Early Modern England 1485-1714: A Narrative History

by Bucholz, Robert

  But what about women who were not born into the political or mercantile elite? Enterprising historians of women and gender have exploded the myth of female invisibility by finding women in all sorts of records in which one might not think to look, especially legal records. Testimony in cases of murder, theft, riot, defamation, scolding, and witchcraft – when the community was under strain – can tell us a great deal about women’s roles, both expected and actual. We have learned that while women were responsible for the household, this brought them into the world when they wielded the sickle beside their men at harvest time; when they went to market to purchase food and to sell surplus butter, eggs, poultry, etc; and when they worked next to their men in urban shops at the front of their houses. Servant girls roamed the length and breadth of London on errands. Often, when their husbands or fathers died, urban women were pulled further into the public sphere of business to run those shops. A single woman, whether a widow or unmarried, was considered a femme sole in English law, that is a legal person in her own right, able to buy and sell property, contract debts and engage in trade as a married femme covert could not do. Hilda Smith has found that women were granted the freedom of many livery companies in London, working in the cloth and hospitality trades, and as grocers, bakers, joiners [carpenters], stationers, leathersellers, blacksmiths, barber surgeons, distillers, vintners, and the like. Amy Froide has shown that over half of women were unmarried at any given time, and, yet able to work and support themselves and, sometimes, whole households. Women without husbands worked as seamstresses, laundresses, barmaids, and mistresses of boarding houses, alehouses, and houses of even less repute. Like most working mothers today, such women were still expected to perform their domestic duties as well, cooking, sewing, spinning, washing, and cleaning for their families and for others so that their families might make ends meet. No wonder that Thomas Tusser wrote “Housewives’ affairs have never no end.”6 Finally, when they stood at their front doors, the liminal space dividing the public from the private sphere, or in the market, arms folded, discussing the affairs of the neighborhood, women were not just gossiping. They were, in effect, regulating communal moral standards, enforcing neighborliness, and holding reputations up to approval or scorn based on how other women ran their households and sex lives. In particular, the word “whore” could lead to a defamation suit, both rending a community and reaffirming its social norms. Ordinary women might also concern themselves with the wider community: during the political tensions of the seventeenth century (see chapters 7 and 8), London women joined apprentices and other subaltern groups to sign and present petitions to Parliament. In short, early modern Englishwomen were neither merely victims nor decorative adornments. They had agency, playing an active role in the world.

  In fact, women’s active roles sometimes caused tension with society’s core beliefs about hierarchy. Men were expected to head their families, so a man whose wife was the breadwinner or who cuckolded or scolded him was viewed as being unmanned. Assertive women were labeled and prosecuted as scolds. The community might react to the inversion of expected gender roles en masse, by banging pots and pans under the couple’s window in a sort of festive riot known as a charivari. Women might also transgress as murderesses, thieves, and prostitutes. The Roaring Girl (1611), a play by Thomas Decker (ca. 1572–1632) and Thomas Middleton (1580–1627), portrayed the career of a famous London pickpocket, Mary Frith (ca. 1584–1659), better known as Moll Cutpurse. Moll unnerved those who embraced the traditional order not just because she picked pockets, but because she wore disguises – often male – to do so. At a performance of the play at the Fortune Theater in London she appeared “in man’s’ apparel and in her boots and with a sword by her side,” played upon a lute and sang a song, telling the audience “that she thought many of them were of opinion that she was a man but if any of them would come to her lodging they should find that she is a woman.”7 No wonder the civil authorities hated the theater (see below) and worried about loose women. There is evidence that as the population rise reached a crisis, from the 1590s through the 1620s, women’s opportunities contracted and guilds imposed more rules to shut them out of business. In any case, women’s work was always undervalued: when working in the fields, their pay was half that of men. In summary, and as we will see further below, women’s role was important and complementary to men’s; patriarchy was flexible – but it was always there.

  Elite Private Life

  Having now examined some of the general material, social, and gender parameters to early modern life, it is now time to ask what that life was like, on a personal level, for the subjects of Elizabeth I or James I? How did it differ from the lives of their late medieval ancestors? How did it vary from rank to rank, place to place? Historians have grown increasingly interested in what might be called “private life.” They have begun to examine those aspects of living with which every human being is concerned, sooner or later or day to day: birth, childhood, and education; courtship (what we would call “dating”), marriage, sexuality, and gender relations; work and play; material culture (housing, clothing, and possessions); nutrition and disease; aging and death. These subjects are not only fascinating in themselves, they also help us to understand England’s political and economic history. For example, early modern political theorists often looked to the patriarchal relationship between husband and wife to explain that between monarch and subject; therefore it behooves us to know more about what early modern marriages were really like. As in political history, these subjects have given rise to their own controversies. How big were families? What was marriage like? Did parents love their children? Did they rear them more harshly than we do today? Did they arrange their children’s marriages? Could young people marry for love? Were people more religious than we are today? Harder working? Less materialistic? How did they deal with their own mortality? The answers to these questions varied from rank to rank but also, less dramatically, from family to family.

  The differences between privileged and common life began at birth. Despite humanist and Protestant arguments against the practice, a noble or gentle family was likely to place a newborn child in the hands of a “wet nurse,” probably a family servant or a tenant who had just given birth to her own child and was, therefore, lactating. She would provide the sustenance and much of the care for the newborn aristocrat for the first few months. Why? First, by freeing an upper-class mother from nursing, this practice enabled her to sooner resume her duties as a wife, hostess, and, often, manager of a great estate. Paramount among those duties was providing more heirs, and a woman was more likely to become pregnant again if she were not nursing. Unfortunately, wet nursing may have increased the mortality and compromised the health of these children. There may also have been psychological implications to the relative lack of physical contact between elite children and their parents, though this point remains controversial among historians.

  The physical and psychological distance between elite parents and children implied above continued as the child grew. Children of the landed elite had separate rooms and, generally, servants (including nurses, nannies, and tutors) to look after them. Their parents were often away in London attending the court, serving in government, sitting in Parliament, or sampling metropolitan delights. At around age 6, a male was “breached,” i.e., taken out of dressing gowns and smocks and put into britches for the first time. At 10 years of age, he would be sent out to a local endowed grammar school or an exclusive public school such as Eton or Winchester. There, a young nobleman or gentleman studied English, possibly some Greek, but, above all, the classics of Latin history and literature. This exposed him to the language of the European elite, as well as to the experiences and attitudes of the Roman patriciate – perfect models for future governors of England and its empire. Increasingly, a privileged adolescent might go up to one of the two universities, Oxford or Cambridge, followed by a stint at one of the four Inns of Court, or common law schools, in London. Though the universities wer
e still places of serious scholarship, most aristocratic scholars, particularly elder sons who were heirs to landed estates, were not expected to take a degree or even to study very hard. Rather, these institutions acted as “finishing schools” where the future leaders of the country picked up a smattering of polish, learning, and law, meeting and “networking” with those with whom they would be running it. After 1625 it became fashionable to complete such finishing and networking by making “the Grand Tour” of continental Europe, lasting anywhere from a season to three years, in the company of a tutor, who acted as both guide and chaperon. Only then was the young aristocrat ready for his debut at court, which, if successful, might lead to office, more lands, and a suitable marriage.

  Welsh and Kentish land was still divided among male heirs according to the principle of gavelkind, or partible inheritance. But in the rest of the kingdom, primogeniture became common by the seventeenth century; that is, only the eldest surviving son of a great family was guaranteed an estate and, therefore, a prominent role in government and local landed society. A younger son might be provided with a “portion” out of the family holdings, but this was more of a stake than a maintenance: Thomas Wilson compared it to “that which the cat left on the malt heap.”8 As a result, younger sons of the aristocracy had no choice but to seek work in the professions, often according to the following pattern: “the second or third son for the law, the next for the Church and the youngest for trade.”9 A prosperous merchant could make thousands, a successful barrister as much as £1,000 a year. After the mid-seventeenth century, military and naval careers offered additional opportunities to rise. Such success, if it came, might enable a younger son to purchase his own estate and found a new branch of the family.

  During the sixteenth century, the Tudors and some of their courtiers embraced the new humanist learning for both men and women. Thus, in her teenage years an upper-class girl might be sent off to a great aristocratic household and there receive a very fine liberal education – witness the examples of Princesses Mary and Elizabeth or Lady Jane Grey. But she was more likely to be taught by an aristocratic guardian or her mother how to preside over the domestic arrangements of a great estate. This was because the chief goal of her young life was to marry and marry well. To increase her attractions and to provide a stake for the resultant young couple she, too, would be accorded a portion out of the family estate as a dowry; and she, too, might go to court. The most socially prominent young women became maids of honor attending the queen. At court, the round of parties, masques, and balls provided an opportunity for young people – and their parents – to make suitable matches.

  So what did “suitable” mean in this context? People, then and now, tend to marry within their social group. A landowning family with a title or a crest could not risk its children throwing away the family legacy on someone of inferior birth and estate. True, a marriage just beyond one’s status, say, between the son of an impoverished aristocratic family and the wealthy heiress of a merchant, was not unheard of. In such a case, each family got something (wealth for the former, status for the latter). Such matches became more common as the London merchant and professional community grew in wealth and prestige. But a love-match with no advantage of birth or wealth – say, between a nobleman and his seamstress or a gentlewoman and her footman – was a non-starter, to be frustrated by an aristocratic family at all costs. After all, land exchanged at the marriage of an heir, principally a dowry provided by the bride’s parents, was usually the most important business deal struck by any given family in a generation, and so parents, friends, and community exerted immense pressure. Another reason for family involvement in elite marriage decisions was that aristocratic children, with no need to worry about finances, tended to marry fairly young, in their late teens or in their early twenties, at a time of life when parental advice was, theoretically, decisive.10 But this does not mean that young people at this level were often forced to marry individuals whom they disliked for the sake of a land deal. While parents often proposed a match, young people generally had veto power over anyone they found really unsuitable.

  Still, because social and economic suitability was more important than love in the arrangement of most aristocratic marriages, it has often been assumed that noble and gentle marriages were loveless. Certainly, marriage at this level projected a formal image. Husbands and wives addressed each other in public as “Sir” and “Madam” and often lived their lives separately: the wife at the family seat, the husband in London or, perhaps, abroad on a diplomatic or military mission. This encouraged a double standard by which aristocratic men engaged in extra-marital affairs while their wives were denied the opportunity to do so. Aristocratic society was much less tolerant of female infidelity because it was so important to maintain pure family bloodlines and, so, inheritance lines. But it is also true that many aristocrats and their families did take compatibility, if not necessarily passion, into account when making a match. Furthermore, letters and diaries suggest that many elite spouses came to have sincere affection for their partners in life and experienced genuine grief at separation or death. In 1584 Robert Sidney married Barbara Gamage, a Welsh heiress, without having met her, as a result of negotiations between the two families at court. And yet, over the course of a lifetime of military service abroad, he wrote letters giving every indication of real love, addressing her playfully as “Sweet wench” and “Sweetheart.” Thomas More’s suggestion in Utopia that prospective brides and grooms should have an opportunity to view each other “stark naked” indicates that members of the English elite were interested in more than the shape of the family tree.

  After marriage, most Elizabethan and Jacobean aristocrats spent the bulk of their lives in the countryside. There, they managed their estates, oversaw the administration of justice, presided over important festivals and social events, and attended the local church. Some historians, aware of the networks of political, social, and family connection which centered on these families and estates, noting that contemporaries used the word “country” to mean their “county” or “locality,” have posited the existence of “county communities” whose leaders governed and socialized together, marrying their children to each other. In fact, as we shall see, the greatest noble and gentry families increasingly based their lives in London as well as their estates and, thus, often married and socialized across county lines. But most middling and lesser gentry did, indeed, tend to think and act as if their principal county of residence was the world, its center, their country house.

  We wrote “country house,” not castle, because the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were a great age for tearing down castles. This was largely due to the Tudor suppression of great noble affinities and the rise of siege artillery which could knock down medieval castle walls. Between 1575 and 1625, out-moded and drafty castles were being replaced by large, airy country houses with lots of windows, surrounded by extensive gardens and parks. The greatest of these, such as Sir John Thynne’s Longleat in Wiltshire or Sir Robert Cecil’s Hatfield in Hertfordshire, were known as prodigy houses (see plate 9). These mansions tended to reflect two contrasting goals of aristocratic life: the longstanding desire to project to the outside world an image of status, wealth, and power; and a new concern for privacy. Unlike medieval castles and houses with multiple enclosed courtyards, their ground plans were often in the shape of an E or an H (see diagram), with a hall in the center or on one wing for dining and ceremonial occasions, and private apartments on the other. The former would allow the family to entertain the county community; the latter would allow their daily lives to take place in private. The days when a great landowner took his meals in the great hall surrounded by servants and retainers were gone. Indeed, an important early modern architectural and social development was the rise of the “withdrawing room,” or, as it came to be called, the drawing room, to which the family could retreat from the prying gaze of guests, servants, and tenants. These two areas and their functions would be
connected by a long gallery full of paintings of the family’s ancestors, a display of lineage to those privileged to be invited inside. For the rest of the world, there was the building’s magnificent, if not necessarily welcoming, façade behind high walls and impressive gates.