Order and place in England, 1580-1640: The view from the pew

Journal of British Studies

Volumn 44, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 3-26

  Marsh, Christopher ^a  

^a QUEEN'S UNIVERSITY BELFAST   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 57349091869     PISSN: 00219371     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/424947     Document Type: Review

References (58)

1. For a classic statement of this cosmology, see "An Exhortation concerning Good Order," in Certaine Sermons or Homilies Appointed to be Read in Churches (1562), 2 vols. (London, 1623), 1:69-77. The word "order" appears twelve times on the first page alone
2. On the general subject of order, see also Keith Wrightson, English Society, 1580-1680 (London, 1982), chap. 6
3. J. A. Sharpe, Early Modern England: A Social History, 1550-1760, 2d ed. (London, 1997), chap. 4
4. editors' introduction to Order and Disorder in Early Modern England, ed. Anthony Fletcher and John Stevenson (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 1-10
5. and Michael J. Braddick and John Walter, "Introduction: Grids of Power: Order, Hierarchy and Subordination in Early Modern Society," in Negotiating Power in Early Modern Society: Order, Hierarchy and Subordination in Britain and Ireland, ed. Michael J. Braddick and John Walter (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 1-42
6. Edward S. Casey, Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World (Bloomington, Ind., 1993), p. 23
7. The relevance of the last of these factors is discussed in Christopher Marsh, "'Common Prayer' in England, 1560-1640: The View from the Pew," Past and Present, no. 171 (2001): 69-70
8. See particularly Susan Dwyer Amussen, An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England (New York, 1988), pp. 137-43
9. Kevin Dillow, "The Social and Ecclesiastical Significance of Church Seating Arrangements and Pew Disputes, 1500-1740" (D.Phil, diss., University of Oxford, 1990)
10. Robert Tittler, "Seats of Honour, Seats of Power: The Symbolism of Public Seating in the English Urban Community, c. 1560-1620," Albion 24, no. 2 (Summer 1992): 205-23
11. David Dymond, "Sitting Apart in Church," in Counties and Communities: Essays on East Anglian History, ed. Carol Rawcliffe et al. (Norwich, 1996)
12. Susan Pittman, "The Social Structure and Parish Community of St. Andrew's Church, Calstock, as Reconstituted from its Seating Plan, c. 1587-8," Southern History, 20-21 (1998-99): 44-67
13. Amanda Flather, "The Politics of Space: A Study of Church Seating in Essex, c. 1580-1640," Friends of the Centre for English Local History Paper (Leicester) 3 (1999): 1-55
14. Flather, "Politics of Space," pp. 54-55
15. See editors' introduction to The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England, ed. Paul Griffiths, Adam Fox, and Steve Hindle (Basingstoke, 1996), pp. 2-3
16. Keith Wrightson, "The Politics of the Parish in Early Modern England," in ibid., p. 32
17. Paul Griffiths, Youth and Authority: Formative Experiences in England, 1560-1640 (Oxford, 1996), p. 109
18. See Marsh, "Common Prayer," and "Sacred Space in England, 1560-1640," Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 53, no. 2 (April 2002): 286-311. Ideally, these articles and the current one should be considered in relation to one another
19. J. C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, Conn., 1985)
20. and Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, Conn., 1990)
21. For the application of Scott's ideas to early modern society, see Griffiths, Fox, and Hindle, "Introduction," p. 6
22. Wrightson, "Politics of the Parish," pp. 12, 35
23. Braddick and Walter, "Introduction."
24. E. P. Thompson, in looking back to the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I, clearly believed that the "paternalist model" had then enjoyed the backing of a powerful social and moral consensus. See his Customs in Common (Harmondsworth, 1993), pp. 252-54. It seems to me that most of the evidence relating to riot in this period can be taken to demonstrate the real force (rather than merely the pragmatic utility) of hierarchical beliefs on all social levels, though there were of course some interesting variations in emphasis
25. For an excellent recent synthesis written from a different viewpoint, see Andy Wood, Riot, Rebellion, and Popular Politics in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, 2002), chap. 3
26. Andy Wood, The Politics of Social Conflict. The Peak Country, 1520-1770 (Cambridge, 1999), p. 20
27. Richard Gough, The History of Myddle, ed. David Hey (Harmondsworth, 1981), p. 78
28. On seating for the poor, see Griffiths, Youth and Authority, p. 105
29. Dillow, "Social and Ecclesiastical Significance of Church Seating," p. 154
30. Claire S. Schen, "Women and the London Parishes, 1500-1620," in The Parish in English Life, 1400-1600, ed. Katherine L. French, Gary G. Gibbs, and Beat A. Kumin (Manchester, 1997), pp. 258-59
31. See also Dymond, "Sitting Apart in Church," pp. 215-17
32. and Nesta Evans, "A Scheme for Re-pewing the Parish Church of Chesham, Buckinghamshire, in 1606," Local Historian 22 (1992): 204
33. Nicholas Alldridge, "Loyalty and Identity in Chester Parishes, 1540-1640," in Parish, Church and People. Local Studies in Lay Religion, 1350-1750, ed. S. J. Wright (London, 1988), p. 95
34. Alldridge, "Loyalty and Identity" p. 95
35. Tittler, "Seats of Honour," pp. 217, 222
36. Evans, "Scheme for Re-pewing," p. 204
37. See Peter Burke, History and Social Theory (Oxford, 1992), pp. 48-49
38. Flather has also noted seating cases in which religions disagreement was a factor. See "Politics of Space," pp. 37, 51
39. The daughters are named in CamRO, Ely Consistory Court Wills, William Gunton (1631)
40. Cited in M. Moir, "Church and Society in Sixteenth-Century Herefordshire" (M.Phil. thesis, Leicester University, 1984), p. 112
41. Amussen, Ordered Society, pp. 141-42
42. and Flather, "Politics of Space," pp. 26, 33-34
43. Erving Goffman, Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order (Harmondsworth, 1971), p. 344: "All behavior of the individual, insofar as it is perceived by others, has an indicative function, made up of tacit promises and threats, confirming or disconfirming that he knows his place."
44. Wiltshire Record Office, Dl/39/2/5, fol. 75r. I am grateful to Eric Carlson for bringing diis case to my attention
45. Thompson, Customs in Common, p. 45
46. For comments on the impact of Laudianism on church seating, see Marsh, "Sacred Space." My figures on instance cases in the diocese of Chester are based on the EDC5 listings held in the Cheshire Record Office
47. The Prayer-Book of Queen Elizabeth (1559; London, 1890)
48. For advice to curates on the use of the official homilies, see the introductory admonition in Certaine Sermons or Homilies, vol. 2
49. Certaine Sermons or Homilies, 1:40-45, 69-78, 89-98, 2:1-11
50. Wrightson, English Society, p. 60
51. For related comments, see Burke, History and Social Theory, p. 94
52. H. F. Lippincott, ed., "Merry Passages and Jeasts: A Manuscript Jestbook of Sir Nicholas Le Strange," Elizabethan and Renaissance Studies 29 (1974): 126
53. E. M. W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture (1943; Harmondsworth, 1988), pp. 36-37
54. See Marsh, "Common Prayer."
55. Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500-1700 (Oxford, 2000), p. 325. In any case, most of the libelers discussed in chap. 6 seem to have been intent on reinforcing the hierarchical code through mockery and irreverence rather than on subverting it
56. Catherine Wright, "A Social Map of Community" (1998), p. 21. I am grateful to the author for allowing me to read her unpublished paper
57. There are excellent discussions of this office in Eric Carlson, "The Origin, Function, and Status of the Office of Churchwarden," in The World of Rural Dissenters, ed. Margaret Spufford (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 164-208
58. and John Craig, "Co-operation and Initiatives: Elizabethan Churchwardens and the Parish Accounts of Mildenhall," Social History 18, no. 3 (October 1993): 357-80