by Ian Mortimer
Debt is another reason why people are imprisoned. Debtors are locked up in the Fleet Prison in London until they pay off what they owe. It is not quite imprisonment as you might imagine it: they have to pay for their lodgings and are allowed to go out in the daytime, if accompanied by a warden. But some people spend years there, unable to pay off their debts, with their lodging bills mounting higher and higher. There is some relief from the oppression by a measure of 1670, which allows the poorer debtors to swear an oath that they have less than £10 in the world; then those who insist on them being locked up until they pay have to fund their maintenance in the gaol, but this does not help people like Moses Pitt, an enterprising publisher who attempts to produce a scholarly atlas of the world in twelve volumes. After volume four he is heavily in debt and is imprisoned in the Fleet Prison in 1689 as a result. The title of his next book tells you what he thinks of his first two years in prison. In full it reads: The Cry of the Oppressed: Being a True and Tragical Account of the Unparallel’d Sufferings of Multitudes of Poor Imprisoned Debtors, in Most of the Gaols in England, Under the Tyranny of the Gaolers, and Other Oppressors, Lately Discovered Upon the Occasion of this Present Act of Grace, For the Release of Poor Prisoners for Debt, Or Damages; Some of Them Being Not Only Iron’d, and Lodg’d with Hogs, Felons, and Condemn’d Persons, But Have Had Their Bones Broke; Others Poisoned and Starved to Death; Others Denied the Common Blessings of Nature, as Water to Drink Or Straw to Lodg On; Others Their Wives and Daughters Attempted to be Ravish’d; with Other Barbarous Cruelties, Not to be Parallel’d in Any History, Or Nation: All which is Made Out by Undeniable Evidence. Together with the Case of the Publisher. In all he spends seven years in the Fleet for debt. (And publishers think they have it hard today …)
Corporal punishment still ranks high on most judges’ list of favourite sentences. In London it tends to fall into two categories: whipping and the pillory. A boy, Philip Clarke, who is found guilty in 1690 of shoplifting a pair of gloves, is sentenced to be whipped through the streets of London, from Newgate Gaol to Aldgate, his hands being bound to the back of a cart. This is no easy punishment: the purpose is to draw blood. Women and children are sent to Bridewell for ‘the correction of the house’, which amounts to being whipped at the post. Thomasine Burton is found guilty in 1689 of shoplifting 60 yards of black crêpe, worth £3, which was discovered on her. As she was caught red-handed, she should be hanged. The jury shows mercy and so does the judge: they declare the true value of the goods to be merely 10d and the judge sentences her to be whipped at Bridewell, the reformatory prison, rather than through the streets.
The pillory is perhaps the best-known means of humiliating a criminal. You put your head and hands between the locked boards that hold you fast, and you face the crowd. For an hour. So what? you might think; an hour is not that long. And besides, isn’t it quite funny to see someone exhibited like that? Ah, no. You certainly won’t be laughing. That hour is likely to change your life for ever. It might even be the end of you, as the pillory occasionally proves fatal. In its grip, you are exposed for people freely to inflict their feelings on you – or, to be more specific, to express their feelings about you and your crime. They have the rare chance to show what they really think about those who attempt sodomy or murder, who blaspheme or spread misleading rumours, or who commit fraud or perjury. People in the crowd feel their reputations are under scrutiny too. In the case of boys and young men, there may well be attempts to outdo each other in viciousness. So they throw rotten eggs and vegetables at you; they empty buckets of urine and excrement over your head; they hurl stones, broken bricks, pieces of wood and dead cats at you. Sometimes they accidentally kill the condemned person. Even if they do not, your reputation is completely shot. You will never again hold up your head in the same town.
As we’ve seen, the Church courts in both England and Scotland are still in business, and these deal out the official punishments for immorality, such as having to stand in the marketplace on market day dressed in a white sheet, confessing that you’ve been found guilty of fornication. Again, the emphasis is on humiliation. This is especially sharp when you have to admit to adultery with a married man in front of all your kin and friends, as well as your own husband and his family. Excommunication still exists as a penalty, and is used as a punishment for those who have failed to perform their lesser penances or who have transgressed in a particularly ungodly manner. In England, such punishments carry less stigma than they did in the past. The Scots are far more assertive, trying fornication in the secular courts, along with incest, sodomy, bestiality, buggery and rape. Adultery too is taken seriously north of the border: adulterers are heavily fined; notorious adulterers are banished and, very occasionally, hanged.29
The extremists who would prefer to see fornication and adultery punished severely start to take matters into their own hands, especially after 1688, when it seems that God has put an end to the flagrantly immoral dynasty of Charles II and James II. Zealous magistrates have prostitutes arrested and publicly flogged. Societies are established for the reformation of manners; by 1699 they exist in London, Coventry, Chester, Gloucester, Hull, Leicester, Liverpool, Newcastle, Nottingham and Shrewsbury; and twelve more are being considered in other British towns.30 They raise money to employ lawyers to prosecute brothel keepers and their clients. The Tower Hamlets society in London produces an annual Black List of the hundreds of lewd and scandalous persons they identify. More than a thousand prosecutions for sexual indiscretions are tried by magistrates in the capital every year. Offenders are flogged through the city or are set to hard labour. Brothel keepers are heavily fined. As a result, the majority of sexual policing and punishment is being organised by these societies by 1700.31
Alongside this new prudery you have older ‘rough justice’ – otherwise known as the court of public opinion. You will probably be aware of the cuckold’s horns or antlers that are set above the door of a house where the housewife has been unfaithful. Sometimes there are processions to mark the fact, led by a man holding aloft the cuckold’s horns on a pole, as the news of the woman’s infidelity is spread around the village. Occasionally this turns into a full skimmington ride. This involves the villagers all gathering with blazing torches before the immoral house, banging drums and pots and pans and generally creating a hullaballoo for three nights; after three nights’ interlude, they return for three more nights, and then a third period. At the end they solemnly burn effigies of the unfaithful wife and her cuckolded husband before the house. In some places a skimmington ride involves a procession led by a man in a white cap on a horse, wearing cuckold’s horns and a fake beard, with pots clanking under the horse’s belly. He is followed by several hundred people chanting and beating drums. When they come to the door of the offender, they all start to sweep the threshold, one by one. They are not supposed to enter the house but sometimes things get out of hand and the errant husband is seized and placed on a horse facing backwards, or the unfaithful wife is thrown into a pond or placed on the ducking stool – a contraption normally maintained by manor courts for teaching scolding women to keep their silence – and she is dunked in the pond or river. It is a cruel punishment: the shame stings far more than the cold water.
Evading Justice
It might seem that crime is on the rise and punishments are being more frequently handed down than ever. Indeed, many people will tell you that the country is going to the dogs. But people always talk like this. They do not remember what things were really like in the past; they hear about dozens of recent crimes and contrast those with the few instances they can remember from their youth, and so convince themselves that law and order are breaking down. In actual fact, the crime figures are improving in Restoration Britain. Levels of law-breaking vary, of course, but the underlying trend is downwards. Despite the new Acts against theft and damage to property, the death penalty is being less frequently applied. In the Middle Ages one in three of those arrested for a felony would hang. In Elizabethan Eng
land, between one in four and one in five would. By 1700, that figure is down to about one in ten.32
One reason for this decline is a greater tolerance in society. Whereas before the Restoration, men worked to uphold one Church and to resist nonconformism, now there is less rigour in the maintenance of a single strict code of observance. Toleration in religious matters is accompanied by a more general relaxedness in matters to do with petty crime. You could say that jurymen are seeing greater virtue in being reformers of manners than persecutors of sin. In addition, the greater individualism in society encourages jurors to be more considerate of other individuals and more forgiving: they judge them as they would want to be judged themselves. Women accused of stealing valuable goods might well find themselves pronounced guilty by a jury that insists that the goods are worth less than the 10s threshold for hanging. Similarly many men accused of murder are found guilty of manslaughter purely because the circumstances of the killing are such that they do not deserve to hang. The English demeanour is softening in this regard, just as we observed with regard to cruelty in chapter 4.
If you are a woman facing a charge of felony, there are two other ancient legal traditions that may save you from the gallows. The first is that a married woman can claim marital coercion in her defence. As a wife is meant to obey her husband in all respects, if he commands her to break the law, then it is hardly her fault if she does so. This can play hugely to a woman’s advantage, as the case of a London woman accused of clipping coins in 1677 shows:
It is supposed her husband was the person that did actually clip, and that her business was to get money in fit for the purpose. It being proved that she often changed milled money for other but always desired that which was large or otherwise would not take it, which occasioned suspicion and her apprehension: which alarming her husband, he fled, and cannot be heard of. There were taken in her lodging abundance of files, melting pots and other implements of that kind, produced in court. However, because under such circumstances, our merciful laws, in favour of marriage, are pleased to suppose the wife’s act to be done by coercion of the husband, and that he by flight had acknowledged his own guilt, she was brought in not guilty of the treason.33
That judgement saves her from being burnt to death.
The other advantage in women’s favour that is being more frequently employed in this period is that pregnant women are not hanged. If sentenced to death, you may claim you are ‘quick with child’. At this, a ‘jury of matrons’ will be assembled from those women present in the courtroom and, if there is sign of movement in your womb, then the death sentence is respited. You will stay in prison until the child is born. In theory, the death penalty can be inflicted after the birth but in practice most women are allowed to live. In 1685 twenty-nine women are sentenced to death at the Old Bailey, of whom eight (27 per cent) are found to be pregnant. The following year, six out of fourteen condemned women (43 per cent) are deemed to be quick with child. These are very high proportions when you consider that only about 5 per cent of women in London are likely to be carrying an unborn child in the fifth month of gestation or later at any given time.34 You have to conclude either that pregnant women have a disproportionate desire to rush out and commit serious crimes – or that the women who have watched the trial and who form the jury of matrons often reach verdicts in favour of the condemned woman, regardless of whether she is pregnant or not. Considering the many gross disadvantages that women suffer on account of the law, it seems fitting that some escape condemnation and the ultimate penalty – through the compassion of those who are prepared to tell a lie to save their lives.
12
Entertainment
It is often said that you can judge a society by the way it treats its poor and needy, but it could also be argued that the spirit of an age is just as well gauged by what the people choose to do for fun. Of course, ‘fun’ is likely to include a wide range of activities and engagements, reflecting all the various interests, tastes and local customs of the time, not to mention wealth. Many townsmen and women find no greater pleasure in life than in dining well with convivial company. But, as a true traveller, you will no doubt want to look beyond the dining room and try to experience everything the period has to offer, from the sport of kings to the literature of the gutter press.
The Fun of the Fair
In chapter 5 we saw how some of the larger fairs remain important places for buying and selling, even if they offer drinking, gambling and other diversions on the side. But some fairs have lost their original raison d’être altogether and have developed into places of pure entertainment – although much of the entertainment on offer is anything but ‘pure’. Foremost among these is Bartholomew Fair, held in West Smithfield, London. For most of our period it lasts two weeks, starting on the eve of St Bartholomew’s Day (24 August), although in 1691 the authorities restrict it to three days. It is a labyrinthine mass of several hundred booths of iniquity, entertainment, vice and curiosity, and few Londoners can resist visiting it every year.
What are the attractions? You need to see for yourself. Ask your coachman to set you down at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, which is as near as you can get to the fair before the stalls, booths, tents, platforms and crowds block your way. Perhaps have a drink first – it is not a bad idea to fortify yourself with a quart of strong beer before venturing further, to where the smells of unwashed bodies, roasting pork and tobacco smoke will warm your nostrils, and the noise of the crowds, drummers, trumpeters and street performers will assault your ears. Watch the dandies of the streets as they stroll through the crush of people with their silver-topped canes; and women ‘who are no better than they ought to be’ as they take in with a glance the looks of their respective admirers. People-watching is a key attraction. In fact, this is what Bartholomew Fair is really all about, with its actors, tumblers, sword-swallowers, fire-eaters, conjurors, gamblers, wrestlers, bearded women, acrobats, dandies, pickpockets, cardsharps, inventors, pretty women and handsome men. Look up at the galleries erected in the streets around Smithfield: here you’ll see a group of amateur players performing the beheading of Holofernes by Judith or re-enacting the fall of Troy. Listen to the criers in the alleys advertising freak shows. Every pleasure here is transitory, every commodity temporary. Even the tokens and presents that you might buy – such as the broadside ballads, or baubles made of glass with objects suspended inside – are ephemeral.1
One act you will not want to miss is the rope-dancing. Pay a sixpence for entry to the enclosure and you will see some extraordinary antics performed by acrobats – some of them on a high tight rope, some on a low slack rope and some even on a trapeze. In 1698 Ned Ward sees all sorts of people making their way along the high rope with a pole in their hands: ‘plump-buttocked lasses’ who wear breeches under their petticoats, and then remove those petticoats when they are up above the crowd; and a huge Irishwoman whose thighs are ‘as fleshy as a baron of beef’, who ‘waddles along the rope like a goose over a barn threshold’; and ‘Doctor Cozen-Bumpkin’, an idle fat chap who lies down, as if to sleep on the slack rope. But the prize of the show is ‘The German Maid’. Ned quite loses himself in admiration and lust, for she ‘does wonderful pretty things up the rope, having such proportion in her limbs and so much modesty in her countenance that I vow it was as much as ever I could do to forbear wishing myself in bed with her’.2
Many of the most renowned performers on the ropes in the 1660s and 1670s are Italians but perhaps the finest of all is an Englishman, Jacob Hall. Pepys sees him perform several times and is mightily impressed. His act includes flip-flops and somersaults on the rope, as well as ‘flying over thirty rapiers’ and ‘flying through hoops’. The ladies are very fond of him, deeming him to be part Hercules and part Adonis. Such is his allure that the king’s ex-mistress, Lady Castlemaine, takes Hall as her lover in 1667 and provides him with a salary for services rendered.3
Animals also perform on the high ropes. John Evelyn describes going to see them at
the other major London pleasure fair in September 1660:
I saw in Southwark, at St Margaret’s Fair, monkeys and apes dance and do other feats of activity on the high rope; they were gallantly clad à la mode, went upright, saluted the company, bowing and pulling off their hats; they saluted one another with as good a grace as if instructed by a dancing-master. They turned heels over head with a basket having eggs in it without breaking any; also with lighted candles in their hands and on their heads without extinguishing them, and with vessels of water without spilling a drop.4
In 1660 you might be lucky enough to see the derring-do of a rope-dancer called ‘The Turk’ who performs barefoot. His stunts include dancing blindfold on the high rope with a twelve-year-old boy tied to one of his feet, who dangles 20 feet below.5 He also stands on his head on a very high mast, before diving off it and sliding down a rope on his chest, head-first, with his arms outstretched – ouch! Visit around 1700 and perhaps you will witness an Italian family who have an act which consists of the father pushing out across the high wire a wheelbarrow containing two of his children and the family dog – all the time balancing a duck on his head, which quacks to the audience and causes much laughter.6
Even more dangerous is the act of ‘Richardson, the famous fire-eater’, whom Evelyn witnesses at work in 1672:
He devoured brimstone on glowing coals before us, chewing and swallowing them; he melted a beer glass and ate it right up; then, taking a live coal on his tongue, he put on it a raw oyster, the coal was blown on with bellows until it flamed and sparkled in his mouth, and so remained until the oyster gaped and was quite boiled. Then he melted pitch and wax with sulphur, which he drank down as it flamed; I saw it flaming in his mouth a good while.7
