Hierarchy and community in the elizabethan parish: The Swallowfield articles of 1596

Historical Journal

Volumn 42, Issue 3, 1999, Pages 835-851

  Hindle, Steve ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 34250322492     PISSN: 0018246X     EISSN: 14695103     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0018246X99008651     Document Type: Article

References (95)

1. Patrick Collinson, 'De republica anglorum: or history with the politics put back', in Patrick Collinson, Elizabethan essays (London, 1994), pp. 23-5.
2. Cf. his earlier discussion in Patrick Collinson, 'The monarchical republic of Queen Elizabeth I', Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 69 (1987)
3. reprinted in Collinson, Elizabethan essays, pp. 32-3.
4. Collinson, 'De republica anglorum', p. 11.
5. The following account is based on VCH Berks., III, pp. 237, 261-74;
6. G. A. Kempthorne, 'An Elizabethan swanimote court roll of Finchampstead bailiwick', Berkshire Archaeological Journal, 36 (1932), pp. 106-20;
7. Cecil R. Humphery-Smith, ed., The Phillimore atlas and index of parish registers (Chichester, 1984), s.v. Berkshire.
8. John S. Beckerman, 'The articles of presentment of a court leet and court baron, in English, c.1400', Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 47 (1974), pp. 230-4;
9. D. A. Crowley, 'The later history of frankpledge', Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 48 (1975), pp. 1-15;
10. John S. Beckerman, 'Procedural innovation and institutional change in medieval English manorial courts', Law and History Review, 10 (1992), pp. 197-252;
11. Phillipp R. Schofield, 'The late medieval view of frankpledge and the tithing system: an Essex case study', in Zvi Razi and Richard Smith, eds., Medieval society and the manor court (Oxford, 1996), pp. 408-49;
12. and Jonas Adames, The order of keeping a courte leet and court baron (London, 1593 (STC. 100)). The formation of the Swallowfield company in early December does not conform to the usual manorial pattern whereby the view of frankpledge and court leet was held twice a year most commonly around Easter and Michaelmas.
13. The classic study remains Sidney and Beatrice Webb, English local government from the Revolution to the Municipal Corporations Act: the parish and the county (London, 1906), pp. 146-276.
14. Cf. the more recent discussions in Beat Kumin, The shaping of a community: the rise and reformation of the English parish, c. 1400-1560 (Aldershot, 1996), pp. 241-59;
15. and Steve Hindle, 'The political culture of the middling sort in English rural communities, 1550-1700', in Tim Harris, ed., The politics of the excluded (London and New York, forthcoming).
16. See Steve Hindle, The state and social change in early modern England, c. 1550-1640 (London and New York, forthcoming), ch. 8 ('The governance of the parish').
17. PRO E179/73/141 (16 Henry VIII).
18. PRO E179/243/25. These calculations employ the multipliers of 4.3 for both the lay subsidy and for the hearth tax, on the basis that the demographic context of the early sixteenth century was not dissimilar to that of the late seventeenth. Cf. L. R. Poos, A rural society after the black death: Essex, 1350-1525 (Cambridge, 1991) ', pp. 89-132.
19. Anne Whiteman (ed.), The Compton census of 1676: a critical edition (British Academy Records of Social and Economic History, 10, 1986), pp. 120, 132 n. 153.
20. The best recent summaries of the literature on the intersecting crises of war, dearth, and theft in the late sixteenth century are Peter G. Lawson, 'Property crime and hard times in England, 1559-1624', Law and History Review, 4 (1986), pp. 95-127;
21. and J. A. Sharpe, 'Social strain and social dislocation, 1585-1603', in John Guy, ed., The reign of Elizabeth I: court and culture in the last decade (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 192-211.
22. Berkshire Record Office, Reading (BRO) D/EN, Neville [Braybrooke] Collection, IV (Taxation Papers), 07/1-10. In a composition schedule of 1593 Swallowfield was liable for 26s8d of a hundredal total of £4 13s 4d. BRO D/EN 07/1/9. The very same day that the Swallowfield articles were drawn up the privy council ordered a report on composition for purveyance 'in the old seven hundreds' of Wiltshire. BRO D/EN 07/1/7.
23. The dealings of the Wiltshire justices with Swallowfield in the closing decades of the sixteenth century were confined to the issuing of alehouse recognizances, six of which were granted in the period 1580-7. H. C. Johnson, ed., Wiltshire county records: minutes of proceedings in sessions, 1563 and 1574 to 1592 (Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Society: Records Branch, 4, 1949), pp. 14, 60, 91, 93, 115.
24. BRO D/P 129/1/1 (register of burials, 1539-52, 1587-96).
25. David Levine and Keith Wrightson, 'The social context of illegitimacy in early modern England', in Peter Laslett, Karla Oosterveen, and Richard M. Smith eds., Bastardy and its comparative history: studies in the history of illegitimacy and marital nonconformism in Britain, France, Germany, Sweden, North America, Jamaica and Japan (London, 1980), p. 175;
26. Marjorie K. Mcintosh, 'Finding language for misconduct: jurors in fifteenth-century local courts', in Barbara A. Hanawalt and David Wallace, eds., Bodies and disciplines: intersections of literature and history in fifteenthcentury England (Minneapolis, 1996), p. 103 n. 67.
27. PRO C93/3/17 (chancery petty bag inquisition taken at Wokingham, 6 Apr. 1610).
28. BRO D/P 129/5/1 (churchwardens' accounts, 1614-1886), unfol.
29. For fuller discussion, see Hindle, 'The political culture of the middling sort'; and Hindle, The state and social change, ch. 8.
30. Christopher Brooks, Pettyfoggers and vipers of the commonwealth: the 'lower branch' of the legal profession in early modem England (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 48-111;
31. Christopher Brooks, 'Litigation and society in England, 1200-1996', in Christopher Brooks, Lawyers, litigation and English society since 1450 (London, 1998), p. 63.
32. Cf. Steve Hindle, 'The keeping of the public peace', in Paul Griffiths, Adam Fox, and Steve Hindle, eds., The experience of authority in early modern England (London, 1996), pp. 213-48
33. Eliz. I; c. 7 (1589);
34. Steve Hindle, 'Exclusion crises: poverty, migration and parochial responsibility in English rural communities, c.1560-1660', Rural History, 7 (1996), pp. 125-49;
35. R. H. Helmholz, 'Harbouring sexual offenders: ecclesiastical courts and controlling misbehaviour', Journal of British Studies, 37 (1998), pp. 258-68.
36. James I, c. 5 (1607); 21 James I, c. 7 (1624).
37. Cf. the earlier parliamentary bills discussed in David Dean, Law-making and society in late Elizabethan England: the parliament of England, 1584-1601 (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 177-8.
38. Steve Hindle, 'The problem of pauper marriage in seventeenth-century England', Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 8 (1998), pp. 71-89.
39. John Walter and Keith Wrightson, 'Dearth and the social order in early modern England', Past and Present, 71 (1976), pp. 22-42.
40. On the value of 'quietness' to the moral community, see Keith Wrightson, 'The politics of the parish in early modern England', in Griffiths, Fox, and Hindle, eds., The experience of authority in early modem England, pp. 18-19.
41. McIntosh, 'Finding language for misconduct', p. 92.
42. VCH Berks., III, p. 269.
43. Cf. Hindle, 'Exclusion crises', pp. 123-5, 136-7;
44. and the faculties in London Metropolitan Archives (LMA) DL/C/338-44 (vicar-generals' books of the diocese of London, 1601-62).
45. BRO D/A 2 c. 7 (visitation book of the archdeaconry of Berkshire, 1594-6), fos. 28, 39V, 52V. One Henry Kennard had served as curate of Swallowfield in 1594-5. The vicar of Shinfield throughout these years was Anthony Colynet, who appears to have attended neither Oxford nor Cambridge, but published The true history of the civill warres of France, between King Henry 4 and the leaguers,.gathered from 1585 untill this present October 1591 (London, 1591 (STC 5590)), of which a second edition appeared in 1609 (STC 5590.5).
46. The consistory of Threadneedle Street, London, summoned a 'Monsieur Colinet' before them in April 1571: A. M. Oakley, ed., Actes du consistoire de l'église de Threadneedle Street, Londres, II: 1571-1577 (Huguenot Society Quarto Series, 48, 1969), p. 7 (I am grateful to Andrew Spicer for this reference).
47. The living of Swallowfield, the advowson of which lay (like that of Shinfield) with the dean and chapter of Hereford cathedral, was a very poor one, with only 1.5 acres of glebe, the house, its garden and tithes of corn and hay for the parsonage of Swallowfield; and only 0.25 acres of glebe, and one cottage, with the small tithes for the vicarage of Shinfield in Swallowfield. Ian Mortimer, ed., Berkshire glebe terriers, 1634 (Berkshire Record Society, 2, 1995), p. 112.
48. The following discussion is based on BRO D/EHR M1-20 (court rolls of Bealmes manor, 1588-1613).
49. The personnel of the vestry and of the manor court in Braintree (Essex) and in Whickham (County Durham) were very similar, despite the lack of overlap in functions between the two bodies. F. G. Emmison ed., Early Essex town meetings: Braintree, 1619-36; Finchingfield, 1626-34 (London and Chichester, 1970), p. xv;
50. David Levine and Wrightson, The making of an industrial society: Whickham, 1560-1765 (Oxford, 1991), pp. 344-5n. 148.
51. BRO D/A 2 c. 7, fos. 28, 39v, 52v.
52. PRO E179/74/280 (36 Eliz. I).
53. PRO STAC 8/24/2 (Yelverton ex rel. Backhouse vs. Phipps et al., October 1619), m. 16.
54. BRO D/EHR Q1 (certificate regarding a pew in Swallowfield church belonging to the lord of Sheepbridge manor). The BRO listing of parish papers dates this document to c. 1625, but it must have been drawn up in the course of the pew dispute of 1619-20.
55. See Hindle, The state and social change, ch. 8.
56. BRO D/A 2 c. 40, c. 46, c. 154, c. 155 (act book, 1597-1601, deposition books, 1590-4, 1594-1600, 1601-10).
57. BRO D/A 2 c. 136, fos. 346-67 (churchwardens' presentments of Swallowfield in the deanery of Reading).
58. BRO D/EHR M1-20. Nothing in the Swallowfield manorial archive suggests the intensive regulation of the uses of waste that was characteristic of other forest communities at the turn of the seventeenth century.
59. Cf. Steve Hindle, 'Persuasion and protest in the Caddington common enclosure dispute, 1635-39, 'Past and Present, 158 (1998), pp. 48-50.
60. Although it is just possible that the Windsor Forest Swanimote court rolls and files contain prosecutions of this kind, the printed example is not very revealing.
61. See PRO C154/11 (Swanimote court, held at Wokingham in Finchampstead bailiwick, 26 Eliz. I-9 Chas. I);
62. and Kempthorne, 'An Elizabethan swanimote court roll'.
63. PRO STAC 8/24/2. John Phipps and Mary Phipps were convicted and fined £500 and £40 respectively' in June 1620. PRO E. 159/460 Trinity 19 Jas., rot. 46 (30 June 1620). The 'inhabitants' of Swallowfield provided a testimonial in support of Phipps. BRO D/EHR Q1. Phipps was prosecuted again two years later for conspiracy to secure an undervaluation of property in order to avoid payment of the damages of £500 and costs of one hundred marks. PRO STAC 8/78/11.
64. VCH Berks., III, p. 271.
65. Buchanan Sharp, In contempt of all authority: rural artisans and riot in the west of England, 1586-1660 (Los Angeles, 1980), p. 223;
66. Edward Thompson, Whigs and hunters: the origins of the Black Act (London, 1975), esp. pp. 61-62, 110-11.
67. For one example among many, see the bishop's faculty for the select vestry at Enfield (Middlesex) issued on 3 Nov. 1615. LMA DL/C/340, fos. 184V-5.
68. The very use of the term 'company' is significant in this regard, since it was widely used in its French form (la compagnie) to describe meetings of consistories on the Calvinist model. For Ellesmere's views on ecclesiastical jurisdiction, see Louis A. Knafla, Law and politics in Jacobean England: the tracts of Lord Chancellor Ellesmere (Cambridge, 1977), pp. 134-45.
69. The most significant recent contributions are Keith Wrightson and David Levine, Poverty and piety in an English village:-Terling, 1525-1700 (2nd edn, Oxford, 1995), pp. 197-220;
70. Martin Ingram, 'Reformation of manners in early modern England', in Griffiths, Fox and Hindle, eds., The experience of authority in early modern England, pp. 47-88;
71. and Marjorie K. McIntosh, Controlling misbehaviour in England, 1370-1600 (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 1-6.
72. Wrightson and Levine, Poverty and piety, pp. 125-41;
73. McIntosh, 'Finding language for misconduct', pp. 93-7;
74. John Bossy, 'Moral arithmetic: seven sins into ten commandments', in Edmund Leites, ed., Conscience and casuistry in early modern Europe (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 214-34.
75. McIntosh, Controlling misbehaviour, p. 39;
76. Ingram, 'Reformation of manners', pp. 65-6.
77. PRO STAC 8/24/2, m. 9 (interrogatories to be ministered to the defendants, item 11);
78. BRO D/EHR Q1. Swallowfield Court was subsequently inherited by Samuel Backhouse's younger son William (1593-1662), renowned as a Rosicrucian philosopher and alchemist, and friend of Elias Ashmole.
79. See DNB (s.v. Backhouse, William);
80. C. H. Josten, 'William Backhouse of Swallowfield', Ambix, 4 (1949), pp. 1-33;
81. and C. H. Josten, ed., Elias Ashmole (1617-1692) (5 vols., Oxford, 1966), 1, pp. 76-8, 81.
82. A preliminary search revealed the wills of four of the eleven men who served on the homage in 1596. George Blunt the younger of Swallowfield, yeoman (d. 1627), made no reference at all to the fate of his soul, and left an inventory worth £85 3s 4d. BRO D/A1/43/169. Thomas Dee of Shinfield, carpenter (d. 1611), bequeathed his soul 'to almighty God and his son Jesus Christ our lord my only saviour and redeemer' and left an inventory valued at £36 7s. BRO D/A1/61/247. John Kirkham of Swallowfield, yeoman (d. 1626), humbly submitted himself'to the grace of God on whose gracious providence I have and do depend assuring myself that of his free grace I shall have forgiveness of all my sins and resurrection and preservation of my body and soul', and left an inventory worth £12 1s 4d. BRO D/A1/89/134. Richard Pether of Shinfield, husbandman (d. 1614), bequeathed his soul 'to almighty God who made me a living soule trusting wholly to be saved through Jesus Christ my redeemer' and left an inventory valued at £7 12s 8d. BRO D/A1/105/10. Only Kirkham gave anything to the poor, asking that 40s be distributed among the poor of Swallowfield at his funeral.
83. Collinson, 'De republica anglorum', p. 19.
84. Cf. Markku Peltonen, Classical humanism and republicanism in English political thought, 1570-1640 (Cambridge, 1995);
85. and Mark Goldie's forthcoming essay in Harris, ed., The politics of the exclud Ed.
86. Cf. Beckerman, 'The articles of presentment of a court leet and court baron'; Patricia Basing, ed., Parish fraternity register: fraternity of the holy trinity and SS. Fabian and Sebastian in the parish of St Botolph Without Aldersgate (London Record Society 18, 1982), pp. 80-1.
87. For the most recent statement of this position, see the essays collected in Peter Blickle, ed., Resistance, representation and community (Oxford, 1997).
88. Hindle, The state and social change, ch. 1.
89. Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, CA., MS Ellesmere 6162, fos. 34av-6ar. These pages have been given a separate catalogue number as MS EL 6195, which they retain for citation purposes. EL 6162 (measuring 350 × 240 mm) is the first of a number of of volumes of miscellaneous papers in the Ellesmere collection, and contains copies of various documents (ranging from 'Epigrams on the state of Spain' to' Notes taken out of John Bale upon the Revelation') in a clerk's hand. The articles are both untitled and unnumbered, and occupy just over three folios, inverted at the rear of the volume. The sequence in which the resolutions appear is logical and coherent, though the rather surprising interval between two clauses relating to single mothers (nos. 8, 13) might suggest either composition by committee or a scribal error in copying from the original.
90. Article [4] implies that the company as a whole should be' made previe' (i.e. informed) of any 'grieffes' (i.e. grievances) which were likely to lead to litigation between its members in order that dispute be pacified informally.
91. Article [13] implies recognition of parochial responsibility only for illegitimate children born to 'towen borne' women (i.e. to women who were themselves born in Swallowfield). Single mothers who had migrated from elsewhere were to be banished even if the bastard was actually born in Swallowfield. This issue was to vex parish officers everywhere until the judges of assize resolved in 1633 that 'the place where such a woman was lawfully settled is the direction in this case, not where she was begotten with child'. PRO SP 16/255/46, item 14, reprinted in Thomas G. Barnes, ed., Somerset assize orders, 1629-1640 (Somerset Record Society 65, 1959), p. 65.
92. The fines stipulated in article [22] (2s for every alehousekeeper found serving ale during divine service, 6d for every customer caught tippling there), and their delivery to the poor of the parish, anticipate the closer regulation of alehouses and tippling under Jacobean statutes.
93. Cf. 1 James I, c. 9 (1604);
94. James I, cc. 4, 5 (1607).
95. The insistence in article [25] that the chief inhabitants send two of their number both to 'Sessyons' (i.e. the Wiltshire quarter sessions) and to 'Sessions leete & Law days' (i.e. the court leet and view of frankpledge of the manors of which the tithings formed part), and the recognition that each institution offered a forum for the suppression of sin, reflects the overlapping jurisdictions to which Swallowfield was subject.