Fear, hatred and the hidden injuries of class in early modern England

Journal of Social History

Volumn 39, Issue 3, 2006, Pages

  Wood, Andy ^a,b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF EAST ANGLIA   (United Kingdom)

^b School of History   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33646498345     PISSN: 00224529     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/jsh.2006.0024     Document Type: Review

References (151)

1. K. Lindley, Popular politics and religion in civil war London (Aldershot, 1997), 235;
2. C. Hill, The world turned upside down: radical ideas during the English Revolution (London, 1972), 29.
3. Early American historians should note the anger that early modem English labouring people sometimes displayed towards their rulers: notably, that evidence challenges nationalist characterisations of social relations, in which the values of hierarchical, status-bound Ancien regime Europe are contrasted to the rugged individualism and lack of deference allegedly obtaining within seventeenth and eighteenth century America. See for instance Michael Zuckermans claim that social relations in early America were "different from anything European" and that a hostility to deference was "bred in the American bone:" M. Zuckerman, "Tocqueville, Turner and turds: four stories of manners in early America," Journal of American History, 85, 1 (1998), 13.
4. For a provocative characterisation of English social relations as purely deferential, see J.C.D. Clark, English society, 1688-1832 (Cambridge, 1985).)
5. See, for instance, J.A. Sharpe, Early modem England: a social history, 1550-1760 (1987; 2nd. ed., London, 1997), 126-9, 233-4.
6. For which approach in early America, see Zuckerman, "Tocqueville, Turner and turds," 26.
7. For the polar opposite of Zuckerman's characterisation of early American social relations, see G. S. Wood The radicalism of the American revolution (New York, 1992).
8. For the former approach, see the recent round table: "Deference or defiance" in Journal of American History, 85, 1 (1998).
9. For the latter approach, see my "Toore men woll speke one daye': plebeian languages of deference and defiance in England, c. 15201640," in T. Harris (ed.), The politics of the excluded, c. 1500-1850 (Basingstoke, 2001), 67-98.
10. K.D.M. Snell, "Deferential bitterness: the social outlook of the rural proletariat in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries" in M.L Bush (ed.) Social orders and social classes in Europe since J500: studies in social stratification (London, 1992), 165.
11. For an important sociological perspective, see H. Newby, The deferential worker: a study of farm workers in East Angiia (London, 1977).
12. For this rehabilitation, see most recently K.E. Wrightson, "These which be participant of the common wealth: class, governance and social identities in early modern England", forthcoming;
13. D. Rollison, "The spectre of a commonwealth: language and class struggle in England on the eve of the Atlantic world," forthcoming. I am grateful to both authors for granting me pre-publication access to these essays.
14. A. Wood, The politics of social conflict: the Peak Country, 1520-1770 (Cambridge, 1999), ch. 1.
15. For deference in nineteenth century England, see P. Joyce Work, society and politics: the culture of the factory in later Victorian England (Hassocks, 1980).
16. For this postmodern/linguistic turn, see in particular P. Joyce, Visions of the people: industrial England and the question of class, 1840-1914 (Cambridge, 1991);
17. J. Vernon, Politics and the people: a study in English political culture, c. 1815-1867 (Cambridge, 1993);
18. J.W. Scott, "The evidence of experience," Critical Inquiry, 17 (1991), 773-97;
19. G. Stedman Jones, Languages of class: studies in English working class history, 1832-1982 (Cambridge, 1983), esp. 1-24,90-178.
20. On class and gender in the early modern period, see L. Gowing, Domestic dangers: women, words and sex in early modem London (Oxford, 1996), 4-6. Nineteenth-century historians have been more interested in the relationship between class and gender. See,
21. in particular, L. Davidoff and C. Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English middle class 1780-1850 (London, 1987)
22. and A. Clark, The struggle for the breeches: gender and the making of the British working class (London, 1995 ).
23. Early modern English popular nationalism has yet to be explored. On court/papist conspiracy to reduce the commons of England to French subordination, see A. Wood, Riot, rebellion and popular politics in earfy modem England (Basingstoke, 2002), Ch.4.III.
24. On popular perceptions of the early reformation, see A. Wood, The 1549 rebellions and the making of early modem England (Cambridge, forthcoming), ch. 4-
25. For an assessment of the relationship between class identity, local-political conflicts, and confessional struggles, see J. Walter, Understanding popular violence in the English revolution: the Colchester plunderers (Cambridge, 1999).
26. For a formative discussion on the relationship between class and religion, see E.P. Thompson, The making of the English uwrking class (London, 1963), ch. 11.
27. For the new attention of labour historians to the pre-nineteenth century, see C. Lis, J. Lucassen and H. Soly (eds.), "Supplement 2. Before the unions: wage earners and collective action in Europe, 1300-1850," International Review of Social History, 39 (1994).
28. For a suggestive approach towards the historical relationship between gender and labour organisation, see M.E. Wiesner, "Guilds, male bonding and women's work in early modem Germany," Gender and History, 1, 2 (1989), 125-137.
29. For the Gloucester weavers, see Public Record Office [hereafter PRO], E134/HChasl/Mich45. Women's work in the early modern period is much better represented in the secondary literature than is that of men: see the generations of research stimulated by A. Clark, The working life of women in the seventeenth century (London, 1919).
30. S. Guazzo, The civile conversation (London, [1581 &. 1586] 1925 ed.) 1,175.
31. J.M. Williams " 'O! When degree is shak'd': sixteenth-century anticipations of some modern attitudes toward usage," in T.W. Machan and C.T. Scott (eds.) English and its social contexts: essays in historical sociolinguistics (New York, 1992), 71-3.
32. For the association between 'nation' and 'class', see L. Colley, "Whose nation: class and national consciousness in Britain, 1750-1830," Post & Present, 113 (1986).
33. M. Savage, "Space, networks and class formation," in N. Kirk (ed.), Social class and Marxism: defences and challenges (Aldershot, 1996), 58-86.
34. See the agenda laid out in P. Burke, "Introduction," in P. Burke and R. Porter (eds.), The social history of language (Cambridge, 1987). Early modern social historians have not really pursued Burke's proposition, leaving language to historians of elite political thought and to cultural historians.
35. For approaches to the 'middling sort/middle class' in the 1640s and after 1789, see K. Wrightson, "Sorts of people in Tudor and Stuart England," in J. Barry (ed.), The middling sort o/people: culture, society and politics in England, 1550-1800 (Basingstoke, 1994), 28-51;
36. Wood, Riot, rebellion, ch. 4;
37. D. Wahrman, Imagining the middle class: the political representation of class in Britain, c. 1780-1840 (Cambridge, 1995);
38. L. Hunt, Politics, culture, and class in the French Revolution (Berkeley, CA, 1984.)
39. D. Cressy, "Describing the social order of Elizabethan England," Literature and History, 3 (1976), 29-44;
40. K. Wrightson, "Estates, degrees and sorts: changing perceptions of society in Tudor and Stuart England," in P. Corfteld (ed.), Language, history and class (Oxford, 1991), 30-52.
41. Sennett and Cobb Hidden injuries, 28.
42. For a similarly overdrawn, and yet nonetheless useful, perspective, see C. Kerr and A. Siegel, "The inter-industry propensity to strike: an international comparison," in A. Kornhauser, R. Dubin and A.M. Ross (eds.), Industrial conflict (New York, 1954).
43. For medieval and early modern Europe, see P. Roberts and B. Naphy (eds.), Fear in early modem society (Manchester, 1997);
44. B.H. Rosenwein, Anger's post: the social uses of an emotion in the middle ages (Ithaca, 1998).
45. For the broader application of social history of emotions, P. Stearns and C.Z. Steams, "Emotionology: clarifying the history of emotions and emotional standards," American Historical Review, 90, 4 (1985), 813-36.
46. For other useful perspectives, see L. Abu-Lughod and C.A. Lutz, "Introduction: emotion, discourse, and the politics of everyday life," in L. Abu-Lughod and C.A. Lutz (eds.), Language and the politics of emotion (Cambridge, 1990), 1-23;
47. M. Berezin, "Secure states: towards a political sociology of emotion," in J. Barbalet (ed.), Emotions and sociology (Oxford, 2002), 3352;
48. D. Reid, "Towards a social history of suffering: dignity, misery and disrespect," Soda/ History, 27, 3 (2002), 343-58.
49. See, for instance, S. Hipkin, "Sitting on his penny rent: conflict and right of common in Faversham Blean, 1596-1610," Rural History, 11, 1 (2000), 1-35;
50. S. Hindle, "Custom, festival and protest in early modern England: the Little Budworth Wakes of St. Peter's Day, 1596," Rural History, 6, 2 (1995), 155-78;
51. S. Hindle, "Persuasion and protest in the Caddington common enclosure dispute, 1635-1639," Post and Present, 158 (1998) 37-78;
52. Wood, Politics of social conflict.
53. This approach is most clearly stated in M.J. Braddick and J. Walter, "Introduction. Grids of power: order, hierarchy and subordination in early modern society" in M.J. Braddick and J. Walter (eds.), Negotiating power in early modem society: order, hierarchy and subordination in Britain and Ireland (Cambridge, 2001),
54. and is implicit in the introduction to P. Griffiths, A. Fox and S. Hindle (eds.), The experience of authority in early modem England (Basingstoke, 1996).
55. For a case-study which suggests a different picture, see my "Subordination, solidarity and the limits of popular agency in a Yorkshire valley, c. 1596-1615," Post and Present, forthcoming.
56. J.C. Scott, Domination and the arts of resistance: hidden transcripts (New Haven 1990).
57. Sennett and Cobb, Hidden injuries, 36-7.
58. Sennett and Cobb, Hidden injuries, 77.
59. For this dismissal, see his Weapons of the weak: everyday forms of peasant resistance (New Haven, 1985), 317-28
60. A. Wood, "The place of custom in plebeian political culture: England, 1550-1800," Social History, 22, 1 (1997). 46-60;
61. 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 (Basingstoke, 1996), 10-46;
62. S. Hindle, "Power, poor relief and social relations in Holland fen, c.1600-1800," Historical Journal, 41, 1 (March,1998), 67-96.
63. E.A. Wrigley, Continuity, chance and change: the character of the Industrial Revolution in England (Cambridge, 1988), 53.
64. K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected works, 37 vols. (London, 1975-1998), I, 224-63.
65. For examples, see PRO, E178/7153; PRO, E133/7/942. For claims to popular rights to timber, see for instance PRO, STAC2/21/93; PRO, STAC3/6/30; PRO, E163/16/14; PRO, DL4/35/8.
66. PRO, DL4/109/8.
67. Essex Record Office [Chelmsford], D/DBa LU;
68. W. Hunt, The puritan moment: the coming of revolution in an English county (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), 35.
69. J.A. Sharpe, "Enforcing the law in the seventeenth century English village" in V.A.C. Gattrell, B. Lenman and G. Parker (eds.), Crime and the law: the social history of crime in western Europe since 1500 (London, 1980), 113.
70. For other late seventeenth-century examples of labouring people being forced to sign away their rights, see PRO, DL4/123/1686/7;
71. Derbyshire Record Office, D258M/28/20v
72. H.A. Hanley "The inclosure of Pitstone common wood in 1612," Records of Buckinghamshire, 29 (1987), 191-2.
73. Essex Record Office [Chelmsford], microfilm T/A 465/1, Colchester Borough book of examinations and recognizances, unfoliated. 18 February 1623 (i.e., 1624).
74. Quoted in R. Terdiman, Discourse/Counter discourse; the theory and practice a/symbolic resismce in nineteenth-century France (Ithaca, NY, 1985), 55.
75. PRO, STAC8/138/8;
76. PRO, C78/174/5;
77. PRO, STAC8/130/3.1-12.
78. R. Williams, Marxism and literature (Oxford, 1977), 31.
79. PRO, C3/154/6.1, 5;
80. PRO, Cl/1187/15-17;
81. PRO, STAC3/3/42;
82. PRO,C1/1204/99101;
83. PRO, STAC3/4/53.
84. For a protracted dispute in which a lower class litigant consistently describes his conflicts with a powerful gentleman in terms of a disparity of power, see PRO, STAC8/265/4;
85. PRO, DL4/69/23;
86. PRO, DL1/320, answer of John Johnson.
87. For hegemony and complicity, see T.J. Jackson Lears, "The concept of cultural hegemony: problems and possibilities," American Historical Review, 90, 3 (1985), 573.
88. For references to 'the povertie', see PRO, STAC3/4/89;
89. E. Lamond (ed.), A discourse of the common weal of this realm of England (Cambridge, 1893), Ixiii;
90. PRO, STAC10/16, fol. 153v; PRO, E36/120, fol. 176v.
91. PRO, STACS/34/4-42, 44.
92. On the language of binary division in early modern culture, see S. Clark, Thinking with demons: the idea of witchcraft in early modern Europe (Oxford, 1997).
93. Norfolk Record Office, NCR 16A/4, fol. 61v.
94. J. Strype, Annals of the Reformation, 4 vols. (Oxford, 1824), IV, 407.
95. M.L. Bush, The Pilgrimage of Grace: a study of the rebel armies of October I536(Manchester, 1996), 32, 46, 202.
96. H. Ellis (ed.), Holinshed's Chronicks, 6 vols. (1577 and 1587, new. edn., London, 1807-8), III, 942.
97. BL, Lansdowne MS 2, fol. 60r (no 25).
98. C. Hill, "The many-headed monster" in his Continuity and Change in seventeenth' century England (London, 1974), 61.
99. PRO.C1/1380/55-6.
100. B. Sharp, in contempt of all authority: rural artisans and riot in the west of England, 1586-1660 (Berkeley, 1980), 34.
101. S.J. Watts, From border to middle shire: Northumberland, 1586-1625 (Leicester, 1975), 31.
102. J. S. Morrill, The revolt of the provinces: conservatives and radicals in the English Civil War, 1630-1650 (London, 1980), 36.
103. Walter, Understanding popular violence, 19.
104. Lindley, Popular politics, 135.
105. Holinshed, Chronicles, III, 963.
106. Holinshed, Chronicles, III, 969.
107. Norfolk Record Office, NCR 12A/1(a), fol. 37r-v,
108. For those grievances against the gentry, see R.W. Hoyle, "Agrarian agitation in mid-sixteenth century Norfolk: a petition of 1553," Historical Journal, 44, 1 (2001), 223-38.
109. Norfolk Record Office, NCR 12A/1 (a), fol. 80v.
110. Historical Manuscripts Commission, Salisbury, XIII, 168-9;
111. Acts of the Privy Council, 1595-6, 88-9.
112. J. Walter, "Public transcripts, popular agency and the politics of subsistence in early modem England," in Braddick and Walter (eds.), Negotiating power.
113. The delicacy ofthat balance is best discussed in E.P. Thompson, Customs in common, ch. 2.
114. See A. Bryson, "The rhetoric of status: gesture, demeanour and the image of the gentleman in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England," in L. Gent and N. Llewellyn (eds.), Renaissance bodies: the human figure in English culture, c. 1540-1660 (London, 1990), 136-53.
115. PRO, STAC8/117/12.
116. For another such example, see Norfolk Record Office, NCR, 12A/1(c),fol. 55r.
117. D.E. Underdown, Revel, riot and rebellion: popular politics and culture in England, 1603-1660 (Oxford, 1985), 218.
118. For poor people pawning their clothes, see PRO, DL4/90/24;
119. The Moderate, 1017 July 1649, BL, Thomason Tracts, E.565 (11).
120. For labouring people's lack of clothing during dearth years, see Norfolk Record Office, NCR20A/10, fols. 2v-3r.
121. B.L. Beer, "The commosyon in Norfolk, 1549," Journal of medieval and renaissance studies, 6, 1(1976), 89-90.
122. Holinshed, Chronicles, III, 965.
123. PRO, STAC8/34/4.45, 54;
124. J.O. Haliwell (ed.), The marriage of wit and wisdom: an ancient interlude (London, 1846), 140-1.
125. C. Hill (ed.), Gerrard Winstanley: the law of freedom and other umrings (London, 1973), 92;
126. D.M. Wolfe, Leveller manifestos of the puritan revolution (New York, 1944), 275.
127. For an identical analysis, see Mercurius Populus, 11 November 1647, BL, Thomason Tracts, £.413(14).
128. For popular disinterest in ritual, see B. Klein, " 'Between the bums and bellies of the multitudes': civic pageantry and the problem of the audience in late Stuart London," London Journal, 17, 1 (1992), 18-26.
129. J.T. Evans, Seventeenth century Norwich: politics, religion and government, 1620-1690 (Oxford, 1979), 113.
130. G. H. Sabine, The works of Gerrard Winstanley: with an appendix of documents relating to the Digger movement (Ithaca, N.Y., 1941), 617-8.
131. M.W. Steinberg, "Culturally speaking: finding a commons between post-structuralism and the Thompsonian perspective," Social History, 21, 2 (1996), 208.
132. S. Guazzo, The civile conversation, I,145, 190;
133. S. Guazzo, The civile conversation, II, 17, 71.
134. PRO, STAC8/227/3.6;
135. K. Lindley, Fenland riots and the English Revolution (London, 1982), 54;
136. for other examples see PRO, STAC8/227/35.13, 38.
137. British Library, Microfilm, M485/82/379;
138. B. Sharp, In contempt of all authority: rural artisans and riot in the west of England, 1586-1660 (Berkeley, CA, 1980), 71.
139. A. Shepard, "Honesty, worth and gender in early modern England," in H. French and J. Barry (eds.), Identity and agency in England, 1500-1800 (Basingstoke, 2004), 87105.
140. Lichfield Joint Record Office, B/C/5/1623, Bonsall.
141. Fox, Oral and literate culture, 100.
142. R. Kegl, The rhetoric of concealment: figuring gender and class in Renaissance literature (Ithaca, NY, 1994), 145.
143. This literature is now synthesized into a powerful argument in S. Hindle, The state and social change in early modem England, c. 1550-1640 (London, 2000).
144. Wood, The J549 rebellions, ch. 5.
145. R. Cust (ed.), The papers of Sir Richard Grosvenor, IstBart. (1585-1645), Lancashire and Cheshire Record Society, 134 (Stroud, 1996), 32, 33, 34, 55, 57.
146. Norfolk Record Office, DN/DEP/5/5a, fols.153v-154v.
147. PRO, DL4/24/5.
148. A. Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England: a regional and comparative study (London, 1970), 147-58.
149. PRO, E134/39Eliz/East8.
150. For an important starting point, see S. Hindle, On the parish? The micro-politics of poor relief in rural England, c.1550-1750 (Oxford, 2004), 387-90,
151. reiterated in his "Civility, honesty and the identification of the deserving poor in seventeenth-century England," in French and Barry (eds.), Identity and agency, 38-59.