Secrecy and authority in late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century London

The Historical Journal

Volumn 40, Issue 4, 1997, Pages 925-951

  Griffiths, Paul ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF LEICESTER   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 85010140272     PISSN: 0018246X     EISSN: 14695103     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0018246X97007528     Document Type: Article

References (185)

1. W. E. Tate called the vestry the ‘parish parliament’: The parish chest: a study of the records of parochial administration in England (3rd edn, Cambridge, 1969), p. 162.
2. Cf. Arlette Farge, Subversive words: public opinion in eighteenth-century Paris, first published in France in 1992, trans. Rosemary Morris (Oxford, 1994).
3. This phrase belongs to James C. Scott, Domination and the arts of resistance: hidden transcripts (New Haven 1991).
4. Cf Adam Fox, ‘The authority of writing’, in Paul Griffiths, Adam Fox and Steve Hindle, eds., The experience of authority in early modern England (Basingstoke, 1996), pp. 89–116.
5. The more important recent contributions include Ian W. Archer, The pursuit of stability: social relations in Elizabethan London (Cambridge, 1991)
6. Jeremy Boulton, Neighbourhood and society: a London suburb in the seventeenth century (Cambridge, 1987)
7. Valerie Pearl, ‘Change and stability in seventeenth-century London’, in Jonathan Barry, ed., The Tudor and Stuart town: a reader in English urban history, 1530–1688 (Harlow, 1990), pp. 139–165, first published in London Journal, v (1979)
8. Steve Rappaport, Worlds within worlds: structures of life in sixteenth-century London (Cambridge, 1989).
9. See my Youth and authority: formative experiences in England, 1560–1640 (Oxford, 1996), ch. 6.
10. Boulton, Neighbourhood and society, p. 150.
11. Robert Tittler associates a concern with record-keeping, secrecy and scrutiny with the ‘ political requirements’ of urban communities - ‘ powers of social control at local levels of authority’ (Architecture and power: the town hall and the English urban community, c. 1500–1640 (Oxford, 1991), p. 128).
12. Cf Farge, Subversive words, pp. 33, 61.
13. SC minute books C, fo. 266
14. GL, MS 6554/1, fo. 18v.
15. Cf. Tittler, Architecture and power, esp. pp. 117–18. The governors of hospitals also expected that their courtroom would be a closed institution. In 1561 the governors of St Thomas's ordered that ‘none of the bedilles nor other officers be suffered to remayne within the courthouse during so longe tyme as the courte shall contenewe for that they shall not be privie to their talke other than onely their clerk’. They ordered ‘that the beadle shall stand withoute the dore’ in 1565. In 1576 they instructed that the steward ‘should attend upon the governors’ when they sat in court ‘without the courte dore and not within for that his offyce is not thereunto incydent’. And in 1660 they ruled that ‘neither the steward… nor any other officer but the clarke onely [is allowed to] be within the court duringe its sitting but [to] stay at the door without and be ready to be called into court upon any occasion. And that a bell be provided to call in suitors’. See G[reater] L[ondon] R[ecord] O[ffice], H1/ST/A1/1, fo. 44; H1/ST/A1/2, fo. 14v; H1/ST/A1/3, fo. 167v; H1/ST/A1/5, fo. 130v.
16. F. F. Foster, The politics of stability: a portrait of the rulers in Elizabethan London (Royal Historical Society Publications, London, 1977), p. 77
17. Valerie Pearl, London and the outbreak of the puritan revolution: city government and national politics, 1625–43 (Oxford, 1961), p. 61.
18. Rappaport, Worlds within worlds, p. 246.
19. GL, MS 1431/1, fo. 21 v.
20. See also GL, MSS 2597/1, fo. 32; 1431/2, fo. 28; 481 3/1, fo. 106; 8771 /, fo. 174; 4072/1, fos. 205, 206v, 211.
21. GL, MS 3579/1, fo. 28.
22. GL, MSS 4887/1, fo. 378; 1431 /2, fos. 28, 37; 4072/1, fo. 291 v; 819/1, fo. 85v; 1240/1, fos. 3, 36; 959/1, fos. 43, 170v; 4214/1, fo. 64. Tittler argues that English urban communities were spending more money on ornate furnishings at this time, and he relates this to rising concern with civic pride and authority (Architecture and power, esp. pp. 36–7, 119–20, 158).
23. GL, MS 3016/1, fo. 250.
24. See also GL, MSS 1175/1, fos. 37, 45; 819/1, fos. 9, 88 v; 3016/1, fo. 636; 4813/1, fos. 2, 14, 14v; 4216/1, fos. 77, 175; 5019/1, fo. 57; 3579/1, fo. 46; 3908/1, fo. 34v; 877/1, fo. 205; 1264/1, fo. 10; 113/1 part 1, fo. 84v.
25. SC minute book C, fo. 135
26. GCL, minute books P2, fos. 365–5v
27. GL, MS 8200/1, fo. 45.
28. For example, GCL, minute books O3, fo. 546
29. Foster, Politics of stability, p. 42, discussing the vestry meeting.
30. GL, MS 6554/1, fo. 238.
31. CLRO, rep. 34, fos. 521v-2.
32. GL, MSS 4165/1, fos. 3, 6, 148, 427; 2597/1, fo. 57; 3016/1, fo. 487; 4887/1, fos. 356, 455.
33. GL, MSS 4415/1, fo. 102v (irregular pagination); 1431/1, fo. 26v.
34. See also GL, MSS 943/1, fo. 13; 819/1, fo. 49
35. Tittler, Architecture and power, p. 121.
36. CLRO, rep. 17, fos. 102, 222.
37. CLRO, rep. 20, fo. 93. Cf. GL, MS 11 3/1, part 1, fo. 10
38. GCL, minute book P2, attached papers at the end of the book, fos. 9–10.
39. CLRO, rep. 34, fo. 348v.
40. Piers Cain, ‘Robert Smith and the reform of the archives of the city of London, 1580- 1623 ’, The London Journal, XIII (1987–1988), 3–16, esp. 3, 8–9, 11
41. Archer, Pursuit of stability, p. 42
42. R. B. Wernham, ‘The public records in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’, in L. Fox, ed., English historical scholarship in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Oxford, 1956), pp. 11–30, esp. pp. 24–6.
43. Tittler has made much the same point for urban communities in other parts of England. He writes that although ‘concern for the keeping of records’, what he calls ‘modern administrative habit’, was ‘ certainly present in some, especially larger or older towns’ before 1530, the second half of the 16th century ‘seems to have been crucial in making it commonplace’. Tittler suggests that rising interest in keeping records was related to greater degrees of urban self-government, Cromwellian administrative methods ‘percolating down’ and the ‘legal necessity’ of producing records ‘to substantiate legal claims’ (Architecture and power, pp. 76, 88–9).
44. For some further examples see my Youth and authority, ch. 6.
45. BCB, 1, fo. 76.
46. GL, MSS 3570/2, fo. 160; 4813/1, fo. 59v.
47. See also GL, MSS 1240/1, fo. 108; 4072/1, fos. 240, 332; 4214/1, fos. 20, 37v-8.
48. Alice E. McCampbell, ‘The London parish and the London precinct, 1640–1660’, Guildhall Studies in London History, xi (1976), 107–24, 116
49. GL, MS 3570/2, fo. 119.
50. GL, MS 3016/1, fo. 38.
51. SC minute book C, fo. 177.
52. GL, MSS 3016/1, fo. 314; 4165/1, fo. 356.
53. GL, MSS 2597/1, fo. 129; 3016/1, fo. 232; 4165/1, fo. 46; 943/1, fo. 52; 819/1, fo. 76v
54. E. Freshfield, ed., Minutes of the vestry meeting and other records of the parish of St Christopher le Stocks in the city of London (London, 1886) [hereafter, Freshfield, St Christopher le Stocks vestry minutes], p. 15.
55. For example, GL, MSS 8200/1, fo. 139; 3570/2, fo. 82; 4165/1, fo. 46; 819/1, fo. 76v; 4813/1, fo. 130v; 4570/2, fo. 72; 1240/1, fos. 23; 80v; 959/1, fos. 65, 105v; 4072/1, fos. 10, 129v, 203; 3908/1, fo. 12.
56. Cf Tate, The parish chest, pp. 35–36.
57. GL, MS 3570/2, fos. 82, 156.
58. CLRO, rep. 34, fos. 348v-9, 522.
59. Cf. Cain, ‘Robert Smith’
60. Tittler, Architecture and power, p. 9.
61. CLRO, rep. 19, fo. 39
62. CLRO, reps. 14, fo. 4
63. GL, MS 8200/1, fo. 161
64. GCL, minute books V, fos. 33v-4v
65. GL, MS 4887/1, fo. 242.
66. GL, MSS 3016/1, fo. 232; 4887/1, fos. 242, 320, 534; 4165/1, fo. 635; 943/1, fo. 52; 3570/1, fo. 19; 3570/2, fo. 82; 4216/1, fos. 153–4; 4216/1, fos. 153–4;594/1, fo. 14; 3579/1, fo. 33; 4072/1, fo. 244v; 3908/1, fos. 12, i8v, 20, 55v;959/1, fo. 65; 4570/2, fo. 45.
67. Freshfield, St Christopher le Stocks vestry minutes, p. 15.
68. GL, MS 1431/2, fo. 17.
69. CLRO, rep. 17, fo. 177.
70. SC minute book E, fos. 108v-9.
71. See also GL, MSS 594/1, fos. 8, 76, 78, 90; 1240/1, fos. 21v-2v; 3579/1, fos. 14, 23; 4072/1, fos. 1 29v, 166; 3908/1, fo. 108.
72. See GL, MSS 3016/1, fos. 261, 262, 274; 4165/1, fos. 356, 380, 531, 536; 1453/1, fo. 33; 6554/1, fo. 265; 4072/1, fos. 195v, 209; 959/1, fos. 65, 78.
73. GL, MS 4415/1, fo. 243.
74. GL, MS 3016/1, fo. 314. See also fo. fos. 423–8.
75. GL, MSS 6554/1, fos. 75v, 135v
76. Cain, ‘Robert Smith’, p. 8.
77. GL, MS 8200/1, fos. 355v, 366v.
78. Cf. GCL, company minute books W, fo. 214
79. GL, MS 1431/2, fo. 302
80. SC minute book D, fo. 40.
81. GL, MSS 4887/1, fo. 421; 1453/1, fo. 25; 6554/1, fo. 4v; 1175/1, fos. 62v, 68v-9; 819/1, fo. 159v; 3016/1, fos. 555, 588; 481 3/1, fo. 59v; 1240/1, fos. 1 3v, 79v; 4072/1, fo. 160v; 978/1, fos. 40, 40v
82. GCL, minute books V, fos. 1 25–5v
83. SC minute books C, fo. 124v
84. GCL, minute book V, fos. 33v-4v
85. SC minute book C, fo. 21 jv. See also GCL, minute books T, fo. 35
86. See also GCL, minute books T, fo. 35
87. SC minute book C, fos. 178–8v.
88. GCL, minute book T, fo. 35.
89. See Archer, Pursuit of stability, p. 127
90. Rappaport, Worlds within worlds, pp. 245–8
91. Boulton, Neighbourhood and society, p. 268.
92. GL, MS 8200/1, fos. 402, 375.
93. CLRO, rep. 34, fos. 521v- 2
94. Strype, Stow's survey, p. 111.
95. See Michael Berlin, ‘Civic ceremony in early modern London’, Urban History Yearbook (1986), 15–27
96. Lawrence Manley, Literature and culture in early modern London (Cambridge, 1995), ch. 5.
97. CLRO, reps. 15, fos. 29iv, 494v; 17, fo. 32 iv; 18, fo. 107v; 19, fo. 182; 20, fos. 425, 461; 21, fo. 537.
98. See my Youth and authority, ch. 2.
99. GL, MS 4415/1, fos. 8v, 15v (second series of pagination).
100. See Tessa Watt, Cheap print and popular piety, 1550–1640 (Cambridge, 1991), chs. 5–6.
101. GL, MSS 1175/1, fo. 73
102. Freshfield, St Christopher le Stocks vestry minutes, pp. 10, 28.
103. SC minute book E, fo. 58v.
104. SC minute book. fo. 140
105. GL, MS 8200/1, fo. 437v.
106. GL, MS 6554/1, fos. 11 ov, 124.
107. GCL, company minute book P2, attached papers at the end of the book, fo. 12.
108. GL, MS 8200/1, fo. 302v.
109. SC minute book E, fo. 37v.
110. GCL, company minute books R2, fos. 133v-4
111. GL, MS 8200/1, fos. 112–113.
112. See Archer, Pursuit of stability, p. 141.
113. For examples of poor attendance see GCL, company minute books S part 1, fos. 390, 454, 525
114. GCL, company minute book Y, fo. 207.
115. This consent covered many issues, including the auditing of churchwardens ‘accounts, granting leases, electing ministers, taxation, scavengers ’fines and the minister's salary. See, for example, GL, MSS 2597/1, fos. 132v, 133, 137, 146v, 182, 200 v
116. Freshfield, St Christopher le Stocks vestry minutes, pp. 7, 16, 25, 28, 29, 31, 33, 35.
117. Rappaport writes that assistants ‘ performed most executive, legislative, and judicial functions within companies… Though at times the opinions of liverymen and even householders were solicited, all matters of great importance to the company were discussed and decided by men who sat on the court, from the framing of ordinances to the construction of a new hall’ (Worlds within worlds, p. 264).
118. Foster writes that the ‘court of assistants was the executive and legislative directory of the company. It was meant to lead, and no one objected seriously to its oligarchic character, though the assistants were expected to confer with the entire fellowship on certain formal occasions’ (Politics of stability, p.45).
119. GCL, company minute books W, fo. 83
120. See, for example, GCL, company minute book V, fos. 45–5v.
121. GCL, company minute books i, fo. 68v
122. SC minute book C, fos. 218, 223–4.
123. GCL, minute books Y, fos. 253v, 258v
124. GCL, company minute book P2, fo. 20iv, attached papers at the end of the book, fos. 9–10. Archer writes that when ‘disputes occurred about the constitutional arrangements within the companies the point behind them usually appears to have been the suspicions of the younger and poorer members about the misapplication of company funds and partiality towards individuals rather than a sense that the court of assistants was an instrument in the hands of the wealthier members for the subjugation of the poorer craftsmen’ (Pursuit of stability, p. 141).
125. Rappaport, Worlds within worlds, p. 359.
126. See GCL, company minute book Z, fo. 119.
127. See above, pp. 925–926.
128. GL, MS 8200/1, fos. 225, 322.
129. GL, MS 1175/1, fos. 50, 73. And for the first steps towards setting up this select vestry see company minute book, fo. 45.
130. GCL, company minute book Z, fo. 119.
131. SC minute book C, fo. 266.
132. For example, GCL, company minute books P2, fos. 196v, 365–5v (irregular pagination), attached papers at the end of the book, fos. 10–11
133. SC minute book C, fo. 206v
134. GL, MS 8200/1, fos. 112–113.
135. GCL, minute book V, fos. 155v, 164–4v.
136. GCL, company minute book W, fos. 225v, 292v.
137. GL, MSS 4813/1, fo. 77
138. Berlin has suggested that in sixteenth-century London the mayoralty ‘underwent a particular elevation in status’, which was also reflected in ‘more grandiose’ civic ceremonial ( ‘Civic ceremony’, esp. pp. 18, 20, 24).
139. I will more fully explore fixations with beauty, comeliness and order in an essay entitled ‘“Uniformity and seemlynes”: the political value of space in early seventeenth-century Cheapside’, in Paul Griffiths and Mark Jenner, eds., Londinopolis: essays in the cultural and social history of early modern London, to be published by Manchester University Press. I will also more fully discuss social problems at this time and the responses of governors in a book provisionally entitled The first bridewell: prisons, policing and petty crime in London, 1545–1645.
140. See Archer, Pursuit of stability, esp. pp. 116–18 and pp. 120–4, quoting p. 124.
141. Archer writes that it ‘may well be that this contraction in participation was prompted more by reasons of escalating costs and the increased size of the companies combined with the constraints of hall space than by any real sense of greater social exclusiveness. However, the consequences were very much the same: a reduction in contact between yeomen and liverymen whose social rounds moved increasingly in separate spheres’ (Pursuit of stability, p. 120).
142. For just a few typical examples see SC minute book C, fo. 77 ;GCL, company minute books P2, attached papers at the end of the book, fo. 10; T, fo. 17. The association with shifts in authority and sharper social differentiation has been most prominently made by Keith Wrightson, most notably in his ‘Estates, degrees, and sorts: changing perceptions of the social order in Tudor and Stuart England’, in P. Corfield, ed., Language, history, and class (Blackwell, Oxford, 1991), pp. 30–52
143. ‘“Sorts of people” in Tudor and Stuart England’, in Jonathan Barry and Christopher Brooks, eds., The middling sort of people: culture, society, and politics in England, 1500–1800 (Basingstoke, 1994), pp. 28–51.
144. For example, GL, MSS 9236/1, account book fo. 94, register of orders and decrees, fos. 76–7; 3016/1, fo. 45; 4415/1, fo. 88 (second series of pagination); 3570/2, fo. 97; 4887/1, fos. 196, 214; 4216/1, fos. 62, 72; 959/1, fos. 58, 84v
145. Freshfield, St Christopher le Stocks vestry minutes, p. 23
146. idem, ed., The vestry minute book of the parish of St Margaret Lothbury in the city of London, 1571–1677 (London, 1887), pp. 14, 24.
147. The significance of this social vocabulary in the city at this time has been discussed by others, including Sidney and Beatrice Webb, English local government… the parish and the county (London, 1906), esp. pp. 40, 176
148. Tate, Parish chest, p. 18
149. Archer, Pursuit of stability, p. 67.
150. Archer, Pursuit of stability, p. 84.
151. Quoting Pursuit of stability, p. 70. See also p. 71.
152. Archer writes that all ‘the heavily populated extramural parishes had select vestries by Elizabeth's reign. [And that] By the time of Laud's survey of parochial government in 1638, 59 out of 109 London vestries were select’ (Pursuit of stability. p. 69).
153. See also McCampbell, ‘The London parish’, p. 109.
154. Foster claims that ‘virtually every London parish by the late sixteenth century was in the hands of a small group’ (Politics of stability, p. 43).
155. The decisive shift towards the setting up of a ‘selected’ vestry is usually located in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centures. See McCampbell, ‘The London parish’, p. 111
156. Boulton, Neighbourhood and society, p. 265.
157. Tate writes that as a rule ‘the select vestry began at some time in the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century by a resolution of parishioners at the open Easter vestry appointing a sort of committee … [which] contrived to recruit itself through cooption long enough to claim a prescriptive right to do so’ (Parish chest, p. 19).
158. A large number of parishes ‘had formally sought episcopal sanction… but others claimed [select] status by prescription alone’ (Archer, Pursuit of stability, p. 69).
159. McCampbell suggests that ‘many parishes maintained the general vestry with broader membership in the 1640s, and then following the trend of the national government reestablished select vestries after 1654’ (‘The London parish’, p. 123. See also pp. 121–3).
160. It should also be said that the Webbs believed that roughly one-quarter of parishes in the city were governed by select vestries at the close of the seventeenth century (English local government, p. 174, n. 1).
161. Archer, Pursuit of stability, p. 93.
162. GL, MSS 3016/1, fo. 43
163. Cf. Archer, Pursuit of stability, pp. 71, 89
164. Rappaport, Worlds within worlds, pp. 183, 215
165. Pearl, ‘Change and stability’, p. 153
166. McCampbell, ‘The London parish’, p. 108.
167. See, for example, GL, MSS 6544/1, fos. 2, 31v, I2IV; 4415/1, fo. 74 (second series of pagination); 943/1, fo. 66; 819/1, fos. 9, 10, 32, 102, 136; 4216/1, fo. 77; 4813/1, fos. 3, 54, 147v-8; 4214/1, fo. 42v; 4049/1, fo. 28v.
168. See Boulton, Neighbourhood and society, esp. pp. 236–47
169. Archer, Pursuit of stability, p. 84.
170. See Archer, Pursuit of stability, esp. pp. 71, 73, 92, 98
171. Valerie 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), pp. 115–31, esp. p. 117
172. Boulton, Neighbourhood and society, esp. pp. 263, 268, 273–4
173. Foster, Politics of stability, p. 41.
174. For example, GL, MSS 978/1, fos. 23v, 40v, 79, 81
175. Archer, Pursuit of stability, p. 64
176. Boulton, Neighbourhood and society, esp. pp. 139–41, 268
177. Rappaport, Worlds within worlds, esp. pp. 256, 258–9, 348–9, 367.
178. GL, MSS 9236/1, register of orders and decrees, fo. 77; 943/1, fo. 40; 1175/1, fo. 38l; 819/1, fo. 5v
179. Tate, Parish chest, p. 19.
180. Much the same note can be detected in the companies, see Rappaport, Worlds within worlds, pp. 256, 348–9.
181. GL, MS 4216/1, fo. 186.
182. See above, esp. p. 9.
183. GCL, company minute book P2, fo. 365v.
184. See above, pp. 943–944.
185. House of lords main papers, 6 July 1641, 16 July 1641, 17 July 1641, 23 July 1641. The missing records included journals of common council and repertories of the court of aldermen.