Tag Archives: English history

Gay sex, treason, and passionate friendships in Tudor England

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Ask about the legality of same-sex sex in Tudor England and you’ll find your Sat Nav–or your GPS if you use American English–no longer knows the difference between a road, a river, and a red brick wall. Or mine doesn’t anyway. I’m posting this report in the hope that someone will find it useful. If I’m not back in time for next week’s post, send sniffer dogs. 

Thanks. 

I’ve lived in Britain long enough to say thanks for everything. Even things that haven’t happened yet.

Utterly irrelevant photo: Castell Cricieth

The problems

The first problem we run into here is figuring out what we’re talking about. Should be simple enough, right? But as Bill Clinton so famously said when he was pushed to say whether he had a sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky, “It depends on what your definition of is is.” 

Even at the time, the definition of sex struck me as more relevant than the definition of is. But forget Bill Clinton. He had been neither born nor imagined during the Tudor period, and no doubt it was better that way. Sex is, um, that thing two people do that’s kind of awkward to talk about around a third person. And sometimes between the two people as well.

Although of course it might involve that third person. Or a person who likes to talk about sex, which generally weirds out other people.

But even with all its amendments and althoughs, that definition wouldn’t hold up in court. So let’s try this, even though it’s guesswork: the men–and they were all men–who wrote the relevant laws seem to have thought of sex as something that could be done with a penis. Tudor women, generally speaking, didn’t have those. That means that people thought of same-sex sex as having to do with men. 

Women? Wrong equipment therefore not part of the discussion.

I’m not sure everyone will agree with me on this, but I’m filing that under Make Male Chauvinism Work for You.

Women were surely having sex (as we might define it) with other women, but if whatever they did made its way into the historical record I haven’t seen it. If anyone knows a reliable source on this, leave me a comment. I haven’t done anything like a deep dive into the topic. What with writing one post a week, keeping a life going on the side, working on a novel, and trying to find a home for a completed novel my publisher decided wasn’t a good fit– 

Yeah. Shallow dive. Some weeks it’s more like a bellyflop.

But back to the problems I ran into: a second one is defining homosexuality, and for this it makes sense to quote Alan Bray, who argues in “Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship in Elizabethan England” that “the forms of sexuality are the creation of culture and change with it.” 

So what? Well, for one thing, like Bill Clinton, homosexuality hadn’t been invented yet. (Now there’s a sentence I never imagined myself writing.) I don’t mean the act of sex between men but the concept of homosexuality. The social mind hadn’t conjured up any group of people who were drawn to have sex with people of the same sex, because they didn’t think that impulse came from the nature of an individual person. They saw it as something sinful that anyone might do. As John Rainolds put it, it wasn’t just a “monstrous sin against nature” but a sin that “men’s natural corruption and viciousness is prone” to.

John Rainolds? Key translator of the King James Bible. Among other things, he gave us the word sodomy. Thanks, John. You’ve been no end of help over the yeas.  

So in contrast to more recent efforts to suppress same-sex sex, the Tudors didn’t go looking for people of a particular type. They looked for something anyone might take part in. 

 

But that’s not all that’s changed

So far we’ve had women and the existence of a sexual minority slip away. The next thing to go is a solid definition of the act itself. The charge of sodomy (the word buggery also finds its way into the conversation) covered a range of out-of-bounds sexual acts. Debauchery might be a better match for what they had in mind, and Bray argues that it wasn’t just a sexual crime but also a political and religious one. So when, during Elizabeth’s reign, Edward de Vere was accused of sodomy, he was also pictured as a traitor, an enemy of society, and a man given to lawless (as opposed to lawful) violence. Oh, and a liar, an atheist, and a blasphemer. All that symbolized, Bray argues, by the charge of sodomy.

Is Bray making this up? Am I? 

Not guilty, your honor. The jurist, barrister, and politician Edward Coke wrote about sodomy as “a sin horrible committed against the king: and this is either against the king celestial or terrestrial.”

It was also a handy thing to accuse a political enemy of, and to make sense of this we need to look at the nature of both beds and male friendship during the period–which may slide over a bit into the post-Tudor era, but people don’t throw out their entire culture just becasue the throne changes hands so I’m not cheating too much.

 

Bedfellows

One thing that made sodomy a handy accusation is that sharing beds was common enough to be nearly universal. Beds were also public, as were bedrooms. Rooms–where there was more than one–led one into the next. So finding two people in bed together? No big deal. In fact, no deal at all. Still, in a world with minimal privacy, beds were a place of intimacy, where people not only slept but talked. In other words, bedfellows often became more than physically close. 

And a bed, obviously, was also a place people could and did have sex, licit or illicit. 

Even outside of the bed, though, it was accepted that men were physically demonstrative.

 

Passionate friendships

If sodomy was the forbidden side of male friendship, passionate male friendships were not only acceptable but a deeply ingrained part of the culture. Men kissed each other, touched each other, used the language of love with each other, and left behind letters demonstrating all of that. This happened both between equals and between patron and client. Court networks depended on it.Take a 1625 journal entry from Archbishop Laud: 

“That night in a dream the Duke of Buckingham [his patron] seemed to me to ascend into my bed, where he carried himself with much love towards me, after such rest wherein wearied men are wont exceedingly to rejoice; and likewise many seemed to me to enter the chamber who did see this.” 

I hear the echoes of sex around the edges there, but I’m from the wrong era. What mattered to him wasn’t just the mark of favor but that it was public.

In James I’s court, someone’s described in a journal as leaning on another man’s arm, pinching his cheek, smoothing his “ruffled garment.” This marks an emotional bond but also the rise to power of the man who received those gestures. 

Or go back to 1570 and we find one man writing a jealous letter to his friend about a third man: do you love me best? he asked.

Some of this, inevitably, would have been as conventional and signing a letter “love” and whatever your name is. Some of it would’ve been a way to curry favor. And some of it would’ve been genuine. For any of it to be proper, though, it had to be between gentlemen. 

Did any of this go on between peasants, servants, cobblers, silversmiths? I doubt the evidence is available to us. Let’s give it a solid Maybe, followed by a Maybe Not.

What is known–or seems to be known–is that gay sex could and did occur between servant and master, who often slept in the same room. It also took place in taverns, farms, and alehouses, in the world of the theater and the church, in the army and the navy, at universities and royal courts. I’m sure it took place in the woods and behind hedges as well. 

So we have loving physical contact, passionate friendships that used the language of love, and people sharing beds. It wouldn’t have been easy, if you weren’t one of the two men in question, to know whether or when a relationship crossed the line into the forbidden zone. It would, though, have been easy to accuse someone of crossing the line and to back it up your accusation by presenting evidence of what would otherwise be conventional behavior. 

 

Legality

While England was still Catholic, sex with the wrong person (or the wrong species) was a matter for the Church, which had its own courts and the power to punish. Then came Henry VIII, who was interested in having sex, licitly, with the wrong person, and England left the Catholic Church, tearing down not just the monasteries but also the Church courts. 

New era, more or less the same rules. Parliament passed An Acte for the punishment of the vice of Buggerie. (Their idea of what letters to capitalize was as foreign to the modern sensibility as their approach to sex.) 

Buggerie was defined as a man having sex with a man or an animal, and in the spirit of equality, the animal could be of either sex. Not only could a man be hanged for an out-of bounds sexual act, whatever assets he had could be confiscated. That included not only his individual assets but also church or monastic property. 

In a fraught political era, you can see why the charge of buggery (or sodomy, or whatever word you dislike least) would be a nifty charge to add to, say, treason. 

Under Edward–Henry’s short-lived son–the law was amended so that widows and heirs could inherit. 

And after him? Mary took the throne, and presto change-o, the country was Catholic again. She repealed the Acte and for five years no one was in a position to prosecute runaway sexuality. I’m going to go out on a limb and assume that was an oversight. Then Elizabeth took the throne and the state stepped back into the role of policing sexuality. 

Cambridge University and the women suspected of evil

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Let me take you back to the good old days, when men were men, kings were kings, and things weren’t at all the way we imagine. Those manly men of the court? They wore ruffs and earrings. And the king in question was a queen. 

Shall we start over? Back in the days when Elizabeth I was on the throne, she granted a charter to Cambridge University that allowed it to arrest and imprison any woman  “suspected of evil.” I don’t know what happened behind the scenes to bring that about, but if she’d set out to prove that a woman wielding power doesn’t necessarily improve life for all women, she did a pretty fair job of it.

irrelevant photo: Men-an-Tol, in Cornwall.It’s from the Bronze Age and your guess is as good as mine what it was for.

 

What kind of evil did she have in mind?

Do you need to ask? Sexual evil, of course. 

The university was a perfect set-up for out-of-bounds sexuality. Until the 1880s, its dons (translation: the men–and they were all men–who taught there) weren’t allowed to marry. That meant they weren’t allowed to have socially (and university-) approved sex. With anyone–presumably including their own lonely selves. 

Admittedly, there’s always a massive gap between the rules and real life, but Cambridge was an all-encompasing institution whose fellows ate, drank, slept, played, prayed, and taught in one fairly limited space. They wouldn’t have expected or found much privacy. 

Into that claustrophobic container, pour half a gallon of hormonally driven adolescent males, also single. Into a series of separate containers, measure out a full gallon of parents worried that loose women would tempt and corrupt their babes. 

Now stir, being mindful to keep the parents at some distance from their offspring but close enough to press their worries on the dons and the university. 

The resulting mixture was combustible, so while both dons and undergraduates could and did keep mistresses, the university had to make gestures in the direction of protecting the undergraduates from sin, temptation, and anything else that might worry a concerned parent or a church.

In other words, it had to arrest any young woman who might represent the forces of sin and temptation, because it sure as hell wasn’t going to arrest its students. 

 

How Cambridge differed from the rest of the country

Under the ordinary laws of Liz’s time, a woman could only be arrested for prostitution if there was something at least vaguely resembling proof that she was, in fact, engaged in prostitution. Under its shiny new charter, though, Cambridge University didn’t have to bother with proof. Its proctors–senior members of the university–could arrest any young woman who was out of the streets after dark. And they did. 

The woman would then be tried by the vice chancellor in a private court, which required no witnesses and no witness statements. The woman had no right to legal defense and wasn’t allowed to say anything more than her name. The university could then imprison her in the Spinning House, a repurposed workhouse. It was cold and damp and the food was bread and sometimes gruel. In 1846, a 17-year-old, Elizabeth Howe, died after spending a December night on a damp bed in a cell with a broken window. She’d been arrested for walking with a friend–another woman–near a brothel, which was enough to demonstrate that she was up to no good.

A friend–possibly the same one but I’m not sure–described her as gentle and kind. The friend tried to get a doctor for her but was stopped by a proctor and threatened with arrest herself. She went home and Elizabeth died.

Women were held for two and three weeks at a time, and anyone who didn’t go along quietly when she was arrested was given a longer sentence. Once inside, anyone who raised hell was held in solitary confinement. In 1748, the vice chancellor paid the town crier 10 shillings to whip “10 unruly women.”

 There’s no way to know how many of the women held there were in fact prostitutes–surely some; prostitution was one of the few ways desperate women could make a little cash–but also surely not all. At one point, the wife and daughter of a councillor (that would be a local politician) were stopped because they’d walked ahead of him and were on the street un–ahem–chaperoned.

I’m going to assume he was able to get them released. No woman could match the power of a respectable man intervening for her, especially when he was aided by a respectable explanation and a bit of local power. Intervening for herself, though, would only get her into deeper trouble. 

Basically, any woman on the streets at night was fair game. Their crimes were listed in the committal books as “street walking” or “suspected of evil.” Over the course of the 19th century, more than 5,000 women were held there.

All this comes from a book, The Spinning House: How Cambridge University Locked up Women in Its Private Prison, by Caroline Biggs. 

“The town,” Biggs says, “was run for the benefit of the university, not the townspeople. The women in my book represent the ultimate example of how the University wanted to run things to suit themselves. They were so frightened of the undergraduates being tempted that they treated the townswomen, mainly working-class women, with great cruelty.”

Semi-relevantly, the university also controlled the sale of alcohol, the licensing of pubs, and how much credit students were allowed, although how they managed that last one is beyond me. 

 

Then it all fell apart

In 1825, parliament gave the university the power to maintain its own police force, nicknamed bulldogs, who patrolled the night streets alongside the proctors. They were supposed to go after women found in the company of members of the university but Biggs says they pursued any rumors–”every morsel of tittle-tattle”–about young women in Cambridge.

That situation held until 1891, when a 17-year-old, Jane Elsden, was arrested although she was alone on the street, not with a member of the university, and a few months later another 17-year-old, Daisy Hopkins, was hauled in although a man admitted he had solicited her, not the other way around. 

At this point, it all gets a little hazy–possibly not in Biggs’ book but in the articles I’ve found. Sorry–I’m not even using secondary sources but tertiary ones. Someone brought a case of habeaus corpus involving one or both of the women, which meant a judge got to rule on whether she or they were imprisoned legally and ruled that she/they wasn’t/weren’t. One or both of them was or were released.

When I looked for more information on the first woman, Jane Elsden, I found the blog of a distant relative who tells the story that’s come down through her family. It holds that Elsden and Hopkins were friends and were both prostitutes. They’d been arrested and the students they’d been with were given only a mild rebuke. Somehow Elsden escaped from the Spinning House, breaking windows in the Wesley House Chapel as she went. 

“She aroused such fierce debate that eventually the power of the University was challenged and changed.”  

Take it for what it’s worth. If you pass a story down through enough generations, it will evolve, but it will probably still carry some bits of truth. Somehow or other, the two cases caused a public uproar and after 1891 women arrested by the university were allowed legal representation. Then in 1894, parliament revoked Elizabeth’s charter and with it the vice chancellor’s right to arrest women. The Spinning House was torn down not long after that and in a sour little bit of irony a police station was built on the site.

Serfdom, freedom, and misogyny in the Middle Ages

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Today’s excursion into English history takes us to a moment in the Middle Ages when misogyny, common law, and feudalism– Well, cars hadn’t been invented yet, so let’s say they had a cart crash. High speeds hadn’t been invented either, so they all came out intact if slightly battered.

We’ll start with the law part.

 

Common law

English common law dates back to the Middle Ages and if you’re a fan of convoluted systems I can’t recommend it highly enough. Basically, this is a system of law that’s based not on what I think of as law–you know, a set of written rules that you transgress at your peril–but on what courts have decided in the past. It can rely on a written law if it’s in the mood, but precedent is the driving force.   

The system gives judges a shitload of power in shaping the law, and I’m naive to think common law’s outside of my experience (although I still think it is), because the system’s in use today in an assortment of countries, including the US and UK, the two countries I’ve lived in. 

Shows you what I know.

A rare relevant photo: medieval rural life–somewhere.

 

Other systems of law in the Middle Ages

Just to confuse things, in the Middle Ages English common law coexisted with other legal systems. Church courts applied canon law, urban and rural courts applied local customary law, Chancery and maritime courts applied Roman law. 

The royal courts were for the most serious stuff and were run by a professional (in other words, paid) judge. Starting in the 13th century, those judges traveled to each county two or three times a year and held county assizes. 

County sheriffs held a court in each hundred. 

A hundred? It was an administrative/political division, smaller than a county but bigger than a pie. Starting in the 14th century, justices of the peace took the role over from the sheriffs. They were drawn from the local nobility and gentry, and they weren’t paid for the job but I’d bet a small pie that they got power and prestige from it. 

In towns, borough courts played a similar role.

After all that, we get to manor courts. These were run by the lord of the manor or the village. They dealt with petty crimes–debt, theft, fighting. The accused would more than likely have been the lord’s own villeins.

What’s a villein? That’s medieval-speak for a serf. Sort of, and it sounds nicer, though, doesn’t it? 

The sources I’ve found in a quick search contradict each other about what the difference is between a serf and a villein. One says villeins, like serfs, were tied to the land–not slaves but not free to leave either. Another says villeins were free to leave but generally couldn’t afford to. Both sources are more or less bite-size but the issue’s off to one side of the point I’m trying to make, so let’s use a word that dodges the whole issue: naif. 

If you consult Lord Google, he’ll inform you that it’s also spelled neif, but I’ll stick with the more familiar spelling. It’s the root of our word naive, and you can trace it back to Old French, where it meant “native inhabitant; simpleton, natural fool.” Or to the Middle Ages, when it meant someone who was born a serf. 

But we were talking about courts. Church courts could try lay people for things like adultery, homosexuality, gambling, or not showing up at church–you know, the stuff that really mattered. Priests acted as the judges and unlike the other courts they had no juries.

If you’re  feeling hemmed in and starting to hyperventilate, I’d say you understand the situation fairly well. Most people probably got through their lives without appearing before any of those courts, but it can leave the modern reader feeling, um, judged. 

 

Common law and serfdom

With all the throat-clearing out of the way, let’s move closer to that collision I promised. A whole lot of legal time and energy gets devoted, both then and now, to disputes over property, and under feudalism the most valuable properties would’ve been land and the naifs who were trapped on it.

This brings us to the blog Legal History Miscellany, and to a post, “All Bastards Are Free.” Understand, please, that the author, Sara M. Butler, isn’t talking here about people she doesn’t like. She’s using the language of the era. Being born inside or outside of marriage mattered. She saw a passing reference to the bastard children of villeins being born free, wondered if that could possibly be true, and off she went down a fascinating rabbit hole. 

As it turns out, the answer to whether bastard children were born free is both yes and no, and that’s due to common law’s annoying habit of changing without having to file a written notice in triplicate. For information, Butler turned to legal treatises, which are as close as you can get to codified law at this stage. 

In the 12th and early 13th centuries, the child of an unmarried, unfree woman was a naif, even if the child’s father was free. 

What if the parents were married? Worrying over that seems to have kept a good number of lawyers occupied, and they went into intricate detail over it.The result? If both parents were unfree, the child was unfree, whether the parents were married or not. If the man was free and the woman not? The child was unfree. If the mother was free and the father wasn’t? Guess what! The child still wasn’t free. In fact, if that free man married the unfree woman, he lost his freedom.

Go a little further into the 13th century, though, and the rules loosen up a bit: the child follows the status of the mother, so if the mother is free, the child is free.

By the end of the 13th century, opinion was branching out in different directions, as it will when judges are essentially making the law. One treatise held that “One who is begotten of a free man but born of a bondwoman out of wedlock is a serf.” Another held that either parent could pass freedom down to their child. A third held that the father was the determining factor: the child of a free man married to a naif would be free; the child of an unfree man married to a free woman wouldn’t be. 

What happened, then, when the jurors didn’t know who the father was and therefore didn’t know if he was free, unfree, or fur-bearing? According to this line of argument, the child “belongs to the lord of the manor, for his condition is determined by that of his mother, by whomsoever he may be begotten, freeman or serf.”

One of those tracts holds that when “jurors do not in truth know whether [a person] is a villein or a free man, judgement must be in favour of freedom.” Another says that the “blood of a man” should not be tried “by means of women,” which means–

Okay, I’m not entirely sure what it means. It sounds like a woman’s status shouldn’t determine a man’s. I mean, come on, it was humiliating enough that a man had to be born of a woman, but why take it further than that?

What Butler says is, “I would argue that it is in these two statements, when taken together, that we see the glimmer of the origins of the common law rule that all bastards are free. Here’s the problem: the only person who can definitively prove that a bastard child’s father is free is the mother: she knows who she slept with and when. Granted, it surely comes as no surprise to anyone who studies the Middle Ages that by the late thirteenth century authorities were not keen to rely on a woman’s word alone, especially if it meant that a man might lose his freedom, or that an elite man would lose the profits associated with a villein and his entire line.

“Did justices decide to declare all bastards free because they didn’t want to have to rely on the word of a woman?” 

The implied answer is yes.

As one judge put it in 1279, “No woman should be received in proof except in a marriage case.“

 

Who actually went to court over this?

As long as all this child-bearing stayed on the manor, I doubt there would’ve been much cause to go to court over anyone’s status. Everyone knew everyone and everyone’s nose was undoubtedly in everyone else’s business–and the lord of the manor was the judge anyway, with the locality’s wealthier citizens acting as jury, so the manor court wouldn’t be a smart place to sue for your or your child’s freedom. But if a naif hightailed it to a town, hoping to establish a new life as a free person, and a lord appeared to reclaim him or her, it was up to the lord to prove his right to the person by establishing that he or she came from a line of naifs. 

If the case Butler cites was typical, proving that was harder than it sounds. In 1280, William of Cressy tried to reclaim William son of Siward by producing a collection of (entirely male) relatives to prove that William S. came from a line of unfree men, but either William S. or his lawyer managed to undermine William C.’s claims about their status, one by one. 

Not only were the courts leaning against women, they seem to have been leaning more toward freedom than unfreedom. As one judge wrote, “Free law is more predisposed to save and maintain a man in his free estate than to condemn him or lead him into servitude and so, since you say that he is your villein and he says he is free, the law acts and we ought rather to act to save him and support him in his free estate than to maintain you in this to bring him back and reduce him to servitude, for it is clear that he is free until you have proved him the reverse by his blood.”

In another case, from 1326, Thomas son of Thomas the Elder tried to claim Richard Lachebere, using three unfree relatives as proof. Richard argued that they didn’t share the same blood because “he was a bastard and thus free.” The judge ruled that because Richard was a bastard, “he had estranged himself from every blood, so that he could not be proven a villein by any blood.” 

Or as Butler puts it, “Rather than rely on the word of a woman, it was simply easier to presume freedom.”

I do wonder, though, whether town courts were more inclined toward freedom since they sat outside the manorial system.

Mary Prince & the ambiguity of slavery in England

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In 1831, a couple of years before the British Empire abolished slavery, a former slave named Mary Prince published The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave. It’s credited with giving a good strong push to the abolitionist chariot and it’s one of Britain’s pivotal slave narratives, the first written by a woman, remembered with Ottobah Cugoano’s from 1787 and Olaudah Equiano’s from 1789, although Cugoano and Olaudah are, I think, better known.

Why am I weaseling around saying “I think” there? Because I’m not originally British. I’ve lived here for–hang on, I’ll need access to my toes to count this high–18 years, give or take a toe, but when you come to a country as an adult there’s some ground you just don’t make up. You bring other gifts. Immigrants are handy to have around, although you wouldn’t know that if your only contact with us comes from following the news. But some of the stuff that happens in your brain when you’re young doesn’t happen when you’re not. And I’m very much not. So I have the impression that Prince is less well known, but y’know, most of British history is new to me, so I’m not the best judge. 

To be fair, a lot of British history would be new to most of the British if they were to stumble over it, just as most of American history would be new to most Americans, and a lot of people are working overtime to make sure it stays that way.

Irrelevant photo: daffodils growing in a hedge. I’d love to run a picture of Mary Prince but there are none.

 

But back to Mary Prince

Prince was born into slavery in the Caribbean, sold away from her family when she was twelve, and shuffled between islands and slaveholders until well into her adulthood. She escaped once briefly, as a child, and as an adult married a free Black man Daniel James, who offered to buy her freedom but was refused. 

In 1828, about a year and a half after her marriage, the last in that collection of slaveholders, John Adams Wood, took Prince to England as a servant, and–

You remember that first paragraph where I said she was a former slave? That’s both true and not true. Her status in England was ambiguous. 

 

The bit about whether slavery was legal

To make sense of this, we have to go back to a 1772 court ruling involving  James Somerset, a slave who escaped in England just as he was about to be shipped overseas and sold. The court freed him and that ruling was generally taken as putting an end to slavery within England’s borders, although not in its empire. 

In fact, it didn’t end slavery. A year after the Somerset ruling, a newspaper reported that an escaped slave had been recaptured and committed suicide. Other newspapers ran ads for the sale of slaves. In 1788, two anti-slavery campaigners bought a slave in England to prove that slavery continued within the country’s borders. 

In fact, the judge in the Somerset case, was aware enough of slavery’s ambiguous status that his 1782 will freed his grand-niece, Dido Elizabeth Belle, who’d been born into slavery but who he’d raised and educated and who lived in England with his family. What he had in fact ruled illegal in the Somerset case was taking a slave out of the country without his or her consent. That left England in a thoroughly weird position: none of its laws gave slavery any standing, but none of them made it illegal either. 

 

And back to Mary Prince again

Not long after Prince arrived in London, she walked out on the slaveholders who’d brought her, and I’d love to tell you how long “not long” was but nothing I’ve found makes it clear. The sources I’ve found do say her health was getting worse–she had arthritis–and a couple of the sources make it sound like she struggled to do the work that the Wood family demanded. One source says they threatened to throw her out on the street.

Whatever happened, she walked out and turned to the Moravian Mission, a Protestant church that she’d joined in Antigua, and at some point she found her way to the Anti-Slavery Society and met Thomas Pringle, the secretary of the London branch. She also found work and, the ambiguities of the law be damned, lived as a free woman.

What Prince wanted was to return to Antigua as a free woman, though, and she and Pringle tried, first through a lawyer and later through a minister, to negotiate with Wood for her freedom. Wood refused to free her on any terms. 

In 1829 she petitioned Parliament, asking them to free the enslaved people of the Caribbean, making her the first woman to petition Britain’s Parliament. And in what seems to be a separate petition, the Anti-Slavery Society petitioned for her manumission. 

Sorry for the murkiness. I’m working from multiple articles here and frankly some of them are better on rhetoric than on detail. Anyway, if there were two petitions, both failed. If there was one– 

Yeah. You get it.

At some point she became unemployed and the Pringles hired her as a domestic servant, and it was while she lived with them that she suggested testifying, in book form, to the brutality and violence of slavery. 

“I have felt what a slave feels,” she wrote, “and I know what a slave knows; and I would have all the good people in England to know it too, that they may break our chains, and set us free.”  

Prince could read and write, but she dictated the book to an English abolitionist, Susanna Strickland, who compiled it, and an abolitionist who’d lived in Antigua “helped on the Antigua section,” whatever that means. An additional slave narrative, by Louis Asa-Asa, was added to the book. He testified to his experience of being captured in Africa and brought ashore in St. Ives, Cornwall, when storms took the ship off course. 

Scholars argue about the extent to which Strickland and Pringle shaped the manuscript. By extension, I’d guess they’re arguing about how much the voice is Prince’s. No one these days seems to question the reality of her evidence, which is graphic and raw. 

 

The book and the lawsuits

At the time, though, the book was questioned, and it wasn’t long after the book was published that the lawsuits started. First Pringle, as the publisher, sued someone who claimed in print that the story was a fraud. Pringle won and was awarded £5 (more or less £485 in 2025 money, and from here on I’ll leave you to do the calculations) plus costs–a total of £160. 

Then Wood–the last in that line of slaveholders, remember–sued Pringle for defamation and Pringle countersued. The court decided that story was exaggerated and Wood was awarded £25 but not costs. All of which added to the book’s popularity. It went through three editions in its first year. 

 

And after that . . . 

. . . Prince drops out of the public record and we don’t get the end of the story. In 1833, slavery was abolished in the British empire, except for, ahem, the parts controlled by the British East India Company, and that first ahem is followed by a second ahem, because for a period of years slavery was replaced with an apprenticeship system that was slavery under a different name.

Still, it’s possible that Prince returned to Antigua and her husband. It’s also possible that she didn’t. 

Bermuda counts her as a national hero and observes a holiday in her honor.

Who were the Bluestockings?

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You’ve just been dropping into the 18th century. You are a) privileged, b) clever, and c) female. That letter C) is going to cause you trouble. And you can expect some grief from the end parenthesis as well. You’re expected to be mindless, pretty (if possible), and above all, childbearing. After that–well, there is no after that. That’s your role. Abandon hope, ye who expected more out of life.

The rational creatures in your world are all male. Just ask one if you don’t believe it. If you think you’re also rational, you’ll have a hard time convincing anyone of it, and you’ll cause all sorts of social embarrassment by trying. 

Any form of ambition will also cause embarrassment.

You will, of course, have been educated, but only to be a wife and mother, to manage a prosperous household, and to be decorative–fashionable, demure, graceful, and several other adjectives. You will have learned reading, embroidery, music, dancing, drawing, a little history and geography, maybe a bit of French. Just enough to make yourself agreeable to men and above all, marriageable.

Irrelevant photo: Montbretia. It’s pretty but it’s invasive.

Those are the limits of your expectations, so let’s shift to the past tense. I don’t want to trap you back there for too long. Or myself. I’m about to hyperventilate.

Did I make any of that up because I’m a childless cat lady? Sadly for the people who lived through that era–and sadly for our era, which inherited a surprising number of assumptions from theirs–no. By way of example, the statesman Lord Chesterfield wrote to his son in 1748 that women “are only children of a larger growth; they have an entertaining tattle, and sometimes wit; but for solid, reasoning good sense, I never knew in my life one who had it, or who reasoned and acted consequentially for four-and-twenty-hours together.”

With a bit more generosity, Dr. John Gregory wrote in A Father’s Legacy to his Daughters (1774), “If you happen to have any learning, keep it a profound secret, especially from men, who look with a jealous and malignant eye on a woman of cultivated understanding.”

This is the world the Bluestockings came from and whose conventions they both broke and stayed within. 

 

The conventions they broke

The Bluestockings were never a formal organization. They were a social and intellectual circle made up for the most part of affluent English ladies, and they’re best known today for having hosted gatherings where men and women spoke on equal terms about literature, art, history, philosophy, science, foreign affairs, and pretty much anything except politics. And as Margaret Talbot puts it in the first article I linked to, England made room for them with, “a kind of condescending, self-congratulatory gallantry.” 

They hosted some of the age’s top talent, including Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke, David Garrick, Horace Walpole, and other men of letters, aristocrats with a literary bent, diplomats, painters, politicians. In short, people who mattered.

But they were more than simply hostesses. These were highly educated women at a time when the doors of any serious school were closed to girls and women. Some were self-educated. Some were educated at home by unconventional parents. But having attained an education against all the odds, they were shut out of most of the public spaces, such as coffee houses, where men discussed the issues of the day. The only way they were going to be part of those discussions was to bring the discussions into their homes. Hence the hostessing.

The men they invited had something to gain as well. Gatherings that discussed serious subjects were in sharp contrast to the usual social evenings of their class, which involved drinking, cards (of course for money, silly), and, as Talbot puts it, getting up to “sexual shenanigans.” That helps explain why the Bluestockings offered lemonade and tea instead of booze.

But the Bluestockings did more than just host salons. Many of them went on to write novels, criticism, history, classical scholarship, and endless letters. Letters were the social media of the day. Others worked as translators. One of them, Elizabeth Montagu, published an essay that was influential in establishing Shakespeare as a central figure in England’s national identity. The essay first appeared anonymously and after it became a smash hit (in the small circles where these things could be smash hits) it was republished under her name. 

Publishing was more than just a way to participate in the national conversation. It was one of the few fields where a woman could keep the money she earned. She couldn’t go into business or own property in her own name, but she could publish. 

 

The conventions they kept

But far from throwing all conventions out the window, they lived the conventional lives of ladies of their class, running their households and caring for aging parents, as women were expected to. Elizabeth Carter, whose translation of Epictetus held its place as the standard translation for the next century, is described by Gibson as “always careful to present herself as the perfect woman: meek and modest, diffident and self-effacing, completely unthreatening to male authority.” 

She could make a pudding as well as she could translate ancient Greek.

And then there was class. As ladies of their class were meant to be, they were snobs. One, Hannah More, had helped a working class woman publish her first book of poems, and when the book was successful enough to bring in some money she pressured the author to put her money in a trust administered by More and another upper-class Bluestocking, because how could “such a Woman” be trusted with her “poor Children’s money?”

(As you can see from the quotes, they didn’t break the conventions around capitalization either. They capitalized anything they damn well pleased.)

Another tale involves conventions around both class and women’s bodies. And religion. When the widow Hester Thrale married her daughter’s music teacher, her Bluestocking former friends were toxic about it. He was of the wrong class, he was foreign born, and he was Catholic. She was giving in to passion, and they were above passion. As one wrote, “Overbearing Passions are not natural in a ‘Matron’s bones.” 

Part of the problem with passion was that their intellectual claims rested on their respectability. One whiff of scandal and the whole structure might collapse. The rest of the problem was that in their world women were thought of as physical and men as intellectual, and in order to emphasize women’s rationality, they saw themselves as standing outside their bodies. That made them refined and respectable. That was the basis for equal treatment. Lose that and they were back to being just babymakers.

 

Their name

The name Bluestockings came not from what the w\omen wore but from a single man at one of those salons–or so the story goes. A botanist, Benjamin Stillingfleet, was invited and didn’t bother to change from the blue worsted stockings he wore in the field to the white silk stockings upper class men wore to formal occasions. Or else he was invited and declined because he didn’t have the appropriate clothes and his hostess told him to come “in his blue stockings.”

Or else–as one article claims–the respectable stockings were black, not white. It doesn’t matter and I can’t be bothered chasing that down. My money’s on white. Believe whatever version you like. Believe them all if you can manage. Either way, the story has nothing to do with what the women wore. The women accepted and used the term. 

Later, when their time had passed, Bluestocking became an insult–something to call a woman with intellectual ambitions and unbecoming opinions. And the radicals who might would’ve been sympathetic to their inherent feminism overlooked them as elitist and conservative. 

Still, history didn’t erase them. The Bluestockings had an effect on Jane Austen, Mary Wollstonecraft, and much later Virgina Woolf, and through them, on us.

Nothing is lost. I swear it to you. 

English Protestantism and the King’s Book of Sports

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Like so much of human history, England’s conflict between Protestants and Catholics (and between Protestants and Protestants) was played out against a backdrop of absurdity. That’s not to say it didn’t turn deadly with grim regularity, and at the time I’m sure it all would’ve looked perfectly sensible. Looking back, though–

Yeah, there’s nothing like hindsight. Let’s drop in on one small, strange moment.

The year is 1603. Elizabeth I has died and King James is riding from Scotland–where he’s already king–to London to have all the hocus-pocus of becoming the English king performed over and around him. Along the way he stops in Lancashire, and while he’s there, proto-king that he is, he’s handed a petition complaining that the local clergy and magistrates are keeping people from playing traditional games on Sunday. 

This, my friends, is important. So important that we’ll shift to the past tense.

Irrelevant photo: geranium

Enter the Puritans

The Puritans got their start inside the Church of England, and their goal was to cleanse the church of all traces of Catholicism–the ceremony, the fancy clothes, the incense, the stained glass, the bishops, and pretty much anything else that wasn’t mentioned in the Bible. And since dancing and Maypoles and archery hadn’t been mentioned–

Okay, I have no idea what was mentioned in the Bible. I’d feel safe betting on Maypoles. Dancing and archery? Those look like shakier ground and I won’t be placing any bets. 

But you know how a movement can start out with one clear argument–being or not being in the Bible is surely as simple as a baloney sandwich–and before it’s even lunchtime people are arguing about ketchup and mustard and pickles? And somebody in a fancy suit wants sliced tomatoes and sourdough bread and swears it’s spelled bologna? 

It was like that. Forget that business about the Bible, the rumor was going around that Catholics encouraged games on Sunday in order to keep people away from Protestant church services. Clearly, the only sensible response was to ban the games. Basically, the idea was to close off all other activities so people would come to church out of sheer boredom, although I don’t suppose they’d have made the argument in quite that way.

 

And now, enter James

James was a good audience for this particular petition. (Remember the petition? If not, return to Go and start over.) Several Puritans writers argued that kings who didn’t support the true religion could legitimately be deposed, which isn’t an argument calculated to win the heart of either king or proto-king. Kings were used to deciding which religion was the true one and watching their subjects fall into line.  

So that didn’t go down well. What’s more, there was a good argument to be made that banning sports on Sunday would drive people not to Protestant services but into the arms of–gasp, wheeze–Catholicism, which didn’t object to a bit of fun on a Sunday.

Sunday, remember, was most people’s only regular day off, so why not allow them a little fun. Catholics would positively come flocking to the Protestant cause.

Once James got to the other side of the checkerboard–or, more accurately, to London–and got himself kinged, he issued the Book of Sports, now known as the King’s Book of Sports, since any idiot can write a book but it takes a certain kind of idiot to be king, and people pay more attention to the second kind of idiot than the first. 

I wish I knew the secret of getting as much press as he did.

 

The book

The book wasn’t actually a book. It was a proclamation allowing (after Sunday afternoon services) dancing, archery, “leaping, vaulting, or any other such harmless recreation . . . having of May games, Whitsun ales and morris dances, and the setting up of May-poles and other sports therewith used, so as the same may be had in due and convenient time without impediment or neglect of divine service, and that women shall have leave to carry rushes to church for the decorating of it, according to their old custom.” 

Women, as ever, got to have all the fun. They were specifically left out of archery but were at least allowed to take part in the dancing. And no doubt the ales.

But not everything was allowed on a Sunday. There would be no “bear and bull-baiting, interludes, and (at all times in the meane [or in some versions, “meaner”] sort of people by law prohibited) bowling.” 

If you’re having trouble untangling that list, so am I, but it’s not law anymore so we don’t have to lose sleep over it. Tangled or not, though, it calls our attention to the class aspect of the conflict. The original petitioners were from the gentry–the “well-born” people below the level of the aristocracy but very much above, as James had it, people of the “meane [or meaner] sort.” 

Why was bowling on the list of no-no’s? It had become such a craze that working people were thought to be neglecting the work they should be doing. So it was banned for them. But the nation wouldn’t suffer if their betters neglected their duties to roll balls across the ground, because let’s face it, they weren’t producing anything anyway.

 

And so . . .

. . . merriness was restored to merrie England. (Scotland was still a separate country, which just happened to have the same king, so we’ll leave it out of the discussion.) But let’s not get too merrie, because in justifying his decree James mentions not only the likelihood of attracting Catholics to the Church of England, but the importance of healthy exercise in making men “more able for war, when We, or Our successors, shall have occasion to use them.”

Drink, dance, and be merrie, folks, for tomorrow the king may lead you to slaughter. 

Sorry, I always did know how to spoil a party.

In 1618, James ordered that his proclamation was to be read from every pulpit in the country, but in the face of an uproar from the Puritans, and on the advice of the Archbishop of Canterbury, he withdrew the order. 

His son, Charles I, wasn’t as wise. In 1633 he reissued the decree, with a few additions, and insisted that it be read, tossing matches into an already combustible situation and leading eventually to the Civil War. 

The class hierarchy in Anglo-Saxon England

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Let’s suppose you’re dropped into Anglo-Saxon England sometime between, say, 866 and 1066. It could happen to anyone, after all. It’s good to be prepared. So how are you going to negotiate the class structure? 

Badly, of course. You’re clueless, you’re an outsider, the class structure isn’t your most immediate problem, and you can’t figure out what anybody’s saying, but set all that aside for now. Let’s magic you up a set of appropriate clothes, slip you a miniaturized translator gizmo that hasn’t  been invented yet, pretend the question makes some sort of sense. The rest of us will hide in the bushes to see how you do. 

But before we start your Anglo-Saxon cheat sheet, a word about disillusionment: you may have read about how free and noble Anglo-Saxon society was. Well, here’s a packet of salt so you can sprinkle a grain or two on your former beliefs. It doesn’t weigh enough to slow you down and you will need it.

Irrelevant photo: rosebay willowherb, a.k.a. fireweed

Slaves

On the lowest rung of Anglo-Saxon society are the slaves–some 10% of the population. (Salt, please.) Some of them are slaves because they were born slaves. Others werethe defeated from one war or another or became slaves as a punishment for some crime–theft, say, or working on a Sunday. (To balance that out, a slave who’s forced to work on a Sunday will–at least in theory– be freed. It’s the one and only legal protection a slave has.) Yet another group sold themselves into slavery as an alternative to starvation. 

Slaves can be sold, and Bristol does a booming business selling slaves to Ireland. Dublin (it’s a Viking port just now) sells Anglo-Saxon slaves on to Iceland, Scandinavia, and Arabic Spain. That makes it pretty well meaningless to say that slaves are 10% of the population, but it’s the number we have, so let’s keep it.

Geburs

Just above the slaves are the geburs–semi-free peasants. (If anyone knows a bit of Old English, be tolerant. One source I’ve found has gebur as a plural and another one swears it’s singular. I’ve added an S for luck.) By the middle of the 1000s, they make up about 70% of the population and they owe their labor to their lord in return for the land they farm. When the Normans invade, they’ll be called villeins. We’d call them serfs. That’s another way of saying that feudalism, which we tend to think was introduced by the Normans when they invaded, had deep roots in free, upstanding Anglo-Saxon England. But we’ve now accounted for 80% of the population and we still haven’t run into anyone who’s free. You’ve got some salt left, don’t you? Toss a little more on.  

Coerls

Above the geburs are the free peasants–coerls–and the way to tell them from the unfree peasants is that they can sell their land. Or give it away. They have a lord–everyone in Anglo-Saxon society does–but they can choose theirs. They can also carry weapons (that might be a more useful identifier, come to think of it) and if they’re accused of a crime they can prove their innocence by swearing an oath. Because clearly they wouldn’t lie.

They can do the same for other people, so you might want to keep a coerl handy in case you violate a law you didn’t know about. It’s easy to do when you’ve just wandered in. The men can fight in the army–in fact, if the king commands it, they have to–and have a share of the village land and flocks. They play a part in the village courts this, I think, is where that image of freedom comes from. The Normans handed the administration of justice over to one person, the lord of the manor. By comparison, yes, Anglo-Saxon justice looks pretty good. 

Exactly how much of these freedoms also apply to women isn’t clear in the sources I’m using here. Women have far more rights in Anglo-Saxon England than they will for centuries to come. Sorry not to chase up a bit more detail, but I’m short on time just now.

In practice, many coerls aren’t much better off than their neighboring gebur. They make up some 15% of the population, so we’ve now accounted for 95% and we’d better hurry and squeeze in everyone who’s left.

The fine print

In the east of England, the whole system of lords and manors and labor service seems to have been weaker than in the rest of the country. And by the end of the period we’re talking about, a coerl could move up and become a thegn by owning five hides of land, a bell house, and having a place in the king’s hall.

What’s a hide? Don’t worry about it. It’s a measurement of land.

And a bell house? Well, kiddies, an extensive two-minute search of the internet informs me it’s a house with a bell. In a tower. To summon people to prayer and whatever else you might want to summon them for. All of which tells us that the society allows for social mobility. That’s generally considered a good thing, and I’m not against it, but I’ll need a little more salt if we start talking about it as a great thing, because while social mobility works well for the people who move up the ladder, it does fuck-all for the people who don’t. 

Yes, I do swear. It’s good for me. It also helps with the earth’s rotation.

Shall we move on?

Thegns

This is the most varied category, ranging from minor nobility at the top down to their retainers. They form the backbone of the army and if they’re rewarded for some spectacular service with land they can become earls. If you want a comparison to post-invasion England, think of them as the country gentry. 

How much of the population are they? Annoyingly, the book I’m working from, Life in the MIddle Ages: Scenes from the Town and Countryside of Medieval England, by Martyn Whittock, switches from percentages to absolute numbers here, so 4,500 held estates that were defined by charters. 

Why do the charters matter? Because those are the records historians can work from. They’re a way to count them.

After this, we’ll stop counting because the numbers are too small. Also because I don’t have any numbers to give you.

Ealdormen

This translates as elders, but they’re powerful nobles who play a role in local government, the king’s court, the army, and the courts of justice. 

Earls

They have authority over regions that were once independent kingdoms. The position isn’t hereditary but by the end of the period it becomes customary to choose an earl from within a small group of powerful families.

The king

Here I can give you a number again: they have one lone king–at least once Anglo-Saxon England is consolidated into one lone kingdom–and the king has one lone family, or at least one that’s recognized. But kingship isn’t hereditary in the way most of us expect. The witan–a council of the most powerful nobles–chooses the king from within the royal family.

Don’t worry about that. You’re not likely to meet any of them, so fix your attention on the lower ranks.

The Hundred Years War in two thousand words

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Taking a long view, the Hundred Years War (1337–1453) started a few hundred years before the count begins, in 1066, with a careless invasion of England. You know how these things happen. You look across the ocean and see a country that needs a king. Sure, it’s got some guy who says he already is king, but it so clearly needs you as king, because let’s face it, you don’t want to stay home and be nothing more than a duke. So you invade and become both a king and a duke. 

Sounds good. You just planted the seeds of a war that won’t blossom for centuries. 

You do have problems, of course. One is that between your kingdom and your dukedom lies that body of water you were looking out over, so you can’t just hop on a bus to move between them. Another is that your dukely self owes fealty and loyalty and several other -ties to a king who isn’t you: the French king.

It’s all a bit awkward, but even so it’s lucrative, and it won’t become a serious problem until after you die, and that makes it somebody else’s problem. 

In case your dual identity as king and duke has left you confused, I’ll clarify: you’re standing in for William the Conqueror today, and what with being dead and all, you now drop out of the picture and we move on to everyone who follows you.

Irrelevant photo: Valerian growing in a neighbor’s hedge.

More kings

The tension between being a duke in one place and a king in another will continue and be made more complicated by the nobility’s habit of marrying only people whose families have land and power and titles, all of which are inherited. High-end medieval marriages are supposed to cement alliances, and they probably do in the short term, but they also lead to disagreements over who gets to inherit what. They also blur the line between (in this case) what’s English and what’s French.

Hold onto that idea of conflict. We’ll get to it, but first let’s dredge up an example of how those lines get blurred. In 1154, when he becomes king of England and duke of Normandy, William the C’s great-grandson Henry II is already the count of Anjou and duke of Aquitaine. So he has four titles and three of them are in France, although his top-ranking title is English. That makes him not only the king of France’s theoretical equal but also the most powerful of the king of France’s subordinates. Under those circumstances, it can’t be simple figuring out who bows and who gets bowed to. It may depend on whose living room they’re in and whose TV they’re going to watch. Not to mention who’ll make the popcorn.

At times, the French king has direct control over less of France than the English king does, although (this being feudalism and all) the English king always plays second fiddle to the French king for those French lands, and it can get dangerous when the second fiddle is powerful enough to challenge the first violinist. So the French kings do what they can to strip away English holdings in France. In return, the English do what you’d expect: try to hang onto them. 

This is a time bomb, and it’s going to explode only a few episodes into the miniseries. But since I promised you a 2,000-word limit, we’ll skip a lot of the details.

 

Dynastic marriages

Let’s go back to those marriages and the conflicts they plant. Edward III of England is the nephew of Charles IV in France because all the appropriate people married other appropriate people. You wouldn’t expect them to marry (gasp) commoners, would you?

When Charlie dies, he doesn’t have a male heir, and French law won’t accept a (more gasps) female on the throne. So the French barons unroll the genealogical charts and–eek!–the closest male heir is the king of England.  Right. They unroll a few more inches of chart and find a cousin, Phillip, who’s not only certifiably male but French.

Eddie protests. France argues that Ed’s claim to the throne comes through his mother and, what with being female and all, she couldn’t transmit the right to a crown she couldn’t claim herself. 

After a bit of grumbling, Eddie caves–at least, that is, until Phil takes away one of his French toys, Gascony, at which point Eddie decides he really is the king of France. He takes the title King of France and the French Royal Arms. 

Why France and its royal arms are separate things is beyond me, but he’s convinced that they are and that he’s king of them both. The year is 1337. The Hundred Years War is about to start, although nobody’s calling it that yet.

 

War

For a while, the war goes well for the English. Eddie stirs up enough of the discontented nobility to make war on the cheap, because even when the English aren’t fighting, France still has to. Parts of the country become ungovernable–or at least Paris can’t govern them. The local lords can.

It’s in this period that England has the victories at Crecy and Poitiers that wander happily through the fields of English memory, often without much in the way of context, leaving the impression that it’s always summer, the wildflowers are always in bloom, and England always prevails. 

But don’t trust me too far on that business of English memory. I’m not English and I imported my memory from elsewhere. What you can trust is that the early signs are all good from the English point of view. They do major damage to the French economy and at Poitiers take the French king (not Phillip; by now it’s John II, or John the Good) prisoner, forcing him to sign a treaty so unfavorable to France that the country repudiates it.

Short digression: I’m having a little trouble figuring out why he’s John the Good, unless it’s because his primary enemy was Charles the Bad and it does make for some pleasing symmetry. John not only signs a bad truce, he marries his daughter to his bitter enemy (would you marry your kid to someone called John the Bad?) then doesn’t come through with her dowry, giving Charles even more reasons to be bad. And if that’s not enough, he gives some of Charles’ lands to his (that’s John’s) constable, no doubt causing further unhappiness in  his daughter’s home. He looks like a shady character to. But John the Good he is. 

Different era, different standards. 

Somewhere in the midst of all that, the Black Death sweeps through and conquers everything it damn well wants. 

 

Peace, and then more war

Starting in 1360, we get nearly ten years of peace, which breaks down when France and England back different claimants for the throne of Castile. Which, I remind you, is in Spain. You’d think that would make it irrelevant, but you’d be wrong. 

This is why I’m going light on the detail. My hair would catch fire if I spent too much time with this stuff. 

The French and the English start fighting again. The English launch raids into French territory. The French, in alliance with Spain, raid English cities along its south coast. France narrows England’s French possessions down to a strip along the coast.

Everyone’s tired and takes a couple of decades off. Mostly. They give serious thought to a lasting peace and say, “Nah, let’s not.” 

And this is where another English victory wanders triumphantly into the National Memory Banks: Agincourt. It’s all going so well that the English are within spitting distance of taking Paris.

In response, the splintered French powers meet to form an alliance against England. But instead of forming an alliance, though, one side assassinates the leader of another side and the French end up signing a treaty that will lead to the English king marrying the French king’s daughter, because these marriages work out so well for everyone, right? The English king will also inherit the French throne once the current king–who’s already not well–dies, and the English king will be regent for the French king while he lives. That disinherits the dauphin–the French heir–who was the guy who messed up that three-way meeting.

The muse of history (that’s Clio, in case you want to invite her to your next party) laughs at their plans. The English king dies before the French king, which leaves a nine-month-old, in all his wisdom, in charge of both countries. 

 

But it’s not over yet 

The south of France backs the dauphin against the baby king, Joan of Arc rides in on her pony, winning a victory for the French, and the dauphin is crowned. France now has two kings. One speaks French, the other (I’m guessing) has yet to speak a full sentence.

Joanie’s captured, tried, and burned for heresy. The French take Paris back. A truce is negotiated. The English indulge in a little last minute sacking and looting, since that’s what medieval warfare’s all about. The truce is abandoned. 

Are you starting to feel hopeless about this thing? Just imagine how people felt at the time. 

The French take back all of France except for Calais. Effectively, although not officially, the war’s over. 

 

Why do we care about any of this?

Many reasons. 

Since the war’s been fought on French soil, and since civilians are fair game (unlike, ahem, in our enlightened times), France has been devastated. All that looting and pillaging has had a massive impact on France. 

And even where they’re not looting and pillaging, soldiers are like a plague of locusts. They need to eat, and guess who gets to feed them? Local people, and payment is not guaranteed. That felt not only in France but also in southeast England, where English armies were been stationed before they shipped out. 

In England, though, most ordinary people feel the impact primarily in the form of taxes, and there’ve been a mass of them. War’s expensive. All those taxes led, among other things, to the Peasants Revolt.

They also led to Parliament becoming more powerful, because each time the king introduces a new tax, Parliament has to wave its magic feather to approve it. As gets Parliament stronger, the king gets weaker. 

Another way for the king to raise money has been to increase the number of nobles, and by the end of the war the size of the nobility has tripled and the crown’s created new ranks–esquire and gentleman.

It all brings in money. It’s also never enough. By the time the war ends, the English treasury is just about empty. 

 

Nationalism

Throughout the war, assorted kings and the church have drummed up a patriotic frenzy, as governments do when they have a war brewing. Among other things, this has led to the country adopting St. George as its patron saint. Hell, he’d been a soldier, hadn’t he? What could be better? 

The problem with patriotic frenzy, though, is that it turns against the leader who loses a war. You’ll find a box of historical examples by the door. Grab a handful on your way out. They’re both instructive and sobering. This particular patriotic frenzy, according to the BBC, which knows all, “had much to do with the outbreak in the mid-1450s of civil war (the ‘Wars of the Roses’). The recovery of the lost lands in France long remained a wishful national aspiration.” No one introduced the slogan Make England Great Again, but that’s only because the baseball cap hadn’t been invented.

Both England and France came away with an increased sense of nationhood and an increased indulgence in nationalism, not to mention a habit of looking down on each other. The English are still snippy about the French, and as far as I can tell with my limited French, the French are the same about the English, although they haven’t gone to war with each other lately. 

One final, and surprising outcome is the development of diplomacy. You wouldn’t expect such a mess of a war to lead to that, but it did. Experience began to be recognized as a surprisingly useful quality in negotiations. 

Who’d have thunk?

*

I’m now fifty-two words over my limit. If you send me a self-addressed, stamped envelope, I’ll send your money back.

The early English novel: morality and–oooh–transgression

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It’s easy to think about the past as one long, undifferentiated stretch of sexual repression for women, during which rich men sexually harrassed the servants, kept mistresses, and picked up prostitutes, all while maintaining their status as upstanding members of the community, and single women who had the bad luck to become pregnant were tossed out into the snow to become prostitutes because what else was left for them and, after all, how else was the supply of prostitutes to be maintained?

That’s not completely off base, but it’s also not completely on base either. Nothing’s ever that simple.

 

Irrelevant photo, with an important update: I originally said I was reasonably sure this is a speedwell. I was wrong. It’s alkanet. A wildflower, though, growing in what it decided was the right place.

The Georgian Era

Let’s plunk ourselves down in the Georgian era (that’s, oh, say 1714 to 1830), because sexual attitudes were changing, especially among what one essay I read calls, without defining them, the upper classes. Think of those classes as the zone where the aristocracy met the monied upstarts. As attitudes shifted, upper-class men could be open about having mistresses, and upper-class married women could conduct affairs, although if one of them got pregnant decency demanded that she give up her child.

Decency’s a strange old bird and not prone to making logical demands.

Why the change? Several reasons: One, more of the population had moved to cities, where people couldn’t do as good a job of watching (and gossiping about) each other as they had in villages and small towns, so community sexual policing wasn’t as efficient as it had been. Two, the power of both extreme Protestantism and the Church of England were fading. People were sizing their morality to fit themselves rather than having it handed to them, all stitched and starched into predetermined dimensions. And three, printing–the technology that had made the Bible accessible to anyone who could read it–now made male-oriented pornography (or erotica if you’re happier thinking of it that way) available to anyone who could afford it (and, of course, read–this was before photos).

Increasing numbers of people could read.

That sound you hear is history’s cracked laughter.

Printing also made written advice about sex available, in the forms of both sex manuals and anti-masturbation tracts. You can date the culture’s obsessive fear of masturbation to this era.

Men were assumed to have sexual needs. Women were assumed to be, by nature, more virtuous. This edged out the earlier belief that women were naturally more lustful, which somehow coexisted with the belief that men just kind of naturally raped women if they wanted to and could.

Don’t try to make sense of it. Your brain will catch on fire.

So sexuality (at least for the upper class) was changing, but only within limits. Step outside the limits and society wouldn’t be forgiving–at least not if you’d shown the poor judgement to be of the female persuasion. But society had at least drawn a larger circle for people to stay within, and stepping across that new line was not only imaginable but thrilling. So writing about it could be lucrative.

 

Enter the novel

We could argue about who wrote the first English novel, but since you’re not actually present and I don’t much care, we won’t. Let the experts place their bets on Chaucer or Defoe or–oh, never mind, other people. We’ll just date it to the early eighteenth century (locking Chaucer out; sorry Geoff) and slam the door in case the experts get noisy. We–or to be more accurate, I–are or am more interested in using the novel as a way to drop into eighteenth century English society.

If you want to argue that we should be talking about Britain instead of England, please do. I have trouble finding the borders. They danced back and forth a bit over the centuries, and no matter where they were people flowed back and forth, books flowed back and forth, even kings and politics flowed back and forth, so how would I know where they were at just the badly defined moment when the novel came into existence?

But while you’re putting your arguments together, I’m going to take advantage of the silence and talk about the novel’s position in eighteenth-century England: Decent people looked down their upper-class noses at it.

What was wrong with it? Well, it appealed to–and was often written by–the middle class. And if that wasn’t bad enough, it was read for the most part by (oh, the shame of it) women. On top of which, it was commercial, and that’s another way of saying it was popular, which even today is understood to mean that it couldn’t possibly be any good.

Who understands popular that way? Why, the people who matter, of course, and I’m always in favor of annoying them.

So the novel was a way for silly people to waste their time, and that attitude still hangs in our cultural corners like a cobweb. As late as the 1980s, when a friend of mine taught at a girls’ public school (if you’re not British, understand that public means private; don’t try to make sense of it), the school librarian informed her that one didn’t read novels in the morning. They were (just barely, I’m guessing) acceptable in the afternoon, but the morning was for nonfiction–in other words, for books that improved one’s mind and character.

Ah, but the novel committed worse sins than frivolity and popularity and keeping bad company. Any number of women wrote novels–some even under their own names–and what’s worse they made a success of it.

Well, no wonder people looked down on the form. And by people, of course, I mean people who thought they were better than women and the middle class. In other words, we’re talking about a small but influential number of folks.

 

The middle class

Here we’d better stop and define the middle class, because it’s easy to find people who’ll tell you how important it’s emergence was, politically, culturally, or economically, but it’s hard to find a solid definition of what they’re talking about. Does being middle class depend on your income, your lifestyle (don’t get me started on what, if anything, lifestyle means), your aspirations, your education, your relationship to the means of production? Or since we’re talking about Britain (or possibly England), your accent or your ancestors?

The answer depends on who you ask, and anything that hard to define should be approached with caution and a supply of dog treats in case it bites. As (at least in part) an American, I’m acutely aware of this, since almost the entire U.S. population considers itself middle class. Dog treats may not be enough.

In Britain of the eighteenth century, the definition was either complicated or clarified, or possibly both, by the existence of a hereditary aristocracy and an impoverished urban and rural working class. Pretty much anyone you couldn’t slot into either of those two groups qualified as middle class.

The problem there is that such a varied collection of people got dumped into the middle class bucket that they didn’t have a whole lot in common. The bucket accumulated everyone from threadbare clerks to mega-industrialists, along with lawyers (great and small) and managers and engineers and the most marginal shopkeepers. But hazy as the definition is, large as the bucket had to be to hold them all, it’s the definition we have. Let’s work with it.

Whatever the middle class was, it grew rapidly in the seventeenth century, both in numbers and in (unevenly distributed) power. A number of people who weren’t part of the aristocracy were rude enough to get rich off the industrial revolution, and the aristocracy resented that. In the logic of the times, it made sense that the aristocracy looked down on them all. The only respectable way to make money was from land—preferably land that had been in your family since the Norman invasion—and the newly rich were making their money from (do forgive me if I use coarse language here) trade.

And then, to further complicate the picture, a group of people who didn’t get rich got solvent (in either absolute or relative terms), and they had the nerve to proliferate.

But despise the middle class as they would, the aristocracy was stuck with them–especially with the brash industrialists who had too much money to dismiss entirely. So much money, in fact, that the aristocracy shamefacedly married some of their kids to industrialists’ kids.

So parts of the middle class lived very comfortably, thanks, while other parts clung as hard as they could to the lower edges of respectability. And many of them, on all parts of the spectrum, wanted a bit of culture, some because it brightened their lives and their brains and others because culture was the kind of thing that people with money were supposed to buy and at least pretend to appreciate.

Put that together with the growing number of people who could read and had a bit of leisure and what happened? The publishing industry invented itself. Booksellers popped up–mostly men but a few women–and they often doubled as publishers.

But this growing middle class audience wasn’t impressed with the books the aristocracy liked. They wanted books that spoke to their experience of the world, and when the novel came along, that’s what it spoke to, so the novel became an important part of the book trade. Some of those novels were what we think of today as the classics, but they were joined by any number of now-forgotten (probably forgettable and often anonymous) novels that writers cranked out to pick up on the trend of the moment.

If you want a modern parallel, think about science fiction or mysteries. They’re popular, so a lot of pretty awful ones get published on the theory that someone’ll buy them–and someone often does. If you want to look down on either genre, you’ll find lots of ways to prove they’re schlock. Some, though, are competent entertainment and others are not only well written but look deeply into our convoluted world. Both forms have opened up ways to consider the world that earlier genres didn’t make possible.

The same thing happened when writers who weren’t straight, white, middle-to-upper class, Christian, and male broke into print. They spoke to new groups of readers, and they brought new life, energy, understanding, and excitement to publishing–along with new readers.

And a predictable number of people despised them for it and blew trumpets announcing the end of literature, or possibly Western civilization and culture in general.

That’s what it was like when the novel brought middle-class voices into the public conversation. A whole new world became visible. The books may look like the same-old same-old now, but in their time they were a quiet revolution.

By the mid-eighteenth century, circulating libraries (as opposed to the private libraries belonging to either institutions or the wealthy) had come along, and by the end of the century you could find them even in small towns. Books were expensive, but you could pay a library subscription and borrow one after another after another. And again, novels made up a healthy portion of the libraries’ stock.

The public library hadn’t been dreamed of yet. If a poor person could read and was hungry for books, they’d be well advised to steal them. And to be careful about how they did it, because the punishments for even small thefts were horrifying.

 

What’s all this got to do with morality?

Dragging along in the novel’s wake, with their heads dipping below the waves as they went, came the moralists, sputtering disapproval every time they surfaced. The novel’s reader, they reminded anyone who’d listen, was typically a woman. A young woman. An impressionable young woman (sorry—this level of hyperventilated disapproval demands italics; be grateful I haven’t broken into the exclamation points), who could easily be led astray or overstimulated.

No, I’m not sure what they meant by overstimulated either. I suspect it had something to do with sex, which impressionable young women weren’t supposed to know about or be interested in, although they were prone to falling in love inconveniently, but that, of course, was sentimental, not sexual because see the beginning of the sentence, Q.E.D. And if that seems like circular reasoning, it lost none of its power just because it made no sense. It kept a fair number people trapped in its eddy for many a circuit.

Did I mention that the above applied only to decent impressionable young women? If we’re talking about fallen women and women of the lower classes, a whole different set of truisms would have to be taken out of mothballs.

Middle-class women read novels in part because the more respectable they–that’s the women, not the novels–were, the less likely they were to be able to take any action in the world. They couldn’t work. They couldn’t run a business or own anything in their own names. They couldn’t vote. They had no legal claim even on their children. If their husbands had enough money, they couldn’t clean or cook or get muddy in the garden, because lesser mortals would do that for them. Their education had suited them better for decorative roles than for useful ones.

If they read, it was because they could. Sitting around looking decorative can get old, and a book can open a larger world. And it doesn’t leave dirt under your fingernails, so no one has to know what you’ve been up to.

I started out by saying that sexual conventions were changing, and they were, but they were contradictory and still powerful, especially for marriageable young women, whose sexuality had to be controlled. A good marriage depended on the bride being a virgin, or at least passing for one.

Conventions and morals, though, are never a perfect fit for the real world. Young women faced twin perils: men and themselves. Even the best-protected woman might be raped, and forget the trauma that caused, it would ruin her on the marriage market unless it could be covered up. As for herself, even the most carefully brought up young woman might fall in love with an inconvenient man.

This was the novel’s home turf: convention and transgression. The novel needed both. Without rigid conventions, it couldn’t have transgression. Without transgression, it couldn’t have thrills.

 

Tune in next week . . .

. . . for the next exciting installment, because this is already too long. I’ll post the second half of it, which at long last makes use of a dismal novel I had to read in high school.  What could be more enticing?

Cornwall’s Prayerbook Rebellion

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It’s 1549, we’re in Cornwall, and (I’m taking a gamble here) none of us speak the language, because it isn’t English, it’s Cornish. Enough people speak English that we can probably buy a loaf of bread and a pint of beer (we’ll want to stay away from the water), but it’s embarrassing to depend on other people being better at languages than we are.

 

The inevitable background

What else do we need to know? Edward the Kid is on the English throne. That makes him sound more like a wild west gunslinger than a monarch, though, so let’s be conventional enough to call him Edward VI. He won’t last long–he becomes king at 9 and dies of TB at 15–but right now he’s sitting in the fancy chair, and he’s seriously, Protestantly Protestant, and more to the point, so are the people around him who, since he really is a kid, are powerful forces. 

This is when (and why) crucifixes and saints’ images are stripped out of the churches. Stained glass is destroyed. Masses for the dead are banned, and so are rosaries and church processions. The clergy’s gotten permission to marry.

But in Cornwall it’s gone further than that. Churches can’t ring bells for the dead. Church ales–fundraising banquets that are one of the important ways local churches raise money–have been banned. Priests’ vestments have to meet strict guidelines, and parishioners have to pay for that. 

Irrelevant photo: A magnolia blossom. For some reasons, it decided to bloom a second time this summer

These West Country rules come from William Body, who (I’m quoting David Horspool’s The English Rebel here) “got his hands on the archdeaconry of Cornwall against local opposition,” and then managed to line his pockets once he did.

In Penryn two years ago (that was 1547), there was a demonstration against him and the changes he’d introduced. It came off peacefully, and so did the government’s response. 

But the next year, the foundations that sang masses for the dead were suppressed, and in Helston Body was attacked and murdered by a mob led by a priest. 

Do I need to point out that this wasn’t peaceful? The priest and eleven other people were executed. This wasn’t a peaceful response.

Aren’t you glad I’m here to tell you these things?

Still, Edward, his advisors, or a combination thereof, didn’t think the opposition meant much. It happened in Cornwall, for fuck’s sake–the outer edges of beyond. They were convinced that people were thirsty for their reforms, but even if they’d believed the opposite, they might have acted the same way. Because they were right. It said so in their holy book, or it did once someone put the correct interpretation on it. So they moved ahead and introduced a major change in church services: they’d now be in English instead of Latin, and they’d follow the Book of Common Prayer. 

The Latin mass was now an endangered species, and if you insisted on saying it you’d be endangered yourself.

And since we’ve caught up with our timeline, we’ll shift back to the present tense. It almost makes sense if you don’t think about it too hard.

Conducting church services in a language people understand is a very Protestant move, and the English church has been edging in this direction for a while, first including snippets of English, then tolerating–maybe even encouraging–English-only masses in a few churches. Now, though, every last church has to use the Book of Common Prayer, and nope, they’re not negotiating this.

This sets off a massive flap. Catholics cling to Latin, and they’re horrified. But people who are further along the Protestant spectrum are equally offended because the Book of Common Prayer doesn’t break as sharply as they’d like with Catholicism. 

And–we’re finally getting to the point here–it offends the Cornish, because say what you like about how a service in the language people actually speak brings religion closer to the people, English isn’t their damn language and their priests can’t say services in Cornish because that’s not how it’s being done this week.

I’m not sure anyone wanted to say the service in Cornish, mind you. I’m just pointing out that the compromise wasn’t on the table. The Act of Uniformity bans every language except English from church services.

 

Cue the rebellion, please 

We’ll start in Bodmin, which is more or less the geographical center of Cornwall. It’s the first day the new services are scheduled to be heard. So people gather. People protest. They convince a local member of the gentry, Humphrey Arundell, to lead them.

Yes, I do notice the strangeness of people having to convince someone to lead them. It speaks, I think, to how deeply ingrained the hierarchy is. Without a gentleman to lead them, how could they possibly know what to do, even if they had to set him up there and tell him to do it?

Instead of going home at the end of the event, the protesters set up camp.

On the same day and for the same reasons, a protest breaks out in Sampford Courtenay, in Devon, the next county up from Cornwall, and nine days later the two groups set up camp a few miles outside Exeter and prepare to lay siege to the city. Figure there are some 2,000 rebels out there. Or some 4,000. Let’s not bog down over the details. A lot of people. More than you’d want at your birthday party.

The rebels put together several versions of their demands, and most of what they want is about religion. The center of religious reformation is in London. In the West Country, they hold to the beliefs and traditions that have been part of daily life for centuries. Still, they don’t call for a full return to the Catholic Church but to a return to the way things were under Henry VIII. And like so many rebels in monarchical countries, they don’t see themselves as challenging the king but the bad counselors around him. 

Yes, everybody’s drunk the monarchical KoolAid. It won’t be until the Civil War that they turn to other drinks.

The siege of Exeter lasts five or six weeks, and Exeter is left to defend itself until John Russell, who just happens to be the Lord Privy Seal (and people take these titles entirely seriously, remember) arrives with soldiers and defeats the rebels.

Estimates of the number of rebel dead are roughly the same as the estimates of the rebels themselves: 3,000 to 4,000. 

Again, don’t try too hard to make the numbers work. The leaders are hauled to London to be ritually hanged, drawn, and quartered. 

 

The aftermath

As a BBC historical article puts it, “The insurrection was eventually crushed with hideous slaughter – some three to four thousand West Country men were killed – and in its wake the ruling classes may well have come to associate the Cornish tongue with rebellion and sedition, as well as with poverty and ‘backwardness’. This in turn may help to explain why the Book of Common Prayer was never translated into Cornish, as it was later to be translated into Welsh. What is certain is that the failure to provide a liturgy in the Cornish tongue did much to hasten the subsequent decline of the language.”

The decline is more or less geographical, with English leaking across the Devon border and pouring south and west. By 1640, Cornish has retreated into the toe of Cornwall’s sock, and as the language dies out, the process of assimilation into England gathers force. By 1700, only 5,000 people speak Cornish.

The last native speaker of Cornish is Dolly Pentreath, who’s born in 1685 and dies in 1777. 

But. The sense of separation stays strong and plays a role in Cornwall taking the royalist side in the Civil Wars–partly (or so the BBC article speculates) because they saw Charles as  British and the Parliamentarians as English. With his defeat, the Cornish identity took another hit.