very sorrowful for that which is done.

While still complaining of the unreformed abuses within the cloth industry, the weavers put great stress on their desire to make their grievances known ‘by a legall and honest course’.110 The change in tone from their petition of early May, with its conscious use of the threat of violence and talk of words not filling the belly, provides ample testimony of the changed situation following the government’s severe enforcement of the law. Contrition had been secured; a show of deference had been regained. Although the threat of further reprisals was allowed to linger within the county – the commission was adjourned, to meet again in early June if necessary – the government was quick to recognise that punitive action was not by itself sufficient to restore the bonds of obedience and subordination, however skilful the mingling of justice and mercy. The trial had temporarily eclipsed the problem of provision for the poor, but the commission, before adjourning, threw its weighty authority behind enforcement of the government’s most recent relief measures. It issued copies of the proclamation for the relief of the poor and the Privy Council’s letter of 22 May, and ordered a full return to be made of each parish’s condition, so that effective action on a county basis could be taken at the next quarter sessions.111 When, by the midsummer sessions, tensions had shifted to the clothworkers’ relations with their employers, the authorities were quick to respond to the weavers’ grievances. A committee of justices, headed by the Earl of Warwick, was instructed to call the clothiers before them, and orders meeting the clothworkers’ complaints were issued at the following quarter sessions.112 At the centre, the Privy Council continued to oversee the county’s administrators and chivvy them into ensuring that all efforts were made to relieve the poor. The legacy of this renewed concern for the poor was to be seen in the county’s response to the more general crisis of the following year. Making unprecedented use of the full range of the county’s administration, Essex’s magistrates achieved a remarkable degree of regulative control. They controlled the movement of grain and curbed abuses in its marketing. Extra grain was imported and sold to the poor at prices which were sometimes well below those in the market-place. Special care was taken to see that Maldon and the clothing towns were well supplied. Those with adequate resources were taxed more heavily to support the greatly increased number of poor. The county authorities acted vigorously, often in advance of prompting from the central government, anticipating the programme initiated nationally by the Book of Orders.113

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Popular politics in early modern England The legacy of riot was, then, double-edged. It brought not just a restoration of the bonds of order but also an increased responsiveness to the demands of the poor. Long after the event, the disorder of 1629 served as a testimony to the reality of the threat posed by the poor. As such, it was employed by all groups within county society in an attempt to secure the response they wanted. When, for example, the weavers sought the aid of the justices later in the year in checking the abuses of their employers, they professed themselves unable to live ‘without using unlawfull meanes to serue our necessities’. Though they were quick to add the saving clause that they were unwilling to do so, the point had been made and taken.114 Action followed. When the justices found their efforts to regulate the clothiers thwarted by the assize judges, they in their turn informed them of the weavers’ discontent, reminded them of the earlier disorder, cited the government’s instructions to prevent any repetition of riot, and ended with the veiled threat that ‘if some what bee not presently done wee shall not bee able to keepe these poore people in quiett’.115 The memory of 1629 became part of the currency of political discourse within the county community. When, by the spring of 1631, the renewed crisis was at its peak, the county returned to the threat of disorder in an attempt to secure intervention by the central government. One justice almost certainly had 1629 in mind when he supported his plea for an effective ban on grain exports with the observation that there was a suspicion of secret exports, ‘w[hi]ch if it should be, and goe on, it would in all probabillyte, breed miserable distractions in the Countye and K[ingd]om’.116 When depression revisited the cloth industry in the later 1630s, the memory of 1629 was still there to be tapped by the poor. One clothworker in a petition for relief managed to remind the justices of Burrow Hills: ‘I never took noe lewed course for to rong any man nor yet Rune about the Country as others have done as it is well knowne that some went for Corne to the sea sid[e] and took it by violen[ce]’, he informed them. By stressing his former loyalty, he was able in the same breath to revive the spectre of popular violence, closing his petition with the ominous observation that ‘it is hard to starue Job saieth, since for skin and all that a man hath he will giue for his life’.117 His audience was well primed. As one gentleman observed, ‘I thinke itt fitt that wee should doe, that w[hi]ch belongeth to us and is fitt to be done for the p[re]venting of so great a mischeife as the want of worke, to so many poor p[er]sons may p[ro]duce.’ A commission was issued to investigate the clothworkers’ complaints.118 IV Maldon, then, has the advantage of having been the scene of two large and comparatively well-documented riots which provide a sharp contrast in both the full range of crowd behaviour and magisterial response. As a case study, it

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Maldon and the crisis of 1629 enables us to examine in some detail the early seventeenth-century food riot and to see reflected in its form popular attitudes to the law and the proper exercise of authority. Riot was seldom simply a form of immediate self-help on the part of the poor. The crowd’s appearance was not designed to end its grievance unilaterally, but to do so by securing (or coercing) the necessary exercise of authority. By publicly confronting authority with its failings, the crowd attempted (more often than not successfully) to recall their governors to their self-proclaimed duty of protecting the poor. In so doing, the poor displayed a perhaps surprising knowledge of the law, and an often acute awareness of its uses. The courts of law (notably quarter sessions) provided a quasi-legitimate forum for the expression of popular grievances. Where petitioning failed and riot followed, knowledge of the law could be used to reinforce popular norms and to offer a sense of legitimacy to the actions of a crowd bent on enforcing these in the face of magisterial inactivity. An awareness of the law not only helped to license popular initiative; it also formed and fashioned its expression. The crowd within the riot consciously mimicked administrative practice. The example of Maldon also enables us to penetrate the rhetoric of authority and to examine the nature of the magisterial response to disorder. Far from being one of proscription and punishment (as might be suggested by their fear of disorder), the authorities’ reaction was often one which implied a recognition of the legitimacy of the complaint, if not the manner of its making. Characteristically, as in the first Maldon riot, the central government accorded the local authorities considerable autonomy in handling the aftermath of riot. This they did with a certain delicacy: not seeking to exacerbate tensions by a rigorous prosecution of the riot but carefully responding to the grievances of the crowd. By contrast, the second riot – however much it may have conformed to the tradition of riot in the object of its attentions and in its sense of legitimacy – provoked a very different response. The size of its disorderly crowd, the attack on property and the repetition of disorder at a time of crisis, all allow us to see another, harsher, face of authority, one which hitherto perhaps has not received sufficient recognition from historians of the period. For though there were limits to the law, in the case of the food riot these lay less in the law’s scope than in its enforcement. And while acknowledging the oft-stressed limitations on authority in dealing with such disorder – the relative spontaneity of riot, the lack of a police force or standing army – it is important to emphasise that at least some of these limitations were self-imposed. They found their force in the authorities’ realisation that the best way of handling disorder was not necessarily to be found in a rigorous enforcement of the law against riot. But the second Maldon riot, openly challenging authority and carrying within it the seeds of further disorder at a time of particular stress for both county and central government, revealed the latent strength of the law. It prompted an effective demonstration of the law’s ability, when necessary,

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Popular politics in early modern England to meet a persistent challenge to authority (particularly from a crowd whose actions appear to have broken the tacit understanding between themselves and the authorities) with decisive action and exemplary punishment. V This ability to define what constituted acceptable popular action through the exercise of law was of crucial importance to the government’s maintenance of social order. It is clear from the tradition of riot that a knowledge of the criminal law’s scope and of the government’s ability to exact the penalties that it prescribed was firmly located within the popular consciousness, alongside an awareness of other laws more beneficial to the poor. If in this period grain riots did not generally conform to the government’s stereotype of collective theft-with-violence or spill over into a conscious attack on the social and political order, this was in part at least because popular awareness of the law of property was already sufficient to suggest that any such direct challenge would invite savage retaliation. Knowledge of the law legitimised action. It also suggested caution. For example, Kentish rioters who had taken the precaution of consulting an attorney’s clerk at Canterbury in the dearth of 1596 about the legality of their plan to stay grain had been told that they might, ‘soe they tooke noe weapon in hande nor did take any of it awaye’ – advice they were careful to heed when executing their design.119 Similarly, rioters in Norwich in 1532 who enforced a policy of taxation populaire in the town’s market-place – setting their own price on grain they had brought into the market and supervising its sale – were careful not to pocket the proceeds of their sale. They surrendered them to a local official, and when he, having second thoughts, returned the money to the rioters, they went to considerable lengths to return it to the owner of the confiscated grain. They did so because they knew, as one of them put it, that ‘iff she had put it in her purse it shuld have ben stolen’. An awareness of the sanctions of the criminal law was burned into the collective memory. Three to four years earlier, a riot against the export of grain from Yarmouth, Norwich’s coastal port, had got out of hand and ended in the execution of some of the rioters.120 The law, then, served as a pivot for the relationship between rulers and ruled in early modern England. Their differing responses to the threat to the social order (for the poor, the threat from dearth and depression, and for the authorities, their outcome in the feared disorder) were articulated around competing definitions of the uses and enforcement of the law. In the ambiguity of its definition and the flexibility of its enforcement, the law gave scope for popular initiative, while simultaneously limiting its ‘legitimate’ expression. If, therefore, the food riot demonstrated the early modern government’s well-

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Maldon and the crisis of 1629 known inability to control the economic order, it also provided an opportunity for authority to redress the balance with a convincing demonstration of its ability to defend the social order. But, it is important to remember, it was only able to do so in early seventeenth-century England because conflict prompted by more persistent social and economic tensions came to be resolved within the framework of the law, in an active and sometimes violent argument over the interpretation, intent and enforcement, but not (generally or collectively at least until the 1640s) the validity of existing laws.121 Why this should be so demands further investigation. Perhaps part of the answer is to be found in the fact that disorder also renewed the tradition of riot. It reminded the authorities of the crowd’s existence and re-emphasised their need to maintain the submission and obedience of the poor (but not inarticulate) by a return to a more active pursuit of measures designed to meet popular grievances. It is perhaps significant that the widespread grain riots prompted by the crisis of 1630–31 were noticeable by their absence in a previously troubled, but now actively governed Essex. NOTES 1 J. Gauden, Three Sermons Preached Upon Severall Publick Occasions (London, 1642), p. 68. 2 Sir Matthew Hale, Historia Placitorum Coronae [1678], Solomon Emlyn (ed.) (2 vols, 1736), vol. 1, p. 565. 3 Edward Thompson has done most to establish this, for a later period, in his important article, ‘The moral economy of the English crowd in the eighteenth century’, P&P, 50 (February 1971), pp. 76–136. 4 John Walter and Keith Wrightson, ‘Dearth and the social order in early modern England’, P&P, 71 (May 1976), 26–7. 5 S. R. Gardiner, History of England from the Accession of James I to the Outbreak of the Civil War 1603–1642 (10 vols, London, 1899), vol. 7, p. 84. 6 Essex Record Office, Chelmsford, hereafter ERO, D/B3/3/208, no. 14; Bodleian Library, Oxford, hereafter Bodl., MS, Firth, c. 4, p. 501. 7 Letters from a Lieutenancy Book OR The Cloth Trade in Essex, A.D. 1629, S. A. Warner (ed.) (Braintree, n.d.) thoroughly confuses the two incidents, as does W. A. Hunt, ‘The Godly and the Vulgar: Puritanism and Social Change in Seventeenth Century Essex, England’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1974), pp. 407–9. 8 B. E. Supple, Commercial Crisis and Change in England, 1600–1642 (Cambridge, 1964), pp. 99–112; see also pp. 43–4 of this chapter. 9 Acts of the Privy Council, hereafter APC, 1628–29, pp. 309–10. It has not been possible to recover a local grain prices series for Essex in this period, but prices were rising at another regional market, Cambridge, early in the year: J. E. Thorold Rogers, A History of Agriculture and Prices in England (7 vols, Oxford, 1887), vol. 6, pp. 40–1. In March, it was reported from Colchester that grain is ‘growen to a greate price in our m[ar]kett here’: Essex Record Office, Colchester, hereafter ERO(C), Morant MSS, D/Y 2/7, p. 247.i.

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Popular politics in early modern England 10 For example, APC, 1628–29, p. 170; ERO(C), Morant MSS, D/Y 2/7, p. 247; Public Record Office, London, hereafter PRO, E 178/5301. 11 PRO, State Papers (hereafter SP) 16/133/19.i. 12 Ibid. 13 APC, 1628–9, pp. 309–10. 14 There is no record of any prosecution of the riot at either quarter sessions or assizes (ERO, Q/SR 266–9; PRO, ASSI (PRO call number for Assize records) 35/70/3; 35/71/3). 15 J. S. Cockburn, A History of the English Assizes 1558–1714 (Cambridge, 1972), pp. 7–8, 58, 181; William Lambarde, Eirenarcha, or The Office of the Justice of Peace, in foure Bookes (1619 edn.), pp. 404–5ff.; William Lambarde and Local Government: His ‘Ephemeris’ and Twenty-nine Charges to Juries and Commissions, C. Read (ed.) (Ithaca, New York, 1962); The Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Magazine, 14 (1874), 208–16; Bibliotheca Lindesiana: A Bibliography of Royal Proclamations of the Tudor and Stuart Sovereigns, R. R. Steele (ed.) (2 vols, Oxford, 1910); Tudor Royal Proclamations, P. L. Hughes and J. F. Larkin (eds) (3 vols, New Haven CT, 1969). 16 ERO, D/B3/3/215 (file vouchers for payment to messengers bringing proclamations 1629); D/B3/1/19 (Maldon ‘Sessions Book 1606–1631’); D/B3/3/77; D/B3/1/3, fo. 39v (market regulations); D/B3/3/ 423, nos. 9, 10a and 10b (charge to special grain jury, 1608); D/B3/3/205, no. 32; /224 unno. (dearth orders, 1622/3). 17 ERO, D/B3/1/4, fo. 9v (Admiralty Record Book 1573–1638); D/B3/3/577, no. 1. 18 Although there are no jury lists for the period preceding the riots, Thomas Spearman was a member of the jury in 1638 and 1639 (ERO, D/B3/1/4, fos 12, 14, 17). 19 N. J. Williams, ‘The Maritime Trade of the East Anglian Ports, 1550–1590’ (D.Phil. dissertation, University of Oxford, 1952), pp. 2–3, 16, 22, 31–8, 42–3, 82; A. Hassell Smith, County and Court: Government and Politics in Norfolk, 1558–1603 (Oxford, 1974), pp. 18–19; PRO, SP 16/155/54; E 178/5301. 20 While only one licence was issued in January, twenty-six were issued in February and eighteen in March (APC, 1628–9, pp. 291–384); no proclamation prohibiting the export of grain was issued until 2 May (Bibliotheca Lindesiana, 1, p. 186). 21 ERO(C), Morant MSS, D/Y 2/7, p. 247; for Jacobs, see pp 37–8 of this chapter. 22 Maldon was at the best of times a clearing port for the trade in grain and other foodstuffs from its rural hinterland; for example, the port book for Maldon for 1628–29 shows a considerable shipment of grain to London (PRO, E 190/603/4). That little of this trade passed through the hands of Maldon men may have increased local discontent: W. J. Petchey, ‘The Borough of Maldon, 1500–1688: A Study in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Urban History’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Leicester, 1972), p. 96. 23 ERO, D/B3/3/208, no. 14 (the words within brackets are crossed through in the original). Ewers was described, in a 1624 note of ships and sailors belonging to Maldon, as a ‘seafaring man dwelling here age about 53 going to Newcastle’ and lived in the same parish as the suspected leader of the riot (ERO, D/B3/3/405, unno.; /167, unno.; /202, unno.). ‘Professional’ jealousy may have given an added edge to the complaints of Ewers and the other sailors, since few of the ships engaged in the grain trade were from Maldon (Petchey, ‘The Borough of Maldon’, p. 96).

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Maldon and the crisis of 1629 24 Dunkirkers were particularly unpopular on the east coast, since their privateering activities seriously disrupted trade with London and the continent (Supple, Commercial Crisis, p. 110; ERO, D/B3/1/19, fo. 269v – for an example of local hostility in 1629). 25 ERO, D/B3/3/208, no. 14. I am indebted to Dr W. J. Petchey for his help in identifying the location of Burrow Hills. 26 ERO, D/B3/3/208, no. 14 (the words in parentheses are crossed through in the original). 27 This particular expression of a common refrain comes from an earlier crisis (APC, 1597, p. 360). 28 ERO, D/B3/3/208, no. 14 (exam. Dorothy Berry). 29 See, for example, the comments of the commissioners appointed to improve the adjacent Tiptree Heath (PRO, SP 14/150/7; Bodl., MS, Firth, c. 4, pp. 489–90). 30 Dr Petchey argues that Maldon did not possess a large wage-earning artisan group and that poor-relief was not a special concern of the town’s governors (‘The Borough of Maldon’, pp. 35, 43–9). 31 ERO, D/B3/3/208, nos. 16, 21; D/DQs/134/8. In the 1610 subsidy, St Mary’s accounted for just under 15 per cent of the town’s assessment, the average contribution being between one-third and one-half of that in the other two parishes (D/B3/3/420, unno.). 32 ERO, D/B3/3/208, nos. 14, 20. 33 ERO, D/B3/1/19, fo. 262; D/B3/3/206, unno.; /293, unno.; D/B3/1/20, fo. 28. 34 ERO, D/B3/3/167, unno. (Jn. Berry ‘newe dweller’ October 1623); D/B3/1/19, fos. 216, 260 (shepherd 1626, April 1629), 262v. (labourer, May 1629); D/B3/3/198, unno.; /206, unno.; /381, unno. 35 ERO, D/P 132/1/1 (parish register St Mary’s: marriage Margaret Boyes, widow, to Geo. Williams (she had formerly married Abraham Boyes in 1612)); D/B3/3/198, unno.; /199 unno.; D/B3/1/19, fos 221v, 232v. 36 ERO, T/R 149/3, fo. 129v; D/B3/3/393, nos. 9–10; D/B3/1/19, fos 143, 156v, 178–9, 195r–v, 221–226v; D/B3/3/167, unno.; /392, no. 31. 37 ERO, D/B3/3/208, no. 32; D/B3/1/19, fos 244v, 258–258v. 38 ERO, D/B3/1/34, pages not numbered; /19, fos 246v, 248, 250; D/B3/3/208, no. 32 (exam. Mary Mansell [that the Carters’ servant was pregnant by her fellow servant may of course help to explain the uncertain terms of her employment]); /198, unno.; /199, unno.; D/B3/1/19, fos 288v–289; D/B3/3/422, no. 7. 39 For example, ERO, D/B3/3/198, unno. (Geo. Williams ‘foreigner’ trading in town; Jn. Berry keeping hoggs streets town); /167, unno.; /381, unno. (Jn. Carter unbaited bull and failure scour ditches); /198, unno.; /266, unno.; /381, unno.; (Jn. & Dorothy Berry and Ann Carter forestalling fish); /167, unno.; /198, unno.; /206, unno. (failure work highways: Thos. Spearman 1622, 1623; Jn. Carter 1623, 1630; Geo. Williams 1629, 1630); D/ B3/1/19, fo. 216 (Jn. Berry unlawful victualling), fos 246v, 248, 250 (Jn. Carter alehouse haunting); /20, fo. 28 (Thos. Spearman drunkenness); D/B3/3/167, unno.; /198, unno.; /393, no. II (absence church Sam. Sturgeon 1621, Ann Carter 1623, Jn. Carter 1629–31). 40 ERO, D/B3/1/19, fo. 32v; D/B3/3/474, no. 8; D/B3/1/19, fos 105, 112, 265; /33, fo. 184v.; D/B3/3/198, unno.; /208, no. 27; cf. /177, unno. (assault by Jn. and Dorothy Berry in the market 1641).

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Popular politics in early modern England 41 Petchey, ‘The Borough of Maldon’, pp. 170–4, 244–6; ERO, D/B3/3/397, no. 18; /423, no. 1. 42 None of the rioters’ husbands appear in the annual list of freemen entered at the Courts of Election in the period (ERO, D/B3/1/19 passim; all appear in various lists of decenners (member of a tithing minor borough office type of jury) one of the qualifications for which was to be ‘no freeman’, e.g. D/B3/3/167, unno.; /198, unno.; /206, unno. 43 For the estimate of Maldon’s population, see Petchey, ‘The Borough of Maldon’, p. 51. 44 ERO, D/B3/3/198, unno.; /199, no. 6; /208, no. 23;/298, m. 9 (Chamberlains’ accounts 1629, payment for making new stocks in St Mary’s parish). Dorothy Berry was again in trouble for drunkenness in 1638 (/177, unno.). 45 ERO, D/B3/3/167, unno.; D/B3/1/19, fos 154, 158, 182; D/B3/3/392, no. 31. The sergeant at mace had his revenge: in 1629 he was among those who escorted Ann Carter to her trial and execution (/298, m. 11). 46 ERO, D/B3/3/198, unno.; /206, unno. As if to express their anger, neither Ann Carter nor Dorothy Berry appeared at Easter quarter sessions to answer this charge against them (/426, unno.). 47 ERO, D/B3/3/298, mm. 9–10; /407, unno. 48 ERO, D/B3/3/479, no. 1. 49 ERO, D/B3/3/298, m. 9. 50 N. S. B. Gras, The Evolution of the English Corn Market from the Twelfth to the Eighteenth Centuries (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1915), pp. 194–5; P. V. McGrath, ‘The Marketing of Food, Fodder and Livestock in the London Area in the Seventeenth Century’ (MA dissertation, University of London, 1948), p. 124; Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, hereafter CSPD, 1627–8, p. 50; CSPD, 1629–31, p. 203; APC, 1628–9, pp. 146–7, 215, 240–1, 246, 328; APC, 1629–30, pp. 296, 299, 300. 51 ERO, D/B3/1/19, fo. 260; D/B3/3/298, m. 10; /426, unno.; Q/SR 266. 52 ERO, D/B3/3/198, unno.; /208, no. 14. The inclusion of John Carter is interesting. Since none of the other husbands were required to attend, it perhaps suggests a suspicion on the part of the authorities that he was somehow implicated in the riot. He does not, however, appear among those examined. 53 ERO, D/B3/3/208, nos. 14–16. 54 ERO, D/B3/3/208, nos. 19, 20; D/B3/1/19, fos 262–262v. Samuel Sturgeon’s place was taken by Lambert Topliffe, a long-serving member of the Corporation and a senior headburgess. However, he also had fallen into debt and was removed from office at the end of 1629, ‘being greatlie indebted and whose service the howse the former yere hath altogether wanted’ (D/B3/1/19, fos Iff, 253v., 255v., 264, 269v.; D/B3/3/ 198, unno.; /217, unno. The co-sureties for all four other husbands were drawn from the ranks of their fellow artisans. 55 ERO, D/B3/3/208, no. 19; the note of Ann Spearman’s recognisance in the Sessions Book, however, makes no reference to the Privy Council (D/B3/19, fo. 262). 56 ERO, D/B3/19, fo. 265. 57 Ibid., fos 265, 267. It is, perhaps, an interesting comment on the immunity that could be enjoyed by members of the early modern crowd that, while no action was ultimately taken against Dorothy Berry for her part in the seemingly more serious crime of riot, she

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Maldon and the crisis of 1629 had in the midst of these proceedings been stocked for her drunkenness (D/B3/208, no. 23). 58 Maldon’s magistrates set no more than the usual guard of six men at the annual fair held just two days after the riot (ERO, D/B3/298, m. 9; cf. /297, unno.). 59 Thompson, ‘The moral economy’, p. 116. 60 As, for example, is suggested by Natalie Zemon Davis in her essay, ‘Women on top’, in N. Z. Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, California, 1975), p. 147. 61 Lambarde, Eirenarcha, p. 180; M. Dalton, The Countrey Justice, Containing the practise of the Justices of the Peace out of their Sessions (1622 edn.), p. 205. 62 PRO, STAC (PRO call number for Star Chamber) 8/223/7. I hope to deal more fully with the fascinating subject of women and riot elsewhere. 63 In 1631, the justices of Dengie hundred informed the Privy Council that it was customary to send grain to London by sea, since it was often difficult to transport it to Maldon by road (Petchey, ‘The Borough of Maldon’, p. 96). 64 Calendar of State Papers, Venetian, hereafter CSPV, 1629–32, pp. 7–8. 65 Both licences were issued in April, none in May (APC, 1628–29, 1629–30). 66 It may be significant that none of Maldon’s inhabitants appears to have joined Ann Carter in the second riot and that no grain riots were recorded to have taken place there in later years of distress in the period. 67 Supple, Commercial Crisis, pp. 6, 12, 102–9, 158; Gardiner, History of England, vol. 7, pp. 82–5; CSPV, 1629–32, pp. 7–8; J. E. Pilgrim, ‘The rise of the new draperies’, University of Birmingham Historical Journal, 7 (1959), pp. 55, 58; F. Hull, ‘Agriculture and Rural Society in Essex, 1560–1640’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of London, 1950), pp. 79, 471–2, 479–83; Bodl., MS, Firth, c. 4, pp. 486–7; ERO, D/DEb/7/1 and 3. 68 Bodl., MS, Firth, c. 4, pp. 488–91. 69 ERO, Q/SR 266/120; Bodl., MS, Firth, c. 4, pp. 486–7, 490. 70 Hull, ‘Agriculture and rural society’, pp. 471–2, 479–80; Bodl., MS, Firth, c. 4, pp. 486– 7, 491, 494–5; ERO, Q/SR 266/121; CSPV, 1629–32, p. 7. 71 ERO, Q/SR 266/121; Bodl., MS, Firth, c. 4, pp. 484–5. 72 Bodl., MS, Firth, c. 4, pp. 484–5 (the date of this letter is wrongly transcribed as the 15th: see the original, PRO, SP 16/141/1). 73 Bodl., MS, Firth, c. 4, pp. 489, 490; cf. PRO, SP 16/141/16. 74 Bodl., MS, Firth, c. 4, pp. 485–6. 75 APC, 1628–29, p. 416; Bodl., MS, Firth, c. 4, pp. 493–4; APC, 1629–1630, pp. 4–5. The minutes of Braintree’s remarkably efficient select vestry contain little reference to the provision of employment or extraordinary relief, besides the symbolic assignment of fines (at the overseers’ discretion) to the ‘poore weavers and keamers’ (Essex RO D/P 264/8/3, fo. 58v). Unfortunately, the accounts of the overseers for the poor do not begin before 1630. 76 APC, 1629–30, p. 5. 77 APC, 1628–29, p. 416; Bodl., MS, Firth, c. 4, p. 494; APC, 1629–30, p. 4. 78 Bodl., MS, Firth, c. 4, pp. 494–5.

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Popular politics in early modern England 79 Ibid., pp. 495–6. 80 Ibid., pp. 499–500; Bibliotheca Lindesiana, 1, p. 186. 81 APC, 1629–30, p. 23. By contrast, a letter from the minister of Braintree written two days earlier noted, ‘the stopp of trade hath bredde much distraction and confusion in our country w[hi]ch for any course that hitherto hath bin taken is like rather to increase then otherwise’ (PRO, SP 16/142/113). 82 Although examinations were taken of the rioters – there is a reference in Maldon’s records to payment to two men ‘for attendinge on the persons examined before his Ma[ jest]ies Justices here touching the matter of Ryotts comitted at Burrow hills’ (ERO, D/B3/3/298, m. 11) – these have not survived. The following description of the May riot is drawn from the report of the authorities who suppressed the riot and a later account of the rioters’ trial. 83 Bodl., MS, Firth, c. 4, pp. 501, 503–4; ERO, D/B3/3/298, m. 11; /157, unno. (references to the charges at Maldon of keeping ‘the mutenes peopell that were kept in presion here’). Dr Hunt, ‘The Godly and the Vulgar’, p. 487 (and drawn upon by N. Z. Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France, p. 148), suggests that men dressed as women were present in the crowd. I have found no evidence of this; the reference there cited refers to the March riot and does not suggest the presence of a transvestite element in that particular disorder. 84 F. G. Emmison, Elizabethan Life: Disorder (Chelmsford, 1970), pp. 62–4; PRO, SP 14/137/13; APC, 1621–33, pp. 371–2, 376. It was, for example, reported of Bocking: ‘That towne abound[s] with poore, whereof many are very unrulie, and havinge noe employment will make the place verie hazardous for men of better Ranke to liue amongst them’ (Bodl., MS, Firth, c. 4, p. 490). 85 Bodl., MS, Firth, c. 4, pp. 494–5, 504–5; ERO, D/B3/3/298, m. 11. 86 Bodl., MS, Firth, c. 4, pp. 503–4. The copyist clearly had difficulty in transcribing this letter. He gives the name of the woman as ‘Agnes Carke, a woman of Maldon’, but other evidence makes it clear that it was in fact Ann Carter, e.g. ERO, D/B3/3/198, unno. 87 ERO, DB3/1/34, not fol. (Ann Carter signs with a mark); John Gardner was a recent freeman who stood surety for Ann Carter after the first riot. He too seems to have fallen on hard times, being later presented as an inmate in 1629, and failed repeatedly to attend the court of election (ERO, D/B3/1/19, fos 253v, 271, 285; /20, fo. 5; D/B3/3/198, unno.; /208, no. 20). 88 T. Birch, The Court and Times of Charles the First, R. F. Williams (ed.) (2 vols, 1848), vol. 1, p. 17. The Maldon authorities had perhaps learnt their lesson: they posted a guard on the bridge leading to Burrow Hills (ERO, D/B3/3/298, m.11). 89 Bodl., MS, Firth, c. 4, pp. 501, 503. The coastal port book for Maldon does in fact contain an entry for ‘the Providence of Hull. … versus Hull’ in which a William Gamble had loaded 160 quarters of rye (PRO, E 190/603/4, pages not numbered). 90 Williams, ‘The Maritime Trade’, pp. 2–3, 16, 22, 31, 35; PRO, SP 16/155/54 (memorandum on the corruption of officials in the outports). Corruption at the nearby port of Colchester in 1629 was later the subject of an inquiry (PRO, E 178/5301). 91 Bibliotheca Lindesiana, 1, p. 186; ERO, D/B3/3/215, unno.; /554, unno. (vouchers for payment messengers bringing proclamations ‘against transportac[i]on of Corne’ to Maldon).

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Maldon and the crisis of 1629 92 Walter and Wrightson, ‘Dearth and the social order’. 93 ERO, T/A 465/1, not fol. The evidence available does not suggest the number involved or the precise form that their action took. Eleven people were mentioned in the examinations: four men, six women and one boy. They appear to have taken grain off the cart of a Suffolk yeoman as it went through the streets of the town. Two of the women cut the bottom of the sacks and allowed the grain to spill out, probably as the cart ran along the streets. Women and child then seem to have gathered up small amounts of the spilled grain, while several men took sacks of grain off the cart, some of which was then placed in one of the weavers’ houses. 94 Bodl., MS, Firth, c. 4, pp. 495, 499. 95 Ibid., p. 509. 96 Walter and Wrightson, ‘Dearth and the social order’, 36–42. 97 Bodl., MS, Firth, c. 4, p. 501. 98 PRO, ASSI 35/71/3/97. Cousen was ordered to be whipped and sent to the house of correction for a week; a year later he was again in trouble at both quarter sessions and assizes (ASSI 35/73/1/70; ERO, Q/SR 273/76). 99 For example, ERO, Q/SR 266/120; cf. Bodl., MS, Firth, c. 4, p. 505. 100 PRO, SP 16/142/113. 101 APC, 1629–30, p. 25. Contrast the Venetian ambassador’s reference to the disorder made just two days later: ‘the poor are in distress from lack of employment, and we hear of some slight riots’ (CSPV, 1629–32, p. 67). 102 APC, 1629–30, pp. 24–5. 103 PRO, C/181/4, fo. 1v. 104 ERO, D/B3/3/208, no. 21; /298, m. 11; Bodl., MS, Firth, c. 4, pp. 503–4. 105 Ibid. A reference in a list of prisoners in Colchester gaol to one John Braynwood, committed ‘from the last sp[ec]iall sessions’, may relate to the trial, but I have been unable to find any further reference to Braynwood that would confirm this (PRO, ASSI 35/71/3/97). 106 Bodl., MS, Firth, c. 4, pp. 503–4; in another report of the trial, Sir George Gresley comments on the severity of the rioters’ sentences (Birch, The Court and Times of Charles the First, vol. 1, p. 17). 107 Bodl., MS, Firth, c. 4, pp. 503–4 (my emphasis). 108 ERO, D/B3/3/208, no. 25. James Brownsward, who was himself several times in trouble with Maldon’s authorities in 1629, lived in the same parish as the Carters and was among those prosecuted with Ann Carter and Dorothy Berry for earlier forestalling fish, D/B3/3/198, unno.; PRO, SP 16/92/85. iv. 109 Bodl., MS, Firth, c. 4, p. 504. 110 Ibid., pp. 504–5. 111 Ibid., pp. 504. 112 Ibid., pp. 507, 508; CSPD, 1629–31, p. 20. 113 Walter and Wrightson, ‘Dearth and the social order’, 37–8; PRO, SP 16/177/32.

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Popular politics in early modern England 114 Bodl., MS, Firth, c. 4, p. 504. 115 Ibid., pp. 509–11. 116 PRO, SP 16/186/62 (I am indebted for this reference – and many other kindnesses – to Mr Arthur Searle, formerly of the ERO). The justice, Sir Thomas Barrington, had been a member of the commission that tried the 1629 rioters (PRO, C/181/4, fo. 1v). 117 ERO, D/Deb 7/4. 118 ERO, D/Deb/7/1–17. 119 CKS, QM/SB 82 (the rioters contented themselves with preventing the grain from leaving the city); P. Clark and P. Slack, Crisis and Order in English Towns 1500–1700 (London, 1972), pp. 152–3. 120 W. Hudson and J. C. Tingey (eds), The Records of the City of Norwich (2 vols, Norwich, 1910), vol. 2, pp. 164–5; F. Blomefield, An Essay Towards a Topographical History of the County of Norfolk Containing the History of the City of Norwich (Norwich, 1745), p. 142. 121 Despite the seditious mutterings of individuals, there appears to have been no concerted critique of the law. The political agitation of the 1640s, however, seems to have had a marked effect on the rhetoric of the poor. A remarkable petition from Wiltshire’s poor in 1648, explicitly attacking the self-interest of their governors which prevented them from regulating the market, asked, ‘that all p[ar]tiallitie may bee abandoned, whereby equity may take place yt soe wee may not be affamished through Colour of Justice’ (Wiltshire Record Office, Trowbridge, hereafter WRO QS/GR/H 1648, unno.).

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Chapter 3

. The geography of food riots, 1585–16491

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rbanisation, regional specialisation and market integration were the larger changes against which disorder was directed in this period. Dearth, occasioned by the recurrent crisis of harvest failure and trade depression, exposed the weak points and tensions that these changes had created. The government’s continued public endorsement of traditional economic suppositions and popular condemnation of changes in marketing practice were sources of legitimation for the crowd’s actions. Since the central government kept an anxious watch on outbreaks of disorder in conditions of scarcity, its records provide a reasonably accurate indication of the chronology and topography of the food riot. These records have been supplemented by, and checked against, a systematic search of central legal and local records. Any attempt to quantify or map the incidence of food riots is beset with difficulties which demand some discussion.2 A dependence on legal records poses familiar problems. The assumption that such riots would be reported and prosecuted may not be warranted by our growing knowledge of the delicacy with which the authorities might handle popular grievances in the crisis of harvest failure. If prosecuted, there is no guarantee that the formalising process of legal indictment may have produced evidence recognisable to the researcher as a food riot. Only the chance survival of other records reveals that the indictment of a man and woman for theft of grain on the highway in Somerset in 1630 relates to an action of a crowd over a hundred strong. A recent definition of collective protest by counting of heads (ten or more people) would have excluded this case. Excluded from consideration here are a handful of incidents which require discussion at greater length, because the evidence suggests that the legal charge of ‘riot’ did not refer to acts of collective protest. Official reports of disorder present other problems. Those in authority too readily translated the threat of disorder into its occurrence, but, on occasion,

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Popular politics in early modern England reports also make it clear that crowds might assemble over a number of days (‘daily flocke togeather’). Any numbers cited here therefore must be regarded as minima. Most critically, the emphasis on riot misses the more complex processes by which popular grievances over food might be expressed. While this national survey is still in progress at a local level, and despite the difficulties noted, it is possible to offer a preliminary indication of the patterning of food riots between 1585 and 1649. 1585–1607 In this period, there were some twenty incidents of disorder recorded: three, possibly four, in 1586; five in 1595; two in 1596; five in 1597; and five in 1605. These occurred in the counties of Somerset, Gloucestershire, Wiltshire, Hampshire, Kent, Sussex, Cambridgeshire, Norfolk and Essex. In 1586, disorder was concentrated in the West Country, signalling an association that was to persist throughout the period. Crowds, 500–600 strong, in which clothworkers almost certainly predominated, twice attacked the barges moving grain down the Severn. In addition, there were otherwise unsubstantiated reports of riots in Cornwall and other western shires. Depression in the textile trade and a preceding poor harvest seem to have lain at the root of the disorder. The bad harvests of the 1590s brought more widespread disorder. In May 1595, women at Wye in Kent attacked and took grain from a yeoman, reportedly among those taking supplies to market. On consecutive days in June, London apprentices enforced a policy of ‘taxation populaire’ on fish and butter. This policy seems also to have been the intention of the Kentish rioters. In October, crowds in Wiltshire were reported to have seized grain from badgers (grain-dealers) moving it from Warminster, the region’s largest grain market, and similar disorder has been recorded for Basingstoke in the same year. Despite worsening harvests and evidence of widespread discontent, only two riots have been recovered for 1596: in February, rioters at Canterbury stayed carts carrying grain that they believed was destined for export, while, in November, labourers’ wives at Navestock in Essex took grain probably destined for the London market. In 1597, there were several riots in Norfolk aimed at preventing the shipping of grain; further disorder was reported on the Kent/Sussex borders, and in the West Country where those collecting grain for Bristol were attacked. Thereafter, the restoration of the harvest equilibrium saw a diminution in disorder. In 1600 at Shepton Mallet, Somerset, there were, however, localised riots against the activities of London merchants’ deputies purchasing grain for the army in Ireland. There were also riots in 1605 in Kent and possibly Wisbech, against the export of grain. Both cases should caution against an overly deterministic model for rioting.

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The geography of food riots, 1587–1649 1608–39 In this period, evidence has been recovered for some forty or more riots: one, possibly two, in 1608; four in 1614, one in 1618; six in 1622; ten in 1629; five in 1630; and fifteen in 1631. The counties of Somerset, Wiltshire, Hampshire, Berkshire, Kent, Sussex, Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk, Hertfordshire and Leicestershire were all the scene of protests. The dearth of 1608 brought only limited disorder. At Southampton, a crowd of women proved over-enthusiastic allies for the town’s magistracy: forcibly unloading a ship destined for London, whose cargo of grain the Corporation had ordered stayed. The poor harvest may also have occasioned disorder in Somerset and Northamptonshire. An indictment of two women in the Somerset quarter sessions, for taking grain and sacks with force, may conceal evidence of crowd action, as may a reference to ‘some stirring of the poor people’ in Northamptonshire’s markets. Disorder was similarly confined in 1614, this time to the single county of Wiltshire. The ‘poor craftsmen’ of that county, having complained to the King of the unrestrained activities of middlemen in their markets, attempted their own reformation. Crowds, twenty to sixty in number, assaulted the carriers, confiscated their grain and, interestingly, deposited it with local officials. In 1622, depression in the textile industry again involved Wiltshire, but extended the disorder more generally. In Wiltshire, riots took the now familiar form of crowds of unemployed clothworkers attacking those taking grain from the county’s markets. Similar disorder, involving crowds up to 500 strong, was reported from the textile area of East Somerset. Protests threatened but were not realised in Gloucestershire, while they did take place on the Essex/Suffolk border in the area of the New Draperies. Disorder at Dover, provoked by the export of grain, provides the one exception to this series of disturbances involving textile workers. A deadly combination of trade depression and harvest failure (1630) brought a notable increase in disorder in the period 1629–31. In 1629, there was disorder in Somerset and Essex, occasioned by a shared grievance: the export of grain. The example of Essex suggests that though disorder might be limited geographically and restricted to short periods of time, by its very nature it could appear to pose a considerable threat. In January, there was a flurry of riots in south-east Essex, in which bands of men and women attacked those moving grain down to the Thames for export. In March, and again in May, crowds composed respectively of women and clothworkers, rioted against the shipment of grain and, in the meantime, there had been disorder at Colchester. In Somerset, rioters at Langport in April and Gregorystoke in May, attacked the movement of grain downstream to be shipped from Bridgwater. On the latter occasion, they returned the grain to its point of departure and informed a local justice of their suspicions that it was being exported

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Popular politics in early modern England contrary to a recent proclamation. Another group of men and women were also indicted for a riot and the taking of grain in Somerset some time before July. Some uncertainty surrounds this riot. By place, residence and date it might more correctly be related to the May riot. The disastrous harvest of 1630 initiated a period of extended disorder. In November 1630, there were riots at Newbury (Berkshire), in Somerset, Wiltshire and Kent, all directed against the movement of grain out of the local, depressed economy. Rioters near Bath, for example, attacked badgers carrying grain to Bristol, and publicly stated their intention to stop all such traffic in Somerset. While the West Country was quiet in 1631, there were a further series of riots with similar grievances and objectives at Woodchurch, Milton and Sittingbourne, Canterbury, Whitstable, Herne, Cranbrook and Faversham in Kent; at Shoreham in Sussex; in Hertfordshire; around Basingstoke, Sherfield and Heckfield in Hampshire; and at Reading. In the latter town, the collapse of the local textile industry gave the poor’s complaints an added edge. 1640–49 Despite the problems of evidence during this period, what has been recovered seems to indicate a narrowing of the geographical focus of disorder. Evidence has so far been found for some fourteen incidents of disorder – two in 1643, five in 1647, seven in 1648 and two in 1649. The early 1640s saw little disorder. In 1643, rioters at Harwich prevented the shipment of grain, and at Melksham in Wiltshire the movement of grain to Somerset again provoked disorder. By contrast, the disastrous harvests of the late 1640s were marked by renewed disorder. For the most part, however, this appears to have been concentrated in the Wiltshire and Somerset cloth districts. In 1647–49 there were a series of riots in the area between the forest of Frome Selwood and Warminster, and in the triangle between Warminster, Trowbridge and Devizes, in which crowds of clothworkers and probably artisans attacked those attempting to move grain from Wiltshire’s markets to Bristol and elsewhere in Somerset. The only exceptions to this geographical narrowing were possible riots in Sussex and the North Riding of Yorkshire and the disorder at Wickham in Cambridgeshire in September 1649. In the latter settlement, a crowd of 200 took grain under the notion of ‘toll corn for the use of the poor’. Thereafter, the record is silent for the 1650s. II While continuing research might be expected to yield further examples and throw light on some of the dark corners of the land, it is already possible to offer a preliminary explanation for the spatial distribution of the food

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The geography of food riots, 1587–1649 riot in this period. Though all smaller urban and proto-industrial centres throughout the realm might have been vulnerable, grain riots appear to have been geographically limited in their incidence as well as confined, for the most part, to years of crisis. Despite patchy record survival, there appear to have been areas where the food riot was noticeably absent. It does not seem to have been a familiar feature in the northern uplands or, for that matter, over much of the north, and possibly not even in the region’s urban centres. There was no simple and necessary relationship between distress and disorder. Cumberland and Westmorland, for example, experienced classic crises of subsistence, but as yet no food riots have been discovered there. More local research is needed to confirm or qualify this conclusion, but evidence so far suggests that this pattern of popular quiescence may also have been found in Cheshire and southern Lancashire. In the Midlands, discontent was equally marked by its absence. The region did not have either large-scale movement of grain or an extensive rural industry, and in accordance with a popular concern with enclosure, disorder took on a different form. Finally, there were the larger urban centres, which combined a sophisticated administrative structure with potential access to reserves of grain and capital, and whose wants the government took care to satisfy, even at the risk of occasioning disorder elsewhere. Only one food riot has so far been found for London in the period and it may be significant that that concerned les denrées de seconde zone, fish and butter. It was in settlements within or bordering upon the traditional arable regions, which in normal years produced surpluses that went to feed other areas (notably the larger towns), that grain riots were most likely to occur. This was true above all of the area which fed London. Riots in Essex, Kent, Sussex, Hertfordshire, Hampshire, the Thames Valley and probably Norfolk, can be shown to have been commonly provoked by the siphoning off of local grain supplies to meet metropolitan demand. Similarly, Bristol’s voracious appetite helps to explain the other noticeable clustering of riots in the west. Urban demand, however, provides only a partial explanation of the exact topography of the food riot. Disorder was most likely at the two weakest points in an as yet immature marketing structure. The first of these was the small market and/or industrial centre, whose prime economic function in the developing market network was no longer simply to serve as a distributive centre for its immediate region, but increasingly to bulk grain from its rural hinterland, thus easing its passage to the larger urban centres. Newbury, where rioters attacked grain carts bound for Reading in 1630, was one of the few grain markets in Berkshire. Reading, the scene of disorder in the following year, was an important entrepôt for the London grain trade. Canterbury acted as a funnel through which downland grain was channelled, while, in Essex, Maldon increasingly served as a clearing port for its rural hinterland. It was at this level of urban development that grain riots were most likely. Though

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Popular politics in early modern England their levels of poverty were shared by the larger towns, their narrow employment base; lack of financial resources or administrative sophistication; and the central government’s relative indifference to their fate, meant that they were particularly vulnerable. The other flashpoint was in the countryside, in areas of proto-industrialisation. As Professor Everitt has reminded us, the progress of commercial agriculture was by no means uniform in this period. Grain moving from areas of surplus to urban centres often had to pass through regions that were equally dependent upon imported corn, but which, in conditions of dearth or depression, could not compete with urban demand. These were the heavily populated, corn-deficient, pastoral woodland areas, all too often dependent on the vagaries of a volatile textile industry. One reason why Bristol’s demand prompted so much disorder in the West Country was that grain had to be brought from the region’s largest granary, Warminster, along a route traversing the densely populated, corn-deficient cloth districts of Wiltshire and East Somerset, while that brought down the Severn ran the gauntlet of the Forest of Dean on one side and the Gloucestershire cloth district on the other. Riots in Essex (1629), Somerset (1630) and Hampshire (1631) occurred in similar woodland or fen locations. Moreover, these were areas where the absence of a resident magistracy may have made popular action not only easier but all the more necessary in the eyes of the poor. It was the development of a market network increasingly co-ordinated by metropolitan demand – and the movement of grain that this necessitated – to which riots were addressed. The period considered here registered one significant change in the spatial distribution of riots. If the map for the 1640s is substantially accurate, then it indicates the disappearance of disorder from at least one of the capital’s major provisioning areas – Kent. After this period, the abandonment of a centrally backed policy of policing grain supplies, and the accelerated growth of a harvest-sensitive population were to explain the increase in both the numbers and geographical spread of crowd actions over food. NOTES 1 The commentary is based on the author’s doctoral research carried out while he was at the University of Cambridge. Because of their number and detail, footnotes have had to be excluded. 2 To assist the reader to interpret what follows, I have restored this paragraph, whose substance was previously incorporated into the general introduction to the volume in which this essay appeared.

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Chapter 4

. A ‘rising of the people’? The Oxfordshire rising of 1596

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lizabeth I, on a progress through Oxfordshire in 1592, visited Sir Henry Lee, one of her favourites, at his house at Ditchley. To greet her, her former champion and master of ceremonies at the accession-day tilts staged an elaborate entertainment of chivalric romance lasting two days. At its conclusion, Loricus (Lee), a knight-hermit, made Elizabeth a mock conveyance of ‘The Whole Mannor of Love’. Among the amorous appurtenances of this transfer were: Woods of hie attemptes, Groves of humble service, Meddowes of greene thoughtes, Pastures of feeding fancies.1

Four years later, Lee’s less-fanciful pastures conjured up darker plebeian fantasies. Ditchley was a deserted village and its owner owed much of his wealth to the profits of pasture. In 1596 it was to be included in the very difficult progress proposed by Bartholomew Steer, a carpenter and choreographer of the Oxfordshire rising: after their rising they would goe to Mr Poers, and knock at the gate, and keepe him fast that opened the dore, and sodainly thrust in, And ... he with his ffawchion would Cutt of their heads, and would not bestowe a halter on them, And then they would goe to Mr Berries and spoill him and Cutt of his heade, and his daughters’ heads, And from thens they would have gonne to Rabons howse a yeoman & spoiled him likewise, and from thens to Mr George Whitton and spoille him, And thens to Sir Henry Lea and spoile him likewise, and thens to Sir William Spencer & spoille him, And so to Mr ffrere, and so to my Lord Norreis, and so to London.2

Whatever the unresolved symbolism of the Ditchley portrait (reputedly painted

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Popular politics in early modern England to commemorate the royal visit) depicting Elizabeth standing on a map of England dispelling heavenly storms, events in north Oxfordshire in 1596 were to suggest that Ditchley was not a happy spot upon which to place Astraea’s feet.3 II In 1596, England was facing a third year of harvest failure. On the eve of the harvest, a correspondent confided to Burghley, ‘I greatly feare that this yeere wylbe the hardeste yeare for the poore people, that hath happened in anie man’s memory’. Successive years of dearth had bred fears of popular disorder on a scale comparable to that which had leapt across Europe in the climacteric of the 1590s. In October 1596, the Earl of Bath wrote to the Privy Council of the need for the gentry to return to their estates, ‘to be at hand to stay the fury of the inferior multitude if they should happen to break out in sudden outcry for want of relief, as without good circumspection many suspect they may and will do’.4 Surviving records would seem at first sight to confirm the realisation of such fears. Cases of sedition and rumours of (intended) disorder abound. At Norwich in 1595, the magistrates were the recipients of an anonymous letter which warned that ‘some barbarous and unmerciful soldier shall lay open your hedges, reap your fields, rifle your coffers and level your houses to the ground’. The letter began by toasting the queen, but ended with that ominous observation, ‘Necessity hath no law’. In Essex in the same year complaint was made, ‘that yf victualls did not growe better cheape some wolde be plucked owte of their howses’. The following year an Essex weaver told a large crowd, ‘that it would never be better untill men did rise & seeke thereby an amendment and wished in his harte a hundred men would rise and he would be their captain to cut the throates of the rich Churles & the Rich Cornemongers’. In Somerset, it was said that ‘before the yeare went aboute ther wold be old thresshing owt of mowes & Cuttynge of throatts’.5 The discovery of plots gave rise to fears that the decade would see the revival of the popular mid-century sport of ‘camping’. In Kent in February 1596, the idea had been mooted of staging a camp to settle scores with farmers and hoarders of grain. The conspirators had talked of petitioning authority, but the intended timing of such an appeal on the eve of Shrove Tuesday, a day of popular licence, was ominous. In Norfolk, there was an even more chilling echo of 1549, in the prophecy that there should be ‘suche as Kettes Campe was & ther men shold fytt [fight] for corne’.6 The outbreak of disorder seemed to give substance to these fears. In 1595, food rioters made unwelcome appearances in both the south-east and the south-west, in Kent (at the same time as the proposed camp) and in Essex in

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The Oxfordshire rising of 1596 1596. In 1597, there were further food riots in the West Country, in East Anglia and on the Kent and Sussex border. Rioters in Somerset who levied a toll on those taking grain from the markets were reported to swear, ‘that they were as good be slayne in the markett place as starve yn ther own howses’.7 Most alarming of all, London in 1595 experienced disorder detonated by two apprentice-led food riots. Punishment of the rioters prompted some apprentices to plot with disbanded soldiers to seize armour, free those imprisoned, and kill the mayor. Their execution did little to stem the litter of libels and ballads which exposed a dangerous vein of popular discontent within the capital.8 Riot metamorphosed fear into fact. Fact dissolved into fantasy. In confirming popular threats, riot hinted at the darker nightmare of popular rebellion. This was the fear which gnawed at government and gentry in 1596. For some historians, the equation between crisis and rebellion has been axiomatic. E. M. Leonard observed that: during the years from 1594 to 1597 there was a great dearth of corn and the price of corn rose in some cases to four or five times the average price of the preceding years. There were rebellions in many parts of the country and great distress in all.

Her analysis has scarcely been challenged; it has become the commonplace of both monograph and textbook.9 Identifying the locus of rebellion has, however, proved more difficult. When the generally small-scale and scattered riots have been discounted, only the Oxfordshire rising remains to substantiate the thesis of rebellion in the 1590s. But does it? Despite the fact that the rising serves as the linchpin in the equation between crisis and disorder, we lack a full study. Frequently employed as a footnote by those who have derived their evidence second-hand from a (sometimes slipshod) reading of the calendar to the main source, the scale and nature of the rising remain vague or, more disturbingly, seriously exaggerated. On occasion, even date and year vary.10 For some, the rising merits a description (‘actual insurrection’, ‘minor rising’) which implies large-scale disorder. Others refer to it as a riot or riots or, more ambiguously, cloak its nature by reference to disturbances in Oxfordshire.11 A consistent description is hard to find. What in Christopher Hill’s earlier and later work was described as ‘an abortive rising’ (probably the best description) was, in the interim, promoted to the status of ‘a minor rising’. Tawney, who recognised the rising’s failure to materialise, subsequently referred to ‘riots in Oxfordshire against enclosure’.12 Such differences, it might be argued, are no more than semantic. The varying descriptions are a further instance of historians’ often indiscriminate labelling of forms of popular political activity. But, in this case, most of the proffered labels do serious injury to the reality of events in Oxfordshire in 1596. The scale – let alone shape – of the rising is seldom examined. Most accounts suggest a serious level of disorder; some indicate a crowd numbered

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Popular politics in early modern England in hundreds.13 But, as the rising’s putative leader, Bartholomew Steer, subsequently confessed: at the time appointed [he with] Thomas Horne and Burton went to Enslow hill ... and mett [one] Bompass there who said that he knewe at Kyrtleton half a Score of good fellows that he could straighte fetche to ioyne with them, And they staied from Nyne of the clocke in the night when they first mett, untill eleven of the clock in the same night, expecting for Companie and for that none Came they departed.

‘Rising’ or ‘riot’, with their implicit association with open and active resistance to authority, seem scarcely appropriate descriptions for a clandestine gathering of less than a handful of conspirators that disbanded for lack of support. Events in Oxfordshire in 1596 were, in the words of a French historian of the crisis of the 1590s, ‘la tentative de soulèvement paysan’. They seem scarcely to merit their inclusion in a recent roll-call of peasant revolts in early modern Europe.14 The Oxfordshire rising would appear at first glance a crumbling cornerstone upon which to elaborate an argument for the association between distress and disorder in the crisis of the 1590s. But the rising is more than a story of might-have-beens. It had important consequences. It offers valuable insights into the nature of social and political relationships in early modern society. An alarmed government’s response to the discovery of the conspiracy was to instigate a vigorous judicial inquiry which culminated in convictions for treason for conspiring to levy war against the Crown. The government’s pursuit and prosecution of the conspirators provides valuable evidence from opposite ends of the political and social spectrum of contemporaries’ perception of the crisis. In particular, detailed interrogations make it possible to examine how the poor perceived, interpreted and sought to respond to change in their society. Married with the local evidence, these records permit a study of the rising in context. But while this offers a corrective to the weight placed on a misreading of the evidence, it poses its own paradox. Local evidence tends to confirm the correctness of the conspirators’ diagnosis of change in terms of enclosure; the judicial records reveal evidence of considerable planning and political acumen. In the light of this, the failure of the rising is all the more striking. Deciphering this conundrum, it will be argued, can contribute to an understanding of the larger discrepancy between the growth of poverty and decline in disorder increasingly into the seventeenth century. But if a correct reading of the evidence questions the automatic assumption of an equation between crisis and rebellion, it confirms our growing understanding of the fragile relationship between rulers and ruled in early modern England. Not the least of the reasons for a study of the rising is that it had important political consequences beyond its puny scale and localist orientation. It was perhaps more than coincidence that those who zealously tortured and prosecuted the conspirators were the leading protagonists and promoters of the restrictive enclosure legislation of 39 Elizabeth caps. 1 and 2.

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The Oxfordshire rising of 1596 III In 1598, the vicar of Wendlebury, a small Oxfordshire parish close to the centre of the projected rising, confided in his otherwise orthodox register, ‘that in the years of our lord god 1597 and 1596 wheate was sold for xis, barley for 7s, and beanes for vis viiid. This was a sorroful time for the poore of the land god grant that such a darth and famyne may never be sene agayn’. Oxfordshire enjoyed no immunity from the strains set up by the crisis of the 1590s. Prices at local markets paralleled the trajectory of prices nationally. Wheat prices at Oxford doubled over the average of the four preceding years in the harvest year 1594. In the year of the intended rising wheat was selling at 5s. a bushel on Lady Day (25 March). Some six months later, at Michaelmas, it was 8s. a bushel, a near threefold increase on the earlier average. At Bicester, the main market for much of the area of the rising, wheat was being sold at 9s. a bushel by the autumn.15 While such figures capture the sudden and seismic impact of harvest failure on local markets, they may understate the impact on those sections of the poor totally dependent on the market. Their terse and indirect historical shorthand cannot recover the impact of harvest failure on the consciousness of a group whose falling exchange entitlements may have rendered the exact percentage point of the increase irrelevant to their ability to purchase grain.16 In early August 1596, the Privy Council spoke of the poorer sort of people who, ‘having theis two years suffered great penury and hardnes by the dearth of corne and other vyctualles, whereby they have spent that little they had, should now by raysing of the prices of graine to so great rates be driven to very great myserie and extremity’.17 In Oxfordshire, as in other counties, the poorer sort represented a large proportion of the county’s population. Taxation records of the early sixteenth century show communities with already considerable inequalities in the distribution of wealth: in villages later to be implicated in the rising, more than 40 per cent of the population were assessed on wages.18 Changes in the sixteenth century sharpened these inequalities.19 While manorial records reveal a small but significant growth in large holdings held by yeomen, the corollary of this concentration of land into fewer hands was a continuing increase in the cottaging and labouring population. The evidence points to an acceleration in this growth of rural poverty in the late sixteenth century.20 In the absence of vital county and local records, evidence of the plight of Oxfordshire’s poor is fragmentary. But the evidence, though sparse, is suggestive. At Kirtlington, one of the villages caught up in the conspiracy, a decision was made in the autumn of 1596 (probably for the first time), to put marginal land under the plough. Repeated and increasingly restrictive stinting orders reflected the problem caused there by a recent sharp increase in the size of the

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Popular politics in early modern England cottaging population. Elsewhere, falling receipts in churchwardens’ accounts and a corresponding increase in the number of debt cases coming before the courts paralleled the movement in prices. At Oxford, an attempt to cut students’ bread allowance led to trouble at Christ Church. In August 1596, Oxfordshire’s magistrates showed their recognition of the seriousness of the situation by attempting to ban the movement of grain out of the county.21 If the exact profile of poverty within the county remains shadowy, evidence gathered after the rising’s discovery confirms that the collision between dearth and longer-term impoverishment created widespread discontent. One man told his examiners: that he hath hearde latelie divers poore people saie (as he traveilled in this Countie beinge a loader to Hampton Gaie Mill) That the prices of Corne weare so deere that there would be shortlie a risinge of the people, and more adoe than had been a greate while, ffor that the poore sorte of people could not telle howe to make shifte to compasse the yeare about.

Another justified his failure to take seriously the conspirators’ approaches by saying that he: made the lesse accompt of their speeches, for that Comonly as ... [he] went to Markets, he heard poore people saie, that they were ready to famishe for want of Corne, and that they thought they should be enforced for hunger to take yt owt of men’s howses.

Dearth was at the centre of the poor’s consciousness and conversation in what one termed ‘this harde yeere’. Two inhabitants meeting on the road fell to talking about the price of grain. On being informed that grain was selling at 9s. per bushel at Bicester market, one posed the question central to the poor’s existence in 1596, ‘then what shall poore men doe?’. ‘Rather then they would be starved, they would ryse’, came back the reply.22 Disorder had not been the immediate answer to that question. The poor’s initial response had been to petition authority. Shortly before Michaelmas 1596, ‘a greate companie’ had visited the Lord Lieutenant, Lord Norris, and petitioned for relief. Their petitioning, however, had involved an element of coercion. They were reported to have told Norris, ‘that yf they Could not have remedie, they would seek remedie themselves, and Cast down hedges and dytches, and knocke down gentlemen’. More direct appeals may have been made to individual gentlemen to honour the obligations of hospitality which state and Church reiterated and which maintenance of their status demanded. After the harvest, the poor in the west of the country were said to have ‘come togeather to gentlemen’s houses’ around Witney.23 There is no evidence to confirm whether the attempt to coerce authority was successful. Norris probably did little, since he was subjected to at least one further appeal ‘for Relief for Corne, and for pullinge downe of enclosures’.

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The Oxfordshire rising of 1596 It was not until after the discovery of the rising that he wrote to the central government about the problem. The one recorded action by the Oxfordshire authorities, the attempt to stem the flow of grain out of the county, had been overruled in the interests of London by a government mindful of the disorders in the capital the previous year. Dearth returns, filed for Oxfordshire for the earlier crisis of the harvest year 1586/7 and called for again in 1596, are missing.24 The evidence of subsequent examinations and depositions offers no hint of possible remedial action taken by the authorities. None of those approached to join the rising felt confident enough to counter with the words of a Somerset mason similarly canvassed in a later crisis: ‘I hope the Justices of peace will take order that wee that are poore men shall have corne without such violence’.25 Despair, not hope, was the characteristic note of conversations and exchanges later recalled under examination. Despair was the seedbed in which Steer hoped to sow his dragon’s teeth. IV Piecing together the evidence from these examinations, sifting through claim and counter-claim, and grappling with the problems posed by popular disregard for the niceties of the Julian calendar, makes it possible to reconstruct the prologue to the attempted rising. The earliest evidence of the conspiracy comes as the dregs of the disappointing harvest of 1596 were being gathered in. The idea of a rising seems to have been first canvassed at a meeting of what were to become two of the main propagandists, James Bradshaw and Bartholomew Steer. Some two to three weeks before Michaelmas, late at night in the village of Hampton Gay, Bradshaw called Steer out of the house where he lodged. They discussed the petitioning of Lord Norris, something of which Steer may have had more direct knowledge, since he had served as carpenter to Norris. Thereafter, both visited Steer’s father in the neighbouring village of Hampton Poyle. There they found Steer’s brother John, a weaver at Witney. According to Bradshaw, it was his companion who first moved the idea of a rising, saying ‘that yt would never be well till gentlemen were knocked downe’. While he, Bradshaw, had declined a share in the slaughter, Steer’s brother had responded enthusiastically, boasting ‘there were an hundred in Witney that would be ready to go with John Steere at all tymes’. But Steer’s brother had a different tale to tell. It was Bradshaw who had asked, ‘Whether there were not certaine good fellowes in Witney that wold ryse & knock down the gentlemen & riche men that take in the comons [sic], and made corne so deare?’. To this question he had given the non-committal answer, that ‘hee knew a greate sort of good fellowes in Witney that lacked work, but whether they cold goe with hym’ he knew not.

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Popular politics in early modern England Both agreed, however, that it was Bartholomew who had put himself forward as leader of the rising. Later that evening, as he and Bradshaw trudged to Yarnton, where Bradshaw had gone to keep Sir William Spencer’s mill, Steer began to flesh out his plans. Perhaps attracted by knowledge of the discontent there, he proposed a pilgrimage to Norris’s house at Rycote some twenty miles away – not to petition, but to recruit followers and to seize his armour.26 Thereafter, Steer and Bradshaw, joined by Bradshaw’s brother Richard and by John Ibill, loader to their father’s mill, moved through the region attempting to gather support. Steer and James Bradshaw were employed as servants in the households of two local gentlemen, both intended victims of their enterprise. They began by attempting to recruit their fellow servants. Steer was particularly keen to recruit Lord Norris’s coachman and carter for the help that they could give in transporting arms and artillery. Before Michaelmas, Steer had told Lord Norris’s carter, ‘that he woulde be gone ffor there was talke of a rysinge and [he] would be one of them’ and asked if he would become another. Bradshaw issued similar invitations to his fellow servants at Yarnton. Calling Sir William Spencer’s carter into the mill, he told him, ‘that there were a greate many of poore people that for want of food wold ryse’ and asked ‘if he could make one to ioyne with him in a Rising of the people?’ Sir William’s baker underwent a similar catechism while he was bolting meal.27 Bradshaw and Steer also attempted to recruit within their respective neighbourhoods. At Hampton Gay and in the surrounding villages, Steer moved among his poorer neighbours, telling them that ‘there would be a rising of the people to pulle downe the enclosures, whereby waies were stopped up, and arrable landes inclosed, and to laie the same open againe’.28 To the poor of the area Steer preached the politics of Cockayne. When he met Roger Symonds, a carpenter of Hampton Gay, he asked, ‘howe he did this harde yeere, and how he maintained his wiffe and Children’. When Symonds told him: that he wrought harde to finde his wiffe and Children, having seaven Sonnes, bread and water, and scarsly could doe that [Steer replied:] ‘Work? Care not for worke, for we shall have a meryer world shortly; there be lusty fellowes abroade, and I will gett more, and I will work one daie and plaie an other, ffor I know ere yt be long wee shall have a meryer world’.29

Steer contrasted his listeners’ poverty with the plenty their actions would bring them. They ‘needed not to worke, nor take anie care for Corne this deere yeare’, for they would ‘pull the corne out of the Riche men’s barnes’. Steer made much of ‘a ffermor that said he hadd 80 quarters of corne ... And yf the poore would Come to him he would sell after 4s [a bushel] and after goe alonge wth them’. Steer’s promised cornucopia must have been in pointed contrast to his audience’s present poverty.30

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The Oxfordshire rising of 1596 On 2 November, a royal proclamation acknowledged that, despite previous measures ordered by the government, the dearth continued to worsen, a fact borne out by the continued upward movement of prices in Oxfordshire’s markets, where the proclamation would have been read some eleven days later.31 Against this background of worsening crisis, Steer continued to proselytise in an area bounded by the markets of Bicester, Witney and Oxford. By mid-November, his plans had matured. The emphasis was now on cutting down gentlemen rather than their hedges. Steer detailed the bloody route they should take to Lord Norris’s house. There they would find armour for a hundred men, also horse and artillery. Thus armed, they were to go ‘with all speede towards London’, where the apprentices would be ready to join forces with them.32 Steer and Richard Bradshaw, now the more active of the brothers, had agreed that the rising should be on the evening of the Sunday/Monday after St Hugh’s day (17 November).33 But the evidence suggests that Steer was scrabbling to gather support on the eve of the rising. Shortly before St Hugh’s day, Steer was still trying to enlist Symonds, encouraging him with promises that Witney would be sending a contingent of a hundred. But on St Hugh’s day, Steer’s visit to his brother to ask ‘whether they good fellows in Witney’ were ready to follow him met with a discouraging reply. Steer departed angrily, declaiming what was to become his own epitaph: ‘if all men were of [that] mind they might live like slaves as he did. But for himself happ what would, for he could die but once and ... he would not allwaies live like a slave’.34 At Witney, Steer had said, ‘that if there weare but three more which did goe, he would be one of them’. His words were sadly prophetic. Four days later, Steer went to Enslow Hill in the company of his fellow villager, Thomas Horne, and Robert Burton, a mason from Beckley. Here they were joined by Edward Bompass, but by neither of the Bradshaws, the hundred from Witney, nor the three hundred claimed by Steer. (Ironically, perhaps by a misunderstanding, the previous Sunday had seen more armed – and anonymous – men at Enslow Hill.) Four strong, they waited for two hours before disbanding, only later to be arrested by the authorities.35 V Why did Steer fail? The question becomes more pertinent when the skill with which he attempted to mobilise support is appreciated. Steer was a good student of the tradition of disorder. Steer and his lieutenants recruited directly from within a broad sweep of central and north-eastern Oxfordshire, and indirectly perhaps over a much wider area. The range of their recruiting confirms the emerging picture of a social universe far wider than once supposed for the early modern villager.

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Oxfordshire and the rising of 1596

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The Oxfordshire rising of 1596 The potential for popular alliance went well beyond the parish pump. A patchwork of evidence points to the skein of threads that drew villages in north Oxfordshire together and enmeshed them in regular contact. Common rights brought communities in the conspiracy together.36 Manorial records reveal the web of debt and credit,37 and parish registers and wills the ties of kinship,38 that linked communities involved in the conspiracy. Markets, regularly, and fairs, intermittently, provided wider links which reinforced commonplace and everyday exchanges and opened a door on to a yet wider universe. A chance survival in a Star Chamber case reveals the constellation of roads and ways radiating out from Bletchingdon, the chosen centre for the rising, along which people and ideas could move. They all fed into the main London road running through the parish, bringing news of the city and knowledge of the 1595 disorders and later discontent upon which Steer set such store.39 Markets, fairs, kin and service were all drawn on by Steer to provide an infrastructure for the projected rising. The market-place provided an opportunity to gather news and spread the word. According to Steer, Richard Bradshawe, ‘being a Miller, and travelling the Countrie tooke uppon him to perswade dyvers to ioyne with them’. As millers, the Bradshaws were particularly well placed to use the market network. But other villagers ordinarily travelled to and from market. It was at Bicester that Steer enlisted Henry Redhead of Kirtlington after talk of the want of corn, and en route to Bicester that Bradshaw attempted to recruit a Kidlington husbandman as they talked of the enclosures that they were passing.40 Fairs also brought villagers to town. Banbury, Bicester, Woodstock and Oxford all had their fairs. It was probably at St Frideswide’s Fair at Oxford that Steer met a former fellow-servant to reclaim a debt.41 But fairs also brought villages together. Much of the early discussions that took place around Michaelmas may have been facilitated by the fairs which increasingly clustered there – one of whose aims was to celebrate the ties between communities and kin. Yarnton held its feast in late August; in late September Hampton Poyle held a joint feast with Kidlington, another community implicated in the conspiracy. Fairs also brought together servants and the young – the group most represented in the rising.42 It was probably the fair at Hampton Poyle, held on 27 September, that brought Steer and his brother back to the family house and allowed them to discuss the possibility of support from Witney. Kinship played an important role in the attempt to gather support. Steer used visits to his brother at Witney to recruit among the weavers there. John Horne, servant to Vincent Barry of Hampton Gay, was suspected of communicating with his brother William, servant to George Pudsey of Elsfield, and so originating the rumour that Pudsey would be the conspirators’ captain.43 Probably, greater use was made of kinship ties than records now allow us to detect. For example, Edward Bompass, who had offered to bring twenty more

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Popular politics in early modern England men from his village of Kirtlington, probably owed his subsequent fate to the fact that Steer lodged in Hampton Gay in a household headed by Bompass’s maternal grandfather.44 Only a painstaking family reconstitution would allow us to probe this question further. But it is worth pointing out that the reasons advanced by historians for the relative absence of kin in the early modern village afforded greater scope for would-be rebels. Service, in particular, scattered the young. It gave the conspirators ready points of entry into other communities. John and William Horne were both from Bletchingdon, scene of the worst enclosure, and centre for the rising. Steer himself gained valuable knowledge and, like Bradshaw at Yarnton, an opportunity to recruit while a servant to Lord Norris. At the time of his arrest, James Bradshaw was working as a miller in Buckinghamshire.45 A less-obvious perquisite of household servants would have included the benefits of their masters’ wider knowledge and greater mobility. Lord Norris’s coachman would have been one of the sources of information on discontent in London; Spencer’s servants, accompanying their master to his family and estates in Warwickshire and Northamptonshire would have brought back news of enclosure there.46 Steer attached particular importance to recruiting servants in gentry households, believing ‘that gentlemen’s men were so holden in, and kept so like doggs as they would be ready to Cutt their masters’ Throates’.47 The attempt to reconstruct the pattern of recruiting for the rising suffers, not surprisingly, from authority’s failure to discover all those involved, and from the conspiracy of silence among minor actors in the drama connived at by authority after the initial panic.48 Nevertheless, it is clear that Steer and his lieutenants used the market and festive community and the institution of service to agitate among a number probably far larger than the figure that can be recovered from the judicial records. The intended rising may have been a common topic of conversation in many communities in north Oxfordshire and beyond in the hard autumn of 1596. Henry Redhead later deposed that he had ‘had conference at Wesby [Weston?] the Greene with one Waring about this rysing ... who said, yf they did ryse he would be one. He thinketh Waring to be as farr acquainted in these rysings as hym self’. Waring was neither identified nor examined.49 Steer’s scheme revealed shrewd planning. The day of the rising was carefully chosen to afford least opposition at the moment of birth. As one of the investigating magistrates reported, ‘I doe not thinke it unfitte to acquainte yor honnors with the tyme by them appointed ... which was when the most parte of ye gentlemen of this Sheire with the beste sorte of yeomen weare to appeare uppon a Jurye in the Kings benche’. There was the added advantage, as Steer pointed out, that the Lord Lieutenant and family were already in London. And others may have fled the country for the city.50 Steer also recognised the need to buttress his well-laid plans with the

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The Oxfordshire rising of 1596 authority that he himself could not give. He was careful to claim support of the ‘better’ sort, which earlier rebels had been at pains to secure. While the names of two gentlemen said to be sympathetic to the idea of a rising were circulated, Steer reported that ‘divers men of good abillitie would be partners in this Rebellion’.51 At the same time, lacking the authority of wealth or office himself, Steer drew on an amalgam of rumour and myth (with a hint of magic) to sanctify the rising. While he was careful to itemise the armour and horse to be had from the gentry’s houses and talked of an armourer living in Thame who knew the whereabouts of all the best arms in Buckinghamshire, he also told of ‘a Mason that Could make Balls of wilde ffire and hadd a Sling to Fling the same, which he Could Fyer houses as occasion should serve’.52 Steer also drew on a plebeian tradition of riot that was both local, national and international, to beat down a fatalistic acceptance of the status quo among his audience. Enslow Hill was chosen as the place from which to launch the rising, because it was the site of an earlier rising, possibly that in 1549.53 After they had risen, Steer told his listeners: they would go to London. And ... when the prentices heare that wee bee upp, they will Come and Joine with us ... And he was the rather induced to thinck the same by reason of the late intended insurrection in London, and that Certain Prentices were then hanged.

Interwoven with specific allusions to past riots were vaguer rumours of popular successes and prophecies of impending disorder. ‘The poore did once Rise in Spaine and Cutt down the gent[lemen]’, Steer told Symonds, ‘and sithens that tyme they have lyved merily there’.54 ‘There would be somewhat adoe shortlie in this Countrie, more then had beene seene a greate while, ffor that manie would Rise’, Roger Ibill was told. Discontent was universal, disorder inevitable, Steer worked hard to suggest. ‘Yt was but a monthes work to overrun England’, he is reported to have said.55 But despite Steer’s skills in recruiting, as the deputy lieutenants later reported (their initial response was rather less assured), ‘notwithstandinge they speake of manye hundreds that would be redie to ryse at theire daye & tyme appointed yet we cannot gett Confession to make upp twentie of that number’.56 VI An explanation for Steer’s failure might be that he misread the amount of discontent that dearth and enclosure had produced. The evidence suggests that there was considerable hardship felt. Prices and poverty seem to have been a frequent topic of conversation. Steer was not alone in anticipating some form of popular disorder, or in seeing enclosure as the primary cause of poverty in the region. Sir William Spencer’s carter gave voice to a common

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Popular politics in early modern England complaint when he said, ‘that Corne would not be better Cheape untill some of the hedgs were throwne downe’.57 But there has been a tendency among agricultural historians to see such popular fears as exaggerated or misconceived. With this, historians of enclosure in Oxfordshire would seem to agree. A study of deserted villages in the county found little evidence of any fresh destruction of villages in the period. According to a detailed study of Oxfordshire’s rural economy, only one in three townships had been enclosed by as late as 1730.58 A rising to pull down enclosures failed, therefore, because enclosure was not a widespread problem. But while the slow and uneven distribution of enclosure must go some way to explaining Steer’s failure, the evidence is less straightforward than this consensus suggests. Steer might have expected greater support. Measuring enclosure is, at the best of times, a difficult exercise. Gauging its progress by the counting of enclosed townships county by county has its problems. Employing a political unit to measure agricultural change ignores the differing experiences between economic regions which existed within, and flowed over, county boundaries. Counting enclosed or deserted townships ignores the more insidious process of piecemeal enclosure which, if included, could seriously inflate the enclosed acreage. And measuring enclosure fails to take account of the fact that, in discussing enclosure as a social and political problem, it is contemporary perceptions of the process that were crucial. It is the poor’s mental map of enclosure that the historian of protest should be concerned to recover.59 Sixteenth-century Oxfordshire had four broad agricultural regions, each with its own very different experience of enclosure. Much of the Chilterns, an area in the southernmost part of the county with poor soils, had been enclosed. By contrast, in the north of the county there had been considerably less enclosure. In the mixed farming area of the limestone uplands (covering one-third of the county) 15 per cent of its townships had been enclosed by 1640, and in the smaller, more densely populated, arable-oriented marlstone uplands some 13 per cent. Enclosure was only slightly more pronounced in the area containing many of the communities implicated in the conspiracy, the central lowlands of the Vale of Oxford, where some 21 per cent of its townships had been enclosed by 1640. But even within the Vale there were important contrasts. The lower Cherwell Valley, heartland of the rising, was an area of heavy, badly drained clay land and therefore far more vulnerable to enclosure.60 If we focus on an area defined by the conspirators’ actions; reconstruct the pattern of often large-scale piecemeal enclosure; and pay particular attention to the social relationships by which enclosure was accomplished, we can move closer to the poor’s own perception of the problem. Bartholomew Steer under interrogation alleged that ‘Mr Poer [Power] hadd inclosed much, and that Mr Ffrere hath destroyed a wholle towne Called Water Eaton, And that Sir William

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The Oxfordshire rising of 1596 Spencer hath inclosed comon ffeildes, and abowt Banbury verie manie have inclosed in every place somewhat’.61 The evidence bears out his claim. Those accused by Steer were all recent enclosers in communities with a history of enclosure. Francis Power was lord of the manor of Bletchingdon. Bletchingdon was a village with a considerable history of enclosure, and the Powers were responsible for most of it. Francis was the latest in a line of enclosing lords. Bletchingdon’s rector had complained of Francis’s father that he: hath inclused much of our Comon; ... converted all his ground which he had by exchange to pasture ground, not tilling one foot of land ... he turns out his tenents as soon as their Leases are expir’d, and setts out ye land at a rackt rent to others; and ... he hath depopulated the Town, allowing to those houses where good Teams have been kept a quartern land; i.e. 3 acres so that the whole Town almost doth consist of poor people.

Francis’s stepfather Alexander Horden had also faced legal action, for attempting to evict copyholders for life.62 Francis’s own activities faithfully reflected his upbringing. He continued to enclose out of the open fields, taking land from cottages, converting to pasture, and running a flock of some 700 sheep. By 1596–97 some 40 per cent (780 acres) of the open fields had been enclosed, and in 1598 it was claimed that there were one-third fewer ploughs and twenty-four houses not let with land as before.63 Francis’s activities too aroused opposition. Edward Hoffer recounted walking through Bletchingdon with Richard Bradshaw, ‘and when they came to Mr Power’s hedges of his new enclosed ground ... Bradshaw wished that the hedges were throwne within the diches, & he under them that made them’. Power’s enclosures made him the prime target of the rising. Steer told Henry Redhead they ‘ment to goe about the Countrie, but specially to Mr Powers’.64 Bletchingdon, then, was on the slide to complete enclosure; in 1622 its final enclosure required the consent of only fifteen land-holders. Depopulation, however, was not the problem. Enclosure exacerbated the problems of landlessness for a growing population within the village. It was the presence of this group that made Steer confident that Bletchingdon would furnish support for the rising.65 Water Eaton was listed by Gray in that group of townships whose early enclosure is to be explained by the presence of an Elizabethan or Jacobean mansion.66 William Frere had begun purchasing land there in the 1580s, built a new manor house in 1586 and bought the lordship in 1590. Frere, one of the wealthiest members of Oxford’s oligarchy, was the grandson of an Oxford alderman, whose profits from trade (as tanner, mercer and vintner) and speculation in monastic property had ensured the family’s ascent from more humble origins as saddlers at High Wycombe. The purchase of Water Eaton represented the last rite de passage in the family’s move into the ranks of landed society – with Frere becoming sheriff for the county in 1596.67 Water Eaton,

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Popular politics in early modern England a monastic manor, had already experienced depopulating enclosure earlier in the century. On purchase, Frere embarked on a policy of enclosure. A witness in Star Chamber claimed that the number of ploughs had been cut by half and some sixteen houses had had their lands curtailed. Other enclosers may also have been active in Water Eaton.68 Yarnton, where Sir William Spencer was lord of the manor, had a similar history. Urban wealth had again funded Spencer’s purchase of the manor in 1580: he had married the daughter of a London alderman. Yarnton, another monastic manor, had experienced considerable earlier enclosure.69 As befitted a sprig of the Northamptonshire Spencers, a family of graziers and enclosers, Sir William continued the enclosure of the manor. He had laid out his considerable park, that popularly most-detested form of enclosure, out of the open fields, perhaps taking twelve yardlands to do so.70 Another thread by which to unravel the impact of enclosure on the popular consciousness is to examine the enclosing record of the rising’s other victims. All shared a history of enclosure as well as inclusion on Steer’s itinerary. John Rathbone was variously described as ‘yeoman’ or ‘Mr’ in the examinations, an ambiguity that accurately catches his status as representative of a family of farmers well on their way into the ranks of the gentry. His grandfather Henry had paid the lion’s share of the 1523/4 subsidy for Hampton Poyle. By mid-century, the family had amassed a substantial holding in the neighbouring parish of Bletchingdon, and in 1589 Henry had capped his ascent with the purchase of the adjoining manor of Shipton-on-Cherwell. John’s father, Thomas Rathbone, had purchased further land in Bletchingdon and in a number of other villages before his death in 1594.71 Enclosure and engrossing had played their part in the making of the Rathbones. By the midsixteenth century, they were leasing meadowland in Hampton Poyle after enclosure there, and at Bletchingdon the Rathbones seem to have been allies of the Powers in their enclosure. John may also have been holding enclosed land at Water Eaton. Shortly before his father’s death he had borrowed £200 from his father to purchase leases from William Frere.72 Vincent Barry was lord of the manor of Hampton Gay. The Barrys were another family whose passage from urban trade to landed wealth in the course of the sixteenth century had been oiled by the Dissolution and eased by enclosure. The profits of sheep raising on a large estate carved out of former Eynsham Abbey lands had allowed Vincent’s grandfather, an Eynsham glover, to become twice mayor – and one of the wealthiest aldermen – at Oxford. In 1544, now styled ‘gent.’, he had purchased Hampton Gay for £1,000.73 An area of badly drained soils, the village was very vulnerable to enclosure and had already experienced it earlier. The Barrys accelerated this process in pursuit of profits from their investment, with some indication of their methods being given by the lease of a large amount of enclosed pasture to an Oxford butcher.74

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The Oxfordshire rising of 1596 George Whitton, a JP in the borough of Woodstock, was lord of the manor of Hensington, which bordered Wychwood forest. Whitton held important offices in the royal forest. His actions in office had earned him both notoriety and unpopularity. He had quarrelled with the Corporation of Woodstock and exercised his office to the detriment of the tenants. Though nothing is known of his enclosure activities, he may have been implicated in the enclosure to enlarge the royal park which had prompted opposition in the 1570s.75 Sir Henry Lee, Elizabeth’s favourite, came of a family of fifteenth-century Buckinghamshire farmers. The family’s foundations had been laid by his grandfather Robert, of whom it was noted, that ‘if he attained his dignity by service at court, it was probably through the less exalted industry of sheepfarming that he amassed wealth’. He had built up an extensive, enclosed estate, something which had brought him before the courts. His grandson Sir Henry maintained this tradition of service at court and market. He built up a second, large Oxfordshire estate, surrounding Woodstock where he too held royal office. Some idea of the scale of his enterprise is given by the fact that in the floods of 1570 he is said to have lost some 3,000 sheep.76 Henry, Lord Norris, was Steer’s last named victim. A successful marriage to Margaret, daughter of Sir John Williams and a favourite of Elizabeth, had brought him both wealth and favour. Williams had used high office and his preferential position as surveyor of monastic lands in Oxfordshire to build up a considerable and widely dispersed estate in the county.77 This Norris inherited – and with it some of the opprobrium Williams’ devotion to the profits of sheep and pasture had prompted. In 1551 the Imperial ambassador had reported that he ‘possesses a huge amount of livestock and is loathed by the people’. Rycote, Norris’s house, was at the centre of an area with a considerable history of depopulation and enclosure for sheep. In 1549 emparkment out of the open fields at Thame and Rycote had attracted the attention of the Edwardian rebels.78 As a servant to Norris, Steer would have been aware of this history of discontent and disorder. Steer’s proposed progress provides one set of contours for the poor’s mental map of enclosure. To this prosopographical evidence can be added the enclosure histories of villages from which Steer expected support or from which support came. Here too, enclosure was an evident presence. In addition to those already dealt with, Steer named Woodstock, Bladon, Hampton and Witney as places from which he expected support.79 At Woodstock, the glove industry, (which made the fortunes of few) and the forest doubtless ensured a pool of poverty, and royal enclosure had created earlier discontent. Sir Henry Lee had built up a large estate there, incorporating areas of earlier depopulation, and enclosure of the waste by the larger tenants may have intensified the problems for those attempting to eke out a living there.80 Bladon, bordering Woodstock Park, also had a landless cottaging presence and had experienced

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Popular politics in early modern England enclosure to enlarge the royal park.81 Hampton Poyle, Steer’s birthplace, was another monastic manor with an earlier history of enclosure and conversion to pasture. Lords of the manor continued to enclose there. By the early seventeenth century, most of the demesne was let to a large sheep or cattle farmer. The Rathbones also rented meadow there.82 Witney’s enclosure history has yet to be unravelled. However, Steer had grounds for expecting recruits from there. A clothing town sharing the depression afflicting the western broadcloth industry, it was described in 1607 as ‘a great Markett Towne ... full of needy people some of them outcasts of depopulated tenements’.83 No rioters came from these communities. Of those who did appear, Robert Burton the mason came from Beckley, a village from which further support had been promised. Beckley was another of the clutch of manors that had passed from Sir John Williams to his son-in-law Lord Norris. Attempts to enclose by Norris and Sir John Croke, who had purchased the ex-monastic manor of Studley, had encountered opposition. Close to Stowood and Bernwood forests, and with common rights on the extensive Otmoor moor, Beckley should not have had a shortage of pasture, but increasingly restrictive stinting by the moor court suggests that this area was also experiencing the pressures of a growing population.84 Others who had assembled at Enslow Hill came from the villages of Kidlington and Kirtlington. Enclosure was not a problem at Kirtlington, and seems unlikely to have prompted Kidlington’s involvement. But these villages’ representation at Enslow Hill cautions against restricting popular consciousness of enclosure to the experiences of the village of origin. Other pressures were present. Villagers at Kirtlington were experiencing a sharp increase in entry fines, in its cottaging population, and in pressure on their commons (especially by the larger sheep farmers), with all these crowding together in the late sixteenth century.85 Kirtlington rubbed shoulders with Bletchingdon, and Kidlington with both Water Eaton and Yarnton. Beyond these lay other communities which also bore the scars of enclosure. The arbitrary manner by which enclosure was thought to have been accomplished may have branded its existence all the more clearly on popular consciousness. For example, at Begbroke, which intercommoned with Yarnton and was enclosed by Humfrey Fitzherbert, a Bristol merchant, in the early 1590s, some of the tenants complained that Fitzherbert had, ‘most pittiefullie defaced the said village and undone his poor Tenants by heddginge and ditchinge and inclosing ... And by unreasonable Rearinge of his rents from sixteen nobles a yeare unto one hundred poundes and upward’, enclosing all but five of the sixteen yardlands.86 Knowledge of enclosure may have reached further. Market towns provided points at which such knowledge could be disseminated and discussed. Bicester, the market for many of the villages in the conspiracy, had enclosure

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The Oxfordshire rising of 1596 grievances of its own.87 Banbury also had experience of enclosure. Steer’s claim that ‘abowt Banbury verie manie have inclosed in every place somewhat’ would not be supported by a head count of enclosed townships. But seen in its ambiguity as evidence of the impact of piecemeal enclosure on the poor’s perception, then there is evidence to support Steer.88 Beyond Banbury was an area of Warwickshire (for which it may have served as a market) which was pitted with enclosure, and which, a short while later, supplied recruits for the Midlands rising.89 Popular awareness of enclosure was no respecter of political boundaries. Oxfordshire shared its experience of enclosure and common boundaries with a group of Midlands counties. A mid-century enclosure pamphlet had linked it with Northamptonshire and Buckinghamshire as the counties most affected by enclosure – an association repeatedly confirmed by commission and inquiry.90 Complaints against enclosure were also to be heard in Northamptonshire in 1596.91 Working outwards from the centre of the rising, the evidence suggests that the poor’s mental map of enclosure might have been rather different from the more restricted map drawn by historians. Small communities bled by plague and earlier depopulation and with a minimal or non-existent freeholding presence (such as the Hamptons, Yarnton and Water Eaton)92 may have been especially vulnerable. But other communities had experience of enclosure or of what were popularly taken as its consequences, not the least of which was dearth itself. Enclosed townships may not have been widespread in late sixteenth-century Oxfordshire, but in the region of the rising (and in popular consciousness) enclosure had a more evident presence than calculating county averages would suggest. Moreover, a prosopographical study of the rising’s intended victims suggests that it was as much the nature of the enclosers as enclosed acreage that prompted popular hostility. They owed their often recent status to the profits of trade, the fruits of office or a successful marriage. For many, the spoils of the Dissolution had eased their passage into the ranks of landed society. All showed a shrewd appreciation of the profits of a pastoral economy. As the mid-century anti-enclosure tract Certayne Causes had noted: [in] Oxford-shyre ... there be many men of worshyp ... [that] sette no store, nor pryse, upon the mayntenaunce of tyllage of theyr landes ... but many of them doeth kepe the most substaunce of theyr landes in theyr own handes. And where tillage was wont to be, nowe it is stored wyrh greate vmberment [over-pasturing] of sheepe.93

Steer, then, had grounds for being sanguine about support for action against enclosures. The petitions for redress of enclosure and relief of corn confirm that enclosure was the focus for popular discontent in the dearth of 1596. Within the catchment area of the rising, the poor found themselves in the midst of a crisis for which enclosure was a shared explanation of both government and people. They had considerable local experience of enclo-

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Popular politics in early modern England sure, and their understanding of it was coloured by recent examples, pushed through by landowners perhaps little concerned with popular expectations of the relationship supposed to exist between landlord and tenant. Beyond the world of experience lay the world of rumour. Both government and people thought enclosure to be gathering pace. Like their betters in a statistically innocent age, the poor found it difficult to distinguish rumour from reality. That ‘shepe and shepe-masters doeth cause skantyte of corne’ was one of the ‘syxe old Prouerbes’ used to validate the analysis of Certayne Causes. It was echoed by those caught up in the rising who said, ‘Corne would not be better Cheape untill some of the hedgs were throwne downe’.94 VII If enclosure was a real presence in the minds of the poor in north Oxfordshire, then we must look for other explanations for the poor’s inactivity. Of these, the most important is the rising’s failure to reach critical mass. Subsequent depositions make clear the crucial nature of Steer’s failure to assemble the nucleus of a rising at Enslow Hill. When James Bradshaw asked Sir William Spencer’s carter ‘if he would make one to ioyne with him in a Rising of the people’, Powell seemed reluctant. Bradshaw, therefore, ‘did telle him that everie bodie would rise, and thereuppon ... [Powell] answered that if everye man did rise, then he must needes make one with them’. This was a common reply, the repetition of which under examination makes it more than an evasion to put off an unwelcome question.95 Vincent Rankell, a Witney weaver, spoke for many perhaps when he told Steer, that ‘he would ioyn with him and the Reste, after they weare risen and entered into some accion, but he would be none of the begynners’.96 Had the rising been launched successfully, more might have joined, but few were prepared to take the initial stride across the Rubicon of resentment into rebellion. Such support as the rising did gather was limited both socially and geographically. The inability of rural and urban poor to unite in revolt was evident. Despite attempts to recruit in Witney and evidence that Oxfordshire’s urban poor were hard hit by the crisis, there was no urban support. Oxfordshire was a county of small towns; urban poverty therefore might have been more easily contained. Steer and others visited Oxford, but no recorded attempt was made to recruit there.97 Moreover, the surviving evidence suggests that recruiting was contained within the boundaries of the county – in fact largely within part of it. Despite the mobility of Steer and his lieutenants, those who supported the rising came from a narrow band around Enslow Hill. And they were drawn exclusively from the lower ranks of rural society. This narrow social and geographical base had a common root in the problem of leadership. Despite authority’s fears, there was no gentry leader-

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The Oxfordshire rising of 1596 ship. Neither was there any clerical involvement, though preaching might have contributed something to the sense of legitimate grievance.98 More surprising was the absence of the ‘middling sort’ – a group otherwise prominent in the early modern agrarian crowd and the backbone of earlier rebellions. At no point did the conspiracy involve those powerful local figures whose combination of wealth, status and local office ensured their growing dominance of rural communities.99 Their support was neither sought nor obtained. The absence of the ‘middling sort’ presages a later, more general tendency which offers one of the most important reasons for the eventual collapse of collective agrarian disorder in the seventeenth century.100 Their withdrawal is to be explained by their changing relationship to the market and by the consequent reordering of their relationships with other social groups. Like their peers elsewhere, Oxfordshire’s yeomen were prospering. As a result, economic stratification was being etched deeper into the Oxfordshire countryside. Yarnton was just one of a group of manors in the Vale of Oxford where half or more of the total acreage was held by tenants with holdings of more than eighty acres. At Hampton Poyle, by mid-century, four tenants accounted for over half the land in the open fields.101 The predominance of vulnerable holdings in the Vale and elsewhere below the Plimsoll line drawn by recent studies suggests how the yeomen tightened their grip on the land.102 Enclosure as well as engrossing (which fed the discontent of the poor but which lacked the high visibility of enclosure as a focus for disorder) helped to satisfy their appetites. The yeomen’s growing involvement with the market predisposed them not to resist enclosure – as long as it accommodated their interests. And the evidence is that in Oxfordshire, by this period, enclosure was increasingly by agreement – at least, as others have rightly cautioned, the agreement of powerful and prosperous landed interests.103 The middling sort therefore were unlikely sponsors of a rising whose declared aim was to challenge the agrarian capitalism which underwrote their growing wealth and power – an interpretation confirmed by their role in Oxfordshire’s later, limited opposition to enclosure in the seventeenth century.104 Like their better-documented contemporaries elsewhere, they may have been more ready to use their power to curb the disorders of the poor. The only yeoman involvement in the rising comes with the inclusion of John Rathbone among Steer’s intended victims, a symbolic representation perhaps of the redrawing of potential lines of conflict in the Oxfordshire countryside. Steer recognised, however, the need to leaven the rising with those of economic and social standing. To Vincent Rankell he said, ‘that some of these which would meete in this rising weare no base fellowes, but husbandmen and such as had a ploughe lande of theire owne’. But the evidence does not support a claim designed to persuade those otherwise reluctant to rise.105

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Popular politics in early modern England Twenty ‘mutinous persons’ were named by the attorney-general. To these can be added the names of a further ten mentioned in examination.106 Occupations can be recovered for twenty-three of these. Few had land themselves. Only one, Edward Hoffer of Kirtlington, was described as a husbandman.107 Most were artisans or servants. There were two carpenters (and an apprentice), two millers, two weavers, a fuller, a smith, a mason and a bricklayer. Of the six servants, all employed in gentry households, two were carters, one a baker and one a coachman.108 By contrast, the landless labouring poor were almost completely absent. There was only one labourer mentioned. But the contrast is less marked than this might suggest. The practice of the crafts represented here was no prophylactic against poverty, especially in the 1590s. At his death at the end of that decade the Bradshaws’ father had fallen into debt with his landlord.109 Roger Symonds, described as a carpenter, was a cottager who, as he told Steer, ‘wrought hard to finde his wiffe and Children ... bread and water, and scarsly could doe that’.110 The fragmentary evidence suggests that his was but one example of the problem facing those entangled in the conspiracy. A less-obvious but just as important reason for the potential discontents of this group was their age and status. Most were young and unmarried. As Sir William Spencer reported, ‘there are few of those which I have apprehended ... that are either poore or have wives and Children; But younge men unmarried and in noe necessitie for wante of livings’.111 This is not perhaps surprising. The early modern agrarian crowd was often a youthful crowd, reflecting the tactical freedom from ties of dependent family, and confirming contemporary fears of the licence of liminal youth.112 But where it is possible to recover the precise age of individuals involved, this argument can be taken a stage further. Bartholomew Steer and Edward Bompass were both twenty-eight, Henry Redhead thirty-four. If, as seems likely, many of the others belonged to this age group, then their age suggests an added reason for their discontent.113 They were angry, but ageing, young men. They stood on the threshold of social adulthood, but their lack of land, low status and single state consigned them to a limbo. Sir William Spencer’s ‘in noe necessitie for wante or livings’ may reflect the protection afforded many by service (if not the uncertainties of its continuation in conditions of dearth),114 but it fails to do justice to their own perception of their position. Some hoped to continue inherited skills, others from smallholding families and those in service may have had hopes of accumulating sufficient capital to give them a purchase on the land. But the evidence suggests that such expectations were becoming increasingly difficult to realise.115 Access to land was becoming harder, and their families’ grip on their holdings was faltering. For a group with such experiences and expectations, enclosure offered a potent symbol for their frustrations. Their failure to gain or retain a toehold on the land, and their increasing dependence on an uncertain market for food and employment, could all be attributed to the

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The Oxfordshire rising of 1596 hedging in of land, of which they had local, recent and vivid experience. But this youth group was not the nucleus for a successful rising. The lack of authority that age might bring compounded the problems of leadership. Steer’s understanding of the popular psyche could not compensate for his lack of social and economic clout. Forced to recruit along lines of personal contact, Steer’s own attempts to persuade others was necessarily limited. To remedy these, he had to depend on lieutenants whose own lack of authority helps to explain their failure. Even allowing for the necessity to disavow support for the rising when examined, the reactions of those approached make it clear that Steer and the others lacked the authority to translate discontent into disorder. Action by what in other societies has been called ‘the boys’ worked only where that group could draw on wider community tolerance or support.116 A rebellion of youth, Steer’s project displayed many points of dissimilarity with the larger tradition of agrarian disorder.117 The institutions of village (manor, church and village assembly) and state (muster, parochial and hundredal office) and the traditions of collective action (regulation of the open fields, the calendars of the church and festive community) which played such a large part in that tradition of riot and which provided part of the infrastructure for earlier rebellions, were denied this marginal group. They were, perhaps, even forced to work clandestinely within their own communities. Much of this clearly followed from the absence of the middling sort. But other striking discrepancies – the complete absence of women, otherwise prominent in the agrarian crowd, for example – cannot be so explained. Riots throughout the period showed how proclamation and even statute could offer a powerful sense of legitimation and even provocation to action by the people. But the conspirators made no reference to policy or preaching. By contrast, the absence of the middling sort allowed a more radical attack on the social order than reference to a moral economy would have allowed. But the shift in Steer’s plans over time – from an attack on enclosures to the assassination of enclosers – may have lost him support. It ran against the grain of a tradition of riot in which violence (if not threats) was directed against property and not persons. VIII Action by the authorities might also have contributed to the rising’s failure to achieve critical mass. Two days before the rendezvous, Roger Symonds had informed his landlord Vincent Barry of Steer’s intentions. Barry had refused to believe him, loyally opining that ‘yf there shoulde be any suche matters as I gesse, yet should procede by the meanes of some papyste or enymes to the state rather then of poore people’. Nevertheless, he thought it a wise precaution to warn his neighbour Francis Power and to examine his own servants, calling on Power the following day and asking him to send warning to their

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Popular politics in early modern England fellow victim, Sir William Spencer. On Sunday, being sick (of worry perhaps, since it was the day of the rising) he stayed at home, but sent word to Spencer and to Sir Michael Blount.118 This flurry of action did not prevent the conspirators from assembling and drifting away disconsolately, but knowledge of it may have kept others away. It was not until two days later that the conspirators began to be rounded up. By 25 November, Steer was in custody, and others had been bound over to answer at the next assizes.119 Lord Norris, who had been informed of the rising by 7 December, was quick to examine his own servants, but took longer to inform the central government. Bearing primary responsibility for the maintenance of order in the county, Norris sought to reassure the Privy Council. ‘Trust that where the evill disposed wretches made their vaunt to have hundreds at their devoc[i]on, they shall not finde but fewe score so evill disposed as theis yor honours have the names of’, he informed them.120 But the Council was not to be so easily reassured. It wrote repeatedly to Norris, ordering fresh arrests and requiring further examinations.121 The ringleaders were to be brought to London under strong guard and the personal supervision of the sheriff, ‘their hands pynnioned and their legs bound under the horse bellys and so looked unto as they maie not have Conference one with the other in the waie hither’. (The Council was equally anxious to have the bruited gentry leaders discovered, but they were to be sent up with Norris’s son ‘in such sort as their examinations should suggest appropriate’.)122 The Council clearly did not feel the rising had been scotched. Norris was ‘to take order with the Justyces and other Gentlemen of hability, honest farmers and other offycers to haue specyall Care that yf any tumult, dysorder or gathering togeather of people shall happen in any parte of the Shire’, it should be speedily suppressed.123 By 19 December, Steer, Ibill and the two Bradshaws were being lodged in separate London prisons. There they were joined by Robert Burton the mason, whose discovery in London (attempting to establish contact with the apprentices?) can have done little to allay the government’s anxiety.124 Their examination was entrusted to a small but powerful committee headed by the attorney-general Sir Edward Coke, which was empowered to employ torture ‘for the better bowltinge forth of the truthe’. They were examined in early January on a list of interrogatories whose litany exposes the neuroses of authority in the crisis of 1596.125 Their inquisitors were anxious to establish whether they had entered into correspondence with ‘Certen persons Calling themselves Egipcians’ (a group of eighty gypsies had been taken moving through Northamptonshire on the eve of the rising)126 and what ex-soldiers (another prominent cause for concern in the l590s)127 should have joined them. Above all, in accordance with government prejudices about the possibility of independent political action by the poor, their examiners wanted to discover ‘what gentlemen or others doe you knowe that doe favour the Comunaltie and that

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The Oxfordshire rising of 1596 wold after you hadd bene upp have taken yor parts?’. Before the end of January, Coke had prepared a breviat of the case, which he sent to Sir Robert Cecil. Coke took very seriously the threat posed by the rising, and he seems to have prosecuted the conspirators with the rigour which earned him comment in later and less-obscure trials. He recommended that the rising be prosecuted as treason for compassing to levy war against the Queen, and that there was sufficient matter to convict Steer, the Bradshaws, Robert Burton and Edward Bompass.128 Accordingly, Burton, Bompass and Richard Bradshaw were indicted at Burford assizes on 24 February, before a jury of local gentlemen whose deliberations were doubtless made easier by the inclusion on the panel of John and Henry Rathbone. The surprising absence of Steer and James Bradshaw suggests that they were already dead, victims of their interrogation or the short life-expectancy of the incarcerated.129 Thereafter, Coke’s pursuit of the conspirators encountered a legal hiccup. On 4 June, Coke wrote again to Cecil, urging him to get the Queen to sign a special commission by which to try the rebels before an Oxfordshire jury at Westminster. Coke had his way. On 7 June, a commission was issued to the lord chief justice Sir John Popham and three colleagues, among them a Edward Fenner, who, a year later, contracted his heir to marry the daughter of Steer’s intended victim: Vincent Barry of Hampton Gay.130 Four days later, Richard Bradshaw and Burton were sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered.131 By an irony that must have afforded considerable satisfaction to the local gentry, Bradshaw and Burton were executed at Enslow Hill within sight of the enclosures that had led them to that fate.132 Their miserable end was doubtless made to serve as a macabre example of the fate accorded those who had the temerity to challenge the gentry’s hegemony by a blind and impartial justice which nevertheless numbered among its servants the Rathbones as jurymen; a prospective son-in-law of the Barrys as judge; and, as escort to torture, trial and execution, William Frere, high sheriff and encloser of Water Eaton. IX No contemporary comment on their trial or execution survives. On the day of their conviction, that inveterate letter-writer John Chamberlain wrote from London to his friend Dudley Carleton. His long, gossipy letter offered the favoured diet of obituaries, lawsuits, plays and the talk of the town. Despite several openings (including a reference to the new lord of the manor of Steer’s birthplace), he made no mention of the Oxfordshire rebels’ fate.133 At the moment of their conviction, they were already passing into that obscurity from which only the editing of the state papers in the nineteenth century was to rescue them.134 No obelisk marks such humble executions. But the rising did win for itself a memorial, which has yet to be fully acknowledged: in folk

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Popular politics in early modern England memory, in the law books, and in the statutes of the realm. Coke’s advice to Cecil to prosecute the rising as treason under the statute 13 Elizabeth cap. 1, rather than, as had been customary, on the statute 25 Edward 3, had raised important points of legal principle. The Elizabethan statute had its advantages. It avoided the problem of the earlier statute, which required an actual levying of war against the Crown and, according to Matthew Hale, that Parliament first be consulted in new cases. It offered greater scope for judicial construction of the statute.135 But, in the case of Bradshaw and Burton, its application required some forcing of the law. The sticking-point was the judges’ recognition of the rising’s abortive conclusion. Accordingly, in mid-April, a massed meeting of judges had been held to discuss the case. All but three agreed that the conspiracy to rise and arm themselves was high treason, since ‘rebellion is all the war which a subject can make against the King’. But the dissenters had argued ‘that the resistance ought to be with force to the Queen, before such acts shall be treason’, citing the Marian statute which had made an assembly to pull down enclosures a felony. However, the majority view that the Marian statute applied to particular enclosure disputes, ‘and not to cases where they have a general dislike to all manner of inclosures’, prevailed. It was decided that ‘the case here tending to a generality, makes the act if it had ben executed to be high treason by the course of the common law’.136 Despite other legal difficulties,137 Bradshaw and Burton resumed their progress to Enslow Hill. But the decision that ensured their fate also ensured the preservation of their memory. Their names were flung in the face of Essex and his compatriots at their trial. Later legal commentators, including Coke in his Institutes, cited Burton and Bradshaw’s case as an important step in the development of the law of treason, some continuing to be troubled by Coke’s constructive use of the Elizabethan statute.138 Bradshaw and Burton were, then, entombed in the sarcophagus of the English Law Reports. But the rising also won for itself a more positive memorial. Reprisal was not, and neither could it be, the only response of the government. Early modern governments, with limited forces of repression, needed to be attentive to the complaints of even their poorest subjects, especially in years of dearth. Even before the conspiracy’s discovery, the government had been concerned by the threat to the social order. The Council had renewed proclamations publicly reminding magistrates of their duty to police the grain market, and had enjoined the archbishops of York and Canterbury to instruct their clergy to preach up the moral responsibilities of the rich in dearth.139 But when the Council learned of the attempted rising, the scarcity remained severe.140 While it took measures to preserve public order (banning plays for example), it publicly renewed measures to combat scarcity. Grain was now to be imported free of tolls, foreign grain in English ports impounded, and slack administration in the provinces probed.141

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The Oxfordshire rising of 1596 In response to the rising, the government was careful to acknowledge its obligations to ‘her Majesty’s poore lovinge subjectes’, and to do so publicly. On Christmas Day, the Council wrote again to the archbishops, requiring them to instruct the clergy to detail from the pulpit the measures taken, ‘so the greatnes of her Majesty’s zeale and care in that poynt made be knowne’. They were also to renew their exhortations to their parishioners and to take special order that collections for the poor might be ‘carefullie gathered and charitably increased’. But, in the face of continuing poor weather, the scope for remedial action was limited. Accordingly, with a fresh batch of revelations about the conspiracy before them as they wrote, the Council also required the clergy to ensure: that the people would also be taught to indure this scarsety with patyence, and to beware howe they give eare to any perswaycons or practyses of discontented and ydle braynes to move them to repyne or swerve from the humble dutyes of good subjects to the further offence of God and displeasing of her Majesty that hath so tender a care of their welfare.142

Action by authority thus demanded inactivity by the people. The government, then, was primed to respond to the grievances uncovered by the rising. Norris’s first letter to the Council had ended with the urgent entreaty: ‘I pray by yor grave & good consideracion such good order may be taken for inclosure on the farr parte of the sheir wher thise styrr & comossion dyd begin as the pore may be able to lyve’.143 Their response went well beyond what Norris might have expected. In their interrrogation of the prisoners, the government proved equally concerned to discover ‘what gentlemen in that Countrey have inclosed or Converted theire lands from tillage’. An agenda drawn up by Coke for a meeting with Burghley about the conspiracy and other matters had at its head ‘Le case de inclosure’. In late January, the Council began the prosecution of seven leading enclosers in Star Chamber. At their head were Francis Power and William Frere.144 In the conditions of the 1590s, however, the government’s response passed beyond the immediate problem of enclosure in Oxfordshire. The threat uncovered by the rising nudged the government into a more general inquiry into enclosure, paralleling a renewed drive to reform abuses in the grain trade. In February 1597, the Council wrote to all judges of assize, ‘touching enclosures, whereby any highe wayes are stopt or villages or houses destroyed and dispeopled or tillage greatly decayed’, ordering them ‘to cause dilligent enquiry to be made that redress may be ordayned’. They were to certify the Council of the greatest offenders. Later in the year, Coke began a series of prosecutions in Star Chamber of engrossers (of corn and land) and enclosers.145 The Oxfordshire rising helped to push the government into greater administrative action against enclosure. But the impetus did not stop there. The

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Popular politics in early modern England umbilical cord between periods of dearth and social legislation has attracted frequent comment but, as Penry Williams has recently observed, ‘it would be difficult to prove any direct connection between a particular revolt and specific statutes or proclamations’.146 Neale and others referred to the rising to suggest the background of economic distress and social unrest that led to the later Elizabethan tillage laws, but drew no direct link. Some local historians have claimed a greater role for the rising in the making of that legislation, but the basis for that claim, the inclusion of a clause relating to Oxfordshire, appears less persuasive when it is realised that Oxfordshire is but one of a large group of counties referred to in that clause.147 Nevertheless, despite a paucity of sources for the Parliament, it is possible to argue a stronger case for the rising having played a more positive role in the genesis of the anti-enclosure statutes. The spectre of Steer haunted the parliament of 1597. Key figures in the passing of the legislation had direct knowledge of the carnage that enclosure had threatened in Oxfordshire in 1596. The problem of enclosure was placed before the Commons on the very first day of business.148 It was Francis Bacon who initiated discussion, introducing two bills drafted by himself against depopulating enclosure and conversion to pasture. Bacon became the main protagonist for procuring legislation against enclosure, dominating the committee established and framing the bills that emerged from it.149 In the course of an opening speech whose vehement denunciation of enclosures set the tone for subsequent debate, Bacon had argued that ‘The Eye of Experience is the sure eye’. As one of the committee of four entrusted with the interrogation of Steer and his lieutenants, Bacon had first-hand experience of the discontent that enclosure could provoke.150 That experience he shared with others in the House who also played leading roles in securing the statutes. Cecil, whose parliamentary notes and later reported speeches make clear his hostility to enclosure, had been responsible as principal secretary for the oversight of the prosecution of the rising.151 His two fellow councillors in the Commons would also have known of the rising by virtue of their office, but one, Sir William Knollys, had more intimate knowledge. As joint Lord Lieutenant, he had acted as intermediary between Norris and the Privy Council.152 That knowledge was shared by key figures active in securing the progress of the bills through the Lords. Whitgift, the leading member of the Lord’s committee set up to discuss the bills, had knowledge of the rising by virtue of his membership of the Privy Council.153 He was joined in committee by five law officers, four of whom had directly confronted evidence of the rising. One had presided at the assizes at which the conspirators were indicted, two had sat in judgement on them, and the other was the attorney-general Coke – their interrogator and prosecutor.154 Of these, the lord chief justice and Coke played a leading role, drafting amendments and acting as go-betweens for the two houses. For Coke, the experience may have left him permanently sensi-

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The Oxfordshire rising of 1596 tive to the possible social costs of enclosure.155 Other members shared their knowledge. Thomas Fleming, solicitor-general, and John Croke, recorder of London, had both been members of the committee entrusted with the conspirators’ interrogation. There was a sprinkling of Oxfordshire landowners among the members, some of whom had more immediate knowledge of the rising, like Sir Anthony Cope, and some of whom, like George Croke or Sir Richard Wenman, were appointed to the committee on enclosure.156 They would have been joined in their concern by members from towns and counties where enclosure was also a problem, reflected on occasion in elections.157 Their knowledge of the rising might help to explain the urgency with which some advocated action against enclosure. Sir Anthony Cope was among those who wanted legislation against enclosure ‘violently penned’. Balked of speaking in debate, he badgered Burghley to take up in the Lords his proposals for tougher penalties and what would have amounted to a biannual commission of inquiry into depopulation. Neale attributed his proposals to puritan zeal, but, as member for Banbury and examiner of many of those implicated in the conspiracy, Cope had recent and pressing memories to urge him on.158 Though the fragmentary reporting of the Parliament makes it impossible to prove, it is difficult to believe that advocates of legislation against enclosure did not draw on Steer’s example to bolster their arguments in a house where some members (probably more than has been allowed) argued for enclosure and even proposed permissive legislation.159 Like members in a later parliament, Coke among them, who cited Kett’s rebellion and the threat of social unrest to defeat enclosure proposals,160 opponents of enclosure in 1597 could use Steer’s example to expose the raw nerve of fear of disorder. Steer’s dreams were the landed classes’ nightmares made flesh. Knowledge of them presented a recent and all too vivid example of the threat that unregulated enclosure presented to state and gentry. It lent menace to the otherwise polished rhetoric of debate. The observation, one among many, that ‘noe realme rich or populous in itself, can either long haue ioy in the streete, or continuance in the state where there groweth cleanenes of teeth through scarcity of breade’, took on added resonance for those made privy to the discontent revealed by the rising and all too aware of tensions in their own constituencies.161 Reference in debate to Steer’s sanguinary reforms would help to explain why Parliament, whose predecessor four years earlier had repealed legislation against enclosure, should re-enact prohibitive legislation. In the absence of hard information available to the government, the microcosm of enclosure in north Oxfordshire revealed in the aftermath of the rising, and confirming other incoming complaints, may have contributed to the fear voiced in Parliament and enshrined in statute that ‘there have growen manie more depopulacions by turning tillage into Pasture, then at anie time for the like number of years heretofore’. The evidence that it offered of recent large-scale depopulating

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Popular politics in early modern England enclosure for sheep, reinforced earlier stereotypes and perhaps coloured Parliament’s perception of a process which was in reality increasingly at variance with that stereotype.162 Discovery of the rising, set in the context of the wider crisis, would have reinforced the ambivalence with which the landed classes regarded enclosure. As landowners they might increasingly appreciate (though application could lag behind appreciation) the economic benefits of enclosure; as members of a ruling class they appreciated that enclosure, especially by newcomers to their ranks, should not be allowed to interfere with the maintenance of the relationship between rulers and ruled on which their authority rested. The rising served as a warning that the economic returns of (unregulated) enclosure might be over-shadowed by its social and political costs. This was the force of Cecil’s argument in his parliamentary notes, that ‘the inconvenience is now come ad statum ... The balancyng of the misery of the people and the decay of the Realmes strength with some trifling abridgements to gentlemen hath no proportion’.163 At a time when enclosure was changing in form and function and gaining more advocates, the government recognised the need publicly to reaffirm their opposition to depopulating enclosure in language that echoed popular attitudes. The government’s ambivalence to enclosure was reflected in its response to one particular dispute in 1597. The encloser was told, ‘rather to consider what is agreable [sic] in this case to the use of this State and for the good of the comon welthe, then to seeke the uttermost advantage that a landlord for his particular profit may take amonge his tenaunts’.164 Maintenance of the social order required the policing of possessive individualism: ‘particular profit’ must give way to the general good (of the gentry). Though the weight to be attributed to the rising – one of a number of factors impelling the government to take action – must remain conjectural, as an encapsulation of a latent threat, known in detail to key individuals in government and Parliament, it probably played a role out of all proportion to its scale. It perhaps paralleled the part played by the Midlands rising in imprisoning government in the continuing need publicly to police enclosure. If so, Bradshaw and Burton (and the others) won for themselves a very different memorial – something that may have been better appreciated at the time as copies of the statutes 39 Elizabeth cap. 1 (An Acte againste the Decayinge of Townes and Howses of Husbandrye) and cap. 2 (An Acte for the Maintenance of Husbandrie and Tillage) began to find their way back to Oxfordshire villages.165 X In the 1930s, the Victoria County History of Oxfordshire could confidently pronounce that ‘the outbursts against enclosure in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries have no political importance’.166 Steer and his companions deserve a

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The Oxfordshire rising of 1596 better epitaph. The Oxfordshire rising, though stillborn, had (and has) important consequences for the history of early modern England and for how historians interpret that history. The response Steer’s plans invoked from government provides valuable evidence about the fragile relationship between rulers and ruled and the obligation that it forced on the government to enter into a dialogue with the people. The response that Steer’s proselytising failed to prompt from the poor provides pointers to the solution of the larger historical problem: of why changes that spawned greater poverty and discontent in rural society paradoxically resulted, increasingly into the seventeenth century, in a diminution in collective, popular action in many areas.167 If there has been a tendency to inflate an abortive rising to proportions bordering on rebellion, there are extenuating circumstances. Authority, the first historian of the events of 1596, lent its imprimatur to such analysis. Coke’s constructive use of the law of treason to prosecute the conspirators as rebels is striking testimony of the alarm with which the government greeted their discovery.168 There is a lesson to be learnt here. In periods of economic crisis, the Privy Council found itself at the centre of a vortex, recipient of incoming reports which by their number and repetition (and sometimes the conscious intention of correspondents who sought government action) distorted and exaggerated the reality of disorder. In such conditions, it was easy for the Council to become the victims of a moral panic, their own anxieties seemingly confirmed by the fantasies blown into their ears by alarmed correspondents of the stamp of the Somerset justice, Edward Hext.169 But if governments believed that they were confronting a crisis whose cataclysmic outcome was popular disorder on a large scale, then this perception (and an awareness of their limited ability to suppress such disorder) forced them to treat popular grievances seriously. The assizes at which Bradshaw and companions were indicted would also have heard a special charge from the judges about the evils of enclosure. An administrative drive to curb enclosures and police the grain market; renewed legislation against enclosure (but part of a remarkable bundle of bills proposed or passed in the 1597 Parliament to deal with popular grievances);170 and repeated rebukes to magistrates for their failure to relieve the poor, all followed, some directly, from discovery of the rising.171 If the crisis was less than the government believed, this matters little when examining its response. But it does have implications for the attempt to write the history of popular disorder out of the records of central government. There is a danger, not always resisted, that historians, like the Privy Council itself, might elide the discrepancy between discontent and disorder. Risings were mooted in several counties in the 1590s, but none of these came to fruition. Despite ample evidence that the rich and elegant prose of sermon and report nevertheless described stark and squalid poverty,172 the roll-call of reported

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Popular politics in early modern England disorder in the 1590s remains less than predicted or presumed. Steer’s failure, but one of several, perhaps provides a key to the puzzle of the poor’s increasing inability to translate discontent into rebellion. The grain riot was the most common form of protest to punctuate the exclamation marks of reports to government in the 1590s. The crisis in the markets, aggravated by the requisitioning of urban merchants with those of London at their head, and the legitimation repeatedly offered by provocative government proclamations, help to explain their occurrence (if not their surprisingly small number). Though these food riots might carry the threat of more disturbing disorder, they were predominantly small scale and highly circumscribed.173 They were not the stuff of rebellion. Evidence from later periods of dearth might suggest an increase in enclosure riots, but the enclosure riot also belonged to a tradition of popular disorder with its own constraints and which stopped well short of rebellion. Knowledge of that tradition and an understanding of the spasmodic chronology and patchwork geography of enclosure, would suggest that, by itself, enclosure was seldom sufficient to spark off general rebellion. Despite the evident presence of enclosure in the minds of the poor in the catchment area of the rising, its impact was very uneven within the county.174 To sponsor a general rising, enclosure needed the licence (or rumour) of government action (1549, early 1640s); the fracturing of political authority (Norfolk 1549, early 1640s); the goad of aggressive, large-scale enclosure schemes (the western forests and eastern fenlands); or harvest failure or its threat (Midlands rising/forest and fen 1629–31), to synchronise discontent. In the 1590s, there was no fracturing of political authority. The legacy of 1549 – reworked by ‘official’ histories, the growing consensus between gentry and government, and growing discord between gentry and people (to which Steer’s objectives bore witness), ensured that the earlier pattern of gentry and commoner alliance in rebellion was not to be repeated in the 1590s. Publicly, there was no hint of government action against enclosure prior to the rising, and the Crown had yet to realise its assets in forest and fen. Despite publicly expressed fears, the absence of swingeing taxation denied popular discontent the co-ordinating punch it gave to Continental rebellions. Equally important, in removing a possible focus for common alliance, it allowed the continuing estrangement of yeomen and the poorer sort. In the 1590s, only harvest failure was present to synchronise discontent, and the evidence suggests that, like much of southern England, Oxfordshire had slipped the shadow of a crisis of subsistence.175 While this should not be read as implying there was not suffering and increased mortality through hunger, it did mean that the Continental famines underwriting large-scale rebellion were absent. Particular groups and areas may have been particularly exposed to the crisis. Others may have enjoyed some insulation from its full impact.176 Although the social profile of distress in Oxfordshire in the 1590s

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The Oxfordshire rising of 1596 is hard to recover, there is strong evidence to suggest the continuing presence of groups, intermediate between rich and poor, some of whom continued to prosper from conditions in the period.177 Husbandmen, as has already been observed, were noticeably absent from Steer’s circle. For others, less-fortunate, membership of the landed village, however slight, may have given rights and expectations which afforded some protection. For the landless, service and regular labour (if they withstood the pressures of harvest failure, which was not always the case) could also ease dependence on the market for food. But the corollary might well be a loss of independence. Paradoxically, changes that produced a discontented poor also forged new fetters to prevent collective political action by them, which only a collapse in political authority might break. The fact that change was experienced for most within the crucible of small-scale, face-to-face rural communities made it easier to meet the challenge posed by the poor. The pervasive and often personal nature of social relationships and the continuing presence of intermediate groups might help to mask the underlying simplification of social relationships, but it was the unremitting reality of that process which permitted the possibility of greater control: The gentry (successfully planting themselves in many villages) and their allies the yeomen (for whom evidence suggests that the crisis of the 1590s and codification of parochial legislation may have been something of a watershed in the redirection of their alliances) were able to reinforce the growing presence of the state in the village, with their powers as landlords, employers and ratepayers.178 Indeed, discovery of Steer’s rising (and the day chosen) emphasised for the government the necessity for residence in the country by the gentry. Repeated charges and proclamations reiterated to the gentry the importance of hospitality, a word whose many nuances are now hard to recover. A speech by the Lord Keeper, almost to the day of the third anniversary of the rising, captures something of its charged meaning: gentlemen were to return to their estates, there to maynteyne hospitalitie, and releive their poure neighboures, and to see good order kept, whereby natural Love will growe, and be continued betwene Landlordes and their Tenants and the gentlemen and those of the poorer and meaner sorte which is a matter of noe small movement, for the goode and Quiett of the Common Weale.179

In this respect, it is worth emphasising that Steer did not propose to attack all gentlemen. Steer’s targets, like the victims of earlier rebellions, were for the most part either newcomers to their community or to the ranks of landed society. There are signs that their enclosing might be only one aspect of their disinclination to meet the expectations of their neighbours, while a preference for letting out their land in large units to absentee graziers may have denied them the possible disciplines of rent roll or labour on the demesne.180

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Popular politics in early modern England The fatalism that so infuriated Steer when attempting to recruit among the labouring poor was then perhaps no more than an accommodation to the realities of power. Collective (but not covert) action by the poor might invite reprisals every bit as destructive as retaliation by the state to their ability to piece together a living. Roger Crab’s ‘labouring poor Men which in Times of Scarcity pine and murmur for Want of Bread, Cursing the Rich behind his Back; and before his Face, Cap and Knee and a whining countenance’ were already to be found in the late sixteenth-century countryside.181 Their growing presence helps to explain not only the failure of the Oxfordshire rising, but also the diminishing agrarian disorder after the Midlands rising. But the subordination of the poor within the ‘dialectics of deference’, while born of dependence, had to be actively maintained. The poor had to be continually won over. Charity therefore was extorted as well as bestowed, poor relief demanded as well as administered.182 Local elites knew better than to believe that the seeming passivity of the rural poor meant an absence of tensions or discontent. Neither they nor the government could afford to ignore those discontents. As Francis Bacon advised in his essay ‘Of Seditions and Troubles’ (for which his experience as interrogator of the Oxfordshire rebels must have provided valuable copy): Neither let any prince or state be secure concerning discontentments, because they have been often, or have been long, and yet no peril hath ensued: for as it is true that every vapour or fume doth not turn into a storm; so it is nevertheless true that storms, though they blow over divers times, yet may fall at last.183

Locally, the Oxfordshire rising took its place in the roll-call of remembered disorder that continued to play a part in the relationship between rich and poor. The executions of 1549 in the county might have contributed to the failure of 1596 and, in turn, its judicial aftermath may have led to Oxfordshire’s seeming immobility in 1607. But that tradition of disorder also had a very different memory for the gentry and their allies. When the Midlands rising broke out, it was rumoured at Witney that the Northamptonshire Diggers were to come to Oxfordshire. Their stated destinations can hardly have been accidental – they were to rendezvous at Yarnton and Bletchingdon.184 The reality of late sixteenth-century rural social relationships meant that gentlemen could draw little comfort from Sir Thomas Smith’s well-known pronouncement that the ‘fourth sort’ (in which he included carpenters) ‘have no voice nor authoritie in our common wealth, and no account is made of them but onelie to be ruled, not to rule other’185 The consequences of one carpenter’s projected actions suggests that there was a more equivocal relationship between the people and their governors in early modern England.

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The Oxfordshire rising of 1596 NOTES I am grateful to Chris Day and Janet Cooper of the Victoria County History of Oxfordshire; Molly Barratt of the Bodleian Library; Clifford Davies, John Morrill, Keith Wrightson and members of Joan Thirsk’s seminar at Oxford for their comments on an earlier draft of this article. 1 J. Wilson, Entertainments for Elizabeth I (Woodbridge, 1980), p. 141; E. K. Chambers, Sir Henry Lee (Oxford, 1936), pp. 145–9. 2 K. J. Allison, M. W. Beresford and J. G. Hurst, The Deserted Villages of Oxfordshire (Department of English Local History, Occasional Papers, no. 17, Leicester, 1965), p. 37; PRO, SP 12/262/4 (exam. Rog. Symonds). 3 R. C. Strong, Portraits of Queen Elizabeth (Oxford, 1963), pp. 75–6; F. A. Yates, Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century (Harmondsworth, 1977), pp. 104–6, 218–19. 4 BL, Lansdowne MS, 81, fo. 152v; HMC, Somerset MSS, p. 20. 5 HMC, Salisbury MSS, 13, pp. 168–9; APC, 1595–96, pp. 88–9; Essex Record Office, Chelmsford, Q/SR 131/35, 136/111; BL, Lansdowne MS, 83, fo. 49; cf. Calendar of Assize Records: Kent Indictments, J. S. Cockburn (ed.), 2 vols (London, 1979–80), 1, pp. 369, 393, 425; ibid.: Hertfordshire Indictments, 2 vols (London, 1975), 1, p. 118; ibid.: Surrey Indictments, 2 vols (London, 1980), 1, p. 406; Centre for Kentish Studies, Maidstone, hereafter CKS, Fa/JQs 24/103; P. Clark, English Provincial Society from the Reformation to the Revolution: Religion, Politics and Society in Kent, 1500–1640 (Hassocks, Sussex, 1977), p. 454, n. 2. 6 CKS, QM/SB 85. That the parish at the centre of the conspiracy, Hernhill, was unable to relieve its poor and that their hundred lacked a JP, may have compounded the problems of the poor: Q/SR 2, m. 8d.; Norfolk Record Office, Norwich, hereafter NRO, C.S3/12A: I am grateful to Mr T. C. Wales for this reference. 7 J. Walter, ‘Food riots in England, 1585–1649’, in A. Charlesworth (ed.), An Atlas of Rural Protest in Britain, 1549–1900 (1982); BL, Lansdowne MS, 83, fo. 49. 8 City of London Record Office, hereafter CLRO, Remembrancia, 2, 97; Matthew Hale, Historia placitorum coronae, S. Emlyn (ed.), 2 vols (London, 1736), 1, p. 565; Historical Manuscripts Commission, hereafter HMC, Salisbury MSS, 5, pp. 248–50; BL, Harleian MS, 2143, fo. 57v; Lansdowne MS, 81, fos 72, 76, 86. I hope shortly to publish an article on the London disorders. 9 E. M. Leonard, The Early History of English Poor Relief (Cambridge, 1900), pp. vii, 73; J. Pound, Poverty and Vagrancy in Tudor England (London, 1971), p. 51. Others have recognised the absence of a major rebellion in the 1590s: A. Fletcher, Tudor Rebellions (1968), pp. 112–13; C. S. L. Davies, ‘Peasant revolt in England and France: a comparison’, Agricultural History Review, hereafter AgHR, 21 (1973), 125 n. 10 E. P. Cheyney, A History of England from the Defeat of the Armada to the Death of Elizabeth, 2 vols (London, 1926), 2, p. 33, misdates the day of the rising (21 November) as 25 November; C. Russell, The Crisis of Parliaments: English History, 1509–1660 (Oxford, 1971), p. 248, puts the rising a year later in 1597. 11 Pound, Poverty and Vagrancy in Tudor England, p. 51; J. Thirsk (ed.), The Agrarian History of England and Wales, 4, 1500–1640 (Cambridge, 1966), hereafter AHEW, p. 229; W. E. Tate, The English Village Community and the Enclosure Movements (London, 1967), p. 73 (‘the riots of the peasants in Oxfordshire’).

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Popular politics in early modern England 12 C. Hill and E. Dell (eds), The Good Old Cause: The English Revolution of 1640–1660, Its Causes, Course and Consequences (London, 1949), pp. 91–3; C. Hill, ‘The many-headed monster in late Tudor and early Stuart thinking’, in C. H. Carter (ed.), From the Renaissance to the Counter-Reformation: Essays in Honour of Garrett Mattingley (London, 1966), p. 297; C. Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (London, 1972), p. 37; R. H. Tawney, The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century (London, 1912), pp. 320, 393. 13 M. Jessup, A History of Oxfordshire (London, 1975), p. 73; A. Appleby, Famine in Tudor and Stuart England (Liverpool, 1978), p. 142. 14 PRO, SP 12/262/4; B. Darivas, ‘Etude sur la crise économique de 1593–1597’, Revue d’Histoire économique et sociale, 30 (1932), 382–98 (although peasants were not to be found among the conspirators); W. Schulze, ‘Europäische und deutsche Bauernrevolten der frühen Neuzeit-Probleme der vegleichenden Betrachtung’, in W. Schulze (ed.), Europäische Bauernrevolten der frühen Neuzeit (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1982), p. 10: I am grateful to Clifford Davies for this reference. 15 Bodl., Oxford, MSS, D. D. Par. Wendlebury d. 1, fo. 43 (prices per bushel); W. F. Lloyd, Prices of Corn in Oxford (Oxford, 1830), p. 26; PRO, SP 12/261/15.iv (exam. Rich. Heath). See also J. E. Thorold Rogers, A History of Agriculture and Prices in England, 1259–1793, 7 vols (Oxford, 1866–1902), 5, pp. 178–81. 16

A. Appleby, ‘Diet in sixteenth-century England: sources, problems, possibilities’, in C. Webster (ed.), Health, Medicine and Mortality in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge, 1979), pp. 112–13; for the concept of ‘exchange entitlements’, see A. Sen, ‘Starvation and exchange entitlements: a general approach and its application to the Great Bengal Famine’, Cambridge Journal of Economics, 1 (1977), 33–59.

17 APC, 1596–97, pp. 94–6. 18 Victoria County History, hereafter VCH, Oxfordshire, 5, p. 314, and 12 (Yarnton, Water Eaton: I am grateful to Chris Day and his colleague Janet Cooper for allowing me to see drafts of this volume); M. Griffiths, ‘Kirtlington: An Oxfordshire Community, 1500– 1750’ (D.Phil. dissertation, University of Oxford, 1979), pp. 62, 171. 19 See, for example, testamentary evidence of the sharply differing levels of wealth of yeomen, husbandmen and craftsmen: M. A. Havinden (ed.), Household and Farm Inventories in Oxfordshire, 1550–1590 (Oxfordshire Record Society, 44, Oxford, 1965), pp. 10– 11. 20 Bodl., MSS, D. D. Par. Bletchingdon c. 6, pp. 72–4 (my pagination); A. Ballard, ‘Three surveys of Bladon’, Oxford Archaeological Society Report 1910, p. 26; Mrs B. [M.H.A.] Stapleton, Three Oxfordshire Parishes: A History of Kidlington, Yamton and Begbroke (Oxford History Society, 24, Oxford, 1893), p. 263; M. A. Havinden, ‘The Rural Economy of Oxfordshire, 1580–1730’ (B.Litt. dissertation, University of Oxford, 1961), pp. v–vi, 38, 83–4; Griffiths, ‘Kirtlington’, pp. 26, 50–1, 159, 171; VCH Oxfordshire, 6, p. 97; PRO, STAC (PRO call number for Star Chamber) 5/A11/9. 21 Griffiths, ‘Kirtlington’, pp. 211–12; Bodl., MSS, D. D. Par. Thame b. 2, pp. 246–7 (churchwardens’ accounts: the rise and fall of receipts for the church ale parallels the trajectory of grain prices); Oxford Record Office, Oxford, hereafter ORO, Misc. Je 1/1 (Witney Court Book, 1558–1605); Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, hereafter CSPD, 1595–7, pp. 161–2; The Life and Acts of John Whitgift, J. Strype (ed.), 3 vols (Oxford, 1822), 3, p. 491; APC, 1596–7, pp. 112–13.

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The Oxfordshire rising of 1596 22 PRO, SP 12/261/10.ii (exam. Rog. Ibill); 12/262/4 (exam. Rog. Symonds); 12/261/15.iv (exam. Rich. Heath). 23 PRO, SP 12/262/4 (exam. Barth. Steer); 12/261/15.iv (exam. Jn. Horne). B. Sharp, In Contempt of All Authority: Rural Artisans and Riot in the West of England, 1586–1660 (Berkeley and London, 1980), p. 40, wrongly conflates the Witney incident and the petitioning of Norris. In August, the archbishops had been commanded to instruct their clergy to preach the need for greater charity to the poor: APC, 1596–7, pp. 94–6. 24 PRO, SP 12/262/4 (exam. Barth. Steer); 12/261/19; APC, 1596–97, pp. 112–13; PRO, SP 12/198/27, 42, 55–6; CSPD, 1595–97; CSPD Addenda 1580–1625 (very few grain returns are extant for the 1590s). There is some evidence to suggest that the county authorities were implementing the traditional response of regulating alehouses: Bodl., MS, D. D. Par Witney d. I, fo. 312. Lord Lieutenant Knollys’ comment to Cecil in late October that during his abode in Oxfordshire he had taken more pains than pleasure may refer to the problems of the county’s magistracy: HMC, Salisbury MSS, v, p. 9. 25 Somerset Record Office, Taunton, hereafter SRO, Q/SR 64.2/243. 26 PRO, SP 12/262/4 (exam. Barth. Steer); 12/261/15.ii (exam. Js. Bradshaw); 12/261/15.v, 12/261/10.ii (exams. Jn. Steer). 27 PRO, SP 12/261/15.iv, 27 (exams. Thos. Powell and Wm. Baldwyn); 12/262/4 (exam. Js. Bradshaw); 12/261/28.i (exam. Thos. Ingoldesby); 12/261/10.i. 28 PRO, SP 12/261/10.ii, 15.iv, 27 (exams. Thos. Horne, Rich. Heath, Hen. Redhead and Rog. Symonds); 12/262/4 (exams. Js. Bradshaw, Rog. Symonds and Barth. Steer). 29 PRO, SP 12/262/4 (exam. Rog. Symonds). 30 PRO, SP 12/261/10.ii, 15.iv, 27.i; 12/262/4 (exams. Thos. Horne and Rog. Symonds). 31 P. L. Hughes and J. F. Larkin (eds), Tudor Royal Proclamations, 3 vols (New Haven, CT, 1964–69), 3, pp. 169–72; for the time taken for proclamations to reach Oxford, F. A. Youngs, The Proclamations of the Tudor Queens (Cambridge, 1976), p. 24; in midNovember, writing from Oxford, Dudley Carleton made reference to ‘the scarcity of all other things’: CSPD, Addenda 1580–1625, p. 377. 32 PRO, SP 12/261/10.ii (exam. Rog. Symonds). 33 PRO, SP 12/262/4 (exam. Barth. Steer). 34 PRO, SP 12/261/10.ii, 15.v (exams. Rog. Symonds, Vincent Rankell and Jn. Steer). Popular celebrations of Elizabeth’s accession day in Oxfordshire may have provided the pretext for Steer’s visit to Witney: R. Strong, ‘The popular celebration of the accession day of Queen Elizabeth I’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 21 (1958), 88. 35 PRO, SP 12/261/10.ii (exam. Jn. Steer); 12/262/4 (exam. Barth. Steer). 36 Two communities, Begbroke and Yarnton, with a common experience of enclosure, intercommoned together: Stapleton, Three Oxfordshire Parishes, pp. 308–9. Hampton Poyle, Steer’s birthplace, intercommoned with Islip; Beckley (another village from which conspirators came) was one of seven townships intercommoning on Otmoor moor: VCH Oxfordshire, 2, p. 201; Havinden, ‘The Rural Economy of Oxfordshire’, p. 94. 37 Three-quarters of debt cases in the manor of Kirtlington involved plaintiffs from another village implicated in the conspiracy: Griffiths, ‘Kirtlington’, p. 306. 38 This statement is based on a systematic search of parish registers for the region, deposited in the Bodleian Library and the ORO.

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Popular politics in early modern England 39 PRO, STAC 5/A11/9; VCH Oxfordshire, 6, p. 56. The movement of livestock from Banbury to London provided another link between region and capital: B. A. Holderness, Pre-Industrial England: Economy and Society, 1500–1750 (London, 1976), p. 69; land-holding by Oxford colleges also brought villagers regularly to Oxford, for example: E. R. C. Brinkworth (ed.), South Newington Churchwardens’ Accounts, 1553–1684 (Banbury History Society, 6, Banbury, 1964), p. 9. 40 PRO, SP 12/262/4 (exam. Barth. Steer); 12/261/15.iii and 7.iv (exams. Hen. Redhead and Edw. Hoffer). Norris and Spencer’s carters would also have been regular visitors to the market-place, where proclamations heard there attributed the continuing dearth to private covetousness and public corruption: Tudor Royal Proclamations, Hughes and Larkin (eds), 3, pp. 165–6, 169–72. It is difficult to believe that the conspirators would not have used the opportunity provided by the alehouse; Kidlington had six and Yarnton at least one: PRO, SP 12/198/42. 41 VCH Oxfordshire, 4, pp. 310–11; 10, p. 58; 6, pp. 32–3; A. Ballard, Chronicles of the Royal Borough of Woodstock (Oxford, 1896), p. 25; PRO, SP 12/261/28.i (exam. Thos. Ingoldesby). 42 Stapleton, Three Oxfordshire Parishes, p. 311; E. C. Prior, ‘Dedication of churches with some notes as to the village feasts and old customs in the deaneries of Islip and Bicester’, Oxfordshire Archaeological Society Report 1901, 23; cf. Spelsbury, Sunday after All Saints’ Day: E. Corbett, A History of Spelsbury (Banbury, 1962), p. 89. Writing later in the seventeenth century, White Kennett noted that many Oxfordshire wakes ‘are now celebrated near the time of Michaelmas, when a vacation from the labours of harvests and the plough, does afford the best opportunity for visits and sports’: White Kennett, Parochial Antiquities Attempted in the History of Ambrosden, Burcester and Other Adjacent Parts in the Counties of Oxford and Bucks. (Oxford, 1695), p. 611; A. Kussmaul, Servants in Husbandry in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1981), p. 62. 43 PRO, SP 12/261/15.i and iv (exam. Jn. Horne); Bodl., MS, Oxon. Wills 29/3/42, will Wm. Horne, Bletchingdon, 1600, leaving 30s. to his brother John. Their father was probably the ‘Horne’ mentioned as occupying a close at Bletchingdon in depositions before Star Chamber in 1598: PRO, STAC 5/A11/9; Thomas Horne, apprentice to Roger Symonds at Hampton Poyle, may also have been related: SP 12/261/27.i (exam. Thos. Horne). 44 PRO, SP 12/261/15.iv (exam. Jn. Horne); Bodl., MS, D. D. Kirtlington b.l, fo. 2, Thomas Bompass m. Edith Kempster; fo. 9v, bap. Edmund; MS, Wills Oxon. 39/1/21, will Wm. Kempster, Hampton Gay, husbandman, 1589, recording bequests to children of his daughter, Edith Bompass, widow. There were also Kempsters holding land at another village in the conspiracy, Kirtlington: MS, D. D. Kirtlington b.l and c.l; Griffiths, ‘Kirtlington’, p. 132, table 3.4. 45 PRO, SP 12/261/15.ii. The Bradshaws may have had a hereditary link with Chetwode; a James Bradshaw had been miller there in the mid-sixteenth century: PRO, STAC 4/2/21. The link may have come from the marriage of Richard Chetwode of Chetwode to the heiress to the lord of the manor of Begbroke in the 1540s: Stapleton, Three Oxfordshire Parishes, p. 331. The coincidence of planning for the rising with Michaelmas, the conventional hiring date for servants at Oxfordshire’s fairs, would have promoted the circulation of news: Kussmaul, Servants in Husbandry, p. 50 and appendix 4. 46 Sir William Spencer, who had estates of his own in Warwickshire and Northamptonshire, was the third son of Sir John Spencer of Althorp: P. W. Hasler, The History of Parliament: The House of Commons, 1558–1603, 3 vols (London, 1981), 3, p. 427; for the Spencers, see M. E. Finch, The Wealth of Five Northamptonshire Families, 1540–1640

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The Oxfordshire rising of 1596 (Northamptonshire Record Society, 14, Oxford, 1956), pp. 38–61; for evidence of Sir William’s visits to the Northamptonshire estates in the 1590s, see J. N. Simpkinson, The Washingtons: A Tale of a Country Parish in the Seventeenth Century (1860). Cf. the role of household servants in American slave risings: E. D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York, 1972), pp. 361–3. 47 PRO, SP 14/28/64, report by Sir Edward Coke on the examination of Bartholomew Steer, January 1597, miscalendared under 1607 by the editors of the CSPD; for the correct date, see the dated copy in the BL, microfilms 485/8, Hatfield MS, 38, fo. 12. 48 Several examinees were allowed to claim no knowledge of the conspiracy, although there was evidence against some of them: PRO, SP 12/261/15iv (exams. Wm. Durbridge, Wm. Dowlay, Hen. Triplett and Wm. Ffabian); 12/262/4 (exam. Js. Bartholomew). Others named by Steer were not examined; for example, ‘ould Bempster’ cited by Steer: 12/261/10.ii. There is also the problem of record survival. The absence of the examinations of leading figures Richard Bradshaw and Robert Burton is probably to be explained by their use in preparing their trials. 49 Redhead, of Kirtlington, may well have been in service in the far west of the county: he was asked by Bradshaw ‘to bring some companie with hym from Burford syde’: PRO, SP 12/261/15.iv. 50 PRO, SP 12/261/10.i and ii (exam. Vinc. Rankell). 51 PRO, SP 12/261/10.i, 13, 15.iv; 12/262/4 (exam. Barth. Steer). 52 PRO, SP 12/261/10.ii; 12/262/4 (exams. Rog. Symonds and Barth. Steer). On the importance of fire in the popular mentalité, see K. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England (Harmondsworth, 1973), pp. 17–20; E. Canetti, Crowds and Power (Harmondsworth, 1973), pp. 88–93. 53 A. Vere Woodman, ‘The Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire rising of 1549’, Oxoniensia, 22 (1957), 80, unfortunately cites only Steer to support the identity of the locus for the 1549 rising; many of those punished in 1549, however, either came from, or were executed in, north Oxfordshire: ibid., 80–1; one of the catholic priests hanged after 1549 had been the incumbent at Hampton Poyle, Steer’s birthplace: Anon., Oxford Archaeological Society Report 1914, 166. Thame seems to have been another centre of discontent in 1549: W. K. Jordan, Edward VI: The Young King (London, 1968), p. 448. Steer might have learned of this when he worked for Norris at Rycote. 54 PRO, SP 12/261/10.ii; 12/262/4 (exams. Rog. Symonds). Sharp, In Contempt of All Authority, p. 40, citing Cheyney, A History of England, 2, pp. 33–4, wrongly dates the London disorder as 1596 and therefore perhaps exaggerates the part that it played in prompting Steer to stage a rising. 55 PRO, SP 12/261/10.ii, 15iv (exams. Rog. Ibill, Hen. Redhead and Jn. Horne); 14/28/64. 56 PRO, SP 12/261/15.i. 57 PRO, SP 12/262/4 (exams. Js. Bradshaw and Barth. Steer). 58 Allison, Beresford and Hurst, The Deserted Villages of Oxfordshire, p. 8; Havinden, ‘The Rural Economy of Oxfordshire’, p. ii. 59 The evidence of the 1607 enclosure commission, for example, measured by agricultural regions rather than political units, might suggest that enclosure was a more serious problem than the calculations of E. F. Gay would suggest: ‘Inclosures in England in the sixteenth century’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 17 (1903), 588–9. See AHEW,

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Popular politics in early modern England pp. 240–55; J. Thirsk, Tudor Enclosures (Historical Association Pamphlet, no. 41, 1959), pp. 20–1. For the concept of mental maps, see P. Gould and R. White, Mental Maps (Harmondsworth, 1974). 60 Havinden, ‘The Rural Economy of Oxfordshire’, pp. iii–vi, 20–1, 73–4, 91–2, 121, 151–2. 61 PRO, SP 12/262/4. 62 VCH Oxfordshire, 6, pp. 62–4; Bodl., MSS, D. D. Par. Bletchingdon c. 6, p. 27 (my pagination): I am very grateful to Molly Barratt of the Bodleian Library for making it possible for me to consult this important source; PRO, C 3/172/32. 63 PRO, STAC 5/A 11/9; Bodl., MSS, D. D. Par. Bletchingdon c. 6, p. 32. 64 PRO, SP 12/261/15.iii and iv (exams. Edw. Hoffer and Hen. Redhead); Bodl., MSS, D. D. Par. Bletchingdon c. 6, p. 149. 65 Several witnesses in Star Chamber, in response to a question about depopulation, stressed the inappropriateness of the question. The population had risen with the result that there were ‘dyvers poore men ... whoe have not [the] wherewithall to sett themselves on worke’: PRO, STAC 5/A11/9 (deposition of Rbt. Secoll); SP 12/261/10.ii (exam. Jn. Steer). 66 H. L. Gray, English Field Systems (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1915), p. 121. 67 Sawyer Papers (in private possession), bundles 1 and 2 (I am very grateful to Janet Cooper for making her transcripts of this important collection available to me); VCH Oxfordshire, 4, pp. 111, 138; Hasler, The History of Parliament, 2, pp. 158–9; List and Indexes, no. 19 (New York, 1963), p. 109. 68 Allison, Beresford and Hurst, The Deserted Villages of Oxfordshire, pp. 36–8, 45; I. S. Leadam (ed.), The Domesday of Inclosures, 1517–1518, 2 vols (1897; reprinted Port Washington, NY, 1971), i, pp. 376–7; Sawyer Papers, bundle 1, no. 1; PRO, STAC 5/A11/9; J. Cooper, ‘Water Eaton’, in VCH Oxfordshire, 12, pp. 470–89); Thomas Temple, representative of another enclosing family, who later sold his share of Water Eaton for some £2,000, may have been already living there: E. F. Gay, ‘The Temples of Stowe and their debts: Sir Thomas Temple and Sir Peter Temple, 1603–1653’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 2 (1938–39), 401 n., 408. 69 Stapleton, Three Oxfordshire Parishes, pp. 210–11, 284, 287; Leadam (ed.), The Domesday of Inclosures, i, p. 386; Bodl., MS, Top. Oxon. b. 19, fos 42, 48. 70 Finch, The Wealth of Five Northamptonshire Families, p. 58; Bodl., MS, Top. Oxon. b. 19, fos 19, 20, 59v. By the 1520s, half the parish was already enclosed and leased as three farms, one to Richard Andrews, a prominent figure in the Oxfordshire monastic land market: C. J. Day, ‘Yarnton’, in VCH Oxfordshire, 12. Yarnton was also among that group of manors whose early enclosure Gray explained by reference to an Elizabethan mansion: Gray, English Field Systems, p. 121. 71 PRO, SP 12/261/10.ii; 264/4 (exam. Rog. Symonds); VCH Oxfordshire, 6, pp. 64–5; Bodl., MSS, D. D. Par. Bletchingdon c. 6, pp. 74–5; MS, Wills Oxon. 12/11/88; 55/1/36; PRO, C 3/155/33. 72 Bodl., MS, Top. Oxon. b. 86, fo. 7v; PRO, STAC 5/A11/9. Francis Power was also in debt to Thomas Rathbone at his death: Bodl., MS, Wills Oxon. 55/1/36. 73 VCH Oxfordshire, 4, p. 111; S. L. Barry, The Pedigree of the Barrys of Eynsham (London, 1928), pp. 9–10.

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The Oxfordshire rising of 1596 74 Beresford suggests depopulation had begun before the early fifteenth century; in 1428 there were fewer than ten households, in 1524 only seven households: M. Beresford, The Lost Villages of England (London, 1954), p. 381; Allison, Beresford and Hurst, The Deserted Villages of Oxfordshire, p. 39; VCH Oxfordshire, 6, p. 157; Havinden, ‘The Rural Economy of Oxfordshire’, p. 25; Bodl., MS, Top. Oxon. c. 328/1, fo. 47: the annual rent paid by the butcher was £120 p.a. 75 Chambers, Sir Henry Lee, pp. 99–103; Corbett, A History of Spelsbury, pp. 74–5; HMC, Salisbury MSS, 2, p. 141. Whitton had also held the manor of Gosford, a depopulated township adjacent to Water Eaton, before selling it to the Frere family: Cooper, ‘Water Eaton’; Allison, Beresford and Hurst, The Deserted Villages of Oxfordshire, p. 38. 76 Chambers, Sir Henry Lee, pp. 3–54; The Domesday of Inclosures, Leadam (ed.), 1, pp. 161, 170; Allison, Beresford and Hurst, The Deserted Villages of Oxfordshire, p. 37; Thomas Knell, A Declaration of Such Tempestious and Outragious Fluddes as Hath Been in Diuers Places of England (1571, STC [A short-title catalogue of books printed in England, Scotland and Ireland, and of English books printed abroad, in 1475–1640). First compiled by A. W. Pollard and G. R. Redgrave. Second edition (revised and enlarged) begun by W. A. Jackson and F. S. Ferguson; completed by K. F. Pantzer (3 vols, London, 1976–91)] 15032), sig. c. 4; Beresford, The Lost Villages, p. 55. 77 N. J. O’Conor, Godes Peace and the Queenes: Vicissitudes of a House, 1539–1615 (London, 1934), pp. 3–4, 6, 10, 17. 78 Ibid., p. 7; Allison, Beresford and Hurst, The Deserted Villages of Oxfordshire, pp. 42–3; VCH Oxfordshire, 6, p. 190; ‘Two London chronicles from the collections of John Stow’, C. L. Kingsford (ed.), in The Camden Miscellany, 12 (Camden Society, 3rd ser., 18, 1910), p. 18. 79 PRO, SP 12/261/10.ii (exam. Jn. Steer). 80 Ballard, Chronicles of the Royal Borough of Woodstock, p. 25; T. E. Schulz, ‘The Woodstock glove industry’, Oxoniensia, 3 (1938), 139–52; Chambers, Sir Henry Lee, pp. 92–3; Corbett, A History of Spelsbury, p. 153; HMC, Salisbury MSS, 2, p. 141. 81 In a 1606 survey, thirteen cottages were listed, eleven of which were without land or entitlement to common: Ballard, ‘Three surveys of Bladon’, 20–7. A seventeenth-century terrier records the continuing presence of some open fields: Bodl., Oxford Archdeacon Papers b. 40, fo. 39. 82 VCH Oxfordshire, 6, p. 164; Leadam, The Domesday of Inclosures, 1, pp. 329, 348; Bodl., MS, Top. Oxon. b. 86, fos 1–7, and b. 87, fos 175–82. In 1625 only about one-third of the demesne was given over to arable, in contrast to two-thirds or more of the tenants’ holdings: ibid., fos 123–49, 215–17. 83 A. Plummer (ed.), The Witney Blanket Industry: The Records of the Witney Blanket Weavers (London, 1934), ch. 1; G. D. Ramsay, The Wiltshire Woollen Industry in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, 2nd edn. (London, 1965), pp. 65–9; PRO, STAC 8/297/11. There had been some earlier enclosure at Witney itself: Allison, Beresford and Hurst., The Deserted Villages of Oxfordshire, pp. 35–6; Leadam, The Domesday of Inclosures, 1, pp. 365, 380. Witney had appointed ‘Collectors for the poore Inhabitants’ from at least 1586 on: Bodl., MS, D. D. Par. Witney d. 1, fos 248, 275v, 287v, 291v, 293, 307, 329, 547. 84 PRO, SP 12/261/10.ii (exam. Barth. Steer); VCH Oxfordshire, v, pp. 56– 76; Havinden, ‘The Rural Economy of Oxfordshire’, p. 94; J. Dunkin, The History and Antiquities of the Hundred of Bullingdon and Ploughley, 2 vols (London, 1876), 1, pp. 106–119. Croke had

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Popular politics in early modern England also acquired Studley Priory’s estate in Elsfield and Begbroke at the Dissolution: VCH Oxfordshire, v, pp. 116–22; Stapleton, Three Oxfordshire Parishes, p. 324. 85 Griffiths, ‘Kirtlington’, pp. 84–5, 128, 159, 171, 206–7; VCH Oxfordshire, 6, p. 225. Although full evidence is lacking for Kidlington, a glebe terrie of 1634 still showed open fields: Bodl., Oxford Archdeacon Papers b. 41, fo. 14. Enclosers elsewhere, however, held land there (William Frere the encloser of Water Eaton; Humphrey Fitzherbert, the encloser of Begbroke, held one manor there), and plague in 1593 prompted a collection throughout Oxford’s parishes for Kidlington’s poor: Stapleton, Three Oxfordshire Parishes, pp. 60, 76, 90. 86 Ibid., pp. 308–9; PRO, STAC 8/142/16. In fact, enclosure had been by agreement, but the complaint confirms that enclosure so accomplished did not imply the consent of all and it might disregard the opinions of cottagers and smallholders. (The commoners’ complaint was referred to a local committee consisting of Spencer, Frere and Power.) There are examples of piecemeal enclosure in other villages in the area of the rising, and these include Elsfield: VCH Oxfordshire, 5, p. 118; Wood Eaton (bordering on Water Eaton): VCH Oxfordshire, 5, p. 315; Somerforde, in Cassington (next to Yarnton): Allison, Beresford and Hurst, The Deserted Villages of Oxfordshire of Oxfordshire, p. 44; Oddington: The Domesday of Inclosures, Leadam (ed.), 1, pp. 361–2, 367; Wootton Dornford, Hordley, Ludwell (all in Wootton): Allison, Beresford and Hurst, The Deserted Villages of Oxfordshire, pp. 39–40; Whitehill and Weaveley in Tackley: ibid., pp. 45– 6; at Tackley itself (next to Kirtlington), enclosure of the open fields for pasture may have begun: A. Ballard, ‘Tackley in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’, Oxford Archaeological Society Report, 1911, 32; VCH Oxfordshire, 11, p. 203. 87 VCH Oxfordshire, 6, pp. 27–8; Allison, Beresford and Hurst, The Deserted Villages of Oxfordshire, pp. 32–3, 47; Leadam (ed.), The Domesday of Inclosures, 1, pp. 334, 340; G. H. Dannet, ‘Bicester in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’, Oxoniensia, 26–7 (1961– 62), 244–311. Some enclosure and the conversion to pasture may have been a response to depopulation after the Black Death, but enclosure was still an issue in 1608 when the vicar was blaming Sir Michael Blount for having depopulated thirty tenements. There was an institutional link between the tithing of Bicester King’s End and Kirtlington, whose manor court it attended: Griffiths, ‘Kirtlington’, p. 271. 88 PRO, SP 12/262/4. The marlstone uplands remained almost entirely unenclosed in terms of enclosed townships, and piecemeal enclosure was not as widespread, as Havinden suggests (‘The Rural Economy of Oxfordshire’, p. 152), but Banbury had experienced enclosure in several of its hamlets (VCH Oxfordshire, 10, pp. 55, 157–75, 206–10, 240), and Broughton just to the south had been largely, and probably recently, enclosed by 1592 by Lord Saye and Sele (Havinden, ‘The Rural Economy of Oxfordshire’, p. 309). 89 W. E. Tate, ‘Enclosure acts and awards relating to Warwickshire’, Transactions of the Birmingham Archaeological Society, 65 (1944–45); M. W. Beresford, ‘The deserted villages of Warwickshire’, ibid., 66 (1945–46). A series of villages with experience of enclosure and agrarian disorder, from which rioters were drawn in 1607, were to be found in Warwickshire just to the north and north-west of Banbury: PRO, SP 16/257/129; STAC 8/15/21; 8/55/13; 8/78/13; 8/61/35; S. H. A. H[ervey], Ladbroke and Its Owners (Bury St Edmunds, 1914), pp. 106–9 and passim; H. Thorpe ‘The lord and the landscape’, Transactions of the Birmingham Archaeological Society, 80 (1962); Finch, The Wealth of Five Northamptonshire Families, pp. 38–44.

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The Oxfordshire rising of 1596 90 Anon., Certayne Causes Gathered Together, Wherein is Shewed the Decaye of England, in Four Supplications, 1529–1553 A.D., J. Furnivall and J. Meadows Cowper (eds) (Early English Text Society, extra ser., 13, 1871), pp. 93–102; Beresford, The Lost Villages, p. 116 and table 14a; W. E. Tate, ‘Inclosure movements in Northamptonshire’, Northamptonshire Past and Present, 1 (1949); PRO, STAC 8/15/21. James Bradshaw worked at Chetwode in Buckinghamshire, which Beresford listed as a suspected depopulated site: Beresford, The Lost Villages, p. 343. Similar movements must have taken place between the region of the rising and Northamptonshire; shortly before the rising Symonds’ landlord had been to Northampton fair: PRO, SP 12/262/4 (exams. Js. Bradshaw and Rog. Symonds). 91 HMC, Report on Manuscripts in Various Collections, 3, p. 89. 92 At Yarnton an early sixteenth-century rental showed only one freeholder: Bodl., MS, Top. Oxon. b. 19, fos 17–19. At Hampton Poyle, a 1625 rental showed only two freeholders: MS, Top. Oxon. b. 86, fos 1–7, and b. 87, fos 175–82. No freeholders were recorded at Water Eaton in 1535: Cooper, ‘Water Eaton’. At Hampton Gay there were thirty-three taxpayers in 1524: Allison, Beresford and Hurst, The Deserted Villages of Oxfordshire, pp. 39, 45. 93 Anon., Certayne Causes, p. 52. Despite the familiar rhetoric, it has been suggested that the pamphlet underestimates the scale of the movement: Beresford, Lost Villages, p. 85; cf. S. Fish, A Supplication of the Poore Commons, in Four Supplications, Furnivall and Cowper (eds), p. 80. 94 Certayne Causes, p. 51; BL, microfilms 485/11, Hatfield MS, 56, fo. 84; Add. MS, 48041, fo. 169v; HMC, Salisbury MSS, 14, p. 27; APC, 1596–97, p. 483. As in other Midland counties, the evidence suggests that there may have been a quickening of enclosure in Oxfordshire following the repeal of enclosure legislation in 1593: L. A. Parker, ‘Enclosure in Leicestershire, 1485–1607’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of London, 1948), pp. 93, 189; E. F. Gay, ‘The Midland Revolt and the inquisitions of depopulation of 1607’, TRHS, new ser., 18 (1904), pp. 235–6. 95 PRO, SP 12/261/27. Cf. Waring, ‘yf they did ryse he would be one’ (SP 12/261/15.iv; exam. Hen. Redhead); Baldwin, ‘if euerie bodie did rise, he muste alsoe be one’ (SP 12/261/27: exam. Wm. Baldwin); ‘yf the day should Come he would be one’ (SP 12/262/4: exam. Js. Bradshaw). 96 PRO, SP 12/261/10.ii (exam. Jn. Steer). 97 VCH Oxfordshire, 4, pp. 90, 343–4, is ambiguous about the problems of poverty in Oxford, suggesting that it was on the increase in the late sixteenth century, but giving no evidence of its dimensions; Carl Hammer suggests that the number exempt from the early sixteenth-century subsidy was as many as two-thirds of the population: C. I. Hammer, ‘The mobility of skilled labour in late medieval England: some Oxford evidence’, Vierteljahrschrift fur Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, 63 (1976), 197 (I am grateful to D. Souden for bringing this article to my attention); see also, C. I. Hammer, ‘Some social and institutional aspects of town–gown relationships in late medieval and Tudor Oxford’, 2 vols (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Toronto, 1973), 1, ch. 4, and 2, p. 504. 98 An attempt to trace sermons preached locally, by checking the Short-Title Catalogue against a list of ministers that was recovered from a variety of sources, proved inconclusive. 99 S. T. Bindoff, Ket’s Rebellion, 1549 (Historical Association Pamphlet, no. 12, 1949), pp. 19–20; J. Cornwall, Revolt of the Peasantry, 1549 (London, 1977), pp. 62, 66; Davies,

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Popular politics in early modern England ‘Peasant revolt in England and France’, 130. The role of the middling sort more generally in the agrarian crowd is based on my wider researches into early modern agrarian disorder. 100 On the collapse of agrarian disorder, see J. S. Morrill and J. D. Walter, ‘Order and disorder in the English Revolution’, in A. Fletcher and J. Stevenson (eds), Order and Disorder in Early Modern England, 1500–1750 (Cambridge, 1985). 101 Havinden, ‘The Rural Economy of Oxfordshire’, pp. 52, 84, 167–73, 275; Bodl., MS, Top. Oxon. b. 86, fos 2–7, and b. 87, fos 175–82; by 1625, half of the tenants at Hampton Poyle held only 8 per cent of the land: ibid., fos 123–49, 215–17. As an example of a similar tendency to polarisation, see Ballard, ‘Tackley in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’, 40. 102 If the estimate of thirty acres for a vulnerable open field holding is accepted (P. Bowden, ‘Agricultural prices, farm profits and rents’, in AHEW, pp. 652–7; M. Spufford, Contrasting Communities: English Villagers in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Cambridge, 1974), pp. 165–7), then the figures provided by Havinden are suggestive; the median holdings in three out of the four agricultural regions (including the Vale of Oxford) were below 30 acres: Havinden, ‘The Rural Economy of Oxfordshire’, pp. 48 (table I), 82 (table 8), 158. 103 Allison, Beresford and Hurst, The Deserted Villages of Oxfordshire, p. 8; J. A. Yelling, Common Field and Enclosure in England, 1450–1850 (1977), pp. 7–8. The evidence provided by the subsequent prosecution of several of the rising’s intended victims bears out Yelling’s cautions on the meaning of enclosure by agreement; the depositions of yeomen and others generally approve of the enclosure and stress agreement, a view not shared by all deponents: PRO, STAC 5/A11/9; cf. 8/142/16 (Begbroke). The sour comment of the Earl of Leicester on a petition against enclosure by the Crown at Woodstock in 1576, that ‘it is not to be suffered that a Prince in such a case should be grudged at, when every upstart and yeoman almost can have more a thousand times at their tenants’ hands to enclose whole towns and lordships’, may be significant: HMC, Salisbury MSS, 2, p. 141; three years later, Sir Henry Lee complained of enclosures by the larger tenants at Woodstock: Corbett, The History of Spelsbury, p. 153. 104 There are eleven Oxfordshire enclosure cases in PRO, STAC 8; of these, four involve inter-elite disputes, of which hedge-breaking is only one aspect (25/6, 98/12, 162/7, 297/11); the seven others were prompted by attempts to enclose without recognising the rights of common – only one of which involved enclosure within the open fields (21/9, 220/3, 245/20, 257/14, 264/14, 279/11, 311/26). Despite its earlier precedence, Oxfordshire was not included in the 1607 enclosure commission. 105 PRO, SP 12/261/10.ii. 106 PRO, SP 12/261/24. Coke named Burton twice to make it twenty names; not all of those named can be assumed to have supported the idea of a rising. 107 The conspirators may have had good reason to expect support from Hoffer; he had held a messuage [house and its appurtenances] and yardland which William Frere sold to Queen’s College before the rising: Stapleton, Three Oxfordshire Parishes, p. 76. 108 As Steer’s example shows, however, craftsman and servant were not mutually exclusive labels; in addition it seems likely that those not given an occupation or status in the examinations were also servants. 109 Bodl., MS, Wills Oxon. 3/5/14. Bradshaw, debts paid, left just over £14, a figure that

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The Oxfordshire rising of 1596 would have put him among poorer craftsmen in the county: Household and Farm Inventories in Oxfordshire, Havinden (ed.), p. 11. Although the Rankell family supplied one of the town’s governors in 1596, Vincent was more likely to have been related to the Thomas Rankell, broadweaver, sued for debt in 1596: Bodl., MS, D. D. Par. Witney d. 1, fos 307, 316. 110 PRO, SP 12/262/4; SP 14/28/64; Bodl., MS, Top. Oxon. c. 328/ 1, fo. 47. 111 PRO, SP 12/261/10.i. 112 E. J. Hobsbawm, Bandits (Harmondsworth, 1972), pp. 31–3; P. Stirling, Turkish Village (New York, 1966), p. 272; K. Thomas, ‘Age and authority in early modern England’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 62 (1976), 15–27. Symonds’ response to Steer’s attempt to recruit him, namely that ‘this was the waie to undoe himself his wyffe and Children’, while designed to please his examiners, may reflect the thinking of a married man: PRO, SP 12/262/4. 113 Bodl., MS, D. D. Par. Hampton Poyle b. 1, fo 3; MS, D. D. Par. Kirtlington b. 1, fo. 9r–v. Their unmarried state and position as servants would tend to suggest that others were of a similar age. Those in their late teens and early twenties may have been particularly hard hit by the economic conditions of the later sixteenth century: for example, the declining opportunities for employment as servants (Kussmaul, Servants in Husbandry, pp. 97–107) have been linked to the over-representation of those of that age in servant deaths by suicide: S. Stevenson, ‘Suicide after the Reformation: The Rise and Decline of Verdicts of felonia de se in South-East England, 1530–1590’ (BA dissertation, University of Cambridge, 1976): I am grateful to Simon Stevenson for allowing me to see his copy of this work. The same declining opportunities have been linked to the rising bastardy ratio in the period: D. Levine and K. Wrightson, ‘The social context of illegitimacy in early modern England’, in P. Laslett, K. Oosterveen and R. M. Smith (eds.), Bastardy and Its Comparative History (London, 1980), pp. 163–72. Notice also the predominance of this age group among the mentally disturbed patients of Richard Napier: M. MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety and Healing in SeventeenthCentury England (Cambridge, 1981), p. 41. 114 Others beside Steer may have found no service in Michaelmas 1596; the ‘putting away’ [dismissal] of servants in dearth was a frequent complaint: Henry Arthington, Provision for the Poore Now in Penurie Out of the Storehouse of God’s Plentie (1597, STC 798), sig. C.2. 115 Steer’s father was a small copyholder who, at his death in 1615, left a personal estate worth £18. 6s. 0d.; his will mentions only ten lands, but his eldest son William may have been the William Steer leasing a yardland at Hampton Poyle in 1625: Bodl., MS, Top. Oxon. b. 86, fos 17, 131v-2, and b. 87, fo. 145v; Wills Oxon. 59/2/30; Bompass’s father was a copyholder at Kirtlington who had held half a virgate of land, but no Bompass was listed in an incomplete 1619 rental: Griffiths, ‘Kirtlington’, pp. 97, 132; Henry Redhead probably came from the family at Kirtlington who had become cottagers after holding a yardland there until 1587: ibid., p. 159; William Horne, a servant and son of a Bletchingdon land-holder, died in 1599, leaving just over £19: Bodl., MS, Wills. Oxon. 29/3/42. 116 See, for example, R. Frankenberg, Communities in Britain: Social Life in Town and Country (Harmondsworth, 1966), pp. 61–4; N. Z. Davis, ‘The reasons of misrule: youth groups and charivaris in sixteenth-century France’, P&P, 50 (Feb. 1971), 41–75. 117 What follows is based on my wider researches into the tradition of agrarian disorder in early modern England.

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Popular politics in early modern England 118 PRO, SP 12/262/4 (exam. Rog. Symonds); 12/261/32. 119 PRO, SP 12/261/10.i; Roger Ibill, whom the authorities thought an important agent in the rising, was also imprisoned. 120 PRO, SP 12/261/28.i; 12/261/15. 121 APC, 1596–97, pp. 364, 383, 397, 412; PRO, SP 12/261/13. 122 PRO, SP 12/261/13. 123 Ibid. 124 APC, 1596–97, pp. 373–4. The keeper of the gatehouse claimed £2. 7s. 10d. for Symonds, who was held there for twenty-seven days, and £18. 5s. 2d. for lodging Burton until 12 June, when he was delivered to the sheriff of Oxfordshire: BL, Add. MS, 41257; PRO, E. 407/56, pt 4, fo. 193. Even allowing for the corruption prevalent in early modern prisons, compare the estimate of £13. 14s. 0d. annual expenditure for a poor family of five in the 1690s: K. Wrightson and D. Levine, Poverty and Piety in an English Village: Terling, 1525–1700 (London, 1979), p. 40; also Gregory King’s estimate of a cottage household’s annual income of £6. 10s. 0d.: Seventeenth-Century Economic Documents, J. Thirsk and J. P. Cooper (eds), (Oxford, 1972), pp. 780–1. 125 APC, 1596–97, pp. 373–4. 126 PRO, SP 12/261/21. The gypsies’ examination had been referred to the recorder of London, a member of the group interrogating the Oxfordshire conspirators. 127 Disbanded soldiers were thought to have been involved in the 1595 London disorders: HMC, Salisbury MSS, v, pp. 249–50. 128 BL, microfilms 485/8, Hatfield MS, 38/12; PRO, SP 14/28/64. 129 PRO, KB 8/53, mm. 12–15. Both Rathbones held enclosed land at Bletchingdon and had links with other potential victims of Steer; at his death their father was owed money by Francis Power, and John had purchased £200 of leases from Walter Frere of Oxford: Bodl., MS, Wills Oxon., 12/11/88; PRO, STAC 5/A11/9. Steer’s omission may just be explained by the authorities’ fear of putting on trial a man who could not have been relied upon to make the repentant confession expected of ‘honourable’ rebels: M. James, English Politics and the Concept of Honour, 1485–1642 (Past and Present Supplement no. 3, Oxford, 1978), pp. 54–5. 130 BL, microfilms 485/47, Hatfield MS, 175/72; PRO, KB 8/53, m. 16; Bodl., MS, Top. Oxon. c. 328/1, fos 44–8. Another judge, Sir Edmund Anderson, had links with another Midlands enclosing family; he had exchanged the ex-monastic property of Arbury, scene of later disorder in the Midlands rising, with the Newdegates of Warwickshire: E. Foss, A Biographical Dictionary of the Justices of England (1870), p. 14. 131 PRO, KB 8/53, mm. 1–11. Sharp, In Contempt of All Authority, pp. 44–5 and n., criticising the summaries of the trials in Fourth Report of the Deputy Keeper of the Public Records (London, 1843), app. 3, pp. 289–90, for frequently omitting Bompass’s name, suggests that Bompass was also executed. A more careful reading of the record, however, shows that while Bompass was included in the special commission of 7 June, his name was omitted from the writs to the sheriff on the same day and from subsequent records. There is no record of Bompass’s trial or conviction, and no endorsement of his indictment: PRO, KB 8/53, mm. 1 (special commission), 8 (writ to sheriff), 6–7 (precepts for trial jury), 13–15 (indictments). Lord Chief Justice Popham, in describing a meeting of judges to discuss the case, referred only to Burton and Bradshaw: Anon., The English

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The Oxfordshire rising of 1596 Reports, 176 vols (1900–30), 79, pp. 1227–8. The suggestion that Bompass suffered the same punishment therefore seems doubtful; he might have been dead already. 132 Sir Edward Coke, The Third Part of the Institutes of the Laws of England Concerning High Treason, and Other Pleas of the Crown, and Criminall Causes (1648 edn.), p. 10. Power had enclosed upwards of 120 acres next to Enslow Hill: PRO, STAC 5/A11/9 (deposition of Wm. Springall). 133 S. Williams (ed.), Letters Written by John Chamberlain During the Reign of Queen Elizabeth (Camden Society, old ser., 79, 1861), pp. 1–5; Sir Michael Dormer had become lord of the manor of Hampton Poyle in 1597: VCH Oxfordshire, 6, p. 162. 134 CSPD, 1595–97, pp. 23–4. 135 Statutes of the Realm, A. Luders, T. E. Tomlins, W. E. Taunton and J. Raithby (eds),11 vols (1810–28), 4, pp. 526–8; Hale, Historia placitorum coronae, 1, p. 132; J. Bellamy, The Tudor Law of Treason: An Introduction (London, 1979). 136 Anon., English Reports, 79, pp. 1227–8. 137 13 Elizabeth cap. I required the offence to be proved at the arraignment by two witnesses, unless the accused had confessed without violence, but Bradshaw and Burton had been tortured: Anon., ‘La seconde part des reports du tresurdite Edmund Anderson’, in English Reports, 123, p. 548. 138 W. Cobbett, Cobbett’s Complete Collection of State Trials and Proceedings for High Treason from the Earliest Period to the Present Time, 33 vols (1809–26), 1, p. 1421, and 6, pp. 899– 906; Hale, Historia placitorum coronae, 1, pp. 132–53; Coke, The Third Part of the Institutes, pp. 9–10. 139 Hughes and Larkin (eds), Tudor Royal Proclamations, 3, pp. 165–6, 169–72; John Hawarde, Les reports del [sic] cases in Camera Stellata, 1593–1609, W. P. Baildon (ed.) (London, 1894), pp. 56–7; APC, 1596–97, pp. 80–3, 94–8, 149, 151–3, 188–9, 226–8, 257–9, 269–70, 281, 319–20, 323, 325, 335–6, 339–40. 140 Prices were high in London, and had yet to reach their peak in Oxfordshire and elsewhere: The Fugger News-Letters, V. von Klarwill (ed.) (2nd ser., London, 1926), p. 286. 141 APC, 1596–97, pp. 97, 380–2, 393–7, 399, 441–2; CSPD, 1595–97, p. 332. 142 APC, 1596–97, pp. 380–2, 383–6. 143 PRO, SP 12/261/10. 144 PRO, SP 12/261/21,98; APC, 1596–97, pp. 437–8, 447, 449, 450–1, 455; ibid., 1597, pp. 37, 39, 43. The other enclosers were Robert Osborne, John Rede and Eusebius Isham of Northamptonshire, and Anthony Terringham and John Dormer of Buckinghamshire. Power and Frere found themselves answering a Star Chamber case which was still proceeding in June 1598 but whose outcome is not known: PRO, STAC 5/A11/9; A47/40; T. G. Barnes, ‘Fines in the Court of Star Chamber, 1596–1641’ (PRO typescript, 1971). 145 APC, 1596–97, p. 483. Hawarde, Les reports, pp. 75–6, 78–9; Youngs, The Proclamations, pp. 118–19. Only a full examination of PRO, STAC 5 would reveal how important this drive against enclosure was. 146 P. Williams, The Tudor Regime (Oxford, 1981 edn.), p. 348; cf. Gay, ‘The Midland Revolt’, 213 and n.; AHEW, 229; W. G. Hoskins, ‘Harvest fluctuations and English economic history, 1480–1619’, AgHR, 12 (1964), 32.

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Popular politics in early modern England 147 J. E. Neale, Elizabeth I and Her Parliaments, 1584–1601 (London, 1957), p. 336; Havinden, ‘The Rural Economy of Oxfordshire’, pp. 113–14; VCH Oxfordshire, 6, pp. 152–9. 148 Sir Simonds D’Ewes, The Journals of All the Parliaments during the Reign of Queen Elizabeth (London, 1682), pp. 551–2. One of Lord Norris’s sons also sat in the Parliament: Hasler, The History of Parliament, 3, pp. 137–8. 149 Ibid., pp. 336, 558, 560, 562, 566, 570, 578, 581, 583, 599; Hayward Townshend, Historical Collections: or, An Exact Account of the Proceedings of the Four Last Parliaments of Queen Elizabeth of Famous Memory (London, 1680), pp. 109, 113, 125; A. F. Pollard and M. Hatcher, ‘Hayward Townshend’s journals’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 12 (1934–35), 13–14. 150 D’Ewes, The Journals of All the Parliaments, p. 551; APC, 1596–97, pp. 373–4. 151 D’Ewes, The Journals of All the Parliaments, pp. 552, 558, 570, 578, 581; Townshend, Historical Collections, pp. 108, 117; BL, microfilms 485/8, Hatfield MS, 38, fo. 12; 485/11, Hatfield MS, 56, fos 67–8; 485/47, Hatfield MS, 175, fo. 72; Add. MS, 48041, fo. 169v; English Economic History: Select Documents, A. E. Bland, P. A. Brown and R. H. Tawney (eds) (New York, 1919), pp. 274–5. 152 CSPD, 1595–7, pp. 296–7; PRO, SP 12/261/10 and 10.i; D’Ewes, The Journals of All the Parliaments, p. 587; Inner Temple, Petyt MS, 537, vol. 6, pp. 295, 304 (I am grateful to David Dean for lending me his transcript of this MS, and for advice about other sources for the history of the Parliament). The other councillor, Sir John Fortescue, would have had an additional reason for taking note of the rising, since he held a variety of landed offices in the county: Hasler, The History of Parliament, 2, p. 148. 153 D’Ewes, Journals of All the Parliaments, pp. 535, 537; Pollard and Hatcher, ‘Hayward Townshend’s journals’, pp. 17–18 and n.; Inner Temple, Petyt MS, 537, vol. 6, p. 293; APC, 1596–97, pp. 357, 364, 371, 373–4, 391, 398–9, 408, 412–13. 154 Journal of the House of Lords, 2, p. 214. Lord Chief Justice Popham and Francis Gawdy were the judges at the trial; Sir William Periam was the assize judge. 155 D’Ewes, Journals of All the Parliaments, pp. 535, 537, 539, 540, 543, 582–3, 584; Pollard and Hatcher, ‘Hayward Townshend’s journals’, pp. 17–18 and n.; Inner Temple, Petyt MS, 537, vol. 6, pp. 295, 299. Coke’s encounter with Steer may help to explain what has been seen as his continuing adherence to the ‘prevention and paternalism’ of Tudor legislation: in 1621 Coke opposed enclosure proposals in Parliament, on the grounds of popular responses, saying ‘God knowes in these tumultuous times of what Dangerous consequences it might be’, and as late as 1624 he believed that the legislation of 39 Elizabeth should remain in force: B. Malament, ‘The “economic liberalism” of Sir Edward Coke’, Yale Law Journal, 76 (1966–67), 1332; Commons Debates, 1621, W. Notestein, F. H. Relf and H. Simpson (eds), 7 vols (New Haven, CT, 1935), 3, pp. 186–67, and v, pp. 148–9; Sir Edward Coke, The First Part of the Institutes of the Lawes of England: or A Commentary upon Littleton (1628, STC 15784), p. 85. 156 APC, 1596–97, pp. 373–4. Both Crokes had Oxfordshire estates near the region of the rising, built out of ex-monastic lands; Cope had estates near Banbury, for which he sat as MP. Wenham, who sat as MP for the county with Knollys, had married the coheiress of Lord Williams. With an estate at Thame Park and links with Witney, where his family had been clothiers, he had reason to take note of the rising: Hasler, The History of Parliament, 1, pp. 675–8; 2, p. 139; 3, p. 594; D’Ewes, The Journals of All the Parliaments, p. 581. Fleming, as well as the privy councillors, also sat on the committee to consider the bills.

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The Oxfordshire rising of 1596 157 Enclosure had been an issue in the election at Leicester: J. Thompson, The History of Leicester from the Time of the Romans to the End of the Seventeenth Century (Leicester, 1849), pp. 300–1; there seems to have been a sharp increase in enclosure in Leicestershire: Parker, ‘Enclosure in Leicestershire’, pp. 93, 189; later speeches would suggest that Northamptonshire’s MPs would have shared this concern: HMC, Buccleuch MSS, 3, pp. 80–1, 91; enclosure was also increasing in pace there: Gay, ‘The Midland Revolt’, pp. 235–6. 158 Neale, Elizabeth I and Her Parliaments, pp. 345–6; BL, Lansdowne MS, 183, fo. 195; PRO, SP 12/261/15.i and iv. 159 D’Ewes, The Journals of All the Parliaments, pp. 555, 574–5, 584; Townshend, Historical Collections, p. 117; BL, Lansdowne MS, 105, fos 201–3; 83, fo. 198r–v; M. Beresford, ‘Habitation versus improvement: the debate on enclosure by agreement’, in F. J. Fisher (ed.), Essays in the Economic and Social History of Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge, 1961), pp. 45, 63. 160 Commons Debates, 1621, Notestein, Relf and Simpson (eds), 3, pp. 186–7, and v, pp. 148–9. 161 BL, microfilms 485/47, Hatfield Papers 176, fo. 12. 162 BL, Lansdowne MS, 81, fo. 60; Add. MS, 48041, fo. 169v; CSPD, 1595–97, p. 542; Statutes of the Realm, 4, pt 2, pp. 891, 894. 163 BL, microfilms 485/11, Hatfield Papers 58, fo. 67v. 164 APC, 1597, p. 129. 165 Statutes of the Realm, 4, pt 1, pp. 891–6; Brinkworth (ed.), South Newington Churchwardens’ Accounts, p. 18 (purchase of statute book, 1598). 166 VCH Oxfordshire, 1, p. 444. 167 A concentration on the examples of large-scale disorder in the seventeenth century (1607, late 1620s to early 1630s, early 1640s) has obscured the fact that the underlying tendency was towards a diminution in disorder (but not discontent), a point that I intend arguing at greater length elsewhere. 168 Bellamy, The Tudor Law of Treason, p. 79; Russell, The Crisis of Parliaments, p. 248. 169 See, for example, BL, Lansdowne MS, 81, fos 161–2v; 83, fos 49–50; for the sociology of ‘moral panics’, see S. Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of Mods and Rockers (1972). 170 In his speech at the end of the Parliament, the Lord Keeper ordered the gentry back to their ‘countrys’ so ‘that the poore people might be relieved’ and the statutes now made ‘seuerely executed’: BL, Add. MS, 48041, fos 166v–170; cf. ‘The Journal of Sir Roger Wilbraham’, H. S. Scott (ed.), in The Camden Miscellany, 10 (Camden Society, 3rd ser., [4], 1902), pp. 12–13; APC, 1597, pp. 359–62; Hawarde, Les reports, pp. 101–2. As well as the better-known poor-law legislation, bills were introduced ‘for the maintenance of Hospitality’, against middlemen in the grain trade, for the better staying of grain within the kingdom; for rating the wages of labourers; and ‘for Relief of the Poor, in Times of Extreme Dearth of Corn’: HMC, Salisbury MSS, 14, pp. 38–9; Townshend, Historical Collections, p. 124; Pollard and Hatcher, ‘Hayward Townshend’s journals’, 14; Journal of the House of Lords, 2, pp. 203, 204, 214. (David M. Dean, ‘Bills and Acts, 1585–1601’(University of Cambridge Ph.D. dissertation, 1985).

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Popular politics in early modern England 171 The rising may have had more subtle consequences; Elizabeth, a frequent visitor to the county who, in her captivity, had said nothing would give her greater happiness than to be like the milkmaids at Woodstock, seems not to have visited Oxfordshire again, except for a brief visit to Caversham Park in the southernmost part of the county: Thomas Platter, Travels in England, 1599, trans. C. Williams (London, 1937), p. 221; J. Nichols, The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth, 3 vols (London, 1823), 3, pp. 564, 567–8. 172 See, for example, the censuses of the poor in some late sixteenth-century Kentish communities: Clark, English Provincial Society, p. 239. 173 J. Walter and K. Wrightson, ‘Dearth and the social order in early modern England’, P&P, 71 (May 1976), 32–4; Walter, ‘Food riots in England’. 174 Havinden, ‘The Rural Economy of Oxfordshire’, pp. ii–vi, 73–4, 91–2, 121, 151–2. 175 E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The Population History of England, 1541–1871: A Reconstruction (London, 1981), pp. 332–6, 416; R. S. Schofield, ‘The impact of scarcity and plenty on population change in England, 1541–1871’ (paper delivered to the conference on ‘Hunger and History’, Belagio, 28 June–2 July 1982), p. 17: I am grateful to Roger Schofield for allowing me to see this paper. The imperfect evidence of the generally small parishes in the conspiracy shows no sharp increase in mortality: Bodl., MS, D. D. Par. Bicester d. 1; R3. 540/Bladon 1, Bletchingdon 1, Hampton Poyle 1, Kirtlington 1, Wendlebury 1, Cassington, Yarnton 1, Witney 3; R. C. Martin (ed.), Kidlington Parish Registers (Kidlington and District History Society, Kidlington, 1981). 176 For a further development of this argument, see J. Walter, ‘Social responses to dearth in early modern England’, in J. Walter and R. S. Schofield, Death and the Social Order (Cambridge, 1989). 177 Although the evidence of probate inventories suggests a decrease in the number of husbandmen, the wealth of the ‘average’ husbandman seems to have increased in Oxfordshire: Havinden, ‘The Rural Economy of Oxfordshire’, pp. 52, 167; see also the same argument for an individual village: Griffiths, ‘Kirtlington’, p. 26. 178 W. G. Hoskins, ‘The Leicestershire farmer in the sixteenth century’, in W. G. Hoskins (ed.), Essays in Leicestershire History (Liverpool, 1950), p. 127; P. Laslett, The World We Have Lost (London, 1965), p. 62; K. Wrightson, English Society, 1580–1680 (1982), pp. 180–3. The very presence of Frere and others attests locally to this colonisation of the rural community. 179 It is not perhaps too fanciful to see the memory of Steer in the Lord Keeper’s emphasis on the need for a resident gentry to prevent disorder before it happens: PRO, SP 12/73/35, fo. 78; cf. Hawarde, Les reports, pp. 11, 57, 101, 106; APC, 1596–7, pp. 94–6, 385; Tudor Royal Proclamations, Hughes and Larkin (eds), 3, pp. 169–72; for the continuing emphasis in sermons on the need for hospitality, see R. L. Greaves, Society and Religion in Elizabethan England (Minneapolis, 1981), pp. 548–91. 180 M. Bush, The Government Policy of Protector Somerset (London, 1975), p. 85; R. B. Manning, ‘Violence and social conflict in mid-Tudor rebellions’, Journal of British Studies, 16 (1977), 24. Thomas Rathbone, for example, had been presented to the church courts for his failure to pay the church rate at Bletchingdon: Bodl., MS, Top. Oxon. c. 56, fo. 202; Alexander Hordern, Power’s stepfather, was disliked as ‘a estranger farre borne ... like unto a couetous gredye and insatiable worldlinge ... practissinge ageanst them the extremitie and rigor of lawe’: PRO, C 3/172/ 32.

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The Oxfordshire rising of 1596 181 Roger Crab, Dagons-Downfall: or, The Great Idol Digged Up Root and Branch (London, 1657), pp. 5–7, 13, quoted in C. Hill, Puritanism and Revolution: Studies in Interpretation of the English Revolution of the 17th Century (London, 1968), p. 307. 182 For an excellent discussion of rural social relationships organised around ‘the deferential dialectic’, see H. Newby, The Deferential Worker: A Study of Farm Workers in East Anglia (Harmondsworth, 1979). The renewed emphasis that the threatened disorder gave to the fear of the ‘many-headed monster’ was doubtless as important as any sense of moral obligation in prompting the ‘charity’ practised by the poor’s betters, like Lord Buckhurst in the 1590s: L. Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558–1641 (Oxford, 1965), p. 48; Greaves, Society and Religion, pp. 557–591. 183 James Spedding (ed.), The Works of Francis Bacon, 14 vols (London, 1857–74), 6, p. 409. 184 PRO, STAC 8/297/4. 185 Sir Thomas Smith, De Republica Anglorum, M. Dewar (ed.) (Cambridge, 1982), p. 76.

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Chapter 5

. The social economy of dearth in early modern England*

I

T

he impoverished repertory of English folk-tales lacks those stories – common in other early modern European societies – in which peasant culture confronts the dilemma of too many mouths to feed, and in which supernatural salvation so often took the form of a superabundance of food.1 This hitherto largely unnoticed absence of English Hansels and Gretels wandering through a Malthusian world takes on added meaning in the light of recent work on the demography of early modern England. This work has challenged the central role accorded to harvest failure as a cause of crisis mortality. By the period in which parochial registration begins, crises of subsistence were absent from the demographic record of many regions. Even those areas scarred by crises of subsistence were free of such crises after the mid-seventeenth century. In contrast to the experience of most of continental Europe and her Scottish and Irish neighbours, England had slipped the shadow of famine at an early date.2 If crises of subsistence were largely absent from early modern England, so were crises of disorder. Despite the predictions of contemporaries and presumptions of historians, years of harvest failure were not marked by widespread and frequent food riots.3 This chapter takes as its focus the series of discrepancies between the dominant and widely accepted model of socioeconomic change which suggests a sharp growth in the proportion of the early modern population that were ‘harvest-sensitive’, and the more muted record of death and disorder that has emerged from recent studies. II A plethora of contemporary comment and practices point to the central importance of the harvest and to the sharp threat its failure posed to early modern society. Diaries and personal correspondence record with uneasy alarm the

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The social economy of dearth uncertain weather, most usually cold springs or wet summers, that threatened the harvest.4 The terse comments that break through the orthodox formulae of parochial registration, and the recording therein of anonymous burials of ‘poore wandering folk’ found starved, bear witness to the shock of harvest failure on a society for which bread was still literally the staff of life.5 That harvest time was normally a period of higher wages, better food, and gargantuan celebration made the inversion of harvest failure all the harder to bear. The dating of past events in contemporary recollections and urban annals by reference to past dearths reflects the psychic hold that harvest failure had on contemporaries. While urban annalists ordered their accounts by reference to past dearths, almanacs (and proverbial lore) reflected their readers’ anxieties about future harvests. (The claim to be able to offer means of determining and influencing the quality of the harvest was yet another important area of overlap between the Church and popular culture.)6 The febrile correspondence between central and local authorities in years of dearth testifies to the fears of those in authority that harvest failure threatened the fabric of the social order. ‘Nothing will sooner lead men to sedition than dearth of victuals’, noted William Cecil, and others chorused their agreement.7 There is perhaps no better illustration of the central importance of the harvest to the maintenance of early modern society than the temporary suspension of social rules otherwise held sacrosanct. The urgent need to gather in the harvest set aside traditional divisions of labour between men and women in industry and agriculture; it suspended the laws against vagrancy to secure a labour force, and sanctioned work on the sabbath.8 Despite this welter of evidence, we lack as yet a systematic survey of the full consequences of harvest failure for early modern society and economy.9 Its economic consequences were extensive in a society where agriculture was the major source of income for the majority of the population and the harvest the major factor dictating levels of demand for non-agricultural production. Both directly and indirectly, the harvest determined levels of prosperity and poverty. Directly, its failure has been seen as playing a major role in the restructuring of land-holding, accelerating the decline of the smallholder in the last decade of the sixteenth century and contributing to the growth of the great estates in the later seventeenth century.10 For those without land, the potential loss of the high harvest wages (accounting for a disproportionate slice of their annual income) compounded by often savage price rises, could send them spiralling into poverty. Harvest failure led to sharp increases in vagrancy and in rural–urban migration.11 Indirectly, harvest failure, by cutting purchasing power, was a major cause of the depressions that afflicted both rural industrial and urban manufacturing and service sectors.12 Attempts to relieve the sharp increases in poverty that dearth brought would compound this problem. Years of harvest failure brought a sharp rise in the cost of poor-relief and, where

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Popular politics in early modern England foreign grain had to be imported, could have an adverse effect on the terms of trade. Directly, harvest failure might cause a drop in the state’s revenues, while indirectly, where harvest failure coincided with attempts to extend the tax base (as in the 1590s and later 1640s), it could provoke opposition to the state’s fiscal demands.13 Directly, it led to riots over food supply, while, indirectly, it might synchronise other forms of opposition, for example to enclosure, in both major rebellions and minor riots. Everywhere, lengthening court rolls provide evidence of the direct impact of harvest failure on levels of appropriation, and of its indirect impact – complex and contradictory – on the presentment and prosecution of theft.14 The harvest also dictated the demographic rhythms of early modern society. Its timing helped to determine the seasonality of marriage; its failure frustrated marriage. In a society where marriage was a process rather than an event, dearth’s disruption of this process has been invoked to explain an increase in illegitimacy (as in the decade of the 1590s) and a consequent intensification in local social regulation.15 Indeed, it might be argued that it was the knowledge of the possibility of frequent harvest failure that helped to drive up the age at which couples considered themselves to have attained the economic independence permitting marriage in this society. The economic stress that harvest failure brought, led on the one hand to the breakup of marriages, and, on the other, to the formation of family groupings whose hybrid character belies the simple nuclear form under which they were listed.16 But, above all, it is the mute testimony of the demographic record which has been held to provide historians with the most graphic confirmation of the serious consequences of harvest failure for early modern society: the failure of the fields being thought to have been followed by a rich crop of burials in the churchyard. Years of harvest failure in modern England were years of heightened mortality. Harvest failures did bring increases in burial figures that were local, regional, and national. More strictly (though still variously) defined as crises of subsistence which saw at least a doubling of background levels of mortality, such crises have been identified by Appleby for Cumberland and Westmorland; by Palliser for Staffordshire; and by Paul Slack for parts of Devon. Other work has added to the map of subsistence crises.17 In the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries especially, harvest failure took its toll of the population. But the most recent work on the demographic history of early modern England, notably Wrigley and Schofield’s The Population History of England, has suggested a more restricted incidence through space and time for harvest-related crisis mortality than these essentially regional examples might suggest. Wrigley and Schofield argue that conspicuous but isolated examples have led some historians to suggest that there was a close and determined relationship between years of high prices and high mortality. While there were

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The social economy of dearth years in which the two did coincide, there are also striking exceptions. In some years, real wages fell savagely but the death rate scarcely rose above trend. For example, in 1586/7, when harvest failure first prompted the government to issue the Book of Orders designed to cope with the consequences of dearth, there was no great recorded increase in mortality. However, in the later crisis of 1649/50, coming after several years of harvest failure and in the midst of civil and military strife, the death rate was actually below trend. Years of harvest failure might be years of heightened – but not necessarily heavy – mortality. Even the crisis years on which much attention has been focused, for example the 1590s, assume less significance in their impact on ‘national’ mortality trends. Famine was above all a regional problem. In the crisis of 1597/8 when mortality was 25.6 per cent above trend, a little over a quarter (28 per cent) of the parishes under observation in the Cambridge Group sample registered crises of subsistence. This regional (as well as age-specific) pattern to famine meant that, unless the rise in prices was exceptionally high, the cumulative effect of crises of subsistence on ‘national’ population trends was after five years essentially zero. While the earlier period saw individual years in which there was a marked increase in famine-related mortality, by the ‘hungry 1690s’ the relationship between high food prices and mortality was muted. In a decade that saw some of the sharpest falls in the index of real wages, the death rate was unusually stable and even fell below trend in those years registering the lowest real wage rates. Even on a regional basis, the impact of crises of subsistence was becoming less great at the point when the dominant model of social change suggested that they should be at their peak. By the difficult years of the 1640s (and perhaps even earlier) even the previously vulnerable north-west was no longer registering crises of subsistence.18 If crises of subsistence were less severe than has been supposed; absent, by and large, from many areas at an early date; and no longer even a regional problem after the mid-seventeenth century, then this raises the problem of why. The chronology of this growing immunity to crises of subsistence does seem to contradict expectations based on the widely accepted model of social and economic change in the period. This, which notes a sharp growth in the size of the landless, labouring population matched by a steep decline in real wages, would suggest a growing vulnerability to periodic harvest failure. But, as we have seen, the reality was very different. The climacteric of the later 1640s, coming at the peak of these changes and marked by a succession of bad harvests in the midst of civil war (classic conditions for Continental crises of subsistence), witnessed no sharp increase in mortality rates. Why was this? Clearly, in the longer term, England’s relative immunity and early escape from famine is to be explained by important economic changes. To these should be added the controls on unrestrained population growth afforded by the nature of England’s ‘low-pressure’ demographic regime. By far

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Popular politics in early modern England the most important economic changes were those in agriculture. An improvement in agricultural techniques (cumulative, rather than revolutionary) perhaps doubled gross yields between the early sixteenth and mid seventeenth centuries and, as Professor Wrigley argues, brought even greater gains in net yields. By the mid-seventeenth century, this had lifted population pressure on food resources; by the late seventeenth century, England had become a net exporter of grain.19 In the longer term, therefore, it would be possible to explain the disappearance of famine in terms of economic change. While the weaknesses of local ecologies, fragile surpluses and poor and unfavourable market integration explain the pattern of famine; agrarian change and better market integration explain its disappearance. Access to grain in southern communities allowed them to escape famine; increased agricultural output and better communications later extended this immunity to the highland zone. These gains in agricultural productivity combined with the favourable nature of England’s low-pressure demographic regime – with its controls on nuptiality and fertility – to avert a major Malthusian crisis. But while both of these factors – demographic and economic – are of obvious importance in the long term, what needs to be emphasised here is that they were by themselves insufficient to solve the problem of the harvest-sensitivity. Indeed, whatever their longer-term importance, they had consequences that exacerbated the problems that harvest failure posed for the harvest-sensitive group in the period when population growth was most rapid and increasing output insufficient to eradicate periodic dearth. An emphasis on economic factors – the provision of a grain surplus through the mechanism of the market – assumes an ability to gain access to grain through purchase on the market. In so doing, it ignores the important criticisms raised by Amartya Sen’s work on famine.20 Sen has argued that explanations that put an emphasis on food availability miss the impact of harvest deficiency on what he terms ‘exchange-entitlements’. In an exchange economy, Sen observes, the ability to obtain food depends on the rate at which labour or commodities can be exchanged for food. Explanations that put the emphasis on the growing availability of grain therefore ignore the all-important problem of command over access to grain. A consequence of harvest failure for the upland pastoral economies was a collapse in the price of their product and an inability to afford grain from other regions: in Sen’s terms, a trade-entitlement failure. A direct failure of entitlements also threatened at least some sections of the communities of lowland arable England. Fragile surpluses and a market insufficiently developed to wipe out local shortages, meant that for the land-poor and labourdependent, in towns as well as villages, the sharp rise in grain prices in years of shortage led to the acute problem of access to grain. The problems of these groups were compounded by the attenuated nature of the kinship system that was the corollary of the demographic regime. While

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The social economy of dearth the low-pressure demographic system offered a check on fertility through the norm of the nuclear family and a later-marrying population, it also created, in Peter Laslett’s striking phrase, ‘nuclear hardship’. The need to secure economic independence before marriage led to later age at marriage, migration, and the formation of neo-local marriages for many couples. These combined with patterns of lower life-expectancy to produce low kinship densities in many communities.21 While kin might represent ‘a store of wealth … to be drawn upon as need arose’,22 an attenuated kinship system meant that protection against economic crises for the generally more mobile harvest-sensitive households had to be sought from within the collectivity, rather than from an extended family or kin. While, therefore, economic growth and the relatively favourable nature of the demographic regime are of obvious importance in explaining the longerterm disappearance of famine, they cannot by themselves explain why famine was not a more general scourge in the period of greatest population growth. The argument here will be that, while the threat of famine has been exaggerated, the possible defences against that threat have been largely unexplored and, consequently, underestimated. In particular, there has been an uncritical use of the ambiguous evidence for famine offered by literary sources. The evidence thus derived has been married with what we might term a Malthusian model of social and economic change, which exaggerates the depth of poverty in early modern England and, therefore, the extent of vulnerability to famine. This model, in its turn, has found support in a reading of price and wage series whose construction (probably) and applicability (certainly) need more critical scrutiny. Finally, an exaggerated emphasis on the economically determined and market-dominated nature of relationships in early modern society has obscured the protection against harvest failure still to be found in such relationships. Together with the better-known crisis relief, this social economy insulated many of the poor from the full impact of harvest failure. It did so, however, in ways that constrained the poor’s ability to articulate popular grievances in collective protest. III Literary evidence has not always been approached with the caution that its use demands. ‘Famine’ and ‘starvation’ are words with an ambiguity of meaning. In contemporary usage, this ambiguity was sometimes intentional or the product of alarmed apprehension.23 For example, while reports from provincial authorities to the centre give an accurate sense of the alarm that contemporaries felt when faced with the failure of the harvest, that same alarm sometimes clouded the accuracy of their judgement. When provincial magistrates were suitors to the central government for aid, this distortion was

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Popular politics in early modern England sometimes deliberate. There is the further danger with literary evidence that such reports, emanating from regions where there was famine, can be taken out of their regional context and married with other evidence taken to be indicators of crisis (sedition, riot) to (mis-) represent the ‘national’ experience of crisis in years of harvest failure. Allied to this use of literary evidence has been the use of a particular model of social structure and social change which, if accepted, lends credence to contemporary reports of famine. At its most extreme, this model of social change emphasises the growth in the harvest-sensitive section of the population to the point that makes famine almost an inevitability. Thus, the Malthusian model holds that at the beginning of the sixteenth century there was already a large proportion of the population dependent on wages. Population growth and inflation brought a polarisation of rural land-holding under the stimulus of commercial agriculture and demographic attrition. Larger farms were built up at the expense of smallholdings as subsistence farming gave ground to commercialised agriculture. There was therefore a sharp increase both relatively and absolutely in those dependent on an uncertain market for employment (which was scarce) and food (which was expensive and subject to savage short-term increases). The logic of this model was that social and economic change resulted in a population that was living so close to the level of subsistence that a deficient harvest could have lethal consequences on a grand scale. As Professor Hoskins wrote in his pioneering study of harvest failure, ‘In a country in which between one-half and two-thirds of the population were wage-earners, and a considerable proportion of the remainder subsistence farmers; in which about one-third of the population lived below the povertyline and another third lived on or barely above it; in which the working class spent fully 80 to 90 per cent of their incomes upon food and drink; in such a country the harvest was the fundamental fact of economic life.’24 The ‘harvest-sensitive model’ depends heavily on the analysis of fiscal records, buttressed by the estimates of contemporary analyses of social structure and distribution of wealth, status, etc. Analysis of early sixteenthcentury taxation records has suggested that between a quarter and one-third of the population was already dependent upon wage labour at the beginning of the sixteenth century, though even higher figures have been claimed for some regions. Similar analysis of hearth tax records for the later seventeenth century has yielded even higher figures, again with pronounced regional peaks reflecting the weaknesses of local economies. These have been taken to lend support to Gregory King’s estimate that just under half of the population in the later seventeenth century were labourers, outservants, cottagers, or paupers.25 It is this evidence, derived from fiscal records, of a growth in the number of the labouring poor which suggests the existence of a large harvestsensitive group vulnerable to the vicious increases in grain prices that marked

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The social economy of dearth years of dearth. Nowhere in this analysis was the problem more acute than in the towns. Thus, according to Professor Hoskins’ much-repeated estimate, ‘fully two-thirds of the urban population in the 1520s lived below or very near the poverty line’, a figure translated into national proportions in his work on harvest failure.26 Hoskins’ reference to the poverty line has been widely followed, but the notion of the ‘poverty line’, a tricky concept even in current social scientific usage,27 has scarcely been defined. If, as seems likely, Hoskins was proposing tax assessments as an approximation for the ‘poverty line’, then recent research might offer some grounds for challenging this usage. Faute de mieux, in the absence of anything approaching a national census, historians are forced to make use of the snapshots provided by census-like fiscal records or contemporary social estimates in order to recover the profile of early modern society. It would be foolish to deny that these provide evidence of a growth in the size of the labouring population. However, there is now perhaps, in the prompting of the demographic record, a need to reassess the meaning and validity of the commonly accepted and widely quoted figures derived from these sources. Taxation records register income inequalities. Without further evidence, these should not be confused with levels of destitution. Both types of source have their problems. Contemporary estimates are simply that, and are therefore subject to a margin of error. Thus, as has already been suggested, Gregory King in his widely quoted estimates of poverty for the later seventeenth century may have over-estimated the size of the labouring poor.28 Fiscal records, despite their attractiveness, require for their use the resolution of technical and methodological difficulties, which hitherto have received inadequate attention from historians drawing on them. Equally important, they also demand a greater attentiveness to the social meaning of the figures derived from their exploitation. Hoskins’ estimates were based on the evidence of the early Tudor subsidies. Where detailed local sources have enabled a comparison with other listings of wealth, it is clear that nil or minimum assessments should not automatically be equated with destitution. For example, Dr Phythian-Adams’ study of earlysixteenth-century Coventry, a town cited by Hoskins, led him to revise downwards Hoskins’ original estimate that between one-third and one-half of the population were vulnerable to harvest failure; perhaps something like one-fifth were affected by bad harvests, he suggests – a figure for which there is support from other urban studies.29 Similar studies suggest the need for a downward revision of levels of rural poverty derived from early subsidy records.30 Revision of the evidence furnished by analysis of the hearth-tax listings suggests a similar need for caution and a greater sensitivity to the way that differing methods of assessment and collection determine the resulting record of levels of exemption. As the work of Dr Husbands has recently detailed, there are

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Popular politics in early modern England many serious problems involved in translating levels of exemption into levels of poverty.31 Ignoring these has led historians to exaggerate levels of poverty in the later seventeenth century. There is a further problem. Decontextualising fiscal records from their socio-economic, as well as their administrative, context, smoothes out significant contrasts in regional social and economic structures. These could give very different meanings to the significance of exemption or minimum assessments. The ‘poverty’ of the urban exempt was probably different from that of their rural counterparts. Within rural society, differences in local ecologies drew further distinctions; the possession of common rights in an area of extensive commons and dual economy doubtless gave a very different social meaning to exemption from that implied by the exemption from taxation of cottagers in an enclosed economy.32 It is clear that first we need more detailed local studies, in order to provide a context in which to assess the social meaning of exemption and, by exploiting record linkage, to provide a more accurate sense of the relationship between taxation assessments and levels of wealth. With this information, we can feel confident in translating the categories imposed by state taxation into sensitive indicators of the vulnerability of the population to harvest failure. If our sense of the proportion of the population that was impoverished needs scaling down, then so does the other side of the equation, represented here by Hoskins, by which vulnerability to harvest failure has been calculated. Although our knowledge of both diet and family budgets is woefully inadequate, Carole Shammas’s research on household expenditure would revise significantly downwards Hoskins’ figure for expenditure on food.33 She suggests that food expenditure probably accounted for just over a half of poorer households’ expenditure, a figure that, if correct, would have given greater flexibility in the face of harvest failure. Clearly, the evidence on income and expenditure needs more critical examination. Using the standard source of the Phelps Brown and Hopkins’ basket of consumables would seem to lend powerful support to the Malthusian model of a society with a large population of wage-dependent and harvest-sensitive poor. Their index shows real wages to have fallen drastically.34 Demographic pressures and the inability of a pre-industrial economy to absorb and employ the surplus population meant that wages failed to keep pace with the rise in the price of essential foodstuffs. Those who became dependent on the market for both employment and food were therefore in a precarious situation. According to the Phelps Brown and Hopkins’ index, by the late sixteenth century, wageearners were only able to purchase some 40 per cent of the basket of consumables that their wages would have brought them in the period 1451–75. Other estimates offer confirmation of this trend. However, the repeated flourishing of these figures, which have acquired the status of textbook orthodoxies, has meant that such ‘statistics’ have been accorded a status which seriously

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The social economy of dearth distorts either their utility or applicability. As a recent review of the republished articles of Phelps Brown and Hopkins noted, ‘The conjectures, conclusions, and influences arrived at by applying the economist’s traditional engine of thought to an incomplete historical record still call loudly for confirmation or refutation.’35 This is not the place to embark on that task, but there are serious technical and what we might call ‘real’ problems that question the use made of the wage and price data to underpin the Malthusian model. In both prices and composition, the construction of the basket of consumables shows a strong southern bias. They find no place for oats which, even at the end of the eighteenth century, were an important component in northern and Celtic diets, and neither do they reflect the fact that wage rates were lower in the pastoral north-west. Ironically, therefore, the index gives a poor guide to the experience of those areas where the threat of famine was a reality. (As Shammas suggests, food expenditure in her ‘northern’ region may have represented a higher proportion of family income and thus left less flexibility against harvest failure.)36 The prices used are those paid by institutional buyers making bulk purchases of largely unprocessed products. The relationship between these wholesale prices, which were likely to have been ‘sticky’, and those paid by smaller consumers is largely unexplored. There are similar problems on the side of wages. The raw materials for the wage series is represented by payments to building craftsmen and labourers. These again reflect a southern bias, and are payments made by institutional employers. The base years for the wage series – 1451–75 – represent a period of exceptional prosperity for wage-labour. The fall indicated in real wages is, therefore, from a high point in what Thorold Rogers called the ‘golden age of labour’. Recent work has suggested that for some building craftsmen the Phelps Brown index may have exaggerated the extent of the decline in their wages. Work on wages and prices in early modern London has suggested that real wages fell by 25 per cent, rather than some 40 per cent, over the sixteenth century.37 However, in addition to the technical problems (some of which were pointed out by Phelps Brown and Hopkins but ignored by consumers of their statistics), there are more fundamental problems with the index of real wages. The construction of the basket of consumables assigns an unchanging proportion of composite commodities over a period stretching from the mid-fifteenth to the early twentieth century. In the inflationary conditions of the ‘long sixteenth century’, the proportion allowed for farinaceous products – 20 per cent (a figure mirroring expenditure in a mid-fifteenth century priest’s household, the first of four budgets used in the construction of the basket) seems a poor reflection of the likely composition of the diet of wage labourers in the period. In turn, the proportion assigned to wheat within this farinaceous component of 37 per cent in 1500, rising to 48 per cent in the 1725 budget, fails to take into account

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Popular politics in early modern England the ability of poorer consumers to trade down to inferior and less expensive grains. This practice was particularly marked in conditions of dearth and, as Appleby argued, it was of growing importance in the seventeenth century.38 Wages are calculated on the basis of per diem payments made to individual workers. To translate per diem payments into annual wage rates, it is necessary to confront contradictory assumptions. While the abolition of holy days after the Reformation would have increased the available days for employment, perhaps by as much as a fifth, this theoretical gain needs to be set against the growing problems of under- and un-employment. Moreover, a basic daily wage fails to reflect the importance of higher payments for seasonal or special tasks. Even given the successful resolution of these problems, the resulting annual wage would still provide an inadequate guide to income. Since in the conditions of the early modern economy the family, and not the individual, was most frequently the unit of production, it is the family income that the historian needs to recover – an even more challenging task. And even then, it needs to be remembered that the wage was for many (but how many remains unknown) only a contribution to that income. How many were solely dependent on wage labour for a living is unknown – as we have seen, the attempt to read off levels of wage-earners from tax records is fraught with difficulty. Nevertheless, for many, not least building craftsmen, a smallholding or common rights continued to provide other sources of income which, depending on the nature of the local economy, might be extensive. Moreover, efforts to measure changes in wage rates depend upon an anachronistic simplification of what constituted the wage in a pre-industrial economy.39 Monetary payment was often only one aspect of the wage. Depending on the form that it took, the wage could offer the possibility of protection from the inflationary pressures of the market-place – through payment in kind or some other form of privileged access to food. One final assumption in the use of the price indices to support the Malthusian model needs challenging. This is the belief that the impact of harvest failure on poorer consumers can be read off from the sharp upward movement of prices in the market. Again, this is a question of our ignorance. We do not know the proportion of the poor that purchased their essential foodstuffs, or the proportion that bought in the market, from middlemen or at the farm gate. Neither do we know the form in which they purchased their food. As Phelps Brown and Hopkins pointed out, the decline in real wages would have been less marked for those who purchased processed food. Although the proportion of the population forced to purchase their grain in the market was undoubtedly increasing throughout the period, there is reason to believe that their numbers may have been exaggerated. If this were the case, then this may be a further factor of some importance in making sense of the resistance of the population to harvest failure.

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The social economy of dearth As Mark Overton has noted, the marketing process must be interposed between harvest quality and the subsequent price of grain.40 Consequently, studies of dearth are more properly studies of prices. It is therefore possible to envisage situations in which, as indeed some contemporaries recognised, market prices either exaggerate or under-represent the extent of grain deficiency.41 Higher prices in markets which had no access to good and cheap waterborne routes (and which therefore experienced high transport costs), reflected the reduced variety of weather zones from which grain could be drawn. With a decrease in the amounts of grain coming on to the market, and a decrease in the number able to purchase grain, there would be a larger amplitude of fluctuations in prices. It may be that because the total quantity of marketable grain was small in relation to demand, and the number of regular purchasers was small relative to the much larger numbers forced to depend on the market when their own small surpluses failed, dearth was able to have such a seismic impact on prices.42 If, however, the number of those who obtained their grain from the market was smaller than has been assumed, then the critical questions become: how did they obtain their grain, and did they do so in ways that afforded them some cushioning from the full impact of dearth on market prices? It could be argued, therefore, that the scale of poverty was less great and its growth less rapid than the Malthusian model assumes. Scaling down levels of poverty is not, however, sufficient to explain the absence of famine. Over time, an increase in agricultural output may have raised the threshold of harvest failure, but for much of the early modern period harvest failure continued to threaten many with potential destitution. Poor-law records perhaps provide better evidence of the contours of poverty. The levels of poverty that they record can offer an important corrective to estimates of poverty derived from the records of taxation. However, the records need to be used with caution. Lists of those in receipt of poor-relief undoubtedly underestimate the extent of poverty, since their compilation betrays notions of eligibility and not necessarily need, and the restricted numbers of recipients reflect the limits of funds rather than the limits of the problem. Censuses of the poor, a relatively underexploited source, avoid many of these problems. These exist for both rural and urban communities. Since they were taken most often in response to the failure of the harvest, they offer the most detailed evidence of levels of harvestsensitivity. If the evidence of the poor law scales down estimates of levels of destitution, then the evidence of the censuses underscores the problem of ‘conjunctural poverty’. This growth of the penumbral poor, with a shaky independence and vulnerability to harvest failure, is well brought out in the excellent series of records available for the Norfolk village of Cawston in the difficult years of the 1590s.43 Poverty may have been less than the Malthusian model assumed, but the existence of the ‘conjunctural poor’, vulnerable to exactly

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Popular politics in early modern England the problems of declining ‘exchange-entitlements’ that Sen emphasises, underlines the need for an explanation of why this potentially large group did not starve, an explanation which goes beyond an emphasis on longer-term agrarian changes.44 IV A partial solution to this demographic conundrum might be found in a reexamination of the impact of change on the social and economic structures of early modern England. Demographic growth and the stimulus that this gave to the intensification of agrarian capitalism were the dominant motifs of change for much of this period; the increasing polarisation of society was its chief consequence. But the end result of this process – an increase in the harvestsensitive sector of society – was less rapid or complete than the enforced brevity of textbook accounts might suggest. Neither was it uniform. A fruitful place to begin an examination of why these changes were not also accompanied by a growing vulnerability to famine, is with the reminder that society and economy in early modern England were local and regional. Clearly, at the level of individual strategies of survival to cope with harvest failure (historically the most difficult to recover),45 the nature of the local economy played an important role. While these strategies might exhibit a common pattern, their success or failure was heavily dependent upon the nature of the local economy. Gleaning, which could provide the poor with a valuable and by no means insignificant source of grain, was likely to have played a larger role in the strategies of the poor in arable areas.46 By contrast, common rights in pastoral areas of wood and fen with extensive waste and common offered greater scope for obtaining alternative sources of food. Similarly, differences in local ecologies doubtless dictated the scope for food substitution – trading down in grains; making use of grain substitutes such as lentils usually reserved for animal feed; and eating animals otherwise proscribed by (informal) dietary restrictions.47 Together with differences in common rights, they also determined the availability of other ‘need foods’. In contrast to their known role in the Celtic fringe, not enough is known about the role of such alternative food sources in early modern England (our ignorance is perhaps a further subtle indication of the early lifting of fears of famine).48 However, when the harvest failed, bread would be baked out of meal ground from acorns and fern roots, and roots and young foliage provided a desperate diet.49 It was in communities practising monoculture that harvest failure was most damaging. The more mixed the economy, the greater were the defences against harvest failure. That much of English agriculture, despite regional emphases, was mixed and that regional specialisation occurred within that context, meant that continuing diversification brought greater insulation

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The social economy of dearth against crop failure. For example, in the fen-edge village of Willingham in Cambridgeshire, the combination of mixed agriculture with dairying helped to avoid sharp increases in mortality in all but successive years of harvest failure. Similarly, a greater diversity within the arable sector offered further insulation. Where, as in the open fields of the Midlands, there was considerable acreage given to the cultivation of peas and beans as animal feed, these could be used to offset failure of the cereal crops. As the Elizabethan proverb observed, ‘hunger setteth his first foot into the horse manger’.50 One particular aspect of crop diversification may have been of special importance in mitigating the impact of harvest failure. As Professor Appleby argued, a growing emphasis on spring-sown crops – oats and barley – broke the symmetrical price structure in which harvest failure saw sharp increases in the prices of all grains. A better balance between winter and spring cereals lessened the impact of the failure of any one of the grains. Appleby argued that this had been achieved by the later 1650s. Regional evidence suggests that this important shift had happened earlier in some areas: for example, in Cornwall by the end of the sixteenth; in the Forest of Arden by the early seventeenth century; and in East Anglia by the 1630s. Richard Carew, doubtless making reference to his county’s experience in the successive harvest failures of the 1590s, paid tribute to the value of spring-sown grain in his Survey of Cornwall: Barley is now grown into great use of late years, so as now they till a larger quantity in one hundred than was in the whole shire before and, of this, in the dear seasons past, the poor found happy benefit, for they were principally relieved and the labourers also fed by the bread made thereof, whereas otherwise the scarcity of wheat fell out so great that these must have made many hungry meals and those outright have starved.51

Like other peasant societies, medieval England had exhibited in its basic structures mechanisms for defence against the frequent failure of the harvest.52 Recent work on the open fields, for example, has suggested that their logic can best be seen in terms of a subsistence–sufficiency orientation. Thus, the persistence of practices whose demonstrable loss to output angered later would-be reformers represented a foregoing of potential profit for protection against probable risks. The scattering of strips and differing crops among the open fields were ways of mitigating risk.53 If the winter crop failed, then fields could be resown with spring cereals, showing the value of a diversified portfolio of plots. To this we might add that where there remained commons, these provided a reserve from which additional land could be taken and put temporarily under the plough, a practice for which we have evidence from a number of communities in years of harvest failure.54 In some regions these defences were undermined by demographic growth and economic change, change which encouraged specialisation that ran ahead

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Popular politics in early modern England of the ability of a poorly integrated market to iron out regional shortages in grain. In others, their continuing vitality may help to explain the absence of crises of subsistence there. From the earliest date for which demographic evidence becomes readily available (though it should be noted that the earliest evidence is thin), some areas seem resistant to crises of subsistence. While more work needs to be done in the mapping of subsistence crises, it is clear that the broad explanatory divisions – between highland and lowland, north and south, pastoral and arable (but more properly mixed) – advanced to explain differing responses to harvest failure need further refinement.55 These broad regional divisions themselves need opening up to explore the more local contrasts in economy and ecology that they contained and which may hold the key to anomalies in the existing maps. Pastoral specialisation has been seen as an important factor in explaining the geography of famine. But it is probably the case that while some forms of pastoral specialisation rendered communities especially vulnerable, other forms may have afforded some protection against harvest failure. Specialisation in cattle-rearing, where capital investment was greater and tied up for several years, may have produced an inflexibility which led to destocking in unfavourable market conditions as a response to harvest failure. Hence, it was reported from the uplands of North Wales in the crisis of 1622/3 that the ‘country [was] exceeding poor, past belief, because their cattle, whereon they lived for the past four years, bore no price’ and that ‘bread corn is at such a rate … that many die of hunger, and the rest bear the impression of hunger in their faces’.56 By contrast, dairying gave a greater degree of flexibility which helped areas like the Somerset Levels to escape famine.57 Rural industrialisation has also been seen as a form of specialisation which exposed communities to the threat of famine. But much may have depended on the exact nature of the interrelationship between agriculture and industry. Where rural industry supplanted agricultural employment, promoting the growth of a work-force dependent on industrial employment alone for subsistence, then it may have weakened defences against harvest failure. The textile communities of Westmorland and the West Riding of Yorkshire were rendered doubly vulnerable as rural industrialisation encouraged population growth in grain-deficient, upland pastoral and harvest-sensitive economies. But where rural industry supplemented household economies that retained an agrarian base, it contributed to a dual economy that offered greater protection against dearth. In the sheep–corn region of north-east Norfolk, by-employments for women and children in the worsted cloth industry made an important contribution to the family economies of smallholders and agricultural labourers. In the Forest of Arden in Warwickshire, the development of metalworking in an economy moving to a better balance between pasture and plough eased the previous ecological disequilibrium, a process similar to that observed in

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The social economy of dearth the metalworking districts of Staffordshire.58 Much may have depended on the date at which specialisation took place. The earlier the specialisation, the less likely it was that market integration was sufficiently developed to iron out regional shortages, or that the gains in overall output were sufficient to provide transferable surpluses. By contrast, later pastoral specialisation in a period of more favourable markets for livestock production, larger surpluses and better integration meant that communities – like those in the Northamptonshire forests, where the equilibrium between grass and corn had by the seventeenth century been pushed too far in favour of the former – escaped any demographic penalty.59 Poverty, then, needs to be understood in its regional and local context. Vulnerability to harvest failure was dictated by a complex of conditions which, while they coincided in some areas (with disastrous results), were only partly present in others. V The resistance to harvest failure of some areas and some sections of those whose economic status was thought to render them harvest-sensitive, should encourage us to challenge another aspect of the ‘harvest-vulnerable’ model. In a reading of social change which emphasises the increasing dominance of market forces and the economically determined nature of relationships, the impact of harvest failure is seen as being all the more disastrous on the landless, since they were now no longer cushioned by the defences of community and neighbourliness. But the triumph of English individualism was perhaps less absolute than this interpretation might suggest. Relationships in which the nature of the exchange was not strictly conditioned by the market had a continuing vitality well into the eighteenth century. To see early modern England as a market society would do serious damage to the realities of social relationships in this period. In particular, it obscures the protection that those relationships still afforded to the land-poor or wage-dependent against the problem of declining exchange entitlements. For, as Sen himself acknowledged, ‘even in capitalist market economies entitlements may not be well defined in the absence of a market-clearing equilibrium and in pre-capitalist formations there can be a good deal of vagueness on property rights and related matters’.60 Even clearly economic relationships offered some degree of protection against harvest failure by giving the possibility of privileged access to grain. Sharecropping, as in other societies, may have offered a form of ‘subsistence crisis insurance’. Although nowhere near enough is known about the role of sharecropping in English agriculture, it has been argued that sowing to halves and thirds was common. Robert Loder in Berkshire and Nicholas Toke in Kent (in the latter county the practice seems to have been well established), both let to halves. If common, sharecropping may constitute an additional reason, along

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Popular politics in early modern England with the prevalence of subletting, for questioning estimates of landlessness based on the snapshots of manorial studies.61 Though sharecropping on the Continent in this period was predominantly associated with rural poverty, it may well be that this form of tenure represented a preference for minimal returns but maximum security against harvest failure. As Sen has pointed out, sharecroppers may have lower entitlements, but they can eat the returns of their labour directly, without having to secure their subsistence through the vagaries of the market. Even if harvest failure left them with insufficient grain to meet the claims of the landowner and their own needs, then the reciprocities of their relationship with their landlord could give them, as in other societies, first claim on what grain there was and, if even this was not sufficient, the expectation of a grain subsidy.62 The nature of the labour market in early modern England could also provide direct access to food. Many were protected from high food prices – during at least one stage in their life-cycle – by residence as a servant in the household of their employer. A recent estimate suggests that as many as two-fifths of the rural labour force lived in the households of their employers, and in towns the proportion may have been even higher. On the basis of social structural listings, Ann Kussmaul estimates that some 60 per cent of the population aged between fifteen and twenty-four were employed as servants. Service, that ‘refuge of the children of the poor’ as one contemporary termed it, offered protection against harvest failure in two ways. It relieved harvest-sensitive families of the burden of feeding young adults and transferred this responsibility to the household of the employer.63 If employment as a servant withstood harvest failure (and there is some evidence to suggest that the response of at least smaller employers might have been to put off servants when the harvest failed), then servants would continue to be fed in conditions of dearth at their employer’s expense. As such, they might fare better than they otherwise would have done in their family of origin. In the early seventeenth century, the Berkshire yeoman, Robert Loder, calculated the annual cost of his servants’ diet at ten pounds each. At the end of the century, Richard Baxter thought the case of servants far easier than that of the poor tenants who were their masters for, ‘they know their work and wages, and are troubled with no cares for paying rent, or making good markets, or for the loss of corn or cattle … or the unfavourable weather’.64 Annual hiring as a servant or non-resident farmworker, even hiring to task, could give privileged access to food through payment in kind and through the valuable perquisites, licit and illicit,65 that this brought. Both Henry Best and Robert Loder paid their farm servants partly in cash and partly in kind, and in this they were representative of others. Where Loder’s servants did not live in as members of his household, he paid them ‘board wages’ with quantities of grain. In 1617, for example, Robert Loder’s carter was hired to board wages

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The social economy of dearth for eleven pounds in cash; four bushels of wheat valued at sixteen shillings; four weeks’ board in the harvest, also valued at sixteen shillings; and a hog’s keeping all year, valued at 13s. 4d., which, as Loder noted, ‘was exceeding great wages’.66 Payments in kind seem to have been made especially to those with particular skills. It was common for shepherds to receive additions to their cash wage. Two shepherds who petitioned the Wiltshire justices for the payment of their wages put their wages at three pounds and two bushels of wheat. A Norfolk shepherd received three pounds a year in cash, a tenement with an acre of land, the right to run eighty sheep with the lord’s flock, furze and breaks for fuel, the ‘tath’ (pasturing) of two acres a year, the right to put three neats and one nag on the ‘heath’ for a rent of 6½d. and a hen, as well as other minor perquisites. The value of these perquisites as insulation against the threat of harvest failure can be seen clearly in the payments made by Henry Best to his farmworkers in the East Riding of Yorkshire. In June 1622, John Bonwick, a farm servant who had worked for Best for a number of years, was hired for ‘£6 in money, 8 bushels of barley, 2 bushels of oats and a peak of oatmeal and a frise coat and a stooke of straw every week from Christmas to Lady Day’. The access that this gave to grain must have been particularly valuable in the ensuing dearth that caused serious crises of subsistence in the north.67 Being hired as a servant or to task could also offer more direct protection against the problems of landlessness. For the fortunate, hiring might be rewarded by the grant of a piece of land which could be sown with grain. For ploughing, Robert Bulkeley paid a man sixteen shillings and the ground to sow three-quarters of hemp seed or a kip of barley. One of Best’s servants was hired for three pounds a year and ‘the sowings of a mette [two bushels] of barley in the claye’. As we have seen, the Norfolk shepherd also received an acre of land as well as grain. In Kent, sowing to halves represented a type of tenancy in which the rent was partly in the form of labour and partly in kind. Others, for example, building craftsmen, may also have been given access to land as part of their employment.68 Even those without land or the protection offered by annual hiring, might yet be protected from the problems of a decline in ‘exchange-entitlements’ by less-formal relationships in the employment of labour. Those hired by the task might, like servants, receive part of their payment in kind – gaining access to grain in this way. Threshers, whose work gave them obvious opportunities for pilfering grain, regularly received part of the grain that they threshed. On the Isle of Wight, Sir John Oglander, who cautioned his son, ‘above all things, be sure your threshers are honest men’, allowed his threshers one bushel for every twenty that they threshed. The diary of Robert Bulkeley of Anglesey for the 1630s regularly records payments in cash and corn to those who did work on his house and lands. Henry Best in Yorkshire and Nicholas Toke in

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Popular politics in early modern England Kent made similar payments. In December 1623, Best paid two carpenters for sawing up a walnut tree and making furniture of it: 10s. and one bushel of barley and a peck of oatmeal, and to two others for building a barn: 13s.4d. and two pecks of barley. In July 1629, Nicholas Toke paid one Longe a load of wood and a bushel of wheat, as well as 40s. in money.69 That both these years were years of dearth underlines the value of these relationships. Even employment by the day, if it included meat and drink, offered some insulation against dearth prices. Henry Best records payments to a man and wife for some seventeen days of work of both money, cheese, and grain. In addition to 6d. per day, those employed to plough for Sir Robert Spencer in the difficult autumn of 1596 received: cheese, breadcorn, malt, beef and five sheep. The provision of food by their employers meant that even some rural industrial workers could find some protection against the direct impact of harvest failure.70 Even those without access to land or food through these relationships may still not have been exposed to the full impact of famine-level prices as some discussions of the period assume. There were, in effect, two markets operating in early modern England. There was the sale of grain through the marketplace (upon which attention has been concentrated) and also through local exchanges. To see the landless as dependent on the market-place for grain is to mistake the experience of certain sections of the poor – notably the urban and rural industrial poor (and then probably not even all of these) – for that of the labouring poor as a whole. Rural labourers, especially those in areas specialising in grain production, could obtain their grain through purchase from their employers or other farmers in the local community – at farm-gate prices. Being able to buy farm produce at a concessionary rate from their employer was one of the perquisites most valued by farm labourers. Accounts and diaries frequently record the sale of small amounts of grain. Robert Loder sold grain both in the market and at home, as did Adam Eyre in Yorkshire. The diary of Adam Winthrop in Suffolk records the sale of small amounts of grain – to those who had threshed for him, those renting a cottage from him, and to widows among others – in the dearth years of the 1590s. Henry Best’s account book shows that it was a common practice for Best in the East Riding of Yorkshire to make sales at home of small amounts of grain, ranging in quantity from a single peck to several bushels, as well as to send grain to market.71 Since sales in this alternative local market were often below market prices, they offered otherwise harvest-sensitive groups valuable insulation against the full pressures of the market-place. A report on the marketing of corn in Norfolk, drawn up in 1631 in response to the previous year’s dearth, referred to ‘labourers that buy it at an under price of them with whom they work’. From Sussex in the same year, it was reported that ‘those who have any corne to spare sell it better cheape at home to their poore neighbors then [than] in

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The social economy of dearth the markets’.72 Local sales had other advantages. They allowed the labouring poor to buy in small amounts without having to pay the higher prices that market sellers were criticised for demanding for the sales of small quantities; neither did they involve the loss of work which trudging to the market entailed. Perhaps most importantly, purchasing grain directly in this way not only allowed the poor to buy at under-prices but also on credit. A memorandum of 1597 summarised these advantages: in those Countries where Corne is plentyfull most men of hability haue of their owne groweth both for their owne store and to spare for their Neighbors and the poorer sort do only buy in the market unles yt be for Seede Corne, and yt were more easy for the poore to fetch yt at the ffarmors house nere to him, where sometymes he is trusted by pecke and half pecke then to go to the markett, w[hi]ch does lose him a dayes labor, and the ffarmer will afforde a better pennyworthe at his house in Charity to a Neighbor then in open markett, where he doth bring Corne to make his best price.73

A final advantage was that the existence of this local market enabled labourers without money to pay for their grain with the promise of future work. In North Wales, Robert Bulkely, when recording sales of small amounts of grain (usually a bushel), notes frequently, ‘he shall pay me in work’. The 1631 Norfolk report pointed to the practice whereby the labourer in the sheep–corn region, ‘hath now corn at home upon trust, or by agreement for work’. Again, the value of this to those otherwise vulnerable to the effects of harvest failure is graphically brought out in the large number of sales of grain in exchange for future work that Henry Best records in the severe harvest failure of 1622/3.74 Clearly, the provision of grain through these various relationships offered a potentially powerful shield against harvest failure. But for this protection to be effective against the problem of declining ‘exchange-entitlements’, it has to be shown that these relationships were not undermined by the failure of the harvest, and that prices within these local circuits of exchange remained below the dearth prices of the market-place. That there was a market price, and that the recovery of this is unproblematic, is itself open to question. Again, we know far too little about transactions in the early modern market. Then, as now, prices might vary according to quality and quantity. But most relevant to the discussion here is the fact that prices might be expected also to reflect both the underlying economic and social relationships between the parties to the transaction. As the difficulties encountered by the Quakers in their refusal to bargain make clear, prices in the market were expected to be negotiable (though presumably within limits). Something of the force of these considerations is captured in the example of the sale of grain between two Oxfordshire women, where the seller gave the buyer ‘advantageous terms’ because she was her niece and ‘a very poor widow … [with] many small children unprovided for’.75

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Popular politics in early modern England Did the divergence in prices between market transactions and local exchanges persist even under the impact of harvest failure? Local transactions were clearly not uninfluenced by economic considerations. There were, as farmers like Best and Loder were well aware, costs in taking grain to market – costs which could lessen profits. By contrast, as has been argued for eighteenth-century Massachusetts, selling locally could tap a sizeable market. But there is also evidence to suggest that selling locally and at under-price was part of an expected relationship between master and labourers. The special nature of transactions in food between members of the same community may have made them, as in other societies, especially subject to social pressures.76 Without considerably more research (for which the recovery of local price series is crucial), it is impossible to generalise confidently, but on the basis of existing evidence it seems to have been the case that prices of local exchanges did rise in years of dearth. However, they continued to lag behind market prices and did not register the seismic leaps that took place in the market.77 But, whatever the exact relationship with market prices, it was of equal importance that as long as grain was available in this way, it could be paid for in ways that offered further protection against declining ‘exchange-entitlements’. Grain could be exchanged on credit for later repayment or future work. Where repayment was in kind, changes in market price were irrelevant to the transaction. However, where grain was provided as part of the contract of employment or for future labour, then if valuations were customary (something about which we know next to nothing, but for which there is some evidence in the eighteenth century) or ‘sticky’ (for which there is some evidence) this also afforded some protection.78 While harvest failure may have challenged these relationships, it is clear that they could and did survive the challenge. Indeed, as responses to inquiries from the central government under the Book of Orders issued in years of dearth make clear, selling locally at under-price may have been more fully implemented in exactly those years. The practice reported from Hertfordshire in 1630 – of allowing farmers and cornmasters a free market on condition that they relieved the poor at home at prices under those in the market – seems to have been widespread. The obvious value of this in offsetting the threatened decline in ‘exchange-entitlements’ is brought out in a report of the Nottinghamshire magistrates in the same year. They reported their corn growers, ‘to have been likewise willing to help their poor neighbours at home upon reasonable prices and upon trust, who otherwise would have tasted of want in greater measure than they have done’. There is evidence to suggest that even those ‘greedy cormorants’ – the middlemen traditionally blamed for high food prices, were sensitive to these expectations and sought to moderate their prices accordingly. One Norfolk corn merchant in 1597 claimed to have, ‘theis three dere yeares last paste … uttered great quantities to the poor w[hi]ch

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The social economy of dearth have fetched the same at his house or Barne by the bushell, halfe bushell & Peck, and hath allwayes or for the most part uttered the same … after the Rate of Twelve pence in the pound cheaper then the price of the markett’. In the same year, another Norfolk man claimed that, ‘he hath Continewally this last and other late deere yeers sold unto the poorer sorte of the towne where he dwelleth and of the neiboure townes aboute him Corne for three shillings the bushill when as it was at fyue shillings in the bushill in the markett’.79 Recent research has emphasised the pervasiveness of credit in early modern society.80 Credit may also have offered a further source of insulation against the full impact of harvest failure. If the proposal by John Cooke in the dearths of the later 1640s to establish banks of piety to lend to the poor without interest came to nothing, there were other institutions and relationships through which credit was available to the poor. Many of the large-scale market transactions were conducted on credit. Although one of the disadvantages of the market for poorer consumers was held to be the need to purchase with ready money, there is some evidence to suggest that they might also purchase on credit. Farmers, shopkeepers, and traders advanced credit to their customers. As we have seen, accounts and diaries record the loan or sale of small amounts of grain on credit. In towns, small retailers may have offered a parallel source of credit. Alehouses sold bread as well as beer, and might serve as pawnbrokers. Bakers sold bread on account. A small Oxfordshire village like Kirtlington had several breadsellers visiting it, while its manorial court records cases concerning the attempt to secure repayment of small quantities of grain. Badgers could also offer credit to their customers. John Veppen, a licensed badger in Cambridge, claimed in 1597 to have sold barley to his poor neighbours ‘better Cheape then they could buye anye in the markett’ and ‘for relieffe of theire necessitie did gyve Credytt for the same’.81 The protection offered by these sources of credit differed according to the nature of the relationship. Credit may have been given relatively freely in some relationships, for example, those between neighbours or kin. In others, credit may have been only reluctantly provided, but still have been vital: for example, in the carrying of rent arrears by landlords or in sales on credit by petty retailers anxious not to allow a temporary crisis to disrupt longer-term relationships with their customers.82 We do not yet know whether the poor of early modern England attempted – as did their counterparts elsewhere – to compensate for their vulnerability as consumers by concentrating their purchases on a particular seller, thus threatening the seller with the loss of all their custom,83 but some such restraint may have faced middlemen bringing grain to sell in rural communities. Debts entered into within a community and within horizontal relationships may neither have carried interest nor have had a fixed term for repayment. Neither, as in eighteenth-century Massachusetts, may creditors have been expected to receive full repayment.84 By contrast,

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Popular politics in early modern England other debts may have carried rates of interest whose burden contributed to the increased pauperisation of those forced to enter into them. Distress sales of land, mortgaging land or sales of futures in next year’s crops may have staved off starvation,85 but at some cost to the ability to secure subsistence in the future. Much depended on the precise nature of the debtor–creditor relationship. But whatever the longer-term consequences of indebtedness, the availability of credit offered vital protection against the short-term threat of starvation. Thus, a further cause for the vulnerability of smallholders in the north-west to famine may have been the tendency that Appleby noted for landlords there to favour rent exploitation rather than tenant co-operation.86 There were both strong positive and negative reasons why those with grain or money to spare should be prepared to advance aid to those rendered vulnerable by harvest failure. Apart from the promptings of Church and conscience, neither of which should be underestimated in this period, it was often in the self-interest of the ‘better sort’ to lend to the poor in conditions of dearth that highlighted inequalities and bred resentment. As the author of Sundry new and artificial remedies against Famine hinted, if Christian charity was not sufficient reason to remember the poor, ‘yet reason, and civill policy might prevaile so much with us for our selves and those which are deare unto us, that we should not stay so long untill our neighbours flames take holde of our owne houses, nor try the extremities that hunger, and famine may work amongst us’. Relief against harvest failure was but one of the reciprocities expected of richer members of the community.87 Meeting these expectations could not only displace hostility but also bring positive gains in terms of enhanced status and reputation. ‘Lending to neighbour, in time of his need/Wins love of thy neighbour, and credit doth breed’, counselled Thomas Tusser. As Thomas Fuller wrote of the yeoman in a work published in the difficult years of the later 1640s In time of famine he is the Joseph of the countrey, and keeps the poore from sterving. Then he tameth the stocks of corn, which not his covetousnesse but providence hath reserv’d for time of need, and to his poore neighbours abateth somewhat of the high price of the market.88

That this was more than wishful thinking can be seen in the need felt by one Kentish yeoman to employ a middleman to sell his grain, because he was ‘loath himself to be seen to sell it’.89 It was the strength of such expectations that prompted aid ranging from the loan of grain without interest to free distribution of grain. The provision of grain in times of dearth was part of an expected relationship between wealthy and poor which might be extended, and expected, more generally. A moral prohibition on seeking to profit from dearth by selling grain into the highest markets might have been felt more strongly (though by no

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The social economy of dearth means always observed) by members of the landed classes. In Warwickshire, for example, members of the gentry were criticised on several occasions for their failure to fulfil this obligation. One of the grievances levelled against the encloser Sir John Newdegate in the aftermath of the Midlands rising was his practice of selling his grain out of the locality, ‘which if it had been brought to the Market would have been a great help to the poor commin[ali]te’. Moreover, at Warwick in 1626, Sir Thomas Puckering, the unsuccessful candidate in parliamentary elections for the borough, was compared unfavourably with his opponent, as ‘but a stranger in the county and not so commodious by sending corn to market for the overall good of the people nor a man of such noble hospitality as that worthy family of the Lucys’.90 If the obligation to provide grain was less formal than in France where, when famine threatened, the seigneur was expected to feed his censitaires, it was widely expected and frequently observed. (Indeed there were those in England who wished to make lords of the manor formally responsible for the relief of their tenants during harvest failure.)91 Successive dearths saw members of the landed classes respond to these expectations. In the dearth of 1586, the Duke of Rutland was reported to have caused his grain in Nottinghamshire, upon the first rumour of dearth, ‘to be soulde to the porest by stryks and pecks & smale measurs in Nottingham, Newarke and Mansfelde, under the marketts iis. viiid. in every quarter, and so continueth the same wherby the gredines of a number was frustrated, the poore releued, and the expectancy of excessiue dearthe stayed’. Several years later, the gentry in Lincolnshire were praised for sending their grain to market to be sold only to the poor and at prices below those prevailing in the market. In the aftermath of the dearths of the 1590s, the Norfolk cousin of Sir Robert Sidney met allegations that he had offended the law by not buying and selling in the market, with the counter-claim that he had sold his corn in the market at below market prices and had relieved weekly four hundred poor men at his door. In the dearth of 1608, Robert Cecil bought grain which he sold to his tenants, at a considerable loss to himself of £461.92 The distribution of grain at under-prices by members of the gentry shaded into more obvious examples of outright benevolence and charity. While many contemporaries believed hospitality and charity to be on the decline, moralists and government continued to urge its importance in combating dearth. In years of dearth, the repeated commands to the gentry to remain on – or to return to – their estates, reflected the government’s belief in the important role that they had to play in relieving (and, of course, if necessary, repressing) the poor. As a royal proclamation in the crisis of 1622 noted, ‘by this way of reviving the laudable and ancient housekeeping of this Realme, the poore, & such as are most pinched in times of scarcity & want, will be much relieved & comforted’.93 Despite the perennial lamentations of what we might term the

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Popular politics in early modern England literature of complaint, there are enough examples to suggest that for many the gentle household remained an important centre of relief until at least well into the eighteenth century. According to the historian of the aristocracy in this period, ‘there was a steady flow of food and alms to the needy, a matter on which the nobility and gentry continued to set great store, to judge by what they liked to have said about themselves after they were dead’. Indeed, the link between the two was sometimes made explicit in the bread doles left to the poor by gentlemen (as well as more humble testators). In Sussex in the 1650s, both Sir Thomas Pelham and William Fettiplace gave money to be used to buy grain for the poor when the harvest failed; by the mid-eighteenth century, at the annual distribution of the Pelham Dole, some seven- or eight-hundred men and women received bread, beer, and a few pence each.94 Though we need to know more about the practice, as opposed to the prescription, of noble charity, it was apparently more common in dearth, and in conditions of scarcity its role could be considerable. In just under three months in the dearth of 1597, Lord Buckhurst spent one hundred and fiftyfour pounds on purchasing imported rye to give away to ‘the hungry villagers’ in six Sussex villages. In what was presumably also a reference to the harvest failures of the 1590s, Sir George Shirley was said to merit ‘the glorious title of father and nourisher of the poor’ for ‘relieving during the great dearth 500 a day at his gate’. Of the Cheshire gentleman, John Bruen, it was said at his death in 1641, that ‘he did usually to his great expence and cost, fill the bellies of great multitudes, which out of his owne and other Parishes, did twice a week resort unto his house … And in the deare years he made provision for them, almost every day in the week’. In particular, In the time of the great dearth, fearing that divers of his poore neighbours were in great want, as having neither money nor meate: He tooke an opportunity, when the most of his family were gone abroad … to call for the keyes of the Store-house, where the corn lay, and presently hee sent into the towne to such persons as were the greatest needers, willing them to bring their baggs with them … and so to supply their wants, hee gave them freely and with a cheerful heart, some fourteene measures of corne amongst them at that time.95

Although the encomiums of ministers for their dead patrons (or of pious descendants for the memory of their ancestors), should not be allowed to conceal the fact that noble charity represented only a fraction of noble incomes (or that this ‘generosity’ was sometimes triggered by the threats of the poor), its value to the ‘harvest-sensitive’ was considerably greater. It is not possible to quantify the value of the food and money thus distributed, or number its recipients, but for those able to benefit from the more generous schemes, it could represent a not inconsiderable contribution to that ‘makeshift economy’ by which the poor survived. In Warwickshire, the charity of Henry, Lord Berkeley, meant that the poor were given pottage, beef, mutton, bread, and

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The social economy of dearth beer three days a week, as well as receiving alms daily and at various festivals. On the estate of Lady Mildmay, there was a carefully planned system of loans and small bonuses and the provision of work, to assist poor families in distress. Noble charity may have been especially important in areas which lagged behind in the introduction of parochial or crisis relief. After a succession of bad harvests, it was reported from Northumberland in 1625 that ‘the multitude of poor people … would starve if they were not relieved out of the bounties and charges of the gentlemen and others here’.96 Charity was not solely the preserve or prerogative of the nobility. Reports of the death of charity are exaggerated, and the dating of its replacement by a more formalised system of poor-relief in the late sixteenth century are premature. There is every reason to believe that the harvest crises of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, which gave a powerful impetus to legislative change in poor-relief, also continued to witness increases in charitable giving. Those below the level of the gentry were also subjected to the same strong pressures: from above (from the Church and state); and from below (from the poor) – to offer relief. In years of dearth, the government called on the clergy to urge their parishioners ‘to relieve the poor and needy by good housekeeping, by setting them on work, and by other deeds of alms and brotherly compassion’. And, as is becoming increasingly recognised, far from providing a simple prescription for ‘a new medicine for poverty’, puritan preaching with its notion of stewardship continued to offer a powerful endorsement of the obligatory (if discriminatory) role of charity.97 The response to such appeals offered the poor another layer of insulation against harvest failure. Beneficed clergy were not only required to preach up the need for charity in years of harvest failure, but also, by residing on their benefices, ‘to give good example to others in usinge hospitality, almes and releyving their poor neighbors’, an injunction reminding them of the requirement in canon law to use part of their income for the poor. Whether the remission of tithe grain offered the land-poor another source of relief against dearth remains to be researched, but not surprisingly, it was often the clergy who took the lead in relieving the poor in years of harvest failure. Examples abound of the initiatives that they took. William Shepherd, minister of the Essex parish of Heydon, where harvest failure left two-thirds of the village in need of relief in 1579, noted in his register: ‘This yer beyng very der yer of corne for whe[a]t was worth xxxs. a quarter, barley xxs. and all other grayn derer, not withstanding I sold my croppe to my power neyghbers so long as yt lasted After the rate as I had sold the yeares before.’ At Dry Drayton in Cambridgeshire around about the same period, the minister Richard Greenham similarly provided out of his own corn, and persuaded the farmers of the parish to provide a common granary from which the poor were supplied at less than half the market price.98 Recent work on the relief of the poor in early modern England confirms that

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Popular politics in early modern England many communities continued to see traditional forms of neighbourly reciprocities as an important source of aid for their own poor. If historians of poverty are right, as seems likely, in their emphasis on the continuing importance of charity, then its role in periods of dearth may have been even greater. If, and where, informal relief was on the decline, there were nonetheless compelling reasons why, in conditions of dearth, the wealthier sort should revert to their earlier practice. Reciprocity and mutual aid were at the heart of the important notion of neighbourliness. In the past, harvest failure must have played a vital role in underwriting the value of this norm, one of whose most important springs was the need for mutual aid to combat the threat posed to all by an uncertain environment. In the early modern period, increasing social polarisation may have meant that wealthier villagers were less dependent on this form of social insurance against harvest failure. But, while neighbourly reciprocity might have been on the decline in relationships between those being driven apart by very different levels of wealth, it is clear that charitable giving remained an important consideration in the evaluation of wealthier members of the community. The inner tensions between ‘possessive individualism’ and continuing membership of the ‘moral community’, advanced to explain the increase in witchcraft prosecutions, point to the continuing force of the sanctions for neighbourly giving. It was reported from Northumberland in the 1660s that the local gentry wanted to prohibit begging, but they were afraid of the curses and clamours of the beggars, who continued to be given alms ‘for fear of their curses’.99 Mental beliefs, moral pressures, magisterial directives and the menace of popular discontent, all conspired to encourage the ‘better sort’ to assist their poorer neighbours. Moreover, what might be seen by these new elites of wealthier farmers as the distribution of charity, may also have had the more positive advantage of marking out the farmers’ status and aligning themselves with the gentry as patrons of the poor. Informal relief has not attracted the attention that it deserves. A teleological obsession with the development of administrative schemes has blunted an awareness of its continuing importance. Despite legislative proscription of begging (in itself, less complete than often assumed), it is clear that toleration of local begging made this a continuing source of support to which the poor had greater recourse when the harvest failed. The decision of the authorities in the West Riding of Yorkshire in 1598 not to enforce parochial rates, since ‘many are able to give relief which are not able to give money’, is but one of many pointers to the continuing practice of informal relief. As late as the dearths of the later 1640s, the poor in one Norfolk community were being relieved by informal means, ‘itt being held fitter by our Minister to provide for the Pore rather by voluntary contributions then by rates and collections’.100 By its very nature, evidence of informal relief is elusive. For example, we only learn of the charity of William Blundell’s aunt, who used ‘sometimes to give a peck

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The social economy of dearth or bushel of corn to several particular persons of the poorest sort’, because of the impudence of one recipient who is reported to have said, ‘I hope, good Mrs., you will give me now some charity or overmeasure, according as others do after a measure of corn sold.’ Not surprisingly, much informal relief took the form of giving small amounts of corn or other food. In Wiltshire in the dearth of 1630, a woman came to beg leave to gather a lapful of peas at a house where she had previously worked as a servant. In some areas, the giving of food could assume the form of a right – at least in the eyes of the poor. In early seventeenth-century Anglesey, it was the custom for married couples to be allowed to beg for such gifts in the year after their marriage: the man for grain and seed, the woman for haulms and thrives [pods of peas and beans]. From Northumberland in the 1660s, it was reported that, ‘the beggars wherever corn is stirring (as in winnowing, sowing, etc.) do beg, or as it were get by custom a part of the same: and to that end many go about to beg in the time of seeding.’101 The pressures that such popular expectations could produce are graphically brought out in the series of orders recorded in the manorial courts of two Lancashire manors in response to the harvest crisis of 1623 which produced widespread famine there. Millers were to be fined if they allowed those without grain to linger in their mills, and the courts found it necessary to threaten with fines anybody bringing grain to be ground who ‘shall give anie almes to anie poore folkes’.102 Something of these tensions were eased by forms of relief which, while still voluntary, exhibited more organisation. Of these, the most frequent was the fast. Fasting by the better sort was called for by the government and preached up by the clergy. An obvious attempt to lessen the scarcity, it served several other purposes. It purged society of the sins that had prompted God to send the scourge of dearth, and propitiated the poor. By fasting, the better sort were to taste of the dearth (albeit temporarily) and to relieve the poor out of the savings they made. Something of the symbolic importance of the fast can be seen in its highly publicised recurrence into the eighteenth century.103 It is difficult now to judge how far fasting made a significant contribution to protecting the ‘harvest-sensitive’. Despite intentions, its symbolic role may have been greater. But apart from providing a further example of those pressures encouraging the persistence of other forms of relief, it could lead directly to relief of the poor. The example of the Essex minister Ralph Josselin, fasting for one to two meals a week and giving what he saved to the poor in the form of money or meat broth, is one reminder of this. And fasting could make a more significant contribution. The minister Ezekiel Culverwell, by his example, encouraged his parishioners to fast once a week, and out of the savings corn was provided for the poor at half the market price.104

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Popular politics in early modern England VI The insulation offered by the mechanisms so far discussed was likely to have been greater in rural rather than urban communities. Years of harvest failure could produce peaks in patterns of urban mortality whose concentration in the poorer parishes reflected the social geography of the early modern town.105 But though the ‘harvest-sensitive’ in at least the larger urban centres lacked the defences potentially available to the rural poor by virtue of their residence in the countryside, it seems likely that even these groups were not totally exposed to the dearth prices of the market-place. As well as producing something of their own food, they also could employ food substitution to offset higher prices.106 There were urban equivalents for many of the mechanisms so far discussed, and the greater wealth and organisation of urban society were available to offset the greater problem of urban poverty. As in the countryside, the nature of the labour market offered those whose employment withstood the depressed trading conditions that dearth brought, some protection against higher food prices. In Coventry in the early 1520s, about a quarter of the population were living-in servants, and most journeymen would also have been fed by their employers on working days. In towns, trade guilds offered an additional source of relief not available in rural villages.107 Networks of credit must have offered a shield for some against harvest failure. The decision of the Corporation at Winchester to remit poorer tenants their rent arrears provides one example of sources of urban credit to ease difficulties in dearth, about which we need to know more. Neighbourliness was also important in an urban context. While these ties may have been strongest among artisans and their neighbours, both the Norwich and Ipswich censuses of the poor record examples of those said ‘to live upon their friends’.108 Even in the urban market, transactions in grain reflected the pressures that surrounded its sale, especially in conditions of dearth, and both sellers and purchasers might attempt to deflect popular hostility by reserving part of the grain for distribution or sale to the poor at under-price. Dealers set aside grain to be sold to the poor at under-prices. At Reading in 1631, the cornmasters were reported to be setting aside a sack in every load to be sold in small quanties at the rate of twelve pence a bushel under the market price. In 1648 in the grain markets of Wiltshire, the cornsellers agreed to set aside a bushel in every quarter to be stored and sold to the poor at a lower price. Purchasers of corn might also make allowances for the poor. At Woodchurch in Kent, Sir Walter Roberts purchased ten quarters of wheat in the dearth of 1631, and left half to be sold to the poor. While his example may reflect the strength of the pressures on the gentry to be charitable, this was a practice commonly followed in that county and elsewhere. Farmers and dealers supplying larger urban centres left grain to be sold at below market prices. From Faversham in

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The social economy of dearth Kent, it was reported in 1597 that ‘the Countrye people … Gratefye the poore in selling twoe q[uar]ters of wheate in the markett after iiijs. the bushell for eu[er]ye skore they passed through the Towne to London, wheate [being] then worth viis. the bushell’.109 Informal relief, which again remains for the most part invisible or underresearched, also played a role in towns. Begging by the local poor was tolerated in cities as well as villages. In the capital itself, the Lord Mayor’s response to the enforcement of the late Elizabethan statute on poor-relief was to recommend to the aldermen that they should prescribe some fit time of day for the parish poor to seek relief from the houses of the richer sort. There may have been many like the Nantwich mercer, who after the harvest failures of the 1590s calculated that he had spent all but five pounds of his reduced profits, ‘by reason of the dearth and great charge I lived at and giving away to the poor, for corn was at such a very fearful price’.110 The Church was used also in towns, large and small, to exhort the wealthy to be charitable. At Southampton in the dearth of 1608, the Corporation ordered that the ministers after their sermons should ‘give the people admonition to remember the poore’, and churchwardens were to stand at the door to take the collection. In the later dearth of 1631 at Dorchester, voluntary contributions were gathered in the church for the provision of corn (and the rector’s contribution compared very unfavourably with the bounty of others).111 Fasting was not only recommended by the Church, but also prescribed by city councils. In London in 1596, the abandonment of the livery companies’ feasts helped to finance the distribution of 4,000 loaves weekly.112 If the gentry abandoned the country for the city, they could not escape the obligation to relieve the poor. For example, in the dearth of 1596, Sir Thomas Egerton was distributing weekly alms to sixty-two inhabitants of the London parish of St Dunstan’s. In the later dearth of 1608, the Lord Chancellor gave forty pounds to be distributed in bread to the poor of Coventry.113 Neither was such giving confined to the capital, nor to wealthy gentlemen or clerics. At Bristol in 1597, all the men of ability in the city were enjoined to give a meal of meat to upwards of eight poor people each. In the same year, the wealthiest citizens at Worcester ‘took into their homes “above two hundred poor and aged persons” and supported them’. At Winchester in the earlier dearth of 1587, this obligation was made more formal, with the maintenance of poor children being specified as a term in some of the city’s leases.114 Individual acts of philanthropy by wealthy urban patricians and others less wealthy, orchestrated on occasion by public fasts, could produce levels of giving that rivalled formal relief. Collectively, their contribution to protecting the poor from harvest failure could be significant, as has been argued was the case in London in the 1590s.115 Philanthropy that took the form of doles or bequests to endow regular distributions of bread had an obvious value in conditions of

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Popular politics in early modern England dearth. Some were intended specifically to afford the urban ‘harvest-sensitive’ insulation against high food prices. Coventry, Chester and the capital were all cities whose citizens benefited from bequests to finance the purchase and distribution at subsidised prices of grain.116 What did distinguish urban relief was the greater degree of organisation. This was most apparent in the purchase and distribution of food in the form of grain or bread to the needy. Nevertheless, despite superior financial and administrative bases, towns found the call on their resources to be considerable. While urban elites sought to finance grain purchases through town revenues – an increase in rates or the re-allocation of other sources of income like market tolls, or less commonly by desperate measures like the sale of the town’s ordnance as at Faversham in Kent – they too were forced to rely on less-formal funding. The provision of grain in many towns depended on the ‘charitable’ inclination of members of the ruling group to advance loans, or on persuading dealers to set aside grain to be sold more cheaply to poorer consumers.117 While the manner by which urban grain purchases were financed illustrates the blurring of informal and formal attempts to relieve dearth, this policy is best discussed under the general heading of official policies to cope with harvest failure. VII Official measures to combat the consequences of harvest failure provide a more familiar reason for early modern England’s resistance to famine. The government’s policies were codified in the first Book of Orders issued in 1586, but they clearly predated this and had been long anticipated by local, especially urban, government.118 When prices rose, exports of grain were to be banned, censuses taken of grain stocks, the market regularly supplied, and the storage and sale of grain closely regulated. All this was intended explicitly to ensure a supply of grain at prices which the poor could afford. These policies to police the marketing of grain were reinforced by the developing system of poorrelief. Together, they are held to have played a critical role in mitigating the impact of harvest failure. Much of what they intended is too familiar to need much discussion. But in the early modern state, intentions were not achievements. There is still considerable scope for exploring how policies intended to ensure a supply of grain were effective in actually providing the ‘harvest-sensitive’ with grain. The history and geography of their local enforcement, and the definitions of eligibility on which they were implemented, await detailed research. Parochial poor-relief was not by itself adequate to offset the impact of harvest failure. Given full expression in the late Elizabethan legislation of the 1590s, which provided for a public rate, this form of poor-relief was slow

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The social economy of dearth to be fully implemented, and, in its funding, as much as in its expenditure, was highly vulnerable to the impact of harvest failure. As recent studies have shown, parochial poor-relief normally offered support – at moments of dependency within the cycle of family formation and dissolution – to a relatively small percentage of the population. Harvest failure dramatically reversed the proportion of ratepayers (usually a minority) to those in need of relief. Indeed, it could create a vicious spiral in which the additional burden of poor-relief pushed more families from independence into dependency. Some idea of this increased burden can be seen in the example of the Norfolk village of Cawston, where the harvest failures of the later 1590s resulted in assessments of ½d. to 20d. weekly, instead of a ‘normal’ rate of ½d. to 3s. 1d. per month.119 To cope with the crisis of harvest failure, relief was needed in much larger amounts and for the much greater numbers of these conjunctural poor. Consequently, dearth years saw sharp increases in poor-relief expenditure. At Norwich in the dearth of 1631, the city’s authorities were forced to rate ‘the better rank of citizens’ three times what they had previously paid, and the rest of the citizens double. In some London parishes, the dearth of the later 1640s brought a doubling in the poor rate. Similar increases were recorded in both towns and villages.120 While some increase would have been necessary to meet the higher costs of relieving regular pensioners, the scale of these increases reflected the greater burden placed on the parish as the precarious independence of the ‘harvest sensitive’ was undermined by rising prices. Relief for the conjunctural poor could take a variety of forms – the provision of work, the binding out of their children, monetary payments, or the provision of grain – but it was the last of these that was the most common. In many communities, the poor rate (even when doubled or trebled) was not sufficient to fund such a policy. Policies for making grain available in dearth years were first implemented – and were at their most developed – in towns. From at least the early sixteenth century, many towns, including London, had their own granaries. Urban granaries were not without their problems however, and a more common policy was to buy in grain when the harvest looked uncertain.121 This was a risky policy, and one which could provoke opposition from both magistrates and people in the areas of supply. But against the temporal risk-spreading offered by urban granaries, towns were able to use their resources and patterns of trade to take advantage of the possibilities of geographical risk-spreading, by importing grain from the Baltic. Although, significantly, this policy may have become less pronounced as early as 1608, imports of Baltic rye played an important role in the relief of both urban centres and their hinterlands in the crises of the sixteenth century. London, Norwich, Bristol, Shrewsbury, Worcester, Exeter, as well as smaller towns like Barnstaple or Maldon, were among those towns importing grain in the dearths of the 1590s.122

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Popular politics in early modern England Urban grain stocks could be used in several ways to offer relief. They could be used as ‘equalisation funds’ to moderate the rise in prices in the retail market. More commonly, they were used to provide the poor with grain at subsidised prices. This was a policy widely implemented: from cities like London, Norwich, Exeter, Winchester, Leicester and Chester, down to small towns like Lyme Regis in Dorset.123 At Norwich in 1596, where rye had been selling at 6s. 4d. or more, 4,600 quarters of rye were imported and sold at 4s. a bushel; at Shrewsbury, where rye had been selling for 12s. a bushel, 3,200 bushels were brought in and sold at 8s. a bushel. At Worcester in the following year, £1,800 was spent on Baltic grain, which was then sold in the market at some 10 to 20 per cent below the current prices. Grain might also be baked and then sold to the poor in small loaves, as at Shrewbury or Maidstone. Less regularly – it would appear – grain might be distributed free to those in most need. At Bristol in 1596, the authorities bought 3,000 quarters of Baltic rye (having spent £1,200 importing grain in the previous harvest) which they sold much under the market rate ‘and many pecks were given among the poor of the city’.124 If the volume of subsidised sales was sufficiently large, then the use of grain stocks in this way too could reduce prices in the market. The value of these schemes in shielding the urban ‘harvest-sensitive’ is shown in the example of Coventry. There, subsidised sales of oats from a store specially provided for the purpose were made from tubs taken through the streets of the city. The scheme, which ran for just over a year, from March 1597 to March 1598, regularly supplied some 500 to 700 households, perhaps as much as a third, and, at its peak, half of the city’s population.125 A similar policy of selling grain at subsidised prices was also adopted by rural communities in dearth years. In 1595, the Privy Council had called on magistrates ‘by charitable persuasions [and personal example] to every man … being of wealth and ability’ to contribute to a stock with which to buy grain to sell to the poor in the market-place at under-prices.126 Norfolk provides a good example of the successful implementation of this policy. The 1631 report on the marketing of grain in that county noted, ‘in Norfolk where corn abounds the inhabitants of the better and abler sort provide in a dearth for the poor in the market of their own town’. Their practice was ‘to provide corn for the poor at home in their own town … at a very easy and under-rate’. As the report makes clear, this had been the policy from at least the 1580s. One of those called before Star Chamber in 1597 to answer charges of marketing abuses, in fact turned out to have bought, with others of the ‘better sort’ of Kenninghall in Norfolk, twenty-five combs of rye to sell in small portions and at reasonable prices to their poor. In 1631 the justices of south-west Norfolk reported that parishes had at their command laid in a store of corn for the poor, ‘which is daylie uttered amongst them att a farr lower price then the market doth yealde.’ In the dearths of the later 1640s, communities in Norfolk again bought in grain

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The social economy of dearth to sell to the poor at under-price or to distribute free.127 Both the geography and chronology of the rural implementation of this policy need further research.128 The policy may well predate the introduction of the first Book of Orders. But it is the provincial reports that this called for which first provide extensive evidence of the practice in rural areas. It became more frequent in subsequent crises, being perhaps most extensive after the issue of the Book of Orders of 1631. For example, in Hertfordshire in 1623, the justices and gentlemen had, ‘by there good and charitable exsamples and perswasiones’, provided grain at nearly half the market price in ‘euery parish where need requireth’. In 1631 the ‘princepall Inhabitants’ of most of Essex’s parishes had laid in corn for their poor, ‘abateinge in some p[ar]ishes Two shillings, in some xviiid., others viid, ye bz. [i.e. bushel] of ye price of ye Market accordinge to ye necessitie of theire poore’; while from east Sussex in the same year the magistrates reported that, ‘the most substantiall inhabitants of those parishes where the poore did most abounde … partly by the perswasions of us and of their ministers and of their owne charytable disposition have laid down in some one parish about thirty pounds, in another twenty pounds, some lesse, accordinge to the extent and abilitie of theire parishes, above their assessments’ to finance the purchase of grain. At its most organised, grain was distributed to the poor in their own homes under this policy, as in Cambridgeshire in 1631, where the poor had their grain at least twelve pence under market price. While the later crises of the 1640s saw further examples of this policy, it may well be that the period of the 1630s represented a peak in its implementation. Significantly, the later harvest failure of 1661/2, one of the most serious in the period, provides markedly less evidence of the formal implementation of this policy.129 VIII Traditionally, the system of transfer payments operated under the poor law has been held to be an important part of the explanation for England’s resistance to famine. Certainly, a comparison with explanations offered for the continuing presence of famine in other parts of the British Isles or the Continent would lend weight to this analysis.130 Gains in agriculture raised the output of food to the point at which harvest failure produced spatial and social shortages which the organised transfer of reduced surpluses could overcome. Increases in the levels of regular relief offered to the parish poor (for which increases the renewed dearths of the period may be partly responsible) were likely to have been especially important in offering protection to exactly those groups (the elderly and the very young) that modern work has identified as being most at risk of starvation when the harvest fails.131 Formal crisis relief, with its policy of providing subsidised or free distribution of grain, offered the much larger

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Popular politics in early modern England group of ‘harvest-sensitive’ poor the possibility of protection from the problem of declining ‘exchange-entitlements’ that Sen has identified as a major cause of starvation among this group. In part, however, the prominence attributed to formal relief reflects the nature of the surviving evidence. By its very nature, poor-relief has left a more visible impression in the historical record. But before we can be certain of the exact value of crisis relief, we need far more detailed studies of its local implementation – were the quantities of grain sufficiently large, the prices sufficiently low and the period of subsidy sufficiently long to offer effective relief against the problem of declining ‘exchange-entitlements’? By contrast, the lack of an official (and hence record-keeping) framework has meant that other means of protection against harvest failure have not received sufficient attention. The continuing importance of these forms of relief has been neglected because of the teleological distortions that disfigure the study of the history of social welfare. Studies of poor-relief have tended to emphasise change at the expense of an attentiveness to continuity; discussions have been organised around a too-sharp transition from charity (itself a questionable label to describe earlier forms of relief) to legal provision. An anachronistic reading of early modern society as a market society marked by the triumph of economic individualism, has helped to underwrite this interpretation. Although more work remains to be done, the evidence here collected cautions against a premature tendency to see early modern England as a fully fledged market society in which the social impact of harvest failure can be read off from the evidence of wage rates and price series. In a world in which the content of relationships is perhaps better captured by considerations of oeconomy, rather than economy, protection against harvest failure was also to be found in a much wider set of relationships: among others, the relationship between landlord and tenant, farmer and labourer, master and servant, rich and poor. Rather than seeking to evaluate the respective contribution of ‘formal’ or ‘informal’ relief in offering protection against dearth, it would be better to emphasise the degree of overlap between them. There was a similarity of language between church sermon and government decree in dearth years. Both employed the vocabulary of compassion and obligation. The government called for contributions to the purchase of grain for sale to the poor to be given ‘according to their devotions, and as charity requireth in this time of dearth’; the Church was to ‘exhort the rich sort to be liberall to help the more with mony or victuall nedfull’.132 This confusion of language was made necessary as much by the inadequacies of parochial assessment to fund the large purchases of grain necessary as by the apparent legal uncertainty over the government’s ability to dictate to holders of grain the prices at which they should sell to the poor. Formal relief succeeded to the extent that it reflected

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The social economy of dearth not simply the degree of political centralisation, but also drew on the attitudes (of both fear and charity) that underpinned the protection afforded by informal practices and exchanges. Similarly, while emphasis has been given here to the continuing importance of patterns of reciprocity, it would be a mistake in turn to exaggerate their importance. Because evidence of the protection offered by these forms of informal relief is necessarily diffuse, it is difficult to gauge or to quantify the protection that they afforded. Taken singly, their value might have been slight. What was important was the opportunity that they offered to the poor to piece them together with more formal relief, in order to secure access to food. The ‘harvest-sensitive’ in early modern England survived by being able to marry together the protection offered by formal and informal relief. But, while it was the interrelationship between formal and informal crisis relief that offered protection against harvest failure, it is clear that the relationship between the two was far from uniform. The balance varied from community to community and from region to region. Neither was there uniform access to either of these forms of relief. They were not freely available to all. The protection that they offered against famine was socially as well as geographically selective. A fuller exploration of the selective nature of crisis relief will provide a final and finer-grained explanation for the patterning of famine-free and famine-prone areas, and point up its consequences for the maintenance of order in the face of harvest failure. Both forms of relief presupposed membership of a community. To take advantage of the full panoply of protection required membership of a community which not only had a surplus to transfer, but also local social and administrative structures to secure that transfer. Grain-deficient upland communities in the highland zone, with limited arable and low yields and a pattern of dispersed settlement, may have lacked both the surpluses and structures to cope with the impact of harvest failure. While further research might be expected to reveal that they had their own mechanisms to minimise the impact of harvest failure (prominent among them migration),133 it is probable that the economic specialisation which pulled them out of a subsistence–sufficiency orientation weakened these. To the greater natural risk faced by these poor-soil uplands with less-favourable climate, an economic risk was added. Where selfsufficiency in arable production had predominated, the underdevelopment of market networks in grain meant that when the harvest failed it was harder to transfer surpluses into these regions. Where communities in these areas were marked by a greater degree of social homogeneity – as has been argued was common – groups with surpluses to transfer informally to their neighbours were likely to have been fewer. The general absence of a resident magistracy and weak parochial administration, as well as the lower density of gentry in such regions, meant that there were not the administrative structures to compensate for these weaknesses by organising formally the import and distri-

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Popular politics in early modern England bution of food.134 Evidence of crisis relief is, significantly, noticeably absent for famine-prone areas like Northumberland, while the implementation of parochial relief lagged behind progress in the south-east.135 The vulnerability of smallholders and labourers in communities with these characteristics is reflected in the patterns of migration in early modern England. The dominant pattern was one of movement out of the marginal uplands of the north and west and into the lowlands of the south and east, a pattern of movement from upland to lowland reflected in microcosm in individual counties. When the harvest failed, there may have been many like Lancelot Brown of the village of Greystoke in Cumberland, who, when famine struck in 1623, ‘went forth of the country for want of means’.136 A disproportionate number of those poor wandering men and women whose anonymous burials are recorded in parish registers throughout England probably wandered from such communities or their equivalents in Wales and Scotland. By the later seventeenth century, the shadow of famine had been lifted from these previously vulnerable communities. They, like the rest of the country, were the beneficiaries of a slowing down in the rate of population growth, an increase in agricultural output and in real wages that brought better market integration for pastoral economies in particular. But if this convergence of factors brought an end to crises of subsistence in even previously vulnerable areas, this did not mean an end to the insecurities that dearth brought. Dearth retained its prominence in popular culture and consciousness. Almanacs and oral weather omens, for example, reveal a continuing popular anxiety about the quality of future harvests, while diaries continued to record the consequences for the poor of sudden, sharp increases in prices.137 At the very end of the seventeenth century, Charles Davenant drew attention to the limited carry-over of grain even in good years, and, well into the eighteenth century, harvest fluctuations remained the dominant cause of economic instability.138 Indeed, the underlying increase in the numbers of those dependent on the market for both food and employment made the problem of falling ‘exchangeentitlements’ potentially that much greater when the harvest failed. Harvest failure thus continued to exacerbate the problem of ‘hidden hunger’ among the labouring poor and, as the later mortality crises of the 1720s and 1740s vividly demonstrated, it could still give a vicious twist to the complex relationship between poor nutritional status and disease that made the impact of epidemics so devastating.139 The disappearance of ‘crises of subsistence’ precisely defined as a demographic measure should not be allowed to obscure the fact that for individuals the threat of starvation might remain very real. In 1683, for example, the overseers of the poor of a Worcestershire parish recorded the allocation of a bushel of wheat to one Henry Best, ‘when he was almost starved’. Famine might have disappeared, but starvation as a ‘class phenomenon’ remained.140

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The social economy of dearth The continuing threat that harvest failure posed to the poor’s subsistence thus made crisis relief, both formal and informal, of great importance to the ‘harvest-sensitive’, even in areas not subject to famine and in the period after famine’s disappearance. But, if such relief was becoming geographically more widespread, access to such relief remained socially selective. It presupposed membership of a community. Without such membership, there was claim to neither the protection offered by the social economy nor the formal defences of poor-relief – a fact grimly attested to by the fate of those wandering poor who died in the streets of early modern England’s villages and towns. Neither did residence automatically guarantee relief. To qualify for formal relief required a stated period of residence and, in conditions of rising expenditure on relief, authorities were probably quick to see this enforced: for example in the dearth of 1596/7 the constables of one Suffolk town were paid to remove almost 250 newcomers.141 Similarly, crisis relief allowed those in charge of its distribution to define eligibility. In Wiltshire during the dearths of the later 1640s, the justices ordered that apart from the impotent poor only those who could show a certificate from their minister and four or five of the ‘chief inhabitants’, declaring that ‘they are laborious & painefull & by reason of their hard charge of children they are not able to mainteyne their familie by their hard labour’, were to receive subsidised grain. This same group were to decide how much grain they should receive.142 If further research confirms that formal crisis relief was in decline in the later seventeenth century, this is a trend that can only have increased the poor’s dependency on relief controlled by local elites who were thus able to define eligibility. Protection, therefore, demanded membership of a community, whose rules and boundaries were defined increasingly by those chief inhabitants for whom growing wealth made redundant the reasons for observing customary patterns of mutual aid against dearth. Access to that membership was itself becoming more selective. The loss of land progressively restricted the circuits of exchange within the social economy into which the land-poor might be qualified to enter and, in the longer-term, harvest failure gave a powerful push to a more conscious and restrictive definition of membership and ‘rights’, such as gleaning, by local elites.143 In towns as well, there is evidence to suggest that harvest failure prompted a more restrictive definition of eligibility for relief.144 While emphasis has been given here to the persistence of some forms of informal relief, it would be a mistake to ignore the evidence of the literature of complaint that these were under threat. While some relationships withstood change, it was undoubtedly the case that the abnormal situation of dearth prompted a temporary return to practices that had been, or were in the process of being, abandoned in the growing pursuit of possessive individualism. It was the fact that ‘traditional’ practices were being repudiated or their observance made discretionary, rather than obligatory, that gave

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Popular politics in early modern England elites scope for greater control. That the same relationship, for example the sale of grain locally, could be treated either as an exercise in ‘neighbourliness’ or as a commercial transaction in which a market price was exacted, further emphasised the importance of the recipient’s status.145 That economic relationships, offering potential protection against harvest failure, such as service or harvest employment, were both subject to cyclical trends eroding their use and vulnerable to harvest failure, underlined the importance of reputation in the local labour market. The fact that harvest failure itself encouraged a temporary, more restrictive access to areas of the social economy offering relief – for example, gleaning, harvest labour – had the same effect.146 The young Somerset groom – before the courts for a theft of a peck of wheat in dust ‘to releiue him in his necessities, for that he being without a Master, and unsettled, was like to famishe for want of food’ – exemplifies the problems of those without claim to relief.147 In circumstances such as these, the labouring poor’s dependence could be used to demand a shift in the ‘rate of exchange’ in those relationships between superiors and inferiors central to the maintenance of order in early modern society. Such a shift was not achieved without contest. (Neither was the change complete: in many ways this contest over the range and nature of the responsibilities of rural elites towards their neighbours remains at the centre of rural conflict well into the nineteenth century.) The continuing threat of harvest failure underlined the value of such relationships for both these groups, since both, in contrasting ways, remained vulnerable. For the poor, they offered protection from famine; for the propertied, they gave protection from the fear of disorder and a validation of their authority. Characteristically, Hobbes captured the nature of this exchange when he wrote that what people usually called charity was either a ‘contract, whereby they seek to purchase friendship, or fear, which maketh them to purchase peace’.148 In this sense, years of dearth continued to provide an arena in which the nature of social responsibilities between the poor and their betters could be continually renegotiated.149 But, over time, this often bitter but unequal contest over the obligatory nature of relief resulted increasingly (if never finally) in a redefinition of reciprocities as discriminatory and discretionary charity. Where this was achieved, it allowed the propertied to pass off as a gift what had previously been perceived as a right. That the gift could take the form of food, gave this exchange added significance in a society in which the giving and receiving of food was encrusted with meanings. In Raymond William’s terms, we might see this as a transition from a ‘charity of production’ to a ‘charity of consumption’. By exercising what they now chose to call ‘charity’ when the harvest failed, local elites contributed to a myth of community which helped to soften and disguise the nature of those expanding inequalities, whose existence dearth otherwise highlighted.150 The poor were encouraged to choose the solidarities of ‘community’ against those

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The social economy of dearth of class. As the shifting geography of the food riot suggests, this was by no means a uniform process. Both the geography of the food riot (predominantly located in urban or rural industrial grain-deficient areas with more ‘individualistic’ economic relationships) and the increasing frequency of this form of popular political action, provide a rough guide to differences in the availability of formal and informal relief. But the absence of the food riot from many purely agricultural areas and – until a very late date in its history – the general absence of the agricultural labourer from such disorder, suggests that even if the poor of early modern England escaped a ‘crisis of subsistence’, many fell victim to a crisis of dependence.151 NOTES I am grateful for comments on earlier drafts of this chapter by Roger Schofield and members of the following seminars: the ESRC Cambridge Group, the Economic and Social History of Pre-Industrial England Seminar, Institute of Historical Research, Comparative Political Economy of Development, Queen Elizabeth House, Oxford, Professor S. J. Woolf’s Poverty in Early Modern Europe Research Group, European University Institute and History of Poverty Seminar, All Souls, Oxford. 1 I am grateful to Ben and Angharad Walter for first giving me the opportunity to realise this. The absence of references to famine is based on an examination of the following sources: A. Aarne and S. Thompson, The Types of the Folktale: A Classification and Bibliography (Helsinki, 1961); J. O. Halliwell and T. Wright (eds), Collection of Seventy-Nine Black Letter Ballads; H. E. Rollins, Pepys Ballads (8 vols, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1929–32); H. E. Rollins, The Pack of Autolycus or Strange and Terrible News … (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1927); H. E. Rollins, ‘An analytical index to the ballad-entries in the registers of the Company of Stationers of London’, Studies in Philology, 21 (London, 1924); W. Chappell and J. W. Ebsworth (eds), The Roxburghe Ballads (9 vols, Hertford, 1871–99); J. W. Ebsworth (ed.), The Bagford Ballads Illustrating the Last Years of the Stuarts (Hertford, 1878); K. M. Briggs, A Dictionary of British Folk-Tales in the English Language (4 vols, 1970–71). Dearth, rather than famine, is the focus of English popular literature. For the importance of famine as a motif in French folk-tales, see R. Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (London, 1984), pp. 9–72. 2 M. W. Flinn, The European Demographic System 1500–1820 (Brighton, 1981); M. W. Flinn (ed.), Scottish Population History from the Seventeenth Century to the 1930s (Cambridge, 1977); E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The Population History of England, 1541–1871: A Reconstruction (London, 1981). 3 J. Walter, ‘The geography of food riots, 1585–1649’, in A. Charlesworth (ed.), An Atlas of Rural Protest in Britain 1548–1900 (London, 1983). 4 Many of the diaries listed in W. Matthews, British Diaries (Cambridge, 1950), show this concern: see, for example, ‘Diary of Philip Wyot’, in J. R. Chanter, Sketches of the Literary History of Barnstaple (Barnstaple, 1886); G. Roberts (ed.), The Diary of Walter Yonge (Camden Society, old ser., 41, 1848); A. Macfarlane (ed.), The Diary of Ralph Josselin 1616–1683 (London, 1976). 5 For some examples, see P. Laslett, The World We Have Lost Further Explored (London,

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Popular politics in early modern England 1981), p. 131; A. L. Beier, Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England 1560–1640 (1985), p. 46; Bodl., Oxford, MSS, D. D. Par. Wendlebury d. 1, fo. 43. 6 Coventry RO, Acc. 4, City Annals F; W. A. Leighton, ‘Early chronicles of Shrewsbury, 1372–1603’, Transactions of the Shropshire Archaeological and Natural History Society, 3 (1880), 239–352; B. Capp, Astrology and the Popular Press (London, 1979), pp. 64, 114; K. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Belief in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England (Harmondsworth, 1971), pp. 74, 284, 368, 396, 404–5; M. Campbell, The English Yeoman Under Elizabeth and the Early Stuarts (London, 1960), p. 369; F. E. Hutchinson (ed.), The Works of G. Herbert (Oxford, 1941), pp. 321–55 (proverbs 516, 749). 7 A. Fletcher, Tudor Rebellions (London, 1973), p. 112; cf. F. Bacon, ‘Of seditions and troubles’, in J. Speeding, R. L. Ellis and D. D. Heath (eds), The Works of Francis Bacon (14 vols, 1857–74), 6, pp. 406–12; W. Gouge, God’s Three Arrowes: Plague, Famine, Sword (London, 1631), p. 136; N. Ling, Politeuphia, Wit’s Common-wealth (London, 1661), p. 114; J. Cornwall, Revolt of the Peasantry 1549 (London, 1977), p. 106. 8 E. Trotter, Seventeenth Century Life in the Country Parish With Special Reference to Local Government (Cambridge, 1919), pp. 143–4, 190; K. Thomas, ‘Work and leisure in pre-industrial society’, P&P, 29 (London, 1964), 52–3; J. Noake, Worcester in Olden Times (London, 1849), p. 21; W. Hudson and J. C. Tingey (eds), The Records of the City of Norwich (2 vols, Norwich, 1910), 2, pp. 134–5, 377; T. S. Ashton, Economic Fluctuations in England 1700–1800 (Oxford, 1959), p. 7; E. L. Jones (ed.), Agriculture and Economic Growth in England 1660–1750 (London, 1967), p. 25; PRO, SP 16/173/11; C. Hill, ‘The uses of sabbatarianism’, in his Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England (London, 1966), p. 150. 9 Ashton, Economic Fluctuations in England, ch. 1, provides the basis for such a study in the eighteenth century, while Barry Supple provides a short but highly valuable discussion of the economic consequences of harvest failure for the seventeenth century in his Commercial Crisis and Change in England 1600–1642: A Study in the Instability of a Mercantile Economy (Cambridge, 1959), pp. 14–19. For an interesting attempt to reconstruct the impact of the dearths of the 1590s in a specific locality, see P. Clark, English Provincial Society from the Reformation to the Revolution: Religion, Politics and Society in Kent 1500–1640 (Hassocks, 1977), chs 7–8. 10 M. Spufford, Contrasting Communities: English Villagers in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Cambridge, 1974), chs 2–4 and pp. 165–6; J. V. Beckett, ‘English landownership in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: the debate and the problems’, EcHR, 30 (1977), 567–81. 11 Beier, Masterless Men, pp. 15–16, 77; P. Slack, ‘Vagrants and vagrancy in England, 1598– 1664’, EcHR, 27 (London, 1974), 369–70; P. Clark, ‘The migrant in Kentish towns 1580–1640’, in P. Clark and P. Slack (eds), Crisis and Order in English Towns 1500–1700: Essays in Urban History (London, 1972), pp. 143, 160n.; D. C. Souden, ‘“Rogues, whores and vagabonds”? Indentured servant emigrants to North America, and the case of midseventeenth-century Bristol’, Social History, 3 (1984), 34; J. R. Kent, ‘Population mobility and alms: poor migrants in the Midlands during the early seventeenth century’, Local Population Studies, hereafter LPS, 27 (1981), 37, 48–50. 12 M. Roberts, ‘Wages and Wage-Earners in England: The Evidence of the Wage Assessments 1563–1725’ (D.Phil. dissertation, University of Oxford, 1981), pp. 260–1; F. Hull, ‘Agriculture and Rural Society in Essex, 1560–1640’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of London, 1950), p. 500; B. Supple, Commercial Crisis and Change in England 1600–1642:

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The social economy of dearth A Study in the Instability of a Merchantile Economy (Cambridge, 1959), p. 111; Ashton, Economic Fluctuations in England, p. 44; P. Bowden, ‘Agricultural prices, farm profits and rents’, AHEW, pp. 636–8. 13 Ashton, Economic Fluctuations in England, p. 47; J. Thirsk and J. P. Cooper (eds), Seventeenth-Century Economic Documents (Oxford, 1972), p. 59. 14 Among an extensive literature, see J. Walter and K. Wrightson, ‘Dearth and the social order in early modern England’, P&P, 71 (1976), 24–5; J. S. Cockburn, ‘The nature and incidence of crime in England 1559–1625: a preliminary survey’, in J. S. Cockburn (ed.), Crime in England 1500–1800 (London, 1977), pp. 49, 67; J. A. Sharpe, Crime in Early Modern England 1500–1750 (London, 1984), p. 62. For a particularly sensitive discussion of the relationship between harvest failure, appropriation and prosecuted crime, see P. King, ‘Crime, Law and Society in Essex, 1740–1820’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Cambridge, 1984), pp. 59–64, 125, 135, 147–8. 15 A. Kussmaul, ‘Agrarian change in seventeenth century England: the economic historian as palaeontologist’, Journal of Economic History, 45 (1985), 1–30; L. Bradley, ‘An enquiry into seasonality in baptisms, marriages and burials’, LPS, 4 (London, 1970), 39; Wrigley and Schofield, The Population History of England, pp. 421–2; K. Wrightson, ‘The nadir of English illegitimacy in the seventeenth century’, in P. Laslett, K. Oosterveen and R. M. Smith (eds), Bastardy and Its Comparative History (London, 1980), pp. 176–91; K. Wrightson and D. Levine, Poverty and Piety, in an English Village: Terling 1525–1700 (London and New York, 1979), ch. 7; M. Ingram, ‘Ecclesiastical Justice in Wiltshire 1600–1640, with Special Reference to Cases Concerning Sex and Marriage’ (D.Phil. dissertation, University of Oxford, 1976), p. 152; M. Ingram, ‘Religion, communities and moral discipline in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England: case studies’, in K. von Greyerz (ed.), Religion and Society in Early Modern Europe 1500–1800 (London, 1984); R. M. Smith, ‘Marriage processes in the English past: some continuities’, in L. Bonfield, R. M. Smith and K. Wrightson (eds), The World We Have Gained: Histories of Population and Social Structure (Oxford, 1987), pp. 43–99. 16 M. Chaytor, ‘Household and kinship: Ryton in the late 16th and early 17th centuries’, History Workshop Journal, 10 (1980); R. Houston and R. M. Smith, ‘A new approach to family history?’, History Workshop Journal, 14 (London, 1982). 17 A. B. Appleby, Famine in Tudor and Stuart England (Liverpool and Stanford, 1978); D. M. Palliser, ‘Dearth and disease in Staffordshire, 1540–1670’, in C. W. Chalkin and M. A. Havinden (eds), Rural Change and Urban Growth 1500–1800: Essays in Regional History in Honour of W. G. Hoskins (London, 1974); P. Slack, ‘Mortality crises and epidemic diseases in England 1485–1610’, in C. Webster (ed.), Health, Medicine and Mortality in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge, 1979); M. Drake, ‘An elementary exercise in parish register demography’, EcHR, 14 (1961/2); M. Drake, Historical Demography: Problems and Projects (Milton Keynes, 1974), pp. 89–118 (Yorkshire West Riding); C. D. Rogers, The Lancashire Population Crisis of 1623 (Manchester, 1975); J. C. Cox, The Parish Registers of England (London, 1910), p. 173 (Minehead, Somerset, 1597); D. Foster, ‘Demography in the North-West: the parish of Poulton-le-Fylde’, University of Lancaster Regional Bulletin, 5 (1976); M. Martin, ‘The parish register and history’, Warwickshire History, 2 (1973–4), 3–15; D. A. Davies, ‘Plague, death and disease in Herefordshire, 1575–1640’, Transactions of the Woolhope Naturalists’ Field Club, 43 (1981), 310–11; J. R. Taylor, ‘Population, disease and family structure in early modern Hampshire, with special reference to the towns’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Southampton, 1980), pp. 352–7, 378, 641ff. The lack of a common definition of crises of subsistence makes comparisons between these studies

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Popular politics in early modern England (some of which employ statistical measures which perhaps favour the finding of crises) difficult. 18 Wrigley and Schofield, The Population History of England, especially pp. 319–35 and appendix 10, pp. 645–93; R. S. Schofield, ‘The impact of scarcity and plenty on population change in England, 1541–1871’, in R. I. Rotberg and T. K. Rabb (eds), Hunger and History: the Impact of Changing Food Production and Consumption Patterns on Society (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 67–93; S. C. Watkins and J. Menken, ‘Famine in historical perspective’, Population and Development Review, 11 (1985), 155–6. 19 C. Clay, Economic Expansion and Social Change: England 1500–1700 (2 vols, Cambridge, 1984), ch. 4 provides a good recent summary of agricultural developments in the period; M. Overton, ‘Estimating crop yields from probate inventories: an example from East Anglia, 1585–1735’, Journal of Economic History, 39 (1979), 375–8; E. A. Wrigley, ‘Some reflections on corn yields and prices in pre-industrial economies’, in J. Walter and R. Schofield (eds), Famine, Disease and the Social Order in Early Modern Society (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 257–9; Wrigley and Schofield, The Population History of England, ch. 10 and pp. 677–8; Appleby, Famine in Tudor and Stuart England, chs 10–11. 20 A. Sen, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (Oxford, 1981). 21 P. Laslett, ‘Family, kinship and the collectivity: systems of support in pre-industrial Europe’ (I am grateful to Peter Laslett for letting me see this unpublished paper); Wrightson and Levine, Poverty and Piety, pp. 82–94; K. Wrightson, ‘Household and kinship in sixteenth-century England’, History Workshop Journal, 12 (1981), 151–8. 22 D. Cressy, ‘Kinship and kin interaction in early modern England’, P&P, 113 (1986), 69. Evidence of aid between kin in dearth years would provide an interesting test of Cressy’s claims that dense and extended kin links were more common than has been allowed and that they provided ‘a store of wealth’. 23. Rotberg and Rabb, Hunger and History, p. 1; D. J. Oddy, ‘Urban famine in nineteenth century Britain: the effect of the Lancashire cotton famine on working-class diet and health’, EcHR, 36 (1983), 69–71. 24 W. G. Hoskins, ‘Harvest fluctuations and English economic history, 1480–1619’, AgHR, 12 (1964), 28–9. 25 A. Everitt, ‘Farm labourers’, AHEW, pp. 397–9; Spufford, Contrasting Communities, pp. 31–3; Thirsk and Cooper (eds), Seventeenth-Century Economic Documents, pp. 780–1. 26 W. G. Hoskins, Provincial England: Essays in Social and Economic History (London, 1965), p. 84; Hoskins, ‘Harvest fluctuations’, 29. 27 See, for example, the comments of Sen, Poverty and Famines, p. 11. 28 P. H. Lindert and J. G. Williamson, ‘Revising England’s social tables, 1688–1812’, Explorations in Economic History, 19 (1982), 387–91. 29 C. Phythian-Adams, Desolation of a City: Coventry and the Urban Crisis of the Late Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1979), pp. 13, 132–4, 240; J. Youings, Sixteenth-century England (Harmondsworth, 1984), pp. 75, 279; cf. A. Dyer, The City of Worcester in the Sixteenth Century (Leicester, 1973), pp. 166–7; P. Slack, ‘Poverty and politics in Salisbury 1597– 1666’, in Clark and Slack, Crisis and Order, pp. 173–7; A. L. Beier, ‘The social problems of an English county town: Warwick, 1580–90’, in P. Clark (ed.), Country Towns in PreIndustrial England (London, 1981), pp. 53–61. 30 B. M. S. Campbell, ‘Population decline in late medieval England: a re-evaluation of the

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The social economy of dearth 1522 muster rolls and 1524/5 lay subsidies’, unpublished paper; R. Fieldhouse, ‘Social structure from Tudor lay subsidies and probate inventories: a case study, Richmondshire (Yorkshire)’, LPS, 12 (1974), 18. 31 C. Husbands, ‘Methodological pitfalls of the Hearth Tax returns’ (I am grateful to Dr. Husbands for letting me see this important paper); Husbands, ‘The Hearth Tax and the Structure of the English Economy’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Cambridge, 1986), especially ch. 6. 32 Ibid., pp. 18–19. The most careful assessment of ecological differences in levels and meaning of poverty is to be found in T. C. Wales, ‘Poverty and parish relief in seventeenth century Norfolk’ (I am grateful to Tim Wales for letting me see this important unpublished paper). See also the comments of Appleby on the southern bias of measures used to measure the rural labouring poor, Famine, p. 45. 33 C. Shammas, ‘Food expenditure and well-being’, Journal of Economic History, 43 (1983), pp. 89–100. Interestingly, the evidence of contemporary budgets of poorer households for the difficult years of the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries give levels of expenditure on food in the range of 70 to just under 75 per cent of income. 34 H. Phelps Brown and S. V. Hopkins, ‘Seven centuries of building wages’, Economica, 22 (1955); ‘Seven centuries of the price of consumables compared with builders’ wage-rates’, Economica, 23 (1956); ‘Wage-rates and prices: evidence for population pressures in the sixteenth century’, Economica, 24 (1957), all reprinted in Phelps Brown and Hopkins, A Perspective of Wages and Prices (London, 1981). 35 P. Deane, Economic History Review, 36 (1983), pp. 140–1. 36 B. Thomas, ‘Feeding England during the Industrial revolution: a view from the Celtic fringe’, AgHR, 56 (1982), 332; Shammas, ‘Food expenditure and well-being’, 96–7. 37 M. Airs, The Making of the English Country House 1500–1640 (London, 1975), pp. 182–9; S. Rappaport, Social Structure and Mobility in Sixteenth Century London (Cambridge, 1989), ch. 7, especially pp. 383–95; Bowden, ‘Agricultural prices’, p. 600. 38 Phelps Brown and Hopkins, Perspective of Wages, pp. 13–20; A. B. Appleby, ‘Diet in sixteenth century England: sources, problems, possibilities’, in Webster (ed.), Health, p. 108; A. B. Appleby, ‘Grain prices and subsistence crises in England and France 1590– 1740’, Journal of Economic History, 39 (1979), 865–87. 39 Airs, The Making of the English Country House, pp. 148–9; D. N. Durant and P. Rider (eds), The Building of Hardwick Hall (2 vols, Derbyshire Record Society, 4, 1980, and 9, 1984: pt one, p. xxi; pt two, p. lxxi; D. M. Woodward, ‘Wage rates and living standards in pre-industrial England’, P&P, 91 (1981), 28–45; M. Sonnescher, ‘Work and wages in Paris in the eighteenth century’, in M. Berg, P. Hudson and M. Sonnescher (eds), Manufacture in Town and Country Before the Factory (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 147–72. 40 Appleby, ‘Diet in sixteenth century England’, pp. 109–10; Overton, ‘Estimating crop yields’, 366. 41 See, for example, the comments of Sir Ralph Maddison reprinted in Thirsk and Cooper (eds), Seventeenth-Century Economic Documents, p. 25. For price series in this period, see Hoskins, ‘Harvest fluctuations’, 28–46; W. G. Hoskins, ‘Harvest fluctuations and English economic history, 1620–1759’, AgHR, 16 (1968), 15–31; Bowden, ‘Agricultural prices’, pp. 693–695, 814–70. These prices may not reflect the impact on poorer consumers. As has been pointed out, Hoskins’ series is based on wheat, and therefore fails to reflect the ability of poorer consumers to switch to other grains: C. J. Harrison,

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Popular politics in early modern England ‘Grain price analysis and harvest qualities, 1465–1634’, AgHR, 27 (1979), 135–55. For a fuller consideration of this and other issues, see Appleby, ‘Diet in sixteenth century England’, pp. 112–13; Wrigley, ‘Some reflections on corn yields’, p. 248. 42 M. Blanchard, ‘Population change, enclosure and the early Tudor economy’, EcHR, 23 (1970), 429; M. Postan, The Medieval Economy and Society (Harmondsworth, 1975), pp. 256–7. 43 Staffordshire RO, D 593 5/4/10/30, of which there is a brief analysis in Clark, English Provincial Society, pp. 239–40; P. Slack (ed.), Poverty in Early-Stuart Salisbury (Wiltshire Record Society, 31, 1975); J. Pound (ed.), The Norwich Census of the Poor: 1570 (Norfolk Record Society, 40, 1971); Beier, ‘The social problems of an English county town: Warwick’, pp. 46–85; Phythian-Adams, Desolation of a City: Coventry, pp. 59, 134, 194; N. Goose, ‘Economic and Social Aspects of Provincial Towns: A Comparative Study of Cambridge, Colchester and Reading, c. 1500–1700’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Cambridge, 1984), p. 344; W. Hunt, The Puritan Moment: the Coming of Revolution in an English County (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1983), pp. 68–9; S. Amussen, ‘Governors and Governed: Class and Gender Relations in English Villages, 1590–1725’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Brown University, 1982), pp. 55–74; T. C. Wales, ‘Poverty, poor relief and the life-cycle: some evidence from seventeenth-century Norfolk’, in R. M. Smith (ed.), Land, Kinship and Life-Cycle (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 369–80. 44 Thus, although the argument up to here has something in common with the revisionist reading offered by David Palliser (‘Tawney’s century: brave new world or Malthusian trap’, EcHR, 35 (1982)), I differ from him in seeing the problem of poverty being greater than perhaps he allows. 45 While there was a common thread to many of these responses for which evidence can be recovered (for example, eating seed-corn or more desperately eating unripe corn: Bowden, ‘Agricultural prices’, p. 634: J. Penry, Three Treatises Concerning Wales, D. Williams (ed.) (Cardiff, 1960), pp. 41–2), evidence of other responses survives by chance; see, for example, the case of an Essex woman who, through prostitution, gained grain after the harvest failures of the 1590s: F. G. Emmison, Elizabethan Life: Morals and the Church Courts (Chelmsford, 1973), p. 17. Vagrancy examinations can occasionally give a vivid glimpse of the dynamic of individual adaptive strategies to cope with dearth; see the case of Humfrey Gibbons recounted in Clark, ‘The migrant in Kentish towns 1580–1640’, in Clark and Slack (eds), Crisis and Order, p. 143. For a detailed story of how one family in the north-west survived the famines of the 1590s, marrying aid from their friends and, when this was temporarily no longer available, mortgaging a future crop for the loan of meal, see R. Parkinson (ed.), The Autobiography of Henry Newcome (2 vols, Chetham Society, old ser., 26–7, 1852), 1, pp. 82–4. For a general discussion of the range of food strategies, see R. Dirks, ‘Social responses during severe food shortages and famine’, Current Anthropology, 21 (1980); E. Colson, ‘In good years and bad: food strategies of self-reliant societies’, Journal of Anthropological Research, 35 (1979). 46 John Cook acknowledged the value of gleaning in helping the poor through the hard winter of 1647/8: Unum Necessarium: Or, The Poor man’s Case: Being An Expedient to make Provision for all poore People in the Kingdome (1647/8), p. 28. We lack as yet an adequate study of gleaning, but it is clear that in the then state of harvest technology it could provide the poor with a significant amount of grain to last them through the difficult winter months, or in some places, as Francis Eden claimed in the 1790s, enough to feed themselves and a pig through the year: B. Bushaway, By Rite: Custom, Ceremony and Community in England 1700–1880 (London, 1982), pp. 141–3; King, ‘Crime, Law

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The social economy of dearth and Society in Essex’, p. 288. The value of gleanings may have been increased by a deliberate policy on the part of harvesters; one Lancashire gentleman who criticised his harvesters for unclean reaping was told, ‘What shall we leave for the poor ones?’: T. E. Gibson (ed.), Crosby Records: A Cavalier Notebook (1980), p. 136. The loss of the protection that gleaning afforded was one of the criticisms made by opponents of enclosure: R. Powell, Depopulation Arraigned, Convicted and Condemned, By the Lawes of God and Man (London, 1636), pp. 66–7. 47 Everitt, ‘Farm labourers’, pp. 403–6; J. Thirsk, English Peasant Farming (London, 1957), pp. 27–8, 119; Appleby, ‘Diet in sixteenth century England’, 105; W. Harrison, The Description of England (Ithaca NY, 1968), p. 133; J. A. Anderson, ‘A Solid Sufficiency: An Ethnography of Yeoman Foodways in Stuart England’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1971), p. 168; E. G. Salter, Tudor England Through Venetian Eyes (London, 1930), p. 73; H. J. Morehouse (ed.), Extracts from the Diary of the Rev. Robert Meeke (London, 1874), p. 75; K. Thomas, Man and the Natural World (London, 1983), pp. 53–5, 116. 48 The success of, and need for, Richard Mabey’s Food for Free: A Guide to the Edible Wild Plants of Britain (London, 1972), perhaps provides a further indication of this. 49 R. V. Sayce, ‘Need years and need foods’, The Montgomeryshire Collections, 53 (1953/4), 55–80; A. T. Lucas, ‘Nettles and charlock as famine food’, Breifne, 1 (1959), 137–46; L. M. Cullen, ‘Population growth and diet, 1600–1850’, in J. M. Goldstrom and L. A. Clarkson (eds), Irish Population, Economy, and Society (Oxford, 1981), pp. 89–112. H. Platt, Sundry new and Artificiall remedies against Famine, written by H. P., esq. uppon thoccasion [sic] of this present Dearth (London, 1596) listed a large number of famine foods. For some examples of their use, see PRO, SP 12/188/47 (Gloucestershire 1586: cats, dogs and nettle roots); J. Schofield (ed.), The Works of James Pilkington (Cambridge, 1842), pp. 611– 12; D. Hartley, Food in England (1954). p. 231; D. Dymond, ‘The famine of 1527 in Essex’, LPS, 26 (1981), 31n.; W. R. D. Jones, The Tudor Commonwealth 1529–1559: A Study of the Impact of the Social and Economic Developments of Mid-Tudor England Upon Contemporary Concepts of the Nature and Duties of the Commonwealth (London, 1970), p. 116; D. M. Palliser, The Age of Elizabeth: England Under the Later Tudors 1547–1603 (London, 1983), p. 192. It may be significant that many of the references to ‘need foods’ in the English record come in the context of polemical comment which draws on their use to heighten the exceptional nature of the events to which they refer disapprovingly. I hope to deal more fully with diet and the use of ‘need foods’ in early modern England elsewhere. 50 Spufford, Contrasting Communities, pp. 129, 152–4; W. G. Hoskins, The Midland Peasant: The Economic and Social History of a Leicestershire Village (London, 1965), pp. 154–6; Hoskins, ‘The Leicestershire farmer in the sixteenth century’, in Hoskins, Essays in Leicestershire History (Liverpool, 1950), p. 161; APC, 1596–97, p. 7; Leicester Record Office, hereafter RO, Hall Papers BR II/18/14, no. 108; Harrison, The Description of England, p. 133. 51 Appleby, ‘Grain prices’, 865–87; V. Skipp, Crisis and Development: An Ecological Case Study of the Forest of Arden 1570–1674 (Cambridge, 1978), p. 48; M. Overton, ‘English probate inventories and the measurement of agricultural change’, A. A. G. Bijdragen, 22 (1979), 214; R. Carew, The Survey of Cornwall (1602), F. E. Halliday (ed.) (London, 1953), pp. 101–3; J. Whetter, Cornwall in the Seventeenth Century: An Economic History of Kernow (Padstow, 1974), pp. 37, 48; cf. P. Large, ‘Urban growth and agrarian change in the West Midlands during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’, in P. Clark (ed.), The Transformation of English Provincial Towns 1600–1800 (London, 1984).

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Popular politics in early modern England 52 For a stimulating discussion of the possible range of ‘life insurances’ against harvest failure, see R. B. Outhwaite, ‘Dearth, the English crown and the crisis of the 1590s’, in P. Clark (ed.), The European Crisis of the1590s: Essays in Comparative History (London, 1985), pp. 37–9; see also Clark, English Provincial Society, pp. 233–4. 53 R. C. Hoffman, ‘Medieval origins of the common fields’; D. McCloskey, ‘The persistence of the English common fields’, both in W. N. Parker and E. Jones (eds), European Peasants and Their Markets (Princeton NJ, 1975); D. McCloskey, ‘English open fields as behaviour towards risk’, Research in Economic History, 1 (1976). For an interesting discussion of the logic of peasant agriculture as a search for long-term stability and minimum subsistence, see M. Watts, Silent Violence: Food, Famine and Peasantry in Northern Nigeria (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1983); see also Colson, ‘In good years and bad’; J. C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven CT and London, 1976), p. 5. 54 See, for example, G. Roberts (ed.), Diary of Walter Yonge, pp. 18–19; D. Hey, An English Rural Community: Myddle under the Tudors and Stuarts (Leicester, 1974), p. 49. Taking land into cultivation, especially to sow extra spring crops, seems to have been common: Skipp, Crisis and Development, p. 37; P. Gough, Human Nature Displayed in the History of Myddle Written by Richard Gough (Fontwell, 1968), p. 33; M. Griffiths, ‘Kirtlington: An Oxfordshire Community, 1500–1750 (D.Phil. dissertation, University of Oxford, 1979), pp. 211–12; Coventry RO, A 14(a), fo. 131; J. A. Chester, ‘Poor Relief in Coventry, 1500– 1640’ (M.Phil. dissertation, University of Reading, 1982), p. 36 and n. In Worcestershire, dredge (a mixture of grains) was sown as a form of insurance against excessively wet summers: R. E. Seavoy, Famine in Peasant Societies (New York and London, 1986), p. 56. 55 Wrigley and Schofield, The Population History of England, pp. 670–2. 56 Anon., Calendar of Wynn (of Gwydir) Papers (Aberystwyth, 1926), p. 173 (I am grateful to Anthony Fletcher for bringing this source to my attention); for evidence of the limited arable land on these estates, see J. G. Jones, ‘The Wynn Estate of Gwydir: aspects of its growth and development c. 1500–1580’, The National Library of Wales Journal, 22 (1981–82), 141–69. In the dearth of 1622/3, Henry Best in the East Riding of Yorkshire was taking in cattle in exchange for grain: D. Woodward (ed.), The Farming and Memorandum Books of Henry Best of Elmswell 1642 (London, 1984), p. 168. 57 P. Croot, ‘The commercial attitudes and activities of small farmers in Somerset in the seventeenth century’, paper read to the Early Modern English Economic and Social History Seminar, Cambridge, 10 November 1983. 58 J. Thirsk, ‘Industries in the countryside’, in F. J. Fisher (ed.), Essays in the Economic and Social History of Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge, 1961), pp. 82–3; P. Hudson, ‘From manor to mill: the west Riding in transition’, in Berg , Hudson and Sonnescher (eds), Manufacture in Town and Country, pp. 124–44 (it would be interesting to know whether the socio-economic differences between areas of worsted production: pastoral, upland, grain-deficient; and woollen production: lower land, mixed agriculture, larger farms and tighter manorial controls, were reflected in differential patterns of harvest mortality); Wales, ‘Poverty and parish relief in seventeenth century Norfolk’, p. 67; Skipp, Crisis and Development, p. 62 and graph, p. 19; M. B. Rowlands, Masters and Men in the West Midlands Metalware Trades Before the Industrial Revolution (Manchester, 1975), p. 13; D. Hey, Rural Metal Workers of the Sheffield Region (University of Leicester Department of English Local History, occas. papers, second ser., 5, Leicester, 1972); Large, ‘Urban growth and agrarian change’, pp. 173, 176.

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The social economy of dearth 59 P. A. J. Pettit, The Royal Forests of Northamptonshire: A Study in Their Economy, 1558–1714 (Northampton, 1968), pp. 152, 169. 60 Sen, Poverty and Famines, p. 49. 61 Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant, p. 56; E. Kerridge, ‘The movement of rent 1540–1640’, EcHR, 4 (1951), 18; C. W. Chalkin, Seventeenth Century Kent: A Social and Economic History, p. 63; Harrison, ‘Village surveys’, 82–9. 62 Sen, Poverty and Famines, p. 5; Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant, pp. 50–1. 63 A. Kussmaul, Servants in Husbandry in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 11–42, 76; Beier, Masterless Men, p. 23. 64 Robert Loder in his accounts showed a recurrent concern with the cost of servants; in the dearth of 1614 he noted, ‘I judge it were good (in such deare yeares) to keep as few servants as possible’: G. E. Fussell (ed.), Robert Loder’s Farm Accounts 1610–1620 (Camden Society, third ser., 53, 1936), p. 90; Thirsk and Cooper (eds), SeventeenthCentury Economic Documents, p. 182. 65 Employment may have given opportunities for appropriating grain as a perquisite. Robert Loder, for whom ‘pilfering’ by servants and taskers was a continuing problem, noted on one occasion ‘Item that corne which my men doe steale (more then I allow of in a yeare); although it be a thing uncertaine, yet I think it may well be valued at xls.’: Fussell (ed.), Robert Loder’s Farm Accounts, p. 56; cf. pp. 24, 96, 127, 139, 163. Dearth may have made owners of grain more willing to treat such appropriation as theft; for examples of prosecutions of taskers and carters for taking grain, see J. A. Sharpe, Crime in Seventeenth-Century England: A County Study (Cambridge, 1983), p. 99; King, ‘Crime, Law and Society in Essex’, p. 132. 66 Fussell (ed.), Robert Loder’s Farm Accounts, pp. 28, 47–9, 113, 136–7, 141; Woodward (ed.), The Farming and Memorandum Books of Henry Best, pp. 39, 169 ff.; Everitt, ‘Farm labourers’, pp. 436–8; J. Rule, The Labouring Classes in Early Industrial England 1750– 1850 (London, 1986), pp. 109–10. For a similar argument about the privileged access to grain enjoyed by certain categories of workers, see M. Vaughan, ‘Famine analysis and family relations: 1949 in Nyasaland’, P&P, 108 (1985), 183–4. 67 Wiltshire Record Office, Trowbridge, hereafter WRO, Q/S Great Roll, Easter 1609/114; A. Simpson, The Wealth of the Gentry, 1540–1660: East Anglian Studies (Cambridge, 1961), p. 186; Woodward (ed.), The Farming and Memorandum Books of Henry Best, pp. 55–7, 169; Kussmaul, Servants in Husbandry, p. 39. 68 H. Owen (ed.), ‘The Diary of Bulkeley of Dronwy, Anglesey, 1630–1636’, Transactions of the Anglesey Antiquarian Society and Field Club 1937 (1937), 106; Woodward (ed.), The Farming and Memorandum Books of Henry Best, p. 164; Chalkin, Seventeenth Century Kent, p. 63; Airs, The Making of the English Country House, p. 72. 69 F. Bamford (ed.), A Royalist’s Notebook: The Commonplace Book of Sir John Oglander Kt. Of Nunwell, 1585–1655 (London, 1936), p. 207; Owen, ‘The Diary of Bulkeley’, pp. 81, 59–60, 71; Woodward (ed.), The Farming and Memorandum Books of Henry Best, p. 179; E. Lodge (ed.), The Account Book of a Kentish Estate, 1616–1704 (London, 1927), p. 112. 70 Woodward (ed.), The Farming and Memorandum Books of Henry Best, p. 175; J. N. Simpkinson, The Washingtons: A Tale of a Country Parish in the Seventeenth Century (London, 1860), appendix. Credit and the provision of cheaper food were one of the few benefits to the workers of the truck system, whose growth in the later eighteenth century, it has

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Popular politics in early modern England been suggested, owed something to the dearths of the period: R. A. E. Wells, Dearth and Distress in Yorkshire 1723–1802 (Borthwick Papers, 52, 1977), pp. 16–17. 71 E. Kerridge, The Farmers of Old England (London, 1973), p. 153; Fussell (ed.), Robert Loder’s Farm Accounts, pp. 28, 47; A. Eyre, ‘A Dyurnall, or catalogue of all my accions and expences from the 1st of January, 1646–[7]’, in H. J. Moorehouse (ed.), Yorkshire Diaries and Autobiographies in the Sevententh and Eighteenth Centuries (Surtees Society, 65, 1875), pp. 50–2, 56–7; G. W. Robinson et al., Winthrop Papers (5 vols, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, 1929–37), l, pp. 52, 113, 122–3, 130; D. Woodward (ed.), The Farming and Memorandum Books of Henry Best, pp. 163–207; see also F. W. Brooks (ed.), ‘Supplementary Stiffkey Papers’ (Camden Miscellany 16, Camden Society, third ser., 52, 1936), pp. 40–2; Hull, ‘Agriculture and Rural Society in Essex’, pp. 136–7. For evidence of the persistence of local sales into the eighteenth century, see N. J. G. Pounds, ‘Food production and distribution in pre-industrial Cornwall’, in W. Minchinton (ed.), Population and Marketing; Two Studies in the History of the Southwest (Exeter Papers in Economic History, 11, 1976), p. 120. 72 Thirsk and Cooper (eds), Seventeenth-Century Economic Documents, p. 344; A. Fletcher, A County Community in Peace and War: Sussex, 1600–1660 (London, 1975), p. 151. Local sales to labourers were specifically exempted from orders to sell all grain in the market in years of dearth: BL, Lansdowne MS, 51, fo. 89. 73 BL, Lansdowne MS, 84/13, fos 30–31v; but cf. a speech in the 1601 Parliament: ‘for the rich have two measures, with one he buyes and ingrosseth corn in the Country, that is the greater, with the other he retails it at home to his poor Neighbours, that’s by the lesser’, S. D’Ewes, The Journals of All the Parliaments during the reign of Queen Elizabeth (London, 1682), pp. 662–3. 74 Owen, ‘The Diary of Bulkeley’, passim; Thirsk and Cooper (eds), Seventeenth-Century Economic Documents, p. 344; Woodward (ed.), The Farming and Memorandum Books of Henry Best, pp. 163–207; cf. Robinson et al., Winthrop Papers, 1, p. 52. 75 S. Mintz, ‘Internal market systems as mechanisms of social articulation’, Annual Proceedings of the American Ethnological Society (1959), 20–30; J. D. Marshall (ed.), The Autobiography of William Stout of Lancaster, 1665–1752 (Chetham Society, third ser., 14, Manchester, 1967), p. 90; A. Everitt, ‘The marketing of agricultural produce’, in AHEW, p. 558. Richard Baxter urged his readers to take into account the quality of the party with whom they dealt and, if they were poor, to mix charity with justice: A Christian Directory (London, 1673), pt 4, ‘Christian politics’. For a glimpse of the pressures around sales of grain to poorer consumers whose custom was to ask for a ‘blessing’ of grain over and above that for which they had paid, see Slack (ed.), ‘Poverty and politics in Salisbury’, pp. 123–5. 76 Thirsk and Cooper (eds), Seventeenth-Century Economic Documents, p. 344; Fussell (ed.), Robert Loder’s Farm Accounts, p. 138; B. Hobbs Pruitt, ‘Self-sufficiency and the agricultural economy of eighteenth century Massachusetts’, William and Mary Quarterly, 42 (1984), 338; S. Ortiz, ‘Reflections on the concept of “Peasant Culture” and peasant “Cognitive Systems”’, in T. Shanin (ed.), Peasants and Peasant Societies (Harmondsworth, 1971), p. 328; Clark, English Provincial Society, p. 121. 77 There appears to have been a relationship similar to that found in work on probate inventories, although as Roger Schofield has suggested to me, the discrepancy between market and probate valuations may also reflect some allowance for wastage and discount to heirs; Overton, ‘Estimating crop yields’, 373; J. D. Marshall, ‘The domestic economy

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The social economy of dearth of the Lakeland yeoman, 1660–1749’, Transactions of the Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society, 73 (1973), 219. Although difficult to interpret, Robert Loder’s accounts show that a lower valuation of grain was given to his workers than the market prices that he records: Fussell (ed.), Robert Loder’s Farm Accounts, pp. 28–9, 125, 136–7. 78 R. S. Schofield, ‘Through a glass darkly: The Population History of England as an experiment in history’, in R. I. Rotberg and T. K. Rabb (eds), Population and Economy: Population and History from the Traditional to the Modern World (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 586–7; Rule, The Labouring Classes, ch. 4. For examples of wage assessments (which, it has been argued, acted as wage norms) tending to stick after being increased, see Roberts, ‘Wages and Wage-Earners in England’, p. 218. 79 HMC, Buccleuch MSS, i, p. 272; PRO, SP 16/185/93; 16/177/50; STAC 5/A55/36. 80 B. A. Holderness, ‘Credit in English rural society before the nineteenth century, with special reference to the period 1650–1720’, AgHR, 24 (1976), 97–109; B. A. Holderness, ‘Widows in pre-industrial society: an essay upon their economic functions’, in Smith (ed.), Land, Kinship and Life-Cycle, pp. 435–42. 81 Cook, Unum Necessarium, pp. 49–50; SRO, Q/SR 38/66 (husbandman bargained in market for two bushels of wheat and gave 6d. ‘in earnest’); L. A. Clarkson, The Pre-Industrial Economy in England 1500–1750 (London, 1971), p. 148; P. Clark, The English Alehouse: A Social History 1200–1830 (London, 1983), pp. 137–8; Clark, Provincial Society, pp. 233–4; G. Pendlebury, Aspects of the English Civil War in Bolton and its Neighbourhood 1640–1660 (Manchester, 1983), p. 4; Griffiths, ‘Kirtlington’, p. 310; PRO, STAC 5/A55/36. 82 For evidence of the sharp increase in rental arrears following harvest failure, see L. Stone, Family and Fortune: Studies in Aristocratic Finance in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Oxford, 1973), p. 140; C. B. Phillips (ed.), The Lowther Family Estate Books 1616–1675 (Surtees Society, 191, Gateshead, 1979), pp. 16–19. The economic conditions of the earlier part of the period when there was competition for land may have made landlords less ready to allow rental arrears than their successors in the later agricultural depressions (Holderness, ‘Credit in English rural society’, p. 102; G. E. Mingay, ‘The agricultural depression 1730–1750’, EcHR, 8 (1955/6), 324–9), but it is clear that Sir Ralph Assheton, who ordered his steward to abate his tenants’ rents after the harvest failure of 1648, was not alone in recognising this obligation of the landlord to his tenants: K. Wrightson, English Society (London, 1982), pp. 57–8; B. A. Holderness, PreIndustrial England: Economy and Society 1500–1750 (London, 1976), p. 79; cf. S. J. and S. J. Watts, From Border to Middle Shire: Northumberland 1586–1625 (Leicester, 1975), p. 169; Marshall, ‘The domestic economy of the Lakeland yeoman’, 217. That landlords were expected to remit a portion of their rents when the harvest failed, might be suggested by the polemical comments of Francis Trigge, that ‘The incloser … will not abate one penie what weather soever come’, The Humble Petition of Two Sisters: The Church and Commonwealth (London, 1604), E2v. 83 P. Stirling, Turkish Village (London, 1965), pp. 62, 64; C. Arensberg, The Irish Countryman (New York, 1968), pp. 143, 158. 84 Wrightson and Levine, Poverty and Piety, p. 124; Hobbs Pruitt, ‘Self-sufficiency’, 353; C. Clark, ‘Household economy, market exchange and the rise of capitalism in the Connecticut Valley, 1800–1860’, Journal of Social History, 13 (1979), 173. 85 Bowden, ‘Agricultural prices’, p. 632; Parkinson (ed.), The Autobiography of Henry Newcome, 1, p. 83.

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Popular politics in early modern England 86 A. B. Appleby, ‘Agrarian capitalism or seigneurial reaction? The north west of England, 1500–1700’, American Historical Review, 80 (1975), 574–94. 87 Sundry new and Artificiall remedies, A3v; cf. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant, p. 5. 88 T. Tusser, Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry (1580, reprinted Oxford, 1984), p. 19; T. Fuller, The Holy State (Cambridge, 1648), pp. 106–7. 89 Clark, English Provincial Society, p. 232. 90 Warwickshire RO, CR 136/c 2614; A. L. Hughes, ‘Politics, Society and Civil War in Warwickshire 1620–50’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Liverpool, 1979), p. 72; see also the complaint against an Oxfordshire landowner that ‘he hath alsoe given nothing to his poore neighboures and Tennants theis twentie yeres to the value of one groate when wheate was sould for tenn shillinges the bushell’: PRO, STAC 8/142/16. 91 C. Tilly, ‘Food supply and public order in modern Europe’, in C. Tilly (ed.), The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton NJ, 1975), p. 412; E. Teall, ‘The seigneur of Renaissance France: advocate or oppressor’, Journal of Modern History, 37 (1965), 140; J. D. Post, ‘Famine, mortality and epidemic disease in the process of modernization’, EcHR, 29 (1976), 24; HMC, Buccleuch MSS, 3, p. 355: Lord Montagu to Lord Manchester, 6 Dec. 1630, ‘Your first rule, for lords of manors to take order for their tenants is an excellent good one’. See also the complaints of the failure of their lord to maintain hospitality and relieve the poor, made by one group of Kentish tenants after the dearths of the 1590s, Thirsk, AHEW, p. 63. 92 PRO, SP 12/190/14; HMC, De L’Isle MSS, 2, pp. 299, 302, 319, 324; L. Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy 1558–1641 (Oxford, 1965), appendix 23; see also the actions of Cecil’s mother in buying and distributing grain in the earlier crisis of 1586/7: BL, Lansdowne MS, 103/51, fo. 118v. 93 Greaves, Society and Religion, pp. 568–91; F. Heal, ‘Hospitality and honor in early modern England’, Food and Foodways, 1 (1987), 66–93; PRO, SP 14/187/109. 94 Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, p. 47; Fletcher, A County Community in Peace and War: Sussex, pp. 155–6; Bushaway, By Rite: Custom, Ceremony and Community in England, p. 43. It may well be that further research will reveal that the source of relief offered by the role of the gentle household as a considerable employer of labour was as important. For example, it was reported of one Norfolk gentleman, Sir Francis Lovell, that ‘he keepeth a great house at Harlinge, where the poor hath good releife’: Wales, ‘Poverty, poor relief and the life-cycle’, p. 382; Wales, ‘Poverty and parish relief in seventeenth century Norfolk, p. 21. 95 C. J. Phillips, History of the Sackville Family (2 vols, 1930), 1, p. 231; E. P. Shirley, Stemmata Shirleiana, or the Annals of the Shirley Family (Westminster, 1873), p. 87; W. Hinde, A Faithful Remonstrance of the Holy Life and Happy Death of John Bruen of Bruen-Stapleford, in the County of Chester, Esq. (London, 1641), pp 187–8; see also J. T. Cliffe, The Yorkshire Gentry from the Reformation to the Civil War (London, 1969), pp. 114ff.; J. T. Cliffe, The Puritan Gentry: The Great Puritan Families of Early Stuart England (London, 1984), pp. 102–24; H. Foley (ed.), Records of the English Province of the Society of Jesus (6 vols, Roehampton, 1875–80), 2, p. 427; F. M. Eden, The State of the Poor, Or, An History of the Labouring Classes in England (3 vols, London, 1797), 3, appendix 6, p. 125; P. Jenkins, The Making of a Ruling Class: the Glamorgan Gentry 1640–1790 (Cambridge, 1983), p. 207. 96 L. Stone and J. C. Fawtier Stone, An Open Elite? England 1540–1880 (Oxford, 1984), p. 317; J. Smyth, The Berkeley Manuscripts, J. Maclean (ed.) (3 vols, Gloucester, 1883–5),

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The social economy of dearth 2, pp. 368–9; R. L. Greaves, Society and Religion in Elizabethan England (Minneapolis, 1981), p. 565; Watts, From Border to Middle Shire: Northumberland, p. 203. 97 P. Slack, ‘Poverty and social regulation in Elizabethan England’, in C. Haigh (ed.), The Reign of Elizabeth I (London, 1984), pp. 236–7; M. Sampson, ‘Property and poverty in mid-seventeenth century England: an intellectual history with particular reference to doctrines permitting theft in the case of extreme necessity’ (I am grateful to Margaret Sampson for letting me see this valuable unpublished paper); APC, 1586–87, pp. 277– 8; J. Strype, The Life and Acts of John Whitgift (3 vols, Oxford, 1822), 2, pp. 348–50. For a good example of the obligations of the propertied towards the poor (derived from the concept of stewardship), see W. Perkins, A Golden Chaine (Cambridge, 1597), pp. 91–100. 98 APC, 1596–97, pp. 94–6; Youings, Sixteenth-Century England, pp. 255, 273; Hull, ‘Agriculture and Rural Society in Essex’, p. 476; Spufford, Contrasting Communities, pp. 51–2. Individual acts of clerical charity abound, but whether these amounted to the one-third of their income that canon law required them to spend on the poor and hospitality seems doubtful; the Essex clergyman, Ralph Josselin, partly to compensate for his earlier failings, attempted to devote one-tenth of his income to the poor, a level that he did not always reach: A. Macfarlane, The Family Life of Ralph Josselin, a Seventeenth-Century Clergyman: An Essay in Historical Anthropology (Cambridge, 1970), pp. 51–2. 99 A. Fletcher, Reform in the Provinces: The Government of Stuart England (New Haven and London, 1986), pp. 184–7; Wales, ‘Poverty, poor relief and the life-cycle’, p. 359; Hey, An English Rural Community: Myddle under the Tudors and Stuarts, p. 217; A. Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England: a Regional and Comparative Study (London, 1970), pp. 174–6; Gibson (ed.), Crosby Records, p. 136. 100 Beier, Masterless Men, p. 71; Slack, ‘Poverty and social regulation’, p. 234; Wales, ‘Poverty, poor relief and the life-cycle’, p. 359. It would be interesting to know whether the spate of ‘ales’ (a gathering of neighbours to raise money for one of their number) recorded by Adam Eyre in Yorkshire during the harvest failures of the later 1640s represents another form of ‘informal’ relief against harvest failure: Eyre, ‘A Dyurnall, or catalogue’, pp. 40–1, 43, 63, 72–3. 101 Gibson (ed.), Crosby Records, pp. 136, 283 [my emphasis]; WRO, Q/S Great Roll M. 1630/132; J. O. Halliwell, A Minute Account of the Social Conditions of the People of Anglesea in the Reign of James I (London, 1860), p. 17; cf. WRO, Q/S Great Roll E. 1634 (examination of a labourer hired to thresh grain and approached by some poor to let them have a little grain). 102 A. J. L. Winchester, ‘Responses to the 1623 famine in two Lancashire manors’, LPS, 36 (1986), 47–8; Parkinson (ed.), The Autobiography of Henry Newcome, I, p. 83. 103 APC, 1596–7, pp. 94–6; S. Gardiner, The Cognizance of a True Christian … Fasting and giving of Almes: verie needfall for these difficult times (London, 1597); W. Vaughan, The Golde-groue moralized in three Bookes (2nd edn., 1608), R2v–R3r; Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, pp. 97, 133–6. In 1796, the Dorset justices met at quarter sessions and agreed to reduce their families’ wheat consumption by one-third: M. E. Holmes, ‘Sources for history of food supplies and marketing during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in local record offices’, in Minchinton (ed.), Population and Marketing, p. 97. 104 Macfarlane, The Family Life of Ralph Josselin, pp. 51–2; E. Culverwell, A Treatise of Faith (London, 1623), preface.

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Popular politics in early modern England 105 P. Slack, The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England (London, 1985), pp. 111–43. Since harvest failure did not see the wealthier citizens fleeing to the country, as was common when plague struck, towns were in theory better able to cope with dearth. 106 We should be careful not to exaggerate the separation of the town from the countryside in this period; that pigs were being kept in almshouses in Canterbury in the 1590s, provides an unusual reminder of the ability of the urban poor to meet some of their own food needs: Palliser, The Age of Elizabeth, p. 208. For examples of substituting cheaper grains or mixing grains with beans in London, see CLRO, Repertory 23, fo. 413v; ibid., Remembrancia, 2, no. 162. 107 Phythian-Adams, Desolation of a City: Coventry, pp. 134, 204; V. Pearl, ‘Social policy in early modern London’, in H. Lloyd-Jones, V. Pearl and B. Worden (eds), History and Imagination: Essays in Honour of H. R. Trevor-Roper (London, 1981), p. 130. 108 A. Rose, ‘Winchester in transition, 1580–1700’, in P. Clark (ed.), Country Towns, p. 157; P. Clark and P. Slack, English Towns in Transition 1500–1700 (Oxford, 1976), p. 122. 109 PRO, SP 16/182/81; 16/191/4; WRO, Q/S Great Roll H. 1648/not no.; CKS, Fa. AC3, fo. 44v. 110 CLRO, Journal 24, fo. 289; Clark and Slack, English Towns in Transition, p. 108. 111 Southampton City RO, SC2/1/6, fo. 71; C. H. Mayo (ed.), The Municipal Records of the Borough of Dorchester, Dorset (Exeter, 1908), pp. 616–17; cf. Colchester RO, D/Y 2/7/226. 112 CLRO, Journal 24, fos 143v, 149v, 152. 113 Clay, Economic Expansion and Social Change, I, pp. 226–7; Coventry RO, A14(a), fo. 165v. 114 L. Toulmin Smith (ed.), Maire of Bristowe Is Kalendar (Camden Society, n.s. 5, 1872), p. 63; Dyer, The City of Worcester in the Sixteenth Century, p. 166; Rose, ‘Winchester in transition’, p. 157. For the emphasis on the role of charity in combating the dearths of the 1590s in London, see CLRO, Journal 24, fo. 141. 115 I. Archer, ‘Social policy in Elizabethan London’ (I am grateful to Ian Archer for allowing me to see this unpublished paper, which contains the most complete analysis of the relative roles of formal and informal relief in an urban context); Pearl, ‘Social policy in early modern London’, pp. 122–31; R. W. Herlan, ‘Poor relief in London during the English Revolution’, Journal of British Studies, 17 (1979), 44; R. W. Herlan, ‘Poor relief in the London parish of Dunstan in the West during the English Revolution’, Guildhall Studies in London History, 3 (1977), 31–2. 116 Greaves, Society and Religion, p. 584; Phythian-Adams, Desolation of a City: Coventry, p. 55; Chester, ‘Poor Relief in Coventry’, pp. 192–3; N. Gras, The Evolution of the English Corn Market from the Twelfth to the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1915), pp. 80–1. 117 Ibid.; J. Chartres, Inland Trade in England 1500–1700 (London, 1977), p. 60; E. M. Leonard, The Early History of English Poor Relief (Cambridge, 1900), chs 5, 7; Dyer, The City of Worcester in the Sixteenth Century, pp. 166–7; W. T. MacCaffrey, Exeter 1540–1640 (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1958), pp. 37, 85, 116, 157–8; Coventry RO, A14(a), fo. 132; Everitt, ‘The marketing of agricultural produce’, p. 487; CKS, Fa AC3, fo. 44; PRO, SP 16/182/81; ERO, D/B3/479, no. 1. 118 Leonard, The Early History of English Poor Relief; P. Slack, ‘Books of Orders: the making of English social policy, 1577–1631’, TRHS, 5th ser., 30 (1980).

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The social economy of dearth 119 Wales, ‘Poverty, poor relief and the life-cycle’; W. Newman Brown, ‘The receipt of poor relief and family situation: Aldenham, Hertfordshire 1630–90’, in Smith (ed.), Land, Kinship and Life-Cycle, pp. 405–22; Amussen, ‘Governors and Governed’, pp. 73–4. 120 PRO, SP 16/177/55; /178/26; Pearl, ‘Social policy in early modern London’, p. 124; K. E. Wrightson, ‘The Puritan reformation of manners with special reference to the counties of Lancashire and Essex, 1640–1660’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Cambridge, 1973), p. 184; F. G. Emmison, ‘Poor relief accounts of two rural parishes in Bedfordshire, 1563–1598’, EcHR, 3 (1931–32), 114. 121 Leonard, The Early History of English Poor Relief, chs 3, 7; P. V. McGrath, ‘The Marketing of Food, Fodder and Livestock in the London area in the Seventeenth Century with Some Reference to the Sources of Supply’ (M.A. dissertation, University of London, 1948), pp. 140–2; P. Clark, ‘“The Ramoth-Gilead of the Good”; urban change and political radicalism at Gloucester 1540–1640’, in P. Clark, A. G. R. Smith and N. Tyacke (eds), The English Commonwealth, 1547–1640 (London, 1979), p. 175. 122 H. Zins, England and the Baltic in the Elizabethan Era (Manchester, 1972), pp. 248–63; J. K. Federowicz, England’s Baltic Trade in the Early Seventeenth Century: A Study in AngloPolish Commercial Diplomacy (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 110–15; Dyer, The City of Worcester in the Sixteenth Century, pp. 166–7; Leonard, The Early History of English Poor Relief, pp. 122–4; MacCaffrey, Exeter 1540–1640, p. 85; Pound, Poverty and Vagrancy in Tudor England, p. 51; J. R. Chanter, ‘The Diary of Philip Wyot, Town Clerk of Barnstaple 1586–1608’, in J. R. Chanter (ed.), Sketches of the Literary History of Barnstaple (Barnstaple, 1866), p. 105. 123 Gras, The Evolution of the English Corn Market, ch. 3; W. Sachse (ed.), Minutes of the Norwich Court of Mayoralty, 1630–1631 (Norfolk Record Society, 15, 1942); Leicester RO, Hall Papers BR II/18 /14, no. 98; H. Stocks (ed.), Leicester Borough Records, 1603–1688 (Cambridge, 1923), p. 204; MacCaffrey, Exeter 1540–1640, pp. 37, 85; D. M. Woodward, The Trade of Elizabethan Chester (University of Hull, occasional papers in economic and social history, 4, 1970), pp. 49–50; W. Whiteway, ‘The Diary of William Whiteway’, Proceedings of the Dorset Natural History and Antiquarian Field Club, 13 (Dorchester, 1892), 73. 124 J. Pound, ‘An Elizabethan census of the poor’, University of Birmingham Historical Journal, 8 (1962), 136; Leighton, ‘Early chronicles of Shrewsbury’, 335–6; Dyer, The City of Worcester in the Sixteenth Century, pp. 166–7; Everitt, ‘The marketing of agricultural produce’, p. 481n.; S. Seyer, Memoirs Historical and Topographical of Bristol and its Neighbourhood (2 vols, Bristol, 1823), 2, pp. 254–5. 125 Chester, ‘Poor Relief in Coventry’, pp. 168–70; Sachse (ed.), Minutes of the Norwich Court of Mayoralty, pp. 92–3, 119. 126 HMC, Buccleuch MSS, 3, p. 35. 127 Thirsk and Cooper (eds), Seventeenth-Century Economic Documents, pp. 346–7; PRO, STAC 5/A55/36; Wales, ‘Poverty and parish relief in seventeenth century Norfolk’, ch. 5. 128 Leonard, The Early History of English Poor Relief, provides an introduction to the subject. The preliminary outline of the geography and chronology that follows is based on research in central and local papers. 129 PRO, SP 14/140/41; 16/177/43; /182/20; Fletcher, A County Community in Peace and War: Sussex, p. 150; PRO, SP 16/189/75; R. B. Outhwaite, ‘Dearth and government intervention in English grain markets, 1590–1700’, EcHR, 33 (1981), 389–406.

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Popular politics in early modern England 130 R. Mitchinson, ‘Local and central agencies in the control of famine in pre-industrial Scotland’, in M. Flinn (ed.), Proceeedings of the Seventh International Economic History Congress (2 vols, Edinburgh, 1978), 2, pp. 395–404; T. C. Smout, ‘Famine and faminerelief in Scotland’, in L. M. Cullen and Smout (eds), Comparative Aspects of Scottish and Irish Economic and Social History 1600–1900 (Edinburgh, 1977); Post, ‘Famine, mortality and epidemic disease’, 22; S. Sogner, ‘A demographic crisis averted’, Scandinavian EcHR, 24 (1976), 127–8. 131 S. C. Watkins and J. Menken, ‘Famine in historical perspective’, Population and Development Review, 11 (1985), 654–6. Both the level of wages and relief payments seem to have risen after the mid-seventeenth-century: Wales, ‘Poverty and parish relief in seventeenth century Norfolk’, and Roberts, ‘Wages and Wage-Earners in England’, p. 196. 132 HMC, Buccleuch MSS, 3, p. 35; J. Goring and J. Wake (eds), Northampton Lieutenancy Papers and Other Documents (Northamptonshire Record Society, 27, Gateshead, 1975), pp. 30–2. Compare the situation in eighteenth-century Norway, where poor-relief was provided for those not looked after on ‘good farms’, Sogner, ‘A demographic crisis averted’, pp. 124–5. 133 There is considerable evidence to suggest that migration was a common response in these regions (e.g. Beier, Masterless Men, pp. 118–19), but, as in other societies and periods, its frequency may be a telling indication of the absence of available alternative strategies to combat harvest failure. 134 Appleby, Famine in Tudor and Stuart England; J. Thirsk, ‘Seventeenth century agriculture and social change’, AgHR, 18 (1970), 167; Thirsk, Peasant Farming, pp. 45–7; A. Everitt, Change in the Provinces: the Seventeenth Century (University of Leicester Department of English Local History, occasional papers, 1, Leicester, 1972), pp. 22–3; Everitt, ‘Farm labourers’, pp. 409–11; R. W. Malcolmson, ‘“A Set of Ungovernable People”: the Kingswood colliers in the eighteenth century’, in J. Brewer and J. Styles (eds), An Ungovernable People: the English and Their Law in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (London, 1980), pp. 85–127. 135 Watts, From Border to Middle Shire: Northumberland, pp. 202–3; Fletcher, Reform in the Provinces, pp. 183–228. 136 Beier, Masterless Men, p. 37; Laslett, The World We Have Lost, p. 131. 137 Capp, Astrology and the Popular Press, pp. 63–4, 114, 204; E. L. Jones, Seasons and Prices: the Role of the Weather in English Agricultural History (London, 1964), pp. 54–5; T. Heywood (ed.), The Diary of Rev. Henry Newcome (Chetham Society, 18, 1849); J. H. Turner (ed.), Autobiography and Diaries of Rev. Oliver Heywood (4 vols, Brighouse, 1882– 5); M. H. Lee (ed.), Diaries and Letters of Philip Henry (London, 1882); Morehouse (ed.), Extracts from the Diary of the Rev. Robert Meeke. 138 Thirsk and Cooper (eds), Seventeenth-Century Economic Documents, pp. 814–15; Ashton, Economic Fluctuations in England. 139 A. G. Carmichael, ‘Infection, hidden hunger, and history’; C. E. Taylor, ‘Synergy among mass infections, famines, and poverty’, N. S. Scrimshaw, ‘The value of contemporary food and nutrition studies for historians’, all in Rotberg and Rabb (eds), Hunger and History; Foster, ‘Demography in the North-West’, pp. 5–6, 53; A. Gooder, ‘The population crisis of 1727–30 in Warwickshire’, Midland History, 1 (1972); J. D. Chambers, The Vale of Trent, 1670–1800: A Regional Study of Economic Change, EcHR, Supplement (London, 1957); J. A. Johnston, ‘The impact of the epidemics of 1727–30 in south-west

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The social economy of dearth Worcestershire’, Medical History, 15 (1971), 283–4, 286; J. Skinner, ‘Crisis mortality in Buckinghamshire 1600–1750’, LPS, 28 (1982). In the Cambridge Group’s analysis, ‘onestar crises’ (in which mortality was between 10 and 20 per cent above trend) showed little diminution over time: Wrigley and Schofield, The Population History of England, p. 335. 140 E. A. B. Barnard, ‘Some Beoley parish accounts, 1656–1700’, Transactions of the Worcestershire Archaeological Society for 1946, 22 (1947), 21. For evidence suggesting the cumulative impact of ‘hidden hunger’ on the harvest-sensitive, see R. D. Lee, ‘Short-term variations in vital rates, prices, and weather’, in Wrigley and Schofield, The Population History of England, pp. 357, 372; Skipp, Crisis and Development, pp. 13–39. It is to be hoped that socially specific reconstitution studies will be able to answer the problem of whether aggregative studies mask a continuing vulnerability of a part-population – the labouring poor – to harvest-related mortality. 141 P. Styles, ‘The evolution of the law of settlement’, University of Birmingham Historical Journal, 9 (1963), 44–5; M. K. McIntosh, ‘Responses to the poor in late medieval and Tudor England’, unpublished typescript of paper to Seminar on Charity and Welfare, Shelby Cullom Davis Center, Princeton University, 1984–86; cf. Palliser, The Age of Elizabeth, p. 121; Winchester, ‘Responses to the 1623 famine’, 48. The peaks in vagrancy in years of harvest failure therefore may, in part, reflect a greater sensitivity on the part of the authorities to the problems of vagrants. 142 WRO, Q/S Order Book 1, H. 1647/8. 143 For an example of harvest failure leading to an intensification of local controls, see Ingram, ‘Ecclesiastical Justice in Wiltshire’, pp. 375–7. The uncertainty that surrounded the poor’s right to glean (W. O. Ault, Open-Field Farming in Medieval England: A Study of Village By-Laws (London, 1972); Bushaway, By Rite: Custom, Ceremony and Community in England, pp. 138–41) made it vulnerable to more restrictive definitions; for example, in one Norfolk village in the 1630s, gleaning was annexed to the poor rates, and access to it was made contingent on a certificate from the churchwardens and overseers of the poor: Wales, ‘Poverty and parish relief in seventeenth century Norfolk’, p. 43. For evidence of discrimination in access to gleaning and of the favouring of certain groups among the poor, see Woodward (ed.), The Farming and Memorandum Books of Henry Best, pp. 25, 46. 144 For an example of harvest failure leading to discrimination between deserving and undeserving poor, see Phythian-Adams, Desolation of a City: Coventry, pp. 64–6. 145 Payments in kind or assistance against harvest failure can also be seen as combining good economic, as well as political, sense to employers. It allowed them to make a temporary adjustment to the conditions of dearth over which they retained control. By contrast, an increase in wage assessments, called for by legislation, but only sporadically enforced, might have seen a permanent increase and would have denied them the leverage over their labourers that discretionary relief permitted them. On wage assessments, see S. Foot, The Effect of the Elizabethan Statute of Artificers on Wages in England (Exeter Research Group Discussion Papers, 5, Exeter, 1980); Roberts, ‘Wages and Wage-Earners in England’, p. 192. 146 Kussmaul, Servants in Husbandry, pp. 97–119; PRO, SP 14/137/16; Roberts, ‘Wages and Wage-Earners in England’, pp. 260–1. For examples of the restriction of those allowed to glean in years of dearth, see Ingram, ‘Ecclesiastical Justice in Wiltshire’, p. 75; Wales, ‘Poverty and parish relief in seventeenth century Norfolk, p. 18; Anon., Notes and Queries for Somerset and Dorset, 1 (London, 1888), 211–12; King, ‘Crime, Law and Society in Essex’, p. 288.

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Popular politics in early modern England 147 SRO, Q/SR 64.1/121. Contemporaries believed that dearth encouraged masters to put off their servants: A. Standish, The Commons Complaints (London, 1611), p. 16; Cook, Unum Necessarium, p. 5. The vulnerability of servants and the independent young (a group that enjoyed a weak position in the social economy outside of their employment) is reflected in their predominance among arrested vagrants, as well as their appearances in criminal records and disorder in the period: Beier, Masterless Men, pp. 24–5, 44; J. Walter, ‘“A rising of the people”? The Oxfordshire rising of 1596’, P&P, 107 (1985), 123 and n. 113. 148 T. Hobbes, The Elements of Law, p. 34, quoted in Hill, Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England, p. 290. 149 Thus, until the end of the eighteenth century, years of harvest failure saw a reversion to earlier practices under the threat of harvest failure: e.g. J. Stevenson, ‘Food riots in England, 1792–1818’, in J. Stevenson and R. Quinault (eds), Popular Protest and Public Order, Six Studies in British History 1790–1920 (London, 1974), p. 48. 150 Heal, ‘Hospitality and honor in early modern England’; S. Mennell, All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the Present (Oxford, 1985); M. Mauss, The Gift: Form and Function of Exchange in Archaic Societies (1954 edn.), p. 72; R. Williams, The Country and the City (St Albans, 1975 edn.), pp. 43–4. Elsewhere I intend to develop at greater length this reading of the shift in social relationships in the later seventeenth century as an attempted recreation of ‘community’ by local elites. 151 Charlesworth (ed.), An Atlas of Rural Protest in Britain; A. Charlesworth, ‘The development of the English rural proletariat and social protest 1700–1850’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 8 (1980), 101–11; Malcolmson, ‘“A Set of Ungovernable People”’; J. Bohstedt, Riots and Community Politics in England and Wales 1790–1810 (Cambridge MA and London, 1983); J. Stevenson, Popular Disturbances in England, 1700–1870 (London, 1979), ch. 5. By contrast, the abandonment by farmers of the selling of grain at under-prices has been seen as one factor in explaining riots by farm labourers in the nineteenth century: J. P. Dunbabin, Rural Discontent in Nineteenth Century Britain (London, 1974), p. 18.

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Chapter 6

. The impact of the English Civil War on society: a world turned upside-down?

I

F

or many contemporaries, the social impact of the 1640s could be captured in the image of the world turned upside-down. The decade began with elections to Parliament in which, it was complained, ‘fellows without shirts, challenge as good a voice as [gentlemen]’. As the decade progressed, Parliament’s destruction of the structures of Charles I’s authoritarian government was paralleled by popular destruction of enclosures and challenges to the authority of the landed classes, and its destruction of Laudianism by the defacing of churches by people and troops. Parliament’s claims for greater powers for itself were accompanied by popular demands for greater spiritual and political liberties, to which the collapse of royal and episcopal authority gave louder voice. The collapse of censorship allowed an unprecedented discussion in public and in print (many thousands of cheap pamphlets were produced in the period), which questioned the social, as well as the political and religious, order. Most alarmingly, the decade which had begun with demands for the restoration of the ‘ancient constitution and fundamental law’, had ended in political revolution, with the fall of the monarchy and the rise of radical groups demanding a new constitution and a radical extension of rights for the people. Contemporaries were ready to believe in the imminence of social inversion for three reasons: their experience of the destabilising impact of longer-term social and economic trends on their society; their knowledge of the close correspondence between hierarchy in the state and society; and the image of the people as the many-headed monster. In the century before 1640, the population of the country had almost doubled. Directly, population growth had led to land shortage and landlessness, a trend exacerbated by the engrossing of land by landlords and richer farmers. Indirectly, the failure of agriculture to keep the food supply in step with the population increase led to inflation and a decline in wages. For anything between

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Popular politics in early modern England one-third and a half of the population, these changes brought a greater dependence on the market for both food and work, and created greater instability in an economy where harvest failure led to unemployment, savagely spiralling food prices and, in some regions, even famine. As magistrates or MPs, gentlemen had to grapple with the problems that these changes created: food shortage, poor-relief, rising levels of (reported) crime and, more worryingly, food and enclosure riots. The most visible symptom of these changes was the growth in the vagrant poor, who combined high visibility with alarming anonymity: masterless men and women without a place in settled society, and therefore, no master or minister to govern them. (In reality, as will be argued later, the outcome of these changes had also enlarged the scope for order.) Tutored by the politics of the state and the preachings of the Church, many gentlemen regarded the people as fickle and irrational: the many-headed monster. This view of the people mingled fear as well as contempt. History, as well as their readings about the plebs in the ancient world prescribed by their classical education, warned them that the people were capable of challenging their rule. In the early 1640s, there was a paper war in which, in speech and pamphlets, gentlemen referred to this earlier history of disorder to discourage each other from taking up arms. Naturally, this was a theme to which the King and his supporters gave constant refrain. The premise of ‘no King, no bishop; no bishop, no gentlemen’ encapsulated the belief in the mutual relationship between political, religious and social hierarchies. That the first two were toppled, and the props of law, religion and even the family were questioned in the 1640s, threatened the third. In the 1640s, religion, ‘the legitimising ideology of the rulers’, threatened to become ‘the revolutionary idiom of the ruled’. It is important to recognise therefore that it was against their experience of longer-term stresses and strains, as well as their own beliefs about the character and intentions of the people (increasingly orchestrated by a cacophony of references to Jack Straw and Wat Tyler – leaders of the rising of 1381) that the gentry reacted to the events of the 1640s. Unfortunately, much of the evidence on which historians have relied in writing the social history of the 1640s is intentionally misleading – being either the deliberate polemic of both Royalists and Parliamentarians (who sought to raise the spectre of social revolution for their own ends), or the aspirations, but not the achievements, of the radicals. It is therefore important to capture the balance between those changes which did seem to presage a social revolution and those limitations which help to explain the failure of a revolution within the revolution. We will look at the threat to the social order posed by a concatenation of disorder and a simultaneous questioning of the structures and ideas by which social order had been maintained. In a final section, we will examine why the 1640s did not in fact see the world turned upside-down.

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The impact on society II The absence of popular rebellion in the previous few decades had actually emboldened English gentlemen to challenge the King. The situation soon changed. The early 1640s was characterised by a level of crowd action which, in terms of the range of targets and geographical spread, had not been seen since the popular rebellions of 1549. The collapse of the personal rule of Charles I, and the political vacuum created by the failure of Parliament and Crown to reach a settlement, gave scope for the people to settle their own grievances with unpopular landlords. The attack on the Crown and its supporters, labelled malignants and papists, offered legitimation for popular violence against the property and persons of those so labelled. The attack on the Laudian Church and the dismantling of its coercive apparatus gave similar scope for popular destruction in churches and attacks on Arminian clergy. The raising of troops by King and Parliament collected the people together into armed bodies and enlarged the scope for popular action. Moreover, from the appeals to the country in the elections to Parliament, to the continuing need for Parliament to counter the royal threat with public demonstrations of support, there was licence for crowds to assemble and protest. The collapse of Charles’ regime was the signal for widespread agrarian disorder. Riots, in which crowds of men, women and children assembled and tore down enclosures in defence of rights of common, took place in a number of counties. These were not a new form of action – indeed many of them represented the continuance of conflicts predating the 1640s – but what was new was the justification that the rioters offered for their actions. Star Chamber had been the court most involved in the prosecution of the enclosure rioters; its abolition left a vacuum which rioters exploited and which the House of Lords tried to fill. But orders from the House of Lords to cease rioting, when read out to crowds, were met with scorn and derision. Rioters in 1641 in the Lincolnshire fens said of such an order: ‘They had believed too many orders of the higher house already … But if they had an Order from the House of Commons they would obey it.’ Such declarations of support for the House of Commons may have been genuine, but they were paralleled by riots elsewhere, in which crowds defied the attempts of magistrates to dismiss them, on the pretext that since they were against the King, their authority had lapsed. ‘Loyal’ rioters in the Cambridgeshire fens told the magistrates attempting to disperse them, ‘that he was no Justice, for he was against the King and was all for the Parliament’. Reports such as these suggested that rioters were deliberately and opportunistically exploiting the fracturing of political authority in their own interest to settle scores with enclosers. Thus, one rioter refused to obey an order of the Lords, ‘because his Majesty had declared that no ordinance of Parliament was to be obeyed without his Majesty’s assent’.

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Popular politics in early modern England Enclosure riots were not an indiscriminate attack on the landed classes. The overwhelming bulk of the riots were directed against those who were directly associated with the discredited ancien régime of Charles I: courtiers and city financiers who had sought to exploit links with the Court to promote enclosure, enclosing bishops and, above all, Charles himself, whose direct involvement in the large-scale enclosure of royal forest and fen challenged the image of the King as protector of his people. But, synchronised by the collapse of authority at the centre and amplified by the attention given them in newsbooks, they seemed the first sign of the inundation of the vulgar that the landed classes had always feared. Levelling of enclosures would, they feared, lead to a levelling of society. When one MP in 1641 told his fellow MPs in a speech subsequently printed, ‘we must take care that the Common people may not carve themselves out Justice, by their Multitudes. Of this we have too frequent experience by their breaking down Inclosures, and by raising other tumults, to as ill purposes … If they be not suddenly suppressed, to how desperate an Issue they may grow, I’ll leave to your better judgements’, he spoke to their common anxieties. At the same time that they were carrying reports of agrarian disorders, the proliferating newsbooks also reported riots in churches against the changes that Archbishop Laud had introduced. If anything, the pulling down of altar rails and images was more common than the pulling down of hedges. The rites of this popular iconoclasm reflected suspicion of Laud’s seemingly ‘popish’ reforms, and puritan hostility to his elevation of sacrament over sermon. Iconoclasts drew on puritan preaching and a series of parliamentary ordinances authorising the dismantling of Laud’s ‘beauty if holiness’ to sanction their actions. Moreover, iconoclasm was often carried out with the leadership or licence of local elites. Iconoclasm, then, was not mindless violence. The rites of destruction reflected deeply held beliefs and a sense of the legitimacy of their actions. For example, in the iconoclastic riots in Essex, images were taken to the traditional place of punishment and whipped. These distinctions were, however, lost on some contemporaries. Churches were the meeting-places of local society. As such, their seating plans often reflected local social hierarchies: the rich seated, the poor standing at the back of the church, men sitting separately from women, and young people from their elders, all beneath the royal coat of arms. Churches were also temples to the gentry, many of whom held the right to appoint the minister. Their munificence was reflected in the heraldic displays on tomb and window. Iconoclasts were reported also to have destroyed the images of gentry thereby, it was claimed, betraying their hostility to their social superiors. In an ordinance of August 1643, calling for further alterations in churches, Parliament had to specify that the monuments of kings and nobles should not be destroyed. Ministers, as well as monuments, were attacked, their surplices (to puritans, those ‘rags of Rome’) torn from

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The impact on society their backs and the Common Prayer Book kicked from their hands. Royalist propagandists were quick to seize on and to exaggerate such incidents. Once again, popular disorder was linked with a threat to the social order. To many, even to committed puritans, popular iconoclasm appeared to be ‘abolishing superstition with sedition’. That the people were becoming more politicised seemed to be confirmed by their role in the petitions and demonstrations that took place around Parliament’s meeting in the early 1640s. On the one hand, the riots and demonstrations reflected popular hostility to many of the policies of the 1630s and fears of a popish conspiracy: the attack in 1640 on Laud’s palace and the detested High Court; the targeting of catholic embassies and chapels; and of course the demonstrations, were characterised by what one contemporary called a ‘discipline in disorder’. The crowds often included wealthy citizens and acted on cues from Pym and his allies among London’s preachers and politicians. The demonstrations were bloodless, and contrasted sharply with the violence and lynchings that took place in similar movements on the Continent. On the other hand, the large crowds that assembled around Parliament in 1640–42 reflected the poverty and unemployment that the political crisis had created, a situation that ran back from the capital and into the clothing regions, where many thousands depended upon London merchants for their market. Petitions and petitioners stressed their poverty. As the petition from the Mayor and the Corporation of London told the Lords, depression would, ‘in a very short time cast innumerable Multitude of those poor Men into such a Depth of Poverty and Extremity as will enforce them upon some dangerous and desperate Attempts not fit to be expressed, much less to be justified’. No wonder one gentleman on the occasion of the presentation of those petitions made notes in his private parliamentary journal about ‘the great insurrection of the villeins and meaner people’ in 1381. The 1640s witnessed coercive petitioning that showed scant respect or deference for social superiors, accompanied as it was by the manhandling of Lords and MPs. Even those who believed the people to be the ultimate basis of Parliament’s authority, envisaged a passive rather than an active role in the polity for the people. ‘Necessity hath no Law’, ‘hunger will break through stone walls’, petitioners told Parliament. Riots in the provinces, as well as in London, seemed to offer dangerous confirmation of this observation. In 1642, it was reported from Suffolk that the unemployed clothworkers, ‘begin to argue the case, whether in this great necessity it be not lawful, for to take something from those that have been the cause to deprive them of all manner of livelihood as to perish for hunger’. On the very eve of the Civil War, large crowds in Essex and Suffolk, with underemployed clothworkers to the fore, had attacked and plundered the houses of local Catholics and proto-royalists among the nobility and gentry. Evidence suggests that these riots have a more complex history than the simple

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Popular politics in early modern England expressions of class hostility that historians as well as contemporaries have taken them for. Such actions represented a popular response to the widely held fear of an internal uprising of Catholics. The crowds produced what they took to be written parliamentary authority for the disarming of proto-royalists and Catholics. Elements of the middling sort joined the crowds, and members of the local puritan and parliamentarian elite were (at least initially) not unhappy with crowd action that neutralised the incipient royalist movement within the region. Royalist propagandists, like the author of Mercurius Rusticus, were, however, quick to seize on the example of the East Anglian riots. The attention that historians have devoted to them is a direct reflection of the notoriety that they achieved with contemporaries. It was with these in mind that the Royalist Clarendon wrote of, ‘the fury and license of the common people, who were in all places grown to that barbarity and rage against the nobility and gentry (under the style of Cavaliers) that it was not safe for any to live at their houses who were taken notice of as no votaries to the Parliament’. Elsewhere, for example in the West Country, it was Parliamentarian gentry and puritan ministers who found themselves menaced and mobbed. Once more, political divisions between Crown and Parliament legitimised attacks by inferiors on their superiors. Here indeed was a world turned upside-down. All the forms of disorder so far discussed tended to be concentrated in the period preceding the outbreak of civil war. Thereafter they became less frequent, but they did not disappear entirely. Civil war created new sources of disorder. If anti-seigneurial riots had died down, then the arrival of troops in a region might be the signal for local crowds to attack the property of unpopular landlords. The troops raised to fight the invading Scots had been active in pulling down hedges and altar rails. Some had attacked and killed several of their officers whom they had suspected of being Catholics; others had rioted over pay and attacked local Catholics. This was a thread of disorder that was to run through the 1640s as Parliament’s soldiers desecrated cathedrals and pillaged royalists and recusants. Royal troops took similar action against the King’s opponents. The foraging and quartering of poorly paid troops probably provided a greater source of disorder in many regions. Discontent over feeding and paying troops was the background to the Clubmen risings in the mid1640s, discontent over pay being one of the factors contributing to widespread mutinies and the emergence of the agitators in the New Model Army in the 1647. The heavy cost of fighting the Civil War forced the introduction of new and far heavier sources of tax. These too became sources of disorder. In particular, attempts to collect the excise, a tax which fell on essential foodstuffs, produced further riots. Harvest failures between 1647 and 1649 brought a sharp intensification of poverty, a scattering of food riots, and widespread discontent, from which radicals like the Levellers and Diggers sought to recruit.

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The impact on society III It was not just the multiplication of sources of collective disorder that threatened the social order. It was also the simultaneous changes in the structures of authority in Church and state and the challenge to the body of ideas by which the social order had been maintained. First came changes in the structure of authority. We have already seen how the collapse of conciliar government and the prerogative courts had made riots more difficult to prevent or punish. The House of Lords attempted to assume responsibility, but it (and the Commons even more so) tended to leave the resolution of disputes to ‘the ordinary course of law’. But the circumstances of the 1640s meant that the course of law was more often extraordinary. The courts of assize and quarter sessions – courts of central importance in the maintenance of local order – ceased to meet (a gap of several years in some counties), while, as we have seen, individual justices had their authority challenged. Worries over the source of their authority and difficulties of attendance in conditions of civil war put obstacles in the way of using the remaining central courts. Radicals challenged the entire basis of the legal system, and individuals flouted its authority. The reported reply of a Wiltshire blacksmith to a woman seeking the return of her frying pan – ‘“she shall come by her pan as she can, for” (saith he) “there is no law”’ – would be amusing if it did not seem to reflect a wider belief. In 1641, London watermen had scorned the Lord Mayor’s authority, ‘boasting that they may do what they like (because now it is Parliament time)’, while in 1649, a Somerset food rioter served with a justice’s warrant, retorted ‘that there was no law going nor no justice’. Manorial courts, by which the landed classes governed their estates, were also disrupted by the absence of the lord or by the seizure of the estates for political delinquency. This shifted power in favour of the tenants; one result was widespread rent strikes. It was such threats that encouraged a committed Parliamentarian like Sir Robert Harley to put properties before political interests and instruct his tenants to pay rents to the royalists in possession of his estates. New structures of state authority were created by the Civil War, but these, with their heavy demands, were seen as further sources of disorder. Moreover, in their recruitment of personnel from outside the ranks of the traditional ruling elite, county committees themselves were seen as socially subversive. Again, the reality is more complex. There were counties – for example, Norfolk, Suffolk, Lancashire – where the old county elite remained in control of the county committee, but there were other counties – for example, Kent, Somerset, Warwickshire – where new and lesser gentlemen and townsmen came to govern the county. In general, the more strongly royalist the county was and the later it fell to Parliament, the more sweeping were the changes

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Popular politics in early modern England in the social basis of power. By the end of the war, the change in the social composition of both county committees and magistracy was more marked in most counties, and even more so after the King’s execution. This was hardly a social revolution. In most counties, as indeed in most corporations, the change was mainly within a class: from county to parochial gentry or wealthy merchant to lesser merchant. Much of this change was what today we would call sponsored social mobility; elements of the old elite remained well represented among the new rulers of counties and cities. But such distinctions were lost on contemporaries who yoked together the lower social status of the new rulers with their greater dependence on the central powers to bolster their authority. Clarendon again captures the contemporary perception of an acutely status-conscious society in which power was expected to be as much a function of social status as office: ‘a more inferior sort of common people … who were not above the condition of ordinary inferior constables six to seven years before, were now the justices of the peace, sequestrators, and commissioners; who executed the commands of the Parliament in all the counties of the kingdom with such rigour and tyranny as was natural for such persons to use over and towards those upon whom they had formerly looked at such a distance’. Civil war armies, parliamentarian and royalist, saw non-gentry assuming command. This gave special affront in a society where the armed gentleman on horseback was a model for relationships of superiors with their biped inferiors. As in other periods, war was a forcing house for social change. We should not allow comparisons with modern revolutions to blind us to the very real shock that the changes in the social relationships of power delivered to such a hierarchical society. The Colonel Pride who purged a Parliament of landowners was a former drayman. New policies as well as new rulers disturbed traditional patterns of authority. Parliament enlisted the co-operation of the people in the implementation of its policies. It was from the well-affected among the ‘middling sort’ – yeomen, farmers, merchants, and master craftsmen – that Parliament recruited local office-holders. (Evidence again suggests a similar process in areas under royalist administration.) This was a trend that had long predated the 1640s, but then the middling sort had implemented the directives of gentleman magistrates, attempting at the same time to act as brokers for the interests of their local communities in mitigating the impact of those directives. Now they were being asked to enforce central policies against local gentleman and communities. At the same time, these policies gave official licence to subordinates to testify against their social superiors. The process of sequestration gave tenants the opportunity to depose against landlords; the committees for scandalous ministers required parishioners to inform against their minister. Not only elites were affected. Those who had seen the struggle as one for godly reformation were now able to pass ordinances with the aim of reforming

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The impact on society a popular culture that they regarded as superstitious and sinful. Godly magistrates and their allies among the middling sort sought to curb the alehouse and the role of drinking in popular sociability; to restrict the number of holidays and festivities; and to reform the customary form of sexual behaviour and marriage formation. Social values as well as relationships were challenged in the 1640s. The hostility that this attempted cultural revolution provoked was reflected in the extent to which the calendar and customs of popular culture became occasions for protest against the parliamentarian regime and its officials. The toppling of the traditional structures of authority within the Church also had consequences for society. The demise of bishops and the church courts seemed to coincide with the rise of separatist religious groups, whose doctrines carried radical social as well as religious implications. Separatist congregations emerged which stressed a spiritual equality that justified preaching and prophesying by the laity. In rejecting the distinction between laity and clergy, and in denying the need for an established Church, they were threatening both the gentry’s and middling sorts’ control of the parish. Gender hierarchies were also challenged by the emergence of the sects. Sects, in which women often outnumbered men, gave women a far more active public role. Within the sects they were allowed to debate and vote. Some sects, it was alleged, gave women the right to preach; by exploiting contemporary notions of the nature of female spiritual power to prophesy, women claimed this right for themselves. At the same time, the collapse of censorship allowed women to write and publish tracts in unprecedented numbers. Some women played a more active public political role, organising petitions and mobilising support for the Levellers. By 1649, The Humble Petition of Divers Well-Affected Women could justify women’s new role in the following language: ‘we are assured of our creation in the image of God, and of an interest in Christ, equal unto men, as also of a proportionable share in the Freedoms of this Commonwealth’. The sexual as well as the social order was under threat in the 1640s. The correspondence between authority in the state and the authoritarian patriarchal relationship between husband and wife in the ‘little commonwealth’ of the family was central to early modern political culture. It suggested that the political authority of the King and the domestic authority of the husband were validated both by God and nature. The fifth commandment – honour thy father and mother – was a key text in the prescription of obedience and deference in political, social and domestic relationships. As a Presbyterian critic of the sects warned, fathers ‘should never have peace in their families more, or ever after have command of wives, children or servants’. Lurid tales of sexual delinquency among the sect suggested that spiritual liberty threatened carnal licence. With an active debate on marriage and calls for divorce, the family itself seemed threatened.

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Popular politics in early modern England Religious and political controversy threatened all those whose authority was grounded in respect for their social status. Perhaps the most worrying way that this was brought home to contemporaries is to historians the most elusive: changes in language and social grammar, those central markers of any social order. The deference of social subordinates to their superiors in early modern society was marked by a series of everyday social rituals in speech and body language. For example, subordinates bared their head, bent their knee, and stood in the presence of their superiors; in addressing them they used terms of respect. These were important as unconscious but powerful acknowledgements of the ‘natural’ superiority of their betters. Civil war (which itself institutionalised plebeian attacks on their betters, something hitherto denied by the code of the duel) saw this etiquette breached and disregarded and, worse still, parodied in rites of subversive humour by sects and soldiers among others. The landed classes found both their social space and social distance invaded. We do not yet know how common this was – the history of the challenge to social convention has yet to be written – but the threat that this was thought to pose can be gauged by the severity of the later reactions to the Quakers, who refused to cap their ‘betters’ or to use the respectful second person plural of ‘you’ to superiors (using the familiar ‘thou’ instead). More worrying still, the spiritual equality of the priesthood of all believers might turn into the brotherhood of Man. Levellers like John Lilburne had been schooled in the separatist groups of London; the Leveller movement crystallised out of the struggle for religious toleration. The Cheshire gentleman, Sir Thomas Aston, feared ‘the old seditious argument, that we are the sons of Adam, born free, some of them say, the Gospel hath made them free … They will plead Scripture for it, that we should all live by the sweat of our brows.’ ‘People are governed more by the pulpit than the sword in times of peace’, Charles I had declared. This was a statement that could be applied to many early modern states, but it applied with particular force to England, where the absence of army and police had meant that the authority of both the King and the landed classes rested on consent rather than coercion. It was the public challenge to the ideological hegemony by which English society had been ordered that made the multiple forms of disorder in the 1640s threatening. New and radical intentions might be behind the traditional form of the enclosure or food riot. The centrality of enclosure as a metaphor for social and political order in the discourse of the 1640s made the throwing down of hedge a social and political threat; it was this that made Charles I’s labelling of the Levellers by the name of earlier agrarian rebels such an effective smear. In the dearth of 1640–49, the Wiltshire justices were the recipients of a petition which blamed their own greed for the high food prices. Earlier in the decade, one Parliamentarian (with estates at the heart of the East Anglian riots) had confided to his journal, ‘there is no doubt but that all right and property all

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The impact on society meum and tuum [mine and thine] must cease in civil wars: & we know not what advantage the meaner sort also may take to divide the spoils of the rich and noble among them, who begin already to allege, that all being of one mould there is no reason that some should have so much and other so little’. When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman? IV With all sources of authority challenged in a society with long-term stresses exacerbated by the pressures of civil war and the challenge of radical ideas, it did indeed seem that the world might be turned upside-down. In 1649, the King was executed and monarchy, along with the House of Lords and episcopacy, abolished. Ideas in circulation, and the radical groups that sought to implement them, offered a challenge to all traditional sources of authority. But the world was not turned upside-down; the radicals were defeated and many of their ideas failed to gain general acceptance. Previously, the death of the monarch had been the signal for an upsurge in disorder reflecting the popular belief that until a new king was proclaimed, or crowned, there was no law in force. But in 1649, the death of monarchy did not see any such increase in disorder. Why was this? For a start, we need to repeat that much of the evidence that the historian is forced to rely on exaggerates the threat of social upheaval. With the certainties of the world collapsing around them, propertied contemporaries were in the grip of a moral panic. Their fears were fed by the unprecedented spate of cheap pamphlets and newsletters and the propaganda of both Royalists and Parliamentarians. Second, viewed through the distorting prism of political polemic and their own fears, the threat that radical groups and sects posed was exaggerated. Most sects sought an equality of souls, not society. In 1647 the London Independents issued a declaration which sought to disassociate themselves from the Leveller programme: ‘it cannot but be very prejudicial to human society, and the promotion of the good of the Commonwealth, Cities, Armies, or families, to admit of a parity, or all to be equal in power’, they declared. ‘The ranging of men into several and subordinate ranks and degrees is a thing necessary for the good of them’. Many Independent congregations were disciplinarian, rather than libertarian, retaining a desire for a looser form of national Church able to reform the profane multitude. They sought godly reformation, not social revolution. Neither was the threat to gender hierarchies as great as supposed. While some sects agreed that the duty of women to obey their conscience justified disobeying their fathers and husbands, they restricted this to spiritual matters, acknowledging that ‘in bodily and civil respects’ the husband still

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Popular politics in early modern England had authority. (Of course, in practice the distinction may have been harder to make.) Even within the sects, ambiguities remained over the legitimacy of women’s speaking, and it became clear that within the group patriarchal authority was to be observed. That the Levellers in the Putney debates claimed the vote for the ‘poorest he’ reflects the strength of patriarchal assumptions even among the radicals, accepted also (at least in public) by their female supporters. Third, the exceptional conditions of the 1640s allowed ideas to circulate freely, but their acceptance was more difficult, and collective action upon them even more so. The radicals of the mid-seventeenth century did not form revolutionary vanguard parties. Impressive though their organisation was by seventeenth-century standards, it was restricted to certain areas and their programmes – betraying their religious origins and belief in the power of Godgiven reason – and relied more on moral than physical force. As we have seen, the ideas of the sects were as likely to attract popular (as well as elite) enmity as much as enthusiasm. We should be careful not to conflate the radical with the popular. The radicals were a minority, an important one, but a minority still. It was only in certain types of physical and social space within the revolution that people were able to organise and act on radical ideas: the New Model Army; areas of forest and pasture with the absence of a resident gentry, the presence of the cloth industry and an earlier tradition of radicalism; and, above all, London (though even here work in progress suggests that the structures of local government presented an obstacle to the more radical type of reform). This is the fourth and most important point. If we view events from the centre, then the emphasis is on conflict. But, seen from the counties, there is increasing evidence of continuity. Long-term change created instability, but it also helped to create the structures with which to contain instability. At the level of the village, where most of the population lived, economic change had promoted a process of social differentiation. Increasingly, this had aligned the wealthier yeoman farmers – the middling sort –with the gentry. It had distanced them from their poorer neighbours and encouraged them, through holding local office, to co-operate in the extension of the power of the state at the local level, a process best reflected in their increasing use of the criminal courts and the implementation of an effective poor law to curb the threat of the poor. The re-alignment of social forces (which had its parallel in urban society) meant that these powerful local elites were unlikely to welcome schemes that challenged the economic order from which they drew their wealth. They approached the revolution Janus-headed. They were concerned to defend their property and faith against royal absolutism and episcopal Arminianism and, for some, to assert their social status against old elites. But they were also anxious not to see themselves threatened from below, hence for some the

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The impact on society added appeal of a disciplinary Calvinism. At the same time, the loss of land by the poorer sort, where it occurred, was making the poor dependent on these local village elites for employment and relief. Here, at the most local level, was a social structure that was able to cope with the crises of the later 1640s, and prevent the widespread suffering that might have mobilised the many-headed monster by continuity in the implementation of an effective system of poorrelief. Significantly, in the difficult 1640s, grain riots were less frequent. But this was also a system which could penalise too open an expression of support for radical ideas. The radical Roger Crabbe showed an appreciation of these realities when he wrote of, ‘labouring poor Men, which in Times of scarcity pine and murmur for want of Bread, cursing the Rich behind his Back, and before his Face, Cap and Knee’. It was no coincidence that the radical ideas and groups were most likely to be found in areas where the powers of landlord, minister, magistrate and middling sort might be weaker: fen and forest, rural industrial areas and the larger cities. The consequences of this re-alignment of social forces in the countryside can be illustrated by returning to the example of enclosure riots. Historians, like contemporaries, have been impressed by the extent of enclosure riots in the 1640s. But there is evidence to suggest that they were less threatening than has been supposed. The 1640s did not see a general rising of the countryside. What is striking about agrarian disorder in the 1640s is its absence from many areas. For example, enclosure riots had been earlier most frequent in the Midlands, and the region had in 1607 experienced the largest agrarian rising by groups styling themselves Levellers and Diggers. But there were very few riots here in the 1640s. The absence of enclosure riots from many areas is testimony to the growing alliance between landlords and tenants in the development of agrarian capitalism. This replaced social solidarity between yeomen and the poorer sort with social distance, and denied discontented smallholders and cottagers the leadership that they required to translate rural discontent into collective action. It was in the forests of the south-west and the fens of eastern England that enclosure riots were concentrated – areas where social differentiation was less pronounced and where the middling and poorer sorts shared a common hostility to sweeping enclosure imposed from outside. Despite some examples of crowds destroying manorial records, well publicised by royalist propaganda, most riots represented the continuation of an earlier tradition of agrarian protest. In the main, enclosure riots did not reflect the demand for access to land based on natural rights, but a more restricted claim to common rights within the manorial system on which landlord power was based. As the hostility to the King in areas with direct experience of royal enclosures showed, there was potential for formal politicisation, but this failed to materialise. Parliament’s decision to assume responsibility for protecting the property of enclosers and its failure to enfranchise copyholders ensured

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Popular politics in early modern England that land and liberty would not become the official slogan of this revolution. The radical groups later in the 1640s failed to provide either an effective programme or leadership for rural discontent. The Levellers, reflecting their urban origin, never gave sufficient attention to enclosure, and they remained primarily an urban-based movement. The Diggers gave greater attention to the land question, but their scheme for collective cultivation of the waste ran counter to the existing tradition of the protection of common rights to uphold shrinking individual holdings. Local communities had not fought lords of the manor to protect their rights – only to surrender them to the Diggers. Enclosure rioters attacked landlords, not landlordism. They sought rights of commons, not rights for the Commons of England. The failure of the single largest social group in seventeenth-century England – the rural poor – to rise, reflects the importance of the underlying social transformation which made the middling sort bulwarks of local order in the midst of political crisis. In fact, the period of the 1640s and 1650s marks an important transition in the way that order was maintained at a local level. Before 1640, there had been an unprecedented use of the courts to prosecute the poor; later in the seventeenth century the courts became less important, as their growing local economic and social power allowed the middling sort to discipline the poor without formal use of the courts. Men may have been worried in the 1640s by the (temporary) absence of courts, but there is evidence to suggest that the new social relationships of power within most communities were capable of containing the threat. V The emphasis here on the threat that the 1640s brought to the social order should not be allowed to exclude the other social face of the 1640s. Not everybody regarded the 1640s as signalling an impending confusion. For many, these were days of liberty and liberation. For committed Parliamentarians and godly puritans, this was a decade of reform. While one gentleman scribbled notes in his parliamentary diary in about 1381, another wrote, ‘no time nor history can show that such great numbers of oppressed Subjects of all sorts ever petitioned with that humility and dissolved so quietly’. The extant notebooks of the London woodturner Nehemiah Wallington provide ample testimony of the hopes of the humbler puritans. For him, the acts of iconoclasm that he so carefully chronicled were not evidence of the ‘reforming rabble’ but of godly reformation. In the provinces, committed puritans like Richard Baxter welcomed the chance to build a holy Commonwealth. For the radicals and their supporters, the progress of the decade brought the possibility of a revolution in Man’s relationship both with God and with fellow men and women. It is impossible to do justice to the ferment of ideas that this unleashed or the

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The impact on society sense of freedom this brought to many men and women. The emphasis here has been on the threat that developments in the 1640s were thought to pose the social order, because ultimately this had the greater significance for the history of the period. Historical analysis might be able to demonstrate (not without a generous dose of hindsight on the part of the historian) that the chances of a radical threat to the social order in the 1640s were more limited than contemporaries supposed, but it was contemporaries’ perceptions of the reality of that threat upon which they acted. In 1649, ‘the year of intended parity’ according to one pamphleteer, few could have been confident that the social order would not be subverted. It was this fear of social upheaval that created the ‘party of order’ which allowed Charles to fight a civil war, and which encouraged men of property in increasing numbers to urge a negotiated settlement. It was the same fear that encouraged a de facto acceptance of the Cromwellian regime, and it was the failure of that regime’s failure to guarantee order that led to the Restoration and the righting of a world turned upside-down.

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Chapter 7

. Public transcripts, popular agency and the politics of subsistence in early modern England I

I

n the summer of 1596, the balladeer Thomas Deloney was facing imprisonment. While Londoners were struggling with the consequences of harvest failure, Deloney had published, ‘a certein ballad containing a Complaint of the great Want and Scarcitie of Corn within the Realm’. His offence was to have represented the Queen speaking ‘with hir people in dialogue-wise in very fond and undecent sort’ and to have prescribed ‘orders for ye remedying of this dearth of Corn extracted … out of ye booke published by your L[ordships] the last year, butt in that vaine & undiscreet manner as that therby the poor may aggravate their grief & take occasion of soon discontentment’.1 The episode encapsulates the argument of this chapter. Deloney’s ballad spoke to a popular political culture in which the monarch was seen as a natural defender of the poor, and where legitimation for popular protest was derived from government measures designed to anticipate and address popular grievances. Although Deloney was threatened with imprisonment, in reality the structures of English early modern government made such a dialogue between rulers and ruled a political necessity throughout the period. Out of that dialogue, the ruled derived legitimation for a political agency otherwise denied them by a state that proscribed popular action and a Church that preached passivity in the face of hardship. In early modern England, crowd actions were, of course, one of the most powerful ways in which the ruled could negotiate the exercise of power. But ‘riot’, itself a lazy shorthand for the complexity within crowd actions, is not the focus here. Instead, the essay attempts to recover that broader ‘infrapolitics’ of the ruled, of which crowd actions form only a part. As the phrase suggests, the starting point for this exercise is a critical engagement with the work of James Scott. Within the constraints of this chapter, it is not possible to provide a detailed inventory for early modern England of what Scott terms the

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Public transcripts and popular agency infrapolitics of the subordinate. It is certainly possible to recover something of the quotidian and largely unremarked exchanges by which individuals attempted to blunt the exercise of power in the micro-politics of manor and parish and the opacity of the work-place, to which tussles over the construction of custom were central.2 But while further work might be expected to add to our knowledge of those personal acts of non-compliance and other forms of resistance,3 it may never be possible to recover anything like the full inventory that Scott was able to identify for communities in which he worked and lived, or to establish their political weight either in altering the rates of exchange with their superiors or in reconciling men and women in early modern England to the structures of their subordination. Here the emphasis will be on those tactics which consciously drew on the public transcript and the scope this gave for a broader agency. Scott’s notion of the ‘public transcript’ – the acceptable public version of relationships between dominant and subordinate groups – by which elites sought to secure their rule, has considerable resonances for understanding the repertoires of rule employed by power-holders in early modern England. Scott’s concern with an ‘everyday politics’, by which subordinates negotiated public transcripts, and his delineation of the ‘weapons of the weak’, with which they effected that negotiation, both points to the agency that subordinates could exercise and extends the range of activities by which they might do so. While the public transcript is largely the work of politically dominant elites, Scott argues that it was also the outcome of negotiation between dominant and subordinate groups. The concern for ideological hegemony (and the legitimation that it brought) requires dominant groups to reformulate their particular interests as general interests. In explaining why a particular social order is in the best interests of subordinates, a public transcript is developed which opens up the possibilities of (legitimate) resistance in relation to the contradictions inherent in the transcript which permit it to be criticised in its own terms. Thus, the public transcript is the outcome of negotiation and it imposes constraints on the exercise of authority. Power-holders have to negotiate means of legitimating their authority and thereafter successfully represent their actions as falling within the terms of legitimacy.4 In early modern England, the negotiation of the public transcript reflected the central fact that the coercive powers of the English state were limited. This placed a premium on anticipating and pre-empting sources of popular disorder. Thus, both Crown and magistracy sought to secure consent to their right to rule, seeking to turn power into authority and finding sanction for that translation in a public policy acknowledging protection of the subject as its primary responsibility. A proclamation of 1549, published in response to high prices, spoke of ‘the King’s Majesty, having the principal and continual charge of the commonwealth and tranquillity of the realm, for which cause

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Popular politics in early modern England Almighty God hath given to his majesty power to rule’, and it went on to stress the ‘pity, which at all times his majesty conceiveth upon the lack and griefs of his people’.5 The almost dialogic nature of royal proclamations repeatedly stressed a discourse of rule which elaborated the responsibilities of royal office. For example, Elizabeth’s of 1598 for the restraint of middlemen was, ‘for the common good of her loving subjects (and specially of the poorer sort whose case her highness doth most gracciously tender and pity)’, while that of Charles I in the dearth of 1630 spoke of ‘the king’s most excellent maiestie (whose watchfull Eye of providence, for the publique good of his loving subjects is alwayes kept open)’.6 Central to the discourse of rule was a recognition of the responsibility of the sovereign for defending the Commonwealth. Commonwealth was an idea whose importance to governance long outlasted its mid-sixteenth-century expression. It made defence of the common good the duty of all members of society. The responsibilities of the King to his weaker subjects extended to those who exercised authority on his behalf. As the remarkable public sermon delivered at Northampton after the suppression of the Midlands rising to a congregation headed by the Lord Lieutenant observed, Christ ‘giveth to great personages, Judges and Magistrates in their places, an honorable patterne of piety, cheerfully to accept, & gently to answer, the cries, petitions & iust complaints of the poore, which stand in need of them, … & come kneeling to them as they kneele to God’.7 Property-owners too had a duty to acknowledge the responsibilities of stewardship in the administration of their property. The ‘prayer for landlords’ in the Primer of 1553, with its call to landlords not to rack rents or to engross holdings may have been (literally) a pious hope, but it represented a statement of the doctrine of stewardship which was widely held. As the Elizabethan Privy Council itself wrote to a would-be encloser in the midst of a run of bad harvests in the 1590s, the landlord was bound, ‘rather to consider what is agreeable … to the use of the state and for the good of the commonwealth, than to seeke the utmost profit which a landlord may take among his tenants.’8 Sermons from the pulpit, often co-ordinated by government-inspired archiepiscopal directives, reinforced this message, reminding magistrates of their responsibilities to the weak; landowners of the sinfulness of oppressing their tenants; enclosers of the dangers of turning ‘the common wealth to common miserie’;9 and holders of grain surpluses of their God-given duty to place poor before profit. While it has been argued that by the second half of the sixteenth century, ‘the Elizabethan state consistently distanced itself from moral complaint’, inconsistently might capture more accurately the continuing moralisation of pronouncements on the politics of land and food.10 This discourse of rule was given widespread and intentionally public expression through a variety of forums – courts, special commissions, Parliament

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Public transcripts and popular agency and the Church. Weaknesses in the institutional bureaucracies of the state placed a premium on securing broader participation in royal rule and, consequently, greater publicity for its policies. As a result, a discourse of the duties of power-holders and property-holders was frequently rehearsed in a series of texts – royal proclamation, parliamentary preamble, pulpit pronouncement – whose common denominator was the concern to address a wider public audience. The compensatory strength of an undisputed royal writ for institutional weaknesses helps to explain why this public transcript in turn emphasised the rule of law and was promulgated, and policed, through courts of law. The government’s use of the law and the law courts increased the scope for popular knowledge and participation. Policy was publicised in the charges delivered both at assizes and quarter sessions. For the large public audience drawn to the meetings of the courts, these could provide a listing of laws in force, a statement of the particular policies that the government wished to see enforced, and a justification for their enforcement which often drew on a commonwealth tradition emphasising the responsibilities of authority for the people’s protection.11 The reintroduction of the royal charge during the economic difficulties of the 1590s, and its particular use thereafter in similar periods of economic difficulty, gave the charge a special place within the politics of subsistence. Those delivered by William Lambarde to the special juries called into being under the Book of Orders to survey grain stores and dealers in Kent in the difficult 1580s and 1590s, suggest how provocative these might be. Lambarde referred to the Queen having, ‘(according to that motherly care which she beareth towards all her natural people) given order that so near as may be none of her children be suffered to cry for want of bread, but that maugre the malice of greedy and hardhearted men, these blessings of God shall be drawn out of the secret places where they be hidden and shall be brought into the open light of the markets ready to be distributed’.12 The government’s anxiety to be seen to be responding to popular grievances closed the circle. A letter written by the Privy Council to lord lieutenants after the Midlands rising, calling for them to send up those enclosers responsible for the greatest depopulations, ended: ‘wee think it not unfitt that by such meanes as yow shall hold most convenient to be divulged in the Countrey that the persons noted to be guilty of these oppressions are sent for by his Ma [ jes]t[ie]s commaundem[en]t to receive the censure of the lawes for their offences’.13 In direct response to local episodes of popular complaint, the government used both churches and market-places in the region to publicise remedial measures in a language once again acknowledging the responsibilities of rule.14 Exemplary prosecutions of dealers in grain and enclosers required offenders publicly to acknowledge the nature of their offences, ‘for the better manifestation of the offence to the Countrey’. They were undertaken, ‘so that the poor people may see that care is taken of them in time of dearth’.15

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Popular politics in early modern England Responsibility under the Commonwealth could be made – or taken – to extend further still. Government policies to protect the people’s subsistence actively encouraged popular participation. This was formally inscribed in the requirement on local office-holders to make returns to articles, in which both depopulation and dealing in grain featured,16 or to serve as hundredal and grand jurors charged with presenting offences. In years of crisis, this popular participation became more pronounced with special juries required to report on enclosure to royal commissions touring the affected regions or to conduct surveys of granaries under the provisions of the Books of Orders. As Paul Slack has recently noted, the idea of commonwealth, ‘carried with it no implication about who was authorised to use it … [and it] left unresolved a fundamental issue … the problem of agency … Far from giving a clear answer to those questions, the rhetoric of the Commonwealth muddied the waters by never quite throwing off its participatory and hence potentially subversive associations’.17 This elaboration of a transcript grounding legitimacy in the use of power to protect, inter alia, the subsistence of subordinate groups underwrote a political culture which, paradoxically, could be read as emphasising the duties of the powerful and the rights of the weak. A public transcript, which was in Scott’s term designed to euphemise power relations, actually exposed them to interrogation by the ruled. This paper, therefore, explores the ways in which ‘ordinary people’ could influence the exercise of power in ways that were less spectacular, but more continuous, than is suggested by the current historiographical emphasis on the crowd. It does so by drawing on a preliminary sketch of the politics of subsistence – constructed around access to commons and markets – and of the political contests to which this gave rise.18 The weapons used here took a variety of forms, but all represented attempts to recall individuals who were the focus of popular grievance to observance of what were represented as common (and moralised) standards by which economic relations ought to be ordered and to remind authority of its obligations in their defence. This was of course a normative order. Experience taught the people that relationships with landlords, employers, merchants and magistrates could be marked as much by conflict as consensus. Therefore, active and selective appropriation, rather than passive acceptance, characterised their relationship to the public transcript. II Grumbling was the easiest, and probably the first, weapon of the weak.19 Grumbling had a role to play in the negotiation of rates of exchange within the everyday politics of neighbourliness, in the struggles over where to draw the boundaries of membership and how to define the rights and responsibilities of inclusion. It gave the poor an agency that accounts of the relabel-

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Public transcripts and popular agency ling of transactions of mutual reciprocity as acts of charity and poor-relief by local elites are in danger of missing, and it helps us to see them as subjects, not objects, in the history of poor-relief.20 Of all the strategies examined here, grumbling was least likely to have left an impression in the historical record. But deliberately seeking a public audience for such grumblings was a tactic commonly secured by using the unregulated space of the alehouse or strategic sites like the bakehouse, workhouse, or market. At Norwich, a conversation among those gathered in the bakehouse ‘touching the hard world’ and the high price of grain, led the baker to claim that the fault lay with farmers who failed to obey the King’s proclamation and to promise, as he volunteered to the city’s mayor on examination, ‘that if it please the kinge to make him hang man he wold hange a sorte [a score?] of them that woold not obey’.21 Cases of grumbling, visible because they were labelled sedition, therefore give some clues to its utility as a political weapon. Grumbling which reflected the opinions of a wider group; showed an awareness of the strategic importance of sensitive sites; and demonstrated a tactical ability to refer to appropriate transcripts, had the best chance of success. In crisis years, grumbling by the poor was also able to exploit a public transcript, then more insistent on the moral nature of the obligation, which called for contributions from the rich, ‘according to their devotions, and as charity requireth in this time of dearth’.22 Dearth years doubtless saw increased grumbling. In the aftermath of the attempted Oxfordshire rising, one man told the authorities that he, ‘made the lesse accompt of their speeches, for that Comonly as … [he] went to Marketts, he heard poore people saie, they were ready to famishe for want of Corne, and that they thought they should be enforced for hunger to take yt owt of men’s howses’.23 Evidence from the godly city of Dorchester during the difficult harvest crisis of 1630/31 suggests how public comment and censure by the poor might put pressure on their betters. That we know about these incidents only because the grumblers were brought to court confirms the sensitivities pricked. In the dearth of 1630, a local widow was reported for daring to complain of that godly patriarch, John White, the minister there. She had claimed, ‘that he did starve the Cuntry & did ioyne with the divell for mony & would be a merchant and fearmer for his profitt’, alleging provocatively that White’s sending of provision to New England was a pretext for exporting food to Spain. In Warwickshire, the gentleman and JP Sir John Newdegate found himself complained against for his policy of buying grain and selling it out of the region, ‘which hath bin very hurtefull to the comentie’ and ‘which if it had bin brought to the Market woulde have bine a great helpe to the poore cominte’.24 Such grumbling showed a fine ability to play upon the sensitivities of their victims and to tap into the public transcript. All grain exporters might be held to flout both laws and popular code which held that local communities should have first claim on food; a year later in

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Popular politics in early modern England Dorchester, another local woman accused a local merchant of sending away ‘the best fruits of the Land … over the seas’.25 But White’s offence as a minister was worse, it was implied, in placing profit before charity and the community of the godly before the community of his parishioners and – worse still – papist before Protestant. Similarly, Sir John Newdegate’s devotion to the dictates of the market was not that to be expected of a godly magistrate and gentleman. Henry Arthington listed ‘their banning and cursing, when they are not served as themselves desire’ as one of the sins of the poor provoking dearth as a judgement of God.26 But his complaint, echoed in the minutes of vestries everywhere, suggest that even the very poorest were able to deploy grumbling as a political weapon. A strategic choice of site (the mill or ‘mens doores … about dinner & supper time’) and season (for example, Christmas or harvesttime) might increase the chances of those, otherwise vulnerable to being labelled as beggars, who sought to draw on the transcript of neighbourliness. It was reported from Northumberland in the 1660s that ‘the beggars wherever corn is stirring (as in winnowing, sowing, etc.) do beg, or as it were get by custom a part of the same’.27 The poor too could grumble to authority in the expectation of action. In 1621, the Wiltshire Grand Jury presented the overseers of four communities, ‘for neglecting to releave their impotent poore as they (wanderinge abroad for relief) doe Complaine’. Years of dearth saw local magistrates responding to the poor’s complaints, bringing to court local officials like the Wiltshire overseer of the poor in 1648 for ‘his abusive carryinge in execucon of that office in threatnynge & starveinge of the poore people which was nowe proved’, or issuing rebukes, as in Nottinghamshire in 1623 where, ‘divers complaints by many poor people … daily brought to us … of want of maintenance and habitation by the negligence of Churchwardens and Overseers of the Poor’ led to orders to hold monthly meetings at which the needs of the poor should be reviewed.28 Cases of grumbling reported to the courts reflect a common strategy to bring pressure to bear on their betters. In a dispute in Oxfordshire, commoners grumbled that the purchaser and encloser of the manor, Mr Fitzherbert, a Bristol merchant, had given, ‘nothinge to his poore neighboures and Tenannts theis twentie yeres to the value of one groate when wheate was sould for tenn shillinges the bushell’, proof of the failure of this parvenu to acknowledge either the responsibilities of lordship or vicinage.29 In Dorchester, again, the reported conversation between three men about the ‘voluntary contrybucion for the provision of corn to be made in Dorchester for the pore’ (itself a response no doubt to those earlier episodes of grumbling), in which they praised the bounty of Mr Cheeke ‘in giving at the colleccions in the church’ and compared this unfavourably with the ‘little or nothing’ given by another of the town’s ministers, hints at the popular (and public) judgements that might allow the poor to influence the ‘largesse’ of their betters.30 Such tactics

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Public transcripts and popular agency undoubtedly encouraged the greater charitable giving that was a characteristic of years of dearth in this period. They were of course the obverse of that calculated deference which, it should be remembered, could itself be a tactic to extract aid.31 Grumbling might shade into cursing. In the course of a dispute over enclosure between the commons and Corporation at York in 1536, a woman was indicted for cursing the mayor and his brethren and wishing the Common Chamber on fire.32 In the long-running dispute over border rights in the northwest the tenants published and distributed a statement of their grievances, Reasons of all the Commons of Westmerland to uphold thire Custome of Tennant. Among the various passages of scripture cited was Deuteronomy 27.17, ‘cursed bee [he] that removeth his neighbour’s Landmarke’. This was a curse literally acted out when, as part of their protests, the tenants staged a play before Kendal Castle in July 1621, in which they ‘did therein make a representacion of Hell and in the same did personate and acte manie Lordes of the Mannors’. To drive home the point, two actors, taking the part of clowns, were made to declare on looking into the mouth of hell, ‘it’s false landlords make all that Croakinge there’.33 Reported murmurings against enclosers, middlemen and those who refused requests for relief may then conceal a more formal resort to the ritual curse. A sensitive reading of the conflicts frozen in the accusations of witchcraft which began with requests for small loans of food or implements and ended in grumbling and cursing following the rejection of help, might yield valuable evidence of similar exchanges otherwise lost to historians. It was widely believed that it was God who gave the poor’s curse its power. Even as late as the 1660s in Northumberland, alms continued to be given to those who begged ‘for fear of their curses’, and cursing made the gentry themselves afraid to prohibit begging.34 Thus, the continuing moralisation of economic relationships made the transcript of the Church (as well as the penumbra of beliefs syncretically associated with it) a resource to be drawn upon in negotiating the politics of subsistence. God’s judgements on greedy farmers who hoarded grain were the subject of both sermons and ballads, whose shared message was that God hears, and answers, ‘the poor’s moan’.35 That we know that tales of the judgements that befell hoarders of grain found their way into a Midlands Justice of the Peace’s charge to a jury, shows how subscription to these beliefs was found beyond the confines of popular culture.36 The Church continued to preach that God punished illegitimate enclosure with financial ruin and the collapse of lineage. This was a message sometimes given powerful expression in particularising from the pulpit on the fate of individual enclosers. Since it reflected and endorsed proverbial wisdom which held that ill-gotten gains ne’er last three generations, it offered additional bite to appeals to enclosers to cease enclosing.37

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Popular politics in early modern England It is difficult to know what exact force cursing might have had in a society whose attitudes were gradually shifting to one of greater acceptance of the market and developing scepticism about the power of the curse. But the rare survival of a contemporary local history of opposition to enclosure from a period when the tide was running in favour of acceptance, suggests the need to take seriously the possible force of this weapon. At Caythorpe in Lincolnshire in the 1650s, the smaller farmers and cottagers had opposed enclosure, but ‘had neither purse nor stomach to make a vigorous opposition against those who were every way better furnished to carry on their designe’. They ‘therefore sate still, & submitted.’ However, despite support for enclosure from the principal freeholders, the young lord of the manor was reluctant to agree, being ‘possest with a strong conceit that after all is finished I shall not live long to enjoy it’. He gave instances of several landowners who had enclosed common land and died shortly thereafter. His feelings can only be guessed at when, after having been persuaded to support enclosure, his principal adviser and one of the enclosure commissioners both died, and a further commissioner only recovered from illness when, ‘being afrighted by the fate of ye 2 former’, he retired from the commission. When Hussey himself died before the enclosure was complete, the author of the history, the local minister, concluded, ‘forasmuch as they never consulted with God, nor his most Holy laws of equity and justice, but trusted to their own wisdome & ye counsell of the lawyers, ye Lord gave them an instance of his power and displeasure’.38 In a society which continued to believe in direct divine intervention, cursing might represent a weapon of some force for the weak. Thus, in a dispute at Landbeach in the sixteenth century, the tenants hoped to prevail against their opponent ‘by his own conscience calling to mind the grievous plagues and strikes of God falling from time to time upon himself in his own person, upon his corn & cattle, upon his children perishing by the stern hand of God as may be feared’.39 Grumbling and cursing might shift to the more formal negotiation of the appeal. Where, as in enclosure disputes, it was possible to put faces to those held responsible for the commoners’ plight, the appeal might be made directly to named individuals. In one episode during the long-running dispute over enclosure at Grewelthorpe Moor in Yorkshire, the women of the community followed the encloser on to the moor and, ‘fallinge downe upon their knees, and some of them weepinge for the losse of their Comon, desired … [him] to be good unto them’. The deliberate gendering of the appeal by women responsible for the subsistence of their household was intended to give it additional force. This was a tactic commonly repeated in other enclosure disputes. Other strategies might have similar intent. In an enclosure dispute at Cannock in Staffordshire that saw several appeals in the form of letters directed to Lord Paget, the lord of the manor, one from his tenants drew on the topos of a king innocent of the misgovernment of his officials to legitimise a request to him

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Public transcripts and popular agency to stop actions carried out ‘without your Lordship’s knowledge or consent as wee hope and beleeve’. Another directly employed the language of commonwealth, trusting that Paget would, ‘not suffer soe many to be impoverished, yea a hundred for inriching of one’.40 Efforts might be made to sharpen their impact by addressing appeals to intermediaries – neighbouring gentlemen, local clergy – with a carefully graded selection of interlocutor and audience to increase the pressure. In the Landbeach dispute, the tenants had first ‘made moan to divers men of worship in the county’.41 Numbers also added force to the appeal. In the crisis of 1648 the overseers of Middlewich market wrote of the pitifull Complaint of the poore in o[u]r Towne for the scarcity and want of bread [which] moves us … to doe our best endeavour to remedie it; our request is to you and the rest of our neighbours that are now at Nantwich that you will be pleased to move the Gentlemen that some course may be taken that corne may come to the Markett and not be sould privately at home to breadbakers and none else and soe the poore are forced to have it uppon their termes or els starve … neglect it not for yesterday there came 3 Load of Corne to John Venables and not a corne to the Markett, in soe much that the poore were very harsh with us and thought it to be our fault.42

Appeals blended reproach and moral censure with the threat of ostracism and public ridicule. While they may have been directed either at those who were considered to be the authors of popular grievances or at a local magistracy from whom remedy was expected, they were in reality addressed to a wider audience. Appeals to enclosers to forbear enclosing shaded into tactics designed to mock and shame the encloser. When, despite the tearful entreaties of the wives of the community, the Yorkshire encloser Sir Stephen Proctor would not stop enclosing at Kirkby Malzeard, it was ‘reported in ye countrey that a picture of a man should be sett upon the dore of everie Alehouse in Englande and … [Sir Stephen’s] name allso written upon everie dore with the picture’.43 Such appeals might exploit the greater freedom of expression given by adopting the cloak of anonymity. Where appeals to enclosers took the form of libellous letters, ballads or poems which were circulated within the market towns and communities of their country, then this appeal to a wider audience was intended to shift the balance of power, threatening a greater loss of face by bringing the encloser ‘into the skorne and contempt of the vulgar people of the Countrie’.44 Copies were made to be read or sung at fairs, markets, and alehouses, while the moralisation of a discourse on subsistence made the church an appropriate space in which to display libels, as for example in the enclosure dispute at Coventry, where libels were found fixed to ‘the Mynster’ or, as in the Midlands rising, where the libel ‘The pooremans Joye & the gentlemans plague’ was cast into the choir of Caistor church.45

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Popular politics in early modern England Where the texts of these appeals have survived, they reveal a remarkable ability of the commoners to couch their criticisms in terms of key categories within the public transcript of commonwealth: neighbourliness and the moral community, the good lord and the good king, and the responsibilities of office. In the dispute over enclosure between the commons and the Corporation at Coventry in the 1490s, which produced a litter of libels, one appealed bluntly to the public transcript: ‘Ye that be of myght,/se that ye do right,/Thynk on yore othe’. From Ladbroke in Warwickshire, an anonymous libel under the signature of ‘Your lovinge friende, Thomas Unhedg all’, one of a number that seem to have circulated freely during the Midlands rising and its aftermath, proceeded to itemise in rough doggerel the moral failings of named members of the local middling sort. Its closing stanzas give a flavour of the moral critique it carried: Oxcalf, or Goodsteadie Chebsey, which dwelleth at the ffarme, the poore had suer forgott thy Almes, else the more had bene thy harme: Yet suerlie I will wish thee, to give out of thy store or els thy hedgs all must downe and nevr prosper more Knowe you not George Chebsey, miser, that dwelleth at the stone I knowe one foole wiser, but yet let him alone: Yet surelie I would wish him, to be a poor mans freinde or els wee must unhedg him and soe I make an end.

Although the background to this libel suggests that its provenance is to be found in village factionalism, it does convey the force of an appeal to the standards of neighbourliness by which members of local society in early modern England judged one another. As its victims complained, this was ‘to drawe theire names, lives and Credditts into publicke disgrace and obl[o]quye’.46 There was, of course, an inevitable tension between the ideal of good lordship, in which lords of the manor were expected to acknowledge the personal nature of their relationship with their tenants and their duty to treat them well, and the actual practices of landowners. But to the extent that this was a standard by which landlords chose to describe their role, then the tension between prescription and practice provided a resource for tenants in conflicts with them.47 Something of the force that the appeal could carry is brought home by the rare survival among the papers of a Midlands gentleman of a series of letters that he received during a dispute over enclosure, together with his annotations upon one he considered libellous and the notes that he prepared for a legal action against its authors. Sir John Newdegate of Chilvers Coton in Warwickshire was the recipient of a letter in November 1607, written ‘in ye name of ye cuntrie & comonwealth’. Although it was addressed to him, copies had been made and passed around, in a deliberate breach of etiquette.48 Opening and closing in mocking acknowledgement of the syntax of deference, the letter was nevertheless a bitter personal attack:

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Public transcripts and popular agency Although few are ignorant of your purpose according to your owne report of depopulating & decaying the farmes at Griffe yet many doubt what should be the cause & end of your doeing the same for if it be upon malice & ill will you beare to the Comonwealth of your country & neighbors. Yet it is generally expected in the whole parish yt you will in a charitable devocion build an hospitall in the comon fieldes at Griffe, bycause the Towne seeth noe reason yt they should be charged wth maynteyning the poore therof when you have all the farmes & fieldes which should do the same, and if it be for covetousness only to inlarge demeynes of yor owne & not malice, pitty it is (saith the country) yt such ffarmes used in Comon where reliefe & hospitality for the poore hath byn & where ye parish hath byn eased in many collections, subsedies & service, should be taken in, improved & imployed only for the private benefitt of one gentleman being alredy of so sufficient & competent demaynes … and if your worship’s authority be such that neyther the kinges Ma[ jes]tie his lawes statutes nor commissions can withstand the same, then I will unfeinedly iuoy [ joy] at this your new found demeyne, in the meane since beseeching you to forbeare threatening in words & not doubting of your magnemious [magnanimous] gentlemanlike resolucion in deedes to put any thinge in practize which may tend for your private benefitt or to the publique hurte & disadvantage of yor poore neighbores & tennants.

This extraordinary letter took the transcripts of monarchical commonwealth, good lordship and gentility and used them to fashion a wounding criticism of Newdegate’s enclosing activities. Newdegate’s marginal annotations provide striking evidence of the force of this tactic. Among the phrases or words that he picked out were: ‘malice & ill wille’, ‘Comon wealth’, ‘covetuousnes’, ‘country’, ‘joy’, ‘publicke hurte’. In a world in which ideas of gentility were coming to depend increasingly upon the moral qualities of the individual – prominent among them liberality, charity and magnanimity49 – he recognised the challenge posed to his status as landlord and gentleman by the claim that in his case it was his inversion of those values that defined his status. A further letter urged Newdegate to throw down his enclosures and reminded him that it was not long since that he went about ‘to seke the distruckion of man woman and child of sum of youre neighbours in Cotton’. The author, ‘a poore miller’, who had also accused Newdegate of failing to do justice as a JP, ended by challenging him, ‘to use youre selfe lyke a neighboure Amoungeste us And offer youre pore neighboures no wrounge’.50 The protean transcript of neighbourliness might offer a powerful check to the pursuit of possessive individualism.51 Taken together, these complaints represent a comprehensive rebuke to Sir John for his failure to observe the dictates of lordship, gentility and neighbourliness, as well as the laws of the Commonwealth and the responsibilities of justiceship.52 In the dispute over enclosure, the commoners’ ability precisely to pick apart the identity that Newdegate had constructed for himself, and moreover to do so publicly, made the threatened loss of face that much greater. It helps to explain Sir John’s decision to proceed against them in Star

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Popular politics in early modern England Chamber, even though he recognised in a note in his papers that he had little chance of recouping the considerable expenses that this would entail. But even then his opponents were able to subvert his attempt to take them to court, claiming to be dutiful subjects of the King, who ‘were witnesses for ye king & had comitted [sic] no misdemeanor’. In a final twist of the tale, Newdegate’s opponents were able to exploit the popular participation called for in the judicial aftermath of the Midlands rising by presenting him as an encloser to the enclosure commissioners at Warwick. That this became the talk of the neighbourhood only added to the loss of face. In the end, it was Sir John who finally appeared in Star Chamber – to answer for his enclosing activities.53 As the example of Newdegate shows, notions of gentility and good lordship provided a transcript which could be reworked by subordinates. A petition arising out of an enclosure dispute at Begbroke in Oxfordshire in 1603 showed such a remarkable ability to deploy both the public transcript of commonwealth and good lordship to represent the challenge to social order posed by the enclosing activities of their lord of the manor, that when the commoners were brought to Star Chamber for it, they were forced to blame the drafter for embellishing their grievances.54 The petition was a more formal weapon, and therefore one of which there is more evidence. The petition might be made in person, and in number. Sir John Oglander, writing of how to manage the dislocations of dearth, spoke of having ‘300 with me in a morning’, while Essex JPs had first-hand experience of mass petitioning in 1629, when a crowd of near two hundred clothworkers delivered a petition detailing their distress, ‘all which they expressed with too many wordes and outcryes followinge us from place to place, and moveing us for Com[m]iseration, and urginge present answer’.55 Petitions, too, sought to manipulate public transcripts in the struggle over subsistence. Given the self-proclaimed duty of Crown and magistracy to prevent dearth, petitions to authority were frequent in years of harvest failure. Petitioning allowed the poor a more direct appeal to the public transcript, echoing official denunciations of middlemen as the creators of dearth, and calling on the authorities to take the actions required by government policy and their obligation to the poor. When a group of Wiltshire JPs met after the 1614 harvest to regulate the activities of middlemen, there were ‘manie poore people at the meeting at Warminster craving for Justice … [and] many poore people to complaine against them’.56 Petitioners showed a refined sensitivity to shifts in the public transcript. In Somerset in 1649, a third successive year of dearth, a petition from those calling themselves ‘many well affected and poore distressed people’, while adopting the appropriate language of humility and subordination, managed to remind their masters of the responsibilities of power and of their equality with them under God. The petition complained of abuses in the use and marketing of grain,

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Public transcripts and popular agency ‘the greatest cause of our sufferings (sin only excepted), hereunder according to our weake capacities, in semblance exprest, which we humbly conceive you maie and are entrusted to ease us of, and take such speedy course (by God’s assistance) effectually to help us, that our poore families be not remedilessely cast away, we having all one maker’. The petitioners expected action from the JPs as men ‘who are both by God & men intrusted to doe it’.57 The monarch was seen as having a natural role as a recipient of petitions detailing the subject’s grievances. This was a central image in that discourse of rule by which monarchs sought to legitimise their power. As such, it too could be appropriated. According to the author of a 1540s commonwealth tract, ‘a king is annointed to be a defence unto ye peoples that they be not oppressed nor overyoked, but by all Godly and polytyke meanes to seke ye commen welth of his people’.58 Thus, in the disputes over enclosure in the Cambridgeshire fens, Edward Powell, alias Anderson of the Fens, secured a following with the credible claim that on meeting with him at Newmarket the King had wept when he learnt of the commoners’ problems and had ordered him to report the names of any who hindered their petitioning.59 As the depression which blighted the Essex cloth industry deepened in 1629, a petition from the Essex weavers ‘humbly’ informed Charles I that had not the local authorities intervened, ‘many wretched people would have gathered together in a mutinie and have beene with your Majestye before this tyme to have made theire miseries knowne unto your Majestye for they said words would not fill the belly nor Clothe the backe’.60 This royal role was symbolised in popular folk-tales in which the King toured his country in disguise righting wrongs, and it was given reality in the complex possessionings of the royal procession. Among the petitioners heard at that time, were those from commoners concerned with their own more humble boundaries. While the procession gave petitioners access to the monarch, carefully managed, it allowed the monarch an opportunity to realise the image of monarchy as fount of all justice. Thus, both parties stood to gain from an exchange, carefully choreographed on each side. In 1603, loyal petitioners to James I on his progression south to the English throne, petitioned for the enclosure of their commons to be thrown open again, ‘which His Highness most graciously promised should be performed’. Similarly, a crowd of women who took advantage of the King’s presence at York in 1642 successfully to petition him about enclosure were reported as saying, ‘he is as proper A man as is in ingland’.61 Intercession might be used as a tactic with individuals but, as these examples show, its more formal use was in a dialogue with authority. In manipulating the public transcript of the responsibilities of the rulers, petitioners sought to call in authority to redress the imbalance between themselves and their powerful opponents. Where distance, either social or spatial, placed the subjects of popular hostility beyond immediate appeal, then intercession might turn to coercion.

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Popular politics in early modern England An incident at Dorchester, involving the same woman who had accused John White, suggests the pressures that sellers of grain had to negotiate on the fault-line of the market in years of dearth. On calling to a man to sell her some wheat and being told it was all sold, she retorted ‘that yf they were served aright they should be served as they were in france to cut holes in their baggs for that they sold al to the millers’.62 The threat made by a weaver (and exsoldier) in Essex in the difficult 1590s, that, ‘it would never be better until men did rise & seeke therby an amendment and [he] wished in his heart a hundred men would rise and he would be their captain to cut the throates of the rich Churles & the rich Cornemongers’, probably also took place in the market, since it was uttered ‘in the presence of many people’. The sequestered yet public space of the alehouse provided a sympathetic audience. Grumbling in an Essex alehouse, again in the difficult conditions of the 1590s, led a blacksmith to declare that ‘there ware dyvers he knewe had made shifte as longe as they can … and they woolde not stearve, and there woolde be such a sture if this ware not redressed between this and Christmas, as they that had moste corne, cheese and such lyke should have leaste’. Lest the point be lost, he went on to warn the sellers of victuals that twenty of them, ‘woold be hanged at our gattes before Christmas day’. Similarly, during the dearth of 1595 grumbling in a Colchester alehouse about grain supposedly being turned back from the port, had led to the threat that, ‘if thys hold our wyffes & chyldren wyll starve but by gods blood before we wyll starve we wyll not goe to the worst fyrst but we wyll goe to the best & pull the bayliffs out be [by] earrs. Some hathe consented to yt but yf all wyll consent to me you shall see a whott [hot] Colchester after next Satterdaye’.63 Such threats had to be negotiated by controllers of surpluses in years when tensions were anyway high, in contexts where there was no ready recourse to the protection of the state, and in a society where the transcript of the state and the preaching of the Church continued to underwrite the popular right to subsistence. The threat might be delivered in person to the subject of popular grievance or advantage taken of a sympathetic audience to air it. Creative adaptation of plays and their texts might secure the latter. Reports from Norfolk in 1536 of the adaptation of a May Day play ‘of a king how he should rule his realm’ in which the actor playing the part of Husbandry ‘said many things against gentlemen, much more than was in the book of the play’ provides but one example of protesters’ ability to appropriate popular cultural forms to stage pointed street theatre.64 But it was the resort to the ‘crime of anonymity’ that best allowed the threat of violence, often implicit in the grumble and appeal, to be made explicit. A libel from Norfolk, undated but probably dating from the 1590s, denounced the local governors for their failure to enforce orders against middlemen and attributed this to corruption. Complaining that ‘for seven years the rich have fed on our flesh’, it went on to warn that, ‘there are

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Public transcripts and popular agency 60,000 craftsmen in London and elsewhere, besides the poor country clown that can no longer bear, therefore their draught is in the cup of the Lord which they shall drink to the dregs, and some barbarous soldier shall lay open your hedges, reap your fields, rifle your coffers and level your house to the ground. Meantime give licence to the rich to set open shop to sell poor men’s skins.’ Opening with a declaration of loyalty to the Queen, it ended nevertheless with the ominous observation, ‘Necessity hath no law’.65 This rhetoric of violence was also much in evidence in enclosure disputes. One of the libels circulating during the late-fifteenth-century enclosure dispute at Coventry in comparing the commons to bees cautioned, Litell small been, That all about fleen, They waggen their whyng, Where as they light, The been will byte, And also styng. Loke that ye do right.66

Such threats might be accompanied with visual cues. Reports of graves being dug all over the disputed land or of ‘certaine boughes in the fashion of a pair of Gallows’ being erected in the disputes in the fens were thought to explain why ‘the country people are very backward in hiring any fen grounds’.67 Authority might also provide an unwitting audience for the broadcasting of the threat. Loyal petitioners could draw on a rhetoric of violence, hinting at the threat of popular disorder that abuses might produce if allowed to go unchecked. In Oxfordshire in the difficult 1590s, a crowd was said to have gone to the house of the Lord Lieutenant ‘and made petition to his L[ordshi]p for Releif for Corne, and for putting downe of enclosures’. According to this account, the crowd had told him ‘that yf they Could not have remedie, they would seek remedie themselves, and Cast downe hedges and dytches, and knocke down gentlemen’.68 Clothworkers in Wiltshire, who had drawn up a petition against the abuses of middlemen – ‘which we truly knowe to be the originall cause of dearthe’ – had had it presented by only one of their number ‘to avoide a trouble unto your worshipps & the danger of the Lawe’, but they were nevertheless able to tell the JPs of their ‘doubte of a farther danger yf this mischiefe be not prevented’, while in the later 1630s a poor Essex clothworker petitioning for relief disavowed any ‘unlawful co[u]rse’, but still managed to remind the magistrates of earlier episodes of disorder and to observe ominously, ‘it is hard to stave Job saieth, since for skin & all that a man hath he will give for his life’.69 The Somerset petitioners of 1649 while ending their petition ‘humbly expecting … charitable assistance in soe iuste a cause’, nevertheless managed to improve their chances by referring to ‘further

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Popular politics in early modern England mischiefes ensuing which want of bread may cause’ and observing ‘water we can drinke, but stones we cannot eate’.70 Thus, petitioners might make explicit the threat of violence, but do so under the guise of loyal subjects anxious to inform authority of the threat, displacing agency for the threat on to an ‘other’ poor. Petitioners against middlemen in the dearth of 1647, though describing themselves as ‘poor inhabitants of Chelmsford and Moulshsam’, sought to increase their chances of securing action from the magistrates by informing them that ‘the poor in the towne thought to goe and take away the goods from these Higlers’.71 Even a single individual might be able to deploy this weapon successfully. A ‘private’ warning to a Gloucestershire JP from a solitary weaver that he was about to be visited by a crowd of at least 500, ‘such as were in want with their staves readye at their dores … [who intended] to doe mee no harme, but to make their wants knowne’, successfully initiated correspondence with the central government about relieving the problems of the clothworkers.72 III In the dearth of 1630 a libel (with footnote!) was thrown into the minister’s porch at Wye in Kent.73 It cautioned: the.CORNE.is.so.deAR. i.dout.MANI.will.stARUe.this.YEARE. if.you.see.not.to.this. sum.of.you.will.speed A.miss. OUR.soules.they.ARE.deAR. for.OURe.Bodyes.HAVe.sume.CEARE Be.fore.We.ARise. lese.will.SAfise ________________________________ NOTE.The.PORe.TheRe.is.MORe. Then. [Than] Goes.from.dore.to.dore YOU.yt.Are.set.in.plAce. See.yt.youRe.PRofesion.you.Doe.not.dis.GRAce

The ironic suggestion that ‘those set in place’ cared more for the souls than for the bodies of the poor or their material well-being, showed the ability of the anonymous author to manipulate the transcripts of both Church and state to shame the authorities into action – and to do so successfully. The anonymous letter was forwarded to the Privy Council with a note expressing the fear that ‘some distemper is growing amongst the inferior sort of people’. Within a week the authorities at the nearby port of Faversham had imposed a toll on the movement of grain through the port and had arranged for the distribution of grain at subsidised prices to the poor. Within little more than a fortnight, the central government, in the guise of the Lord Treasurer, had written angrily

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Public transcripts and popular agency to the town’s authorities, withdrawing a licence to export grain granted at the beginning of November.74 This was a common pattern. Shaming by reference to standards more widely held was common to all those weapons that drew on public transcripts. Where the victims were members of the local community, then such a tactic might achieve its goal of prompting a response to the grievances articulated. In a face-to-face society, the effect on those who lived within the community of these and other forms of everyday moral and economic boycott – so trivial and daily as to have escaped the historian’s attention – may well have stood a good chance of success. The example of a Kentish yeoman employing a middleman to sell his grain because he was ‘loath himself to be seen to sell it’ hints at the potential power of the moral condemnation underlying these weapons of the weak.75 As Keith Thomas has noted, laughter in close-knit village communities could preserve established values and condemn unorthodox behaviour.76 But shaming tactics might also have purchase higher up the social order, and the potential costs of the loss of good opinion could stretch to some surprising places. That failure to sell his grain ‘for the overall good of the people’ was a judgement made on an unsuccessful candidate in a parliamentary election, and featured as a criticism of two aldermen in a dispute with the Corporation at Newcastle, hints at the political costs that failure to observe the moral economy could bring.77 In 1597, the Earl of Huntingdon’s parliamentary candidate for the borough of Leicester, a stronghold of anti-enclosure feeling, was rejected on the grounds that as an encloser he was unlikely to correct that fault in others; while in Cambridgeshire in the county election of 1614, the freeholders expressed a similar concern, ‘that if Sir John Cutts, etc., were chosen, their Fens would be drained, and a third Part be given away to the Undertakers’.78 Ostracism might stretch even further. The prosecution of his cousin in Star Chamber for failing to sell grain on the open market led to Sir Robert Sidney being treated ‘like a pariah’ at the Elizabethan Court.79 The experience of the encloser Sir Thomas Tresham in Northamptonshire offers an example of the force of this moral condemnation. Tresham’s ‘hard and extreme usage of his tenants and countrymen’ was said to have made him ‘most odious in this country’. In 1596, it was reported that ‘the common people and many others exclaim upon enclosures, and that Sir Thomas is not forgotten for Hasselbiche, although it be beforehand’. At Great Houghton, Tresham’s son was forced to conclude that a scheme to enclose the village would not work since, ‘you could not remove all the tennantes without much clamor, and especiallie when itt is so neare Northampton, whose affecttiones arr well knowen to you’.80 In 1603 he was informed by one of his servants that his attempt to sell his sheep in the local markets had provoked uproar and had been met with many speeches, ‘that your sheep hath done much wrong in the commonwealth’; significantly, the only sale he had been able to make that day

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Popular politics in early modern England was to ‘a poor foreigner’. Ultimately, Tresham’s reputation as an encloser led to his prosecution in Star Chamber.81 As these examples suggest, the weapons of the weak were at their most effective when manipulating public transcripts in a dialogue with authority. Grumbling by the poor that their rulers had turned away grain or failed to prevent its export, and that the wealthy had failed to exercise the charity demanded of them by the Church, their own self-image and the social construction of their responsibilities to their subordinates, might have an immediate local impact. But it was when these complaints were relayed to authority that they had most chance of making a difference. Reports to the Privy Council of expressions of popular discontent were invariably followed by orders into the region to relieve the poor, to regulate the markets or to report on enclosures. There are multiple examples of this ability of the central government to defy the logic of its own dismissal of sedition as ‘the frutes of some idle and discontented braynes’ on the grounds that they ‘glanceth at soome abuses worthie [of ] reformacion’.82 Following the discovery of a seditious libel at Norwich in the dearth of 1595 – almost certainly the one quoted above – the Council complained to the Mayor, ‘what mutinous and haughty term that kind of people is carried, not in any sort to be tollerated’, but in almost the same breath it went on to inform him, ‘by way of admonicion that we hold yt requizit that you take better order for the releif of the poore inhabitantes there by procuring them worke and by other good meanes then yt seemeth you have done’.83 But the weapons of the weak also derived their clout from reference to another transcript, Scott’s hidden transcript of the subordinated. Scott perhaps underestimates both the difficulties for the historian in recovering hidden transcripts in past societies and, more importantly, the interpretative problems in establishing the level of popular subscription to that transcript. The relationship between sedition and broader patterns of possible class-consciousness in early modern England remains complex. As E. P. Thompson concluded in his study of the threats of letter-writers in a later period, ‘their intent is serious, but it may not be taken too literally’.84 For some, their ability to whisper threats, as it were, under their breath in what Scott terms sequestered sites, like the alehouse, undoubtedly offered a breathing space within the cultural hegemony that otherwise constrained such open expressions, while in other cases outbursts undoubtedly reveal the high psychic and material costs of poverty and subordination. All show the potential ability of the subordinated to see through the terms of their subordination. But, fortunately, the thorny issue of how wide popular subscription was to the hidden transcripts revealed in sedition need not detain us here. Their superiors’ readiness to believe that threats of ‘stirs’ and hangings revealed the hidden transcript of the poor allowed them to use these fears as a fulcrum on which to lever authority into adherence to the public transcript prescribing the appropriate remedial policies that authority

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Public transcripts and popular agency should pursue. Cases of grumbling and sedition, thus reflected a sophisticated borrowing of the elite’s own hidden transcript of the ‘many-headed monster’. As another libel from the enclosure dispute at Coventry warned: Such favour as ye shewe us such shall ye see. We may speke feire and bid you good morowe, But luff [love] with our hertes shull ye have non Cherish the Cominalte and se[e] they have their right For drede of a worse chaunce be day or be nyght.85

The rhetoric of violence was then an invitation to action on the part of the authorities, rather than a call to arms. As such, it reflected a shrewd reading of the acceptable and effective limits to collective action under the existing balance of power within early modern England. Thus, The pooremans Joy and the gentlemans plague, an extraordinarily bloody libel from the Midlands rising, which warned Lincolnshire gentlemen inter alia ‘not [to] looke to dye in bed, as oth[e]rs haue don before/but let som thinke to hang upon the dore’, none the less ended with the call, ‘take order som, which be very good/or ells as we have said, yt shall cost the price of blood’.86 Crowd actions were always an exceptional intervention in the politics of subsistence.87 But the tradition of disorder to which they bore witness played its part in the everyday politics of subsistence. As the Wiltshire Bench warned, the lack of work for clothworkers was such as, ‘wee feare, & have experimentally found in times past & on lesse occasion they will take such indirect courses to supply themselves which may be of evill Consequence’.88 Knowledge that crowds appeared in predictable contexts, but that, of course, the exact timing of their next appearance could never be predicted, worried authorities who were only too well aware of the limited forces that they had to repress crowds once risen. In the aftermath of the Midlands rising, the Earl of Salisbury received a series of letters from provincial magistrates anxious to ensure that the harvest failure of 1608 should not lead to further violence. A letter from Warwickshire warned him that harvest failure there made ‘the people arrogantly and seditiously to speake of the not reformeing of Convertion of errable lande into pasture by enclosing’, while one from Northamptonshire reported a meeting of the high constables at which they expressed, ‘the great dislike they have of th’inclosures, which bread the latter Sture among the Meaner sort … and … greve that no reformation doth follow’.89 A further letter from Northamptonshire, reporting that ‘the poorer sort begin to cry out … and I hear there has been in some of our markets some stirring of the poor people’, called for the reintroduction of the Book of Orders.90 The tradition of disorder therefore lent weight to the other weapons of the weak, forcing the authorities to treat seriously even drunken alehouse grumblings.

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Popular politics in early modern England IV Crowd actions provide a privileged point of access to popular political culture. They represent moments when the opaque surface of the past is punctured, allowing subordinated groups – rendered otherwise silent by limited access to a public voice and to the preserved record – to testify to their beliefs. But reconstructing popular politics from riot and rebellion has produced what we might label a ‘stepping-stone’ history, in which periods of subordination are punctuated by moments of agency and a popular politics is seen as spasmodic and reactive.91 Scott’s concern with ‘everyday politics’ is a critique of those who have attempted to read off popular political consciousness from spectacular episodes of collective action. Studies of crowd actions that fail to situate them within an understanding of the broader popular political culture from which they arose will continue to offer an impoverished picture of the potentialities of popular politics. As we have seen, Scott’s notion of the public transcript can be made to address directly issues of political culture. The concern of elites to secure ideological hegemony and hence legitimation, has considerable resonances for understanding both the repertoires and discourses of rule employed by powerholders in early modern England. The concern for legitimation opened up a space for the development of a popular political culture which derived much of its force, and certainly much of its legitimation, from a (selective) appropriation of power-holders’ public transcripts. An awareness that the public transcript is the outcome of regular, not episodic, negotiation between dominant and subordinate groups, extends the range of forms that resistance might take. Subordinate groups had available to them means of affecting the terms of their subordination which were both less dramatic and more continuous than ‘riot’. Scott’s work allows us to contextualise crowd actions within a broader repertoire of the ‘weapons of the weak’, and to see them in relation – rather than in opposition – to these other forms of negotiation. An awareness of everyday politics provides a corrective to that historiography which equates the absence of riot with the absence of popular political consciousness or the acceptance of existing patterns of subordination. As Scott himself cautions, ‘an assessment of power relations read directly off the public transcript between the powerful and the weak may portray a deference and consent that are possibly only a tactic’.92 Above all, Scott’s work underwrites a redefinition of the political that makes it difficult to sustain claims that subordinate groups in early modern England were either powerless or lacked political awareness. Although without formal political power, the people in early modern England were able to exercise agency, and to do so on a more regular basis, than is suggested by accounts which focus on the irregular appearance of the crowd. They were able to do so

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Public transcripts and popular agency because the weapons that they chose to employ exploited the spaces created by the structures and discourses of rule in the early modern English state. It was the state’s formal weaknesses in its powers of repression and its concern to secure consent through a very public transcript of the responsibilities of power, that required authority to anticipate and placate popular protest. At the same time, this exposed provincial authorities both to the threat of popular action from below and of royal criticism from above. This heightened their sensitivities to expressions of popular grievance, and made them more ready to negotiate or to invoke relief from central government – negotiations in which, ironically, they themselves were not averse to employing the hidden transcript of ‘the many-headed monster’ to force the central government’s hand. Thus, it was the people’s ability to articulate their interests in terms of a public transcript that gave legitimacy to the state that also gave legitimacy to their complaints, if not always to the manner of their making. As Scott observes, ‘the safest and most public form of discourse is that which takes as its basis the flattering self-image of elites. Owing to the rhetorical concessions that this self-image contains, it offers a surprisingly large arena for political conflict that appeals to these concessions’.93 A rhetorical strategy based on popular knowledge of the public transcript, while allowing subordinates to shame and coerce individual opponents, was most effective when it allowed the ruled to summon authority to intervene on their behalf in the politics of subsistence. At the same time, the subordinated in early modern England were able to enlarge the terms of their agency by evoking the elite’s fears of the many-headed monster, at once part of the official, and hidden plebeian, transcript. The political sophistication with which the people deployed their weapons within the infrapolitics of subsistence, manipulating both their betters’ self-image and their image of the many-headed monster, makes it hard to sustain the notion that they inhabited a pre-political world. NOTES I am indebted to Keith Wrightson and Mike Braddick for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this chapter. 1 BL, Lansdowne MS, 81, fo. 76. No copy of the ballad appears to have survived. 2 On the politics of custom, see K. Wrightson, ‘The politics of the parish in early modern England’, in P. Griffiths, A. Fox and S. Hindle (eds), The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England (London, 1996), pp. 22–5; A. Wood, ‘The place of custom in plebeian political culture: England 1550–1800’, Social History, 22 (1997), 46–60; E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common (London, 1991), pp. 1–15, 97–184. 3 The attempt to defend a festive community, which emphasised the obligations of the wealthy to provide money, food and drink, and for which the inversionary and liminal form of the celebrations themselves could provide another potent weapon of the poor, provides one area of early modern historiography worth revisiting. For some helpful

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Popular politics in early modern England insights on the ‘festive community’, see K. E. Wrightson, ‘The Puritan Reformation of Manners with Special Reference to the Counties of Lancashire and Essex 1640–1660’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Cambridge, 1973), pp. 24–38; for an excellent example of the politics of this conflict for a later period, see R. Bushaway, By Rite: Custom, Ceremony and Community in England 1700–1880 (London, 1982). 4 J. C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven CT, 1985), p. 15; and ibid. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven CT, 1990). 5 P. L. Hughes and J. F. Larkin (eds), Tudor Royal Proclamations (3 vols, New Haven, 1964–69), I, pp. 464–5. 6 Hughes and Larkin, Tudor Royal Proclamations, 3, pp. 193–5; PRO, SP 16/541, no. 134. 7 R. Wilkinson, A Sermon Preached at North-Hampton the 21. of June last past, before the Lord Lieutenant of the County, and the rest of the Commissioners there assembled upon occasion of the late Rebellion and Riots in those parts committed (London, 1607), sig. B3v. 8 R. H. Tawney and E. Power (eds), Tudor Economic Documents (3 vols, 1924), 3, pp. 62–3; APC, 1597, p. 351. 9 L. Wright, A Summons for Sleepers, Wherein most grievous and notorious offenders are cited to bring forth true frutes of repentance (London, 1589), p. 4. 10 A. McRae, God Speed the Plough: The Representation of Agrarian England, 1500–1660 (Cambridge, 1996), p. 58 (but cf. p. 72). 11 J. S. Cockburn, A History of the English Assizes 1558–1714 (Cambridge, 1972), pp. 181– 7; A. Hassell Smith, County and Court: Government and Politics in Norfolk, 1558–1603 (Oxford, 1974), pp. 91ff. 12 C. Read (ed.), William Lambarde and Local Government (Ithaca, NY, 1962), pp. 163–4. 13 BL, Lansdowne MS, 90, fos 48–9. 14 E.g. Bodl., MS, Firth c.4, pp. 485–6; SRO, DD/PH 222/92; ibid., Quarter Session Order Book 1646–1650, fos 137r–v. 15 R. P.[owell], Depopulation Arraigned, Convicted and Condemned, By the Lawes of God and Man: a Treatise Necessary in These Times (London, 1636), p. 145; CSPD, 1649–1650, p. 121. 16 For example, B. W. Quintrell (ed.), Proceedings of the Lancashire Justices of the Peace at the Sheriff’s Table During Assize Week, 1578–1694 (Lancashire and Cheshire Record Society, 121, 1981), pp. 171–2. 17 P. Slack, From Reformation to Improvement: Public Welfare in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1999), p. 12; cf. M. E. James, ‘The concept of order and the Northern rising of 1569’, P&P, 60 (1973), 61–4. 18 I am preparing a larger study on the politics of subsistence in early modern England which will integrate a fuller analysis of ‘the weapons of the weak’ with an analysis of the politics of the crowd. 19 Cf. J. M. Neeson, Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700–1820 (Cambridge, 1993), ch. 9. Neeson’s discussion of opposition to enclosure in a later period offers many points of comparison with the analysis here. 20 For a development of these ideas, see J. Walter, ‘The social economy of dearth in early modern England’, in J. Walter and R. Schofield (eds), Famine, Disease and the Social

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Public transcripts and popular agency Order in Early Modern Society (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 123–8; S. Hindle, The Birthpangs of Welfare: Poor Relief and Parish Governance in Seventeenth-Century Warwickshire (Dugdale Society, occas. papers, 40, 2000), pp. 27–8. 21 Dorset Record Office, Dorchester, hereafter DRO, DC/DOB/8/1, fos 46r, 54; Tawney and Power, Tudor Economic Documents, 2, p. 189. 22 HMC, Buccleuch MSS, 3, p. 35. 23 J. Walter, ‘A “rising of the people”? The Oxfordshire rising of 1596’, P&P, 107 (1985), 97. 24 Warwickshire RO, CR 136/c.2614. 25 DRO, DC/DOB/8/1, fos 46r, 54, 59, 100v–101. For White, see D. Underdown, Fire From Heaven: Life in an English Town in the Seventeenth Century (London, 1992), passim. 26 H. A.[rthington], ‘Provision for the poore, now in penurie’. Out of the Store-Houes of Gods plentie … (London, 1599), C2. 27 F. G. Emmison, Early Essex Town Meetings (London, 1970), pp. 19, 23, 96, 101; Walter, ‘The social economy of dearth in early modern England’, p. 112. 28 WRO, Quarter Sessions Great Roll (hereafter Q/S Gt. Roll), Easter 1621, 16; ibid., Quarter Sessions Order Book, I, Hil. 1647/8 (case of Rog. Ballard); A. Jackson, A History of Retford: The Growth of a Nottinghamshire Borough (Retford, 1971), pp. 19–20. 29 PRO, STAC 8/142/16. 30 DRO, DOB 8/1, fo. 78v. 31 Walter, ‘The social economy of dearth in early modern England’, especially pp. 105–113. 32 A. Raine (ed.), York Civic Records, 4 (Yorkshire Archaeological Society, 108, 1945), p. 2. 33 PRO, STAC 8/34/4. 34 Walter, ‘The social economy of dearth in early modern England’, p. 111. 35 For example, J. King, A Sermon Preached in Yorke the Seventeenth Day of November 1595 (Oxford, 1597), p. 705; Anon., ‘A Looking glasse for Corne-hoarders’, in H. E. Rollins, A Pepysian Garland: Black-Letter Broadside Ballads of the Years 1595–1639 (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1922), pp. 370–5; Anon., ‘A warning-piece for engrossers of corn …’, in Rollins (ed.), The Pack of Autolycus or Strange and Terrible News … (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1927); ‘The Rich Farmers Ruine, Who Murmured At the Plenty of The Seasons, Because He Could Not Sell Corn So Dear As His Covetous Heart Desired’, in W. Chappell and J. W. Ebsworth (eds), The Roxburghe Ballads (9 vols, 1871–97), VI, pp. 535–6. 36 Warwickshire RO, CR 136/B711 (2 October 1608). 37 On the ritual curse, see K. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth Century England (London, 1971), pp. 599–611. For examples of a belief in God’s judgements on enclosers, see J. Moore, A Target for Tillage, Briefely Containing the Most Necessary Pretious, and profitable use thereof both for King and State (London, 1613), pp. 43–5; J. Moore, The Crying Sin of England of not Caring for the Poor. Wherein Inclosure, viz. such as doth unpeople Townes, and uncorn Fields, is Arraigned, Convicted, and Condemned by the Word of God. Being the chief Heads of two Sermons, Preached at the Lecture at Lutterworth in Leicester-shire in May last, and now published in love to Christ, his Country, and the Poor (London, 1653), pp. 21–3; J. Bentham, The Christian Conflict: A Treatise, Shewing the Difficulties and Duties of this Conflict, with the Armour, and speciall Graces to be exercised by Christian Souldiers … Preached in the Lecture of Kettering in the County of Northampton (London, 1635), p. 322.

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Popular politics in early modern England 38 W. H. Hosford, ‘An eye-witness account of a seventeenth-century enclosure’, EcHR, 2nd ser., 4 (1951), 215–20, quotations at 215–16. 39 J. R. Ravensdale, ‘Landbeach in 1549: Ket’s rebellion in miniature’, in L. M. Mumby (ed.), East Anglian Studies (Cambridge, 1968), p. 110. 40 PRO, STAC 8/227/3; Warwickshire RO, CR 931/177–8. 41 Ravensdale, ‘Landbeach in 1549’, p. 110. 42 J. H. E. Bennett and J. C. Dewhurst (eds), Quarter Session Records with other records of the Justices of Peace for the County Palatine of Chester 1559–1760 (Lancashire and Cheshire Record Society, 94, 1940), p. 13; PRO, SP 16/187/12. 43 PRO, STAC 8/105/9. 44 Ibid. 45 T. I. J. Jones, ‘The Enclosure Movement in South Wales in the Tudor and Early Stuart Periods’ (M.A. dissertation, University of Wales, Cardiff, 1936), p. 364; A. Fox, ‘Ballads, libels and popular ridicule in Jacobean England’, P&P, 145 (1994), 47–83; Tawney and Power, Tudor Economic Documents, 3, p. 12; Belvoir Castle MSS, Muniments Room, Room I, Case 3, vol. 15, fo. 41v. 46 PRO, STAC 8/10/18. I intend to publish a contextualised study of this episode. 47 F. Heale and C. Holmes, The Gentry in England and Wales 1500–1700 (London, 1994), pp. 102–5. Richard Hoyle’s work on landlord–tenant relations led him to conclude that moral constraints and social conventions had real force in curtailing landlord oppression: R. W. Hoyle, ‘Lords, tenants and tenant right in the sixteenth century: four studies’, Northern History, 20 (1984), 44, 47. 48 Warwickshire RO, CR 136/B.2, 136/c.2623. The letter appears to have been written by a local gentleman. 49 Heal and Holmes, The Gentry in England and Wales, pp. 277, 372. For the centrality of magnanimity to the ideal of gentility, see Anna Bryson, ‘Concepts of Civilty in England c. 1560–1685’ (D.Phil. Dissertation, University of Oxford, 1984), p. 237. 50 Warwickshire RO, CR 136/c.2613, 2615. 51 See the interesting examples discussed in A. Wood, The Politics of Social Conflict: The Peak Country 1520–1770 (Cambridge, 1999), p. 189. 52 Sir John was a godly magistrate who argued in his commonplace book, ‘as obedience is due to us, so is our study, our labour and our industry, with virtuous example, due to them that be subject to our authority’, and stressed in his charges to quarter sessions the JPs’ duties ‘to our neighbour’ and responsibilities to the poor, even, on one occasion, detailing the laws against forestallers and engrossers: V. M. Larminie, The Godly Magistrate: The Private Philosophy and Public Life of Sir John Newdigate 1571–1610 (Dugdale Society, occas. papers, 28, 1982), quotations at pp. 15, 17; and V. M. Larminie, Wealth, Kinship and Culture: The Seventeenth Century Newdigates of Arbury and Their World (Woodbridge, 1995), pp. 13–14; Warwickshire RO, CR 136/B711 (notes, dated 2 Oct 1608, for a charge to a jury by a local JP, presumably Newdegate; this is not included in Larminie’s list of charges, Wealth, Kinship and Culture, p. 152n). 53 Warwickshire RO, CR 136/B557/3; 136/B557/2; PRO, STAC 8/15/21. 54 PRO, STAC 8/142/16.

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Public transcripts and popular agency 55 F. Bamford (ed.), A Royalist’s Notebook: The Commonplace Book of Sir John Oglander, Kt. of Nunwell (1585–1655) (London 1936), p. 61; Bodl., MS, Firth c. 4, p. 484. 56 WRO, Q/S Gt. Roll, Hil. 1615, 186. 57 SRO, Q/S Petitions, Wells, Jan. 24 Car I. 58 Henry Brinkelow, The Co-Plaint of Roderych Mors, sometimes a gray fryre unto the parlament house of Ingland hys naturall countrey: for the redresse of certeyn wycked lawes evell custumes & cruell decrees [?1548] (Amsterdam, 1973), A8r–v. 59 PRO, SP 16/409/50. 60 Bodl., MS, Firth c.4, p. 495. 61 C. Geertz, ‘Centers, kings and charisma: reflections on the symbolics of power’, in J. Ben-David, J. Clarke and T. Nichols (eds), Culture and its Creators, Essays in Honour of Edward Shils (Chicago, 1977), p. 153; C. H. Firth (ed.), Stuart Tracts 1603–1693 (London, 1903), p. 40; F. P. Verney, Memoirs of the Verney Family During the Civil War (4 vols, 1892), 2, p. 86. See also, Wood, The Politics of Social Conflict, pp. 236–7. 62 DRO, DC/DOB/8/1, fo. 46r. 63 ERO, Q/SR 131/36; ERO(C), D/DB 5 Sb2/5, fo. 186v. 64 G. R. Elton, Policy and Police: The Enforcement of the Reformation in the Age of Thomas Cromwell (Cambridge, 1972), p. 143. 65 HMC, Salisbury MSS, 18, pp. 168–9. That much of this passage echoes word-for-word a passage in an Elizabethan accession-day sermon, delivered in the harvest crisis of 1595 and printed in 1597, raises intriguing questions about the direction of the borrowings – or was there a common source? – between the public and hidden transcript: King, A Sermon Preached in Yorke, p. 704. 66 Tawney and Power, Tudor Economic Documents, 3, pp. 12–13; R. B. Rose, ‘Coventry: the common lands’, VCH, Warwickshire, 8 (1969), pp. 199–203. 67 PRO, STAC 8/266/19; 8/265/7; S. R. Gardiner (ed.), Reports of Cases in the Court of Star Chamber and High Commission (Camden Society, 2nd ser., 39, 1886), pp. 509–65; J. Rushworth, Historical Collections of Private Passages of State … (1659–1701), 3, pp. 39–40; CSPD, 1639–1640, pp. 35–6. 68 PRO, SP 12/262/4. 69 WRO, Q/S Gt. Roll, Hil. 1615/192; ERO, D/DEb 7/4. 70 SRO Q/S Petitions, Wells, Jan. 24 Car I. 71 ERO, Q/SR 332/106. 72 PRO, SP 14/131/4. 73 PRO, SP 16/175/81. 74 CKS, Fa AC 3, fo. 172r–v; Fa CPw 68, unno. (1 November, 9, 14 December 1630). 75 P. Clark, English Provincial Society from the Reformation to the Revolution (London, 1977), p. 232. 76 K. Thomas, ‘The place of laughter in Tudor and Stuart England’, Times Literary Supplement, 21 January 1977, p. 77. 77 Walter, ‘The social economy of dearth in early modern England’, p. 106; CSPD, 1596– 1597, pp. 428–9.

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Popular politics in early modern England 78 J. Thompson, History of Leicester to the End of the Seventeenth Century (London, 1849), pp. 300–1. Enclosure was also an issue in the 1614 election at Knaresborough: D. Hirst, The Representative of the People? Voters and Voting in England Under the Early Stuarts (Cambridge, 1975), p. 142. 79 R. L. Greaves, Society and Religion in Elizabethan England (Minneapolis, 1981), p. 626. 80 P. A. Pettit, The Royal Forests of Northamptonshire: A Study in Their Economy 1558–1714 (Northamptonshire Record Society, 23, 1968), p. 17; HMC, Various Collections, 3, pp. 89, 123; M. E. Finch, The Wealth of Five Northamptonshire Families 1540–1640 (Northamptonshire Record Society, 19, 1956), p. 89. Given that Tresham’s estate policy had been to switch to sheep – which accounted for nearly half of his income in the early 1590s – such a boycott could have had a major impact: Heal and Holmes, The Gentry in England and Wales, pp. 105–6. 81 PRO, STAC 8/18/12. 82 APC, 1615–1616, pp. 101–2. 83 APC, 1595–1596, pp. 88–9. 84 E. P. Thompson, ‘The crime of anonymity’, in D. Hay, P. Linebaugh, J. G. Rule E. P. Thompson and C. Winslow, Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (London, 1975), p. 279. 85 Tawney and Power, Tudor Economic Documents, 3, p. 13. 86 Belvoir Castle MSS, Muniment Rooms, Room I, Case 3, vol. 15, fo. 41v. 87 For why this was so, see the discussions in J. Walter, ‘The geography of food riots, 1585– 1649’, in A. Charlesworth (ed.), An Atlas of Rural Protest in Britain 1548–1900 (London, 1983), pp. 72–80; 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 Their Law in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (London, 1980), pp. 47–84; Walter, ‘“A rising of the people”?’. 88 WRO, Q/S Order Book 1, Mich. 1652. 89 PRO, SP 14/34/4; /35/52. 90 HMC, Salisbury MSS, 20, p. 174. 91 For further development of these ideas, see J. Walter, Understanding Popular Violence: The Colchester Plunderers (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 1–9, 348–52; and Walter, ‘Crown and crowd: popular culture and popular protest in early modern England (sixteenth and seventeenth centuries)’, Sotsial’naia Istoriia: Problemy Sinteza (Moscow, 1994), pp. 235– 48. 92 Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, p. 3. 93 Ibid., p. 18.

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Index

Note: ‘n’ after a page reference indicates the number of a note on that page. Bacon, Francis 15, 100, 106 Book of Orders 19, 55, 144, 154–7

Leonard, E. M. 75 libels 21–2, 24, 205–6, 210–211, 214, 215 London 5, 68, 71, 75, 79, 83, 85, 104, 155, 196

Captain Pouch 21 Carter, Ann 8, 34–5, 36–7, 39, 49, 52–3, 54 cloth industry 33, 43–8, 50–1, 55, 56, 68, 69, 70, 72, 93, 138 Cobb, Richard 3, 14 Coke, Sir Edward 98, 99, 100–1, 103, 120n.155 Commonwealth 198–9

Manning, Brian 4, 10 May Day 22, 23 Midlands Rising (1607) 5, 20, 21, 22, 104, 106, 193, 198, 199, 205, 208, 215 moral economy 18–19, 20, 25 Oxfordshire Rising (1596) 5, 11, 26n.3, 73–106 passim, 201

Davis, N. Z. 23 dearth 49, 67, 69, 74, 77–8, 81, 85–6, 98, 147–8, 160, 196, 201

petitions 44, 46–7, 50–1, 54–5, 56, 78, 185, 189, 194, 208–9, 211–12 politics of subsistence 11, 18, 21, 196–217 passim poor relief 50, 55, 150–1, 153–9, 160–2 poverty 34–5, 43–8, 50–1, 77, 94, 130–9, 142, 151–2, 182 protest enclosure 18, 20–4, 73–106 passim, 183–4, 190, 193–4 fenland 104, 183, 184, 209, 213 food 5, 7, 8, 18, 24, 27–59 passim, 67–72, 74–104, 124, 163 historiography 1–4, 6, 7, 10, 15–18, 27–8, 75–6 protesters clothworkers 43–9, 69 women 22, 32–41, 68–70, 95 public transcripts 10, 11, 197–200, 201, 216–17

enclosure 86–92, 93, 99–102, 103, 111n.59, 114n.87–8, 116n., 203, 204, 206–8 English Revolution 4, 11, 14, 16–17, 21, 25, 181–95 passim famine 124–30, 138, 146 Gardiner, S. R. 28 Gauden, John 27 Ginzburg, Carlo 18 Hale, Matthew 27, 98 harvest failure, 27, 29, 69–70, 74, 77–8, 104, 124–9, 136–7, 143, 148, 160 Hill, Christopher 4, 10, 75 Hobsbawm, Eric 3 Hoskins, W. G. 130–1 iconoclasm 25, 184–5, 186 infrapolitics 196–7 Ingram, Martin 23

rebellion, 1–3, 6, 16 rising, Western 5, 23, 104 Rogationtide procession 22–3 Rudé, George 3

Jacobs, Lucas 32, 37–8 James, M. E. 2

Scott, J. C. 18–19, 196–7, 200, 214, 216–9

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Index see also public transcripts; infrapolitics sedition 51, 73, 74, 125, 200–1, 203–4, 210–11, 212 Sen, Amartya 128, 139, 140 Shrove Tuesday 22 skimmington 23–4 Smith, Sir Thomas 15, 106 social economy 139–54 Steer, Bartholomew 73, 76, 79–81, 83–6, 89–95, 96–7, 105

subsistence crises 71, 104, 124, 126–7, 138, 141, 160 Tawney, R. H. 5 taxation populaire 29, 58, 68 Thomas, K. 213 Thompson, E. P. 3, 4, 5, 18–19, 214 Tilly, Charles 3 Underdown, D. 24

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