Imprisonment is generally the punishment used for debtors. If a man is accused of failing to pay another man a sum of money that he owes, he is arrested by the constables or watchmen and consigned to prison, where he must remain until the debt is paid. In London this is the Fleet. The conditions therein are awful – fifty or so men in a room with bare boards and no furniture or blankets, and with many inmates suffering from some disease or other. A debtor has to pay rent for his chamber if he does not wish to lie with the common criminals, and he also has to pay for his food. He is free to receive visitors and even to go out of the prison, if accompanied by a guard and as long as he pays the warden for the privilege. However, doing so only increases his debts. Many prisoners find themselves relegated from the chambers to the grim pit of the prison basement.
Bridewell Hospital in London is the place where people (mostly women) are locked up for vice crimes such as vagrancy, prostitution and domestic disorders. It also has its own courts where the master and governors can proceed without reference to any other external authority. The beds are filthy, the food is ‘fit for dogs’, and the open sewer of the Fleet River runs beside it. Yet this is where poor Frances Palmer is sent in 1603. She has twice been made pregnant by menservants with whom she worked, has most recently given birth in the open street next to an alehouse – and both her children have died. Having been arrested for whoredom and vagrancy, she is taken to Bridewell where it is ordained that she be ‘punished’ – as if she needs further misery.26
Whipping. This is a common punishment generally used for vagabondage, theft, deceit and sedition. Palliards and wild rogues looking for food and money often end up being whipped out of town before they can obtain either. Petty thieves who steal goods worth less than a shilling (petty larceny) are often sentenced to be whipped. Two men who remove lead from London’s conduits, cutting off the city’s water supply on 30 November 1560, are punished in this way.27 In 1561 a man is whipped through the streets of Westminster and then through London and across London Bridge to Southwark for forging documents in the hand of the queen’s Master of Horse.28 In such cases the sentence is that the culprit be ‘whipped at a cart’s arse’. Tied to the back of a cart, he is stripped half-naked and, as he stumbles along, his back is lashed with leather whips ‘until he bleeds well’. This is also a punishment meted out by JPs to couples who have an illegitimate child: the man and the woman are tied together, stripped half-naked and whipped as they are led twice through the parish.29
Certain other crimes entail whipping at a post. In 1561 a waterman is fastened to the whipping post at Queenhithe for uttering some seditious words against the magistrates.30 A whipping post can also be found in many rural manors, complete with iron clasps for hands and legs to support the offender; here it is used for such crimes as taking timber or firewood from the manor without permission, a crime known as ‘hedgebreaking’.31 Women and children are whipped too, both through the streets and at a whipping post. A woman heard denouncing Bridewell Hospital and its governors is ‘well-whipped’ for her slander. A painter’s wife is whipped so thoroughly that the gashes of the whip are deeper than her finger.32 Young Fyndern Catesby steals a woman’s kirtle, cloak, sheet and some linen worth 31s 4d, which is enough to warrant the gallows, but because he is under the age of fourteen he is only whipped.33 Even the mentally ill are whipped. In April 1561 a man released from Bedlam Hospital goes about professing that he is the risen Christ. Teaming up with a man released from the Marshalsea prison by the name of Peter, the madman comes to believe that his companion is Saint Peter, which only confirms his conviction that he is Christ. Both men are whipped through the streets.34
The pillory. In the modern world, the pillory has become something of an object of amusement. But as you will see, it is anything but a light punishment. Just ask the man who started a fight in St Paul’s Cathedral in 1561. A special pillory is set up in the churchyard for him and, in the time-honoured fashion, his ears are nailed to the wooden frame. Here he has to withstand the insults of the mob. And when the time comes for him to be released, his ears are sliced off.35
What crimes might lead you to the pillory? In short, almost anything that requires you to be humiliated. One Essex man who claimed that the queen has had two children by Robert Dudley is imprisoned for five months in 1580, then made to stand in the pillory, before being taken back to prison for three years. Two other Essex people spreading a similar rumour in 1590 (that Queen Elizabeth has four children by Lord Dudley, one of whom he killed by burning it in the fire in the chamber where it was born) also end up in the pillory, with paper notices stuck on their heads stating the nature of their crime. Selling rancid bacon or bad fish can also lead to you being pilloried – with the foul-smelling food tied in front of your face.36 The hundred court is supposed to maintain a pillory, and the court leet of a manor can also sentence people to stand in one for an hour or two: you’ll find that many country towns and parishes have a pillory set up near the church or in the market place.
Other crimes that might result in you being pilloried include slander (especially against an office holder), counterfeiting documents, conjuring, and spreading false rumours and news. A woman who declares that Queen Mary is dead on 12 November 1558 – five days before she actually passes away – receives the pillory for sedition. If that seems harsh, in April 1563 a woman is pilloried for eating meat in Lent.37 As the seriousness of the crime increases, so too does the severity of the pillorying. In July 1563 a schoolmaster called Penred is pilloried for beating a boy with a buckled leather belt so hard that he has torn all the skin off the boy’s back. Watch what happens when Penred is punished in Cheapside. The boy is taken along to the pillory and his cloak is removed and his wounds exhibited alongside the guilty schoolmaster. After he has been inspected in his pitiful state by the mayor and a great throng, Penred is whipped as he stands in the pillory, until the blood flows freely and all the skin has been removed from his back too.38
Ironically it is the very severity of the pillory that allows it to be used as an instrument of clemency. The rumour-mongers who say Elizabeth has had children by Dudley would normally be drawn, hanged and eviscerated; but if the sedition is treated as slander, a spell in the pillory might be deemed sufficient. In May 1560 a maidservant is set on the pillory for having tried to poison her master. Had he died, this would have been petty treason and she would have been burnt at the stake. As things stand, she is lucky to be alive – being pilloried twice, losing one ear on each occasion and being branded on the forehead.39
Cutting off hands. The cruelty of Elizabethan justice goes beyond evisceration, burning at the stake, branding, and cutting off ears. In a 1559 case of attempted poisoning that is nearly successful – the victims are only saved by the quick-wittedness of a woman who gives them olive oil to drink – the man and the woman who perpetrate the crime are pilloried twice, and have both their hands cut off as well as their ears.40 According to William Harrison, malice aforethought should result in loss of hands prior to hanging; he adds that having your hands cut off is also the punishment for brawling in court. We have already heard about John Stubbs and his printer losing their right hands for publishing a tract that the queen does not like. By law, you can still have your hand cut off at the Standard in Cheapside for striking an alderman of the city of London, but whether anyone will impose this penalty is open to question. Given the number of hands that are lopped off for other reasons, you might be best advised to err on the side of caution.
Stocks. This is a frame containing a pair of wooden boards, like the pillory, but designed to hold two or three people by their legs. Stocks are to be found in both town and country: in towns they are frequently used for restraining people who do not obey an officer or watchman; in rural manors they are used in conjunction with fines for allowing animals to wander and break other people’s crops, for failing to maintain a lane or for a moral crime. But they are not limited to these crimes: a stranger coming into the city of London in 1561 is ove
rheard saying that he is the ‘king of kings and lord of all lords’, so he is set in the stocks; and some women caught eating meat on a fish day in 1563 are also placed in the stocks and left there all night.41 Vagabonds and rogues are regularly placed in the stocks before being whipped out of the manor. Hedgebreaking is often punished by a 12d fine and a four-hour spell in the stocks.42 If you see a man and a woman in the stocks together, the chances are that they have had a bastard child together and are spending twelve hours fastened by their legs.43
Cucking or ducking stool. In many rural manors and small towns there are customary penalties and bye-laws. One of most common punishments, found almost everywhere in England, is the cucking or ducking stool. This is a seat on a long pole to which a woman is tied wearing nothing but her smock. She is then raised in the air and left there as an example to others, or she may be dipped in the water of a pond. Legally this punishment is reserved for ‘a troublesome and angry woman who, by her brawling and wrangling among her neighbours, doth break the public peace and beget, cherish and increase public discord’.44 It is not normally used for a first offence; there is a warning first, and the culprit is admonished in church before the stool is used. However, repeat offenders are punished in this way at every session of the court leet – until eventually they are pilloried. Interestingly, most women who are condemned to be ducked are married: you might guess from this that single women have less reason to be scolds. Men who similarly break the peace through brawling and wrangling are usually fined or put in the stocks.
Tumbrel. An alternative to the cucking stool is the tumbrel: a cart with wooden wheels in which the transgressor is placed and wheeled through the village or town. In 1571 the wife of the vicar of Epping is convicted in the court leet of being ‘garrulous to her neighbours’ and placed in the tumbrel.45 The same punishment is meted out to Londoners found guilty of immoral behaviour. In December 1559 the wife of the goldsmith Henry Glyn is paraded through the city in a cart for selling the sexual services of her own daughter. The next month a baker is similarly paraded for multiple instances of fornication. In June 1560 a cart is drawn through the city exhibiting two men and three women:
one man for he was the bawd, to bring women unto strangers, and one woman was the alewife of the Bell in Gracechurch Street, and another was the alewife of the Bull’s Head by London Stone, and both were bawds and whores, and the other man and woman were brother and sister and were taken naked together.46
A few days later the cart is used again to exhibit the widow of Master Warner, late sergeant of the Admiralty, who is found guilty of being a bawd to her daughter and her maidservant, both of whom are unmarried and both of whom are pregnant. And on 16 June 1563 Dr Christopher Langton, an Eton-and Cambridge-educated Fellow of the College of Physicians, is carted through London in his best clothes – a gown of damask lined with velvet, and a coat and a cape made of velvet. Henry Machyn notes that he has a blue hood pinned on his cape and so comes ‘through Cheapside on the market day, and so about London, for he was taken with two young wenches at once’.47
Fines. After all this dismemberment, killing and ritualised humiliation it seems prosaic to inform you that the most common form of punishment in Elizabethan times is a fine. Manorial courts, hundred courts and quarter sessions all operate on the basis of amercing people – fining them for wrongdoings or for failing to do their duty. Fines are levied for playing unlawful games, poaching, minor assaults, grazing too many cattle on the commons, driving away cattle, blocking drains and so on. Fines for petty larceny and theft are normally small – 4d for the theft of a horseshoe, 12d for poaching a fish – but even these small sums can be onerous to pay if you are poor. Large fines of £5 or more are meted out to officers who fail to do their duty, or fail to respond to an instruction by a court. Manorial courts also use large fines as a threat: if a blocked stream is not unblocked quickly, the threat of a hefty fine of £2 usually prompts the offender to remedy the problem straight away.
Getting Away with it, or the Process of Crime Detection
You might wonder how people are apprehended for crimes in the sixteenth century, an age with no forensic methods and no modern police force. The simple answer is that crimes are reported by the local community. The old system of the ‘hue and cry’ is still in place, under which communities are sworn together as tithings (nominally groups of ten men) and required to report each other’s misdemeanours. If a crime is found to have been committed, the hue and cry is raised and all those in the tithing are duty-bound to pursue the criminal and report the matter to the hundred constable. Depending on the severity of the case, the hundred court then either passes the matter over to the JPs at the quarter sessions or to the assize judges.
If a crime is brought to the attention of the constable he will usually interview the witnesses. In cases involving a dead body, the coroner will be summoned. In 1577 Alice Neate is arrested on suspicion of having murdered her sister-in-law, whose throat has been slit as she lay in bed. The constable questions all the witnesses and potential suspects – everyone who has recently visited the cottage. One reports that Alice’s husband exclaimed, ‘God save my wife,’ seemingly reflecting that he thought his wife had killed his sister. Others testify that Alice hated her sister-in-law because she believed that two of her children were murdered by the deceased woman. All of these other people can satisfactorily place themselves elsewhere on the night of the murder itself. Alice’s daughter Abigail is then asked to give evidence. She admits she was sleeping in the same room as her murdered aunt that night, and maintains that it was not her mother who committed the deed. However, under intense questioning, her defence breaks down: she admits she was awake and saw her mother cut her aunt’s throat. She further admits that her mother asked her to conceal what she saw. Alice Neate is imprisoned, and at the next gaol delivery is sentenced to hang.48
Alice Neate’s case is relatively straightforward, showing that the systematic questioning of witnesses can produce results. However, many other cases are much more difficult. Crimes often go unreported. In small communities where everyone knows who committed the deed, there is frequently a reluctance to hand the perpetrator over to the authorities. Similarly, when a crime is reported and an inquiry takes place, local people often say nothing. The constable, coroner or JP may have to threaten them with a heavy fine of £5 or more if they will not give evidence. In such cases testimony is often fabricated, with the culprit falsely named as, for instance, ‘Richard Nemo’ (Richard Nobody). In many parts of Essex, local communities attribute crimes to ‘John at Love’, ‘John at Stile’ or ‘John at Noke’.49 When a serving girl is beaten to death, the crime is often blamed on a fictitious person on account of the fact that an employer has the right to chastise his servants. A husbandman one morning loses patience with his servant girl for taking too long to feed the pigs and strikes her in the face, making her nose bleed profusely. Six weeks later she dies. When the case comes to court he is not found guilty of murder; instead John at Stile is deemed to have killed her.50
The sense of natural justice underlying such lenient treatment affects other cases too. A pregnant servant in the house of a yeoman secretly delivers her baby herself and then hides it among her employer’s pigs. When the yeoman finds the dead baby he reports his servant to the constable. At the subsequent trial the jury decides the child was already dead before it ended up in the pigsty. Another case concerns a woman who drowns a baby in a horse-pond and submerges the corpse, weighed down with stones. She too is given the benefit of the doubt, and the jury decides it was stillborn.51 Similarly a jury might be lenient on a man caught stealing a goose to feed his family, and might deliberately undervalue the animal so that he is merely fined for petty larceny rather than hanged for theft.
Ecclesiastical Law
Perhaps the biggest difference between the law in Elizabethan times and in the modern world is its religious dimension. Some of the moral rules that apply to everyone in society have already been mentioned, such
as the carting of bawds and incestuous couples through the streets of London. However, these few references do not even hint at the huge number of cases that are tried by the ecclesiastical courts. Essex has an adult population of about 35,000 rising to 40,000 at the end of the reign. At least 15,000 of these people – over one-third – are arraigned for sexual offences. Nor is this a peculiar feature of Essex. In the diocese of York, the proportion indicted for sexual offences is even higher. It appears that people have a lot of sex and a great proportion of that sex is unlawful. Much of it is detected and reported by jealous husbands and wives, or revealed through the pregnancies of maidservants, girls, unmarried women and widows. Even just being suspected of a sexual offence can result in you being summoned to appear and prove your innocence. While you might not treat ecclesiastical law as seriously as the common law – and many Elizabethan people don’t treat it with much respect – its very ubiquity is a reminder that England is a deeply religious society.
If you are found to be living immorally or are in breach of any ecclesiastical law, the churchwardens of your parish will report you to the local archdeaconry court. You will then be summoned to appear by an apparitor on a certain date. If you are innocent, you need to arrange for a number of ‘compurgators’ – upstanding, honest and sober parishioners – to come to court with you and testify to that effect. The exact number of compurgators will be determined by the court; five or six is normal, but for some offences the court might ask for eight or nine. Men are required to produce male compurgators, women have to find other women (compurgatrices). If the archdeaconry court is twenty or thirty miles away you might well have to pay substantial expenses, including an overnight stay for all those accompanying you. If you are poor, therefore, you may find it impossible to produce compurgators in court. Moreover, if just one compurgator does not turn up, or fails to swear an oath on the Bible before testifying, then you will be found guilty and ordered to do penance.
The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England Page 39
